MooseIBe
11-15-2005, 12:42 PM
I think I touched on this briefly in the thread I started about traditions but I've been thinking about it more in the last few days because I have been rereading M M Kaye's 'The Far Pavilions', set in 19th century India and to a certain extent concerned with suttee.
What a particularly cruel practice this was. And how awful for women to have to live with the knowledge that when they died, if they were high born they would burn alive on their husband's pyre, or, if low born (it was pretty much restricted only to the nobility by the time the book was set), they would become chattels of their husband's family, regarded as ill luck for causing his death and forced to be drudges for the rest of their lives.
Yet the rub is that, as in the case of female circumcision, many women underwent this practice voluntarily, believing that it was a path to sainthood. I am pretty damn sure that many went involuntarily, screaming and kicking too but .. plenty didn't, plenty considered it a duty and even, in some bizarre way, an honour.
That's the problem with all these rituals.. that the 'victims' are too often complicit because they've been brainwashed into believing that the thing is good, or dutiful or noble. Which is bullshit, because if it was so 'saintly' to be burned alive, why weren't the men doing it too?? But enough women seem to have complied that the practice existed in places even after its abolition by the British Raj. Why? And how can people derive pleasure from watching such a thing?
What a particularly cruel practice this was. And how awful for women to have to live with the knowledge that when they died, if they were high born they would burn alive on their husband's pyre, or, if low born (it was pretty much restricted only to the nobility by the time the book was set), they would become chattels of their husband's family, regarded as ill luck for causing his death and forced to be drudges for the rest of their lives.
Yet the rub is that, as in the case of female circumcision, many women underwent this practice voluntarily, believing that it was a path to sainthood. I am pretty damn sure that many went involuntarily, screaming and kicking too but .. plenty didn't, plenty considered it a duty and even, in some bizarre way, an honour.
That's the problem with all these rituals.. that the 'victims' are too often complicit because they've been brainwashed into believing that the thing is good, or dutiful or noble. Which is bullshit, because if it was so 'saintly' to be burned alive, why weren't the men doing it too?? But enough women seem to have complied that the practice existed in places even after its abolition by the British Raj. Why? And how can people derive pleasure from watching such a thing?