suttee

“Indeed it was: I had as good a right to die when my time came as he had: but I should bide that time, and not be hurried away in a suttee.”

It is believed that widows have gathered in the city since Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, a 16th-century Bengali social reformer, brought a group of them there to escape from suttee, a now-banned practice in which Hindu widows immolated themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres.

“Say, what’re you doing today, anyhow? All dressed up and mooning around like the prologue to a suttee. Did you go to Psychology this morning?”

One of the most disturbing poems here is Suttee, his record of Plath’s emergence as a poet, in which Hughes casts himself as a midwife delivering an “explosion / Of screams” and before being “engulfed / In a flood, a dam-burst thunder / Of a new myth”, a birth that “sucked the oxygen out of both of us”.

When the case is appealed to the Supreme Court, as expected, it will rank among a handful of decisions defining when the state should interfere with religious practice — most memorably, the 1987 act that banned glorification of suttee, an outlawed ritual in which widows climbed onto their husbands’ funeral pyres and were burned to death.