"Suttee" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... child widow, who, on returning to a home of which she was once an honored member, finds herself virtually an outcast. Her pretty clothes are taken from her, and she is required to do the menial work of the family; this is the Indian protest against the abolishing of the suttee, or the burning of widows on the funeral pyre of their husbands,—cruelties prevented by English rule, as are also the practice of child suicide and the passing of the Juggernaut car over the prostrate bodies ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... Herodotus tells us, thought it an honourable act and no murders committed, when they slaughtered the king's councillors and officers of state, and guards and their horses, on which they stuck them upright by skewers, to be in death the king's attendants. The suttee is still thought no wrong. There is habit of thought that justifies habit of deed. Southey, in his History of the Brazils, tells a sad tale of a dying converted Indian. In her dying moments, cannibalism prevailed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... I trembled from head to foot, and, though burning with impatience to obtain from them farther particulars, it was some moments before I could trust myself to speak. At length I asked them when the Suttee would take place; and was answered by one of them, that it would certainly be performed on the following day; and that he had seen the funeral pile himself. Without any farther delay, I set out immediately for the city, and reached it in as short a ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... obeys the laws; and the laws ought to be such as men of all religions can obey. Yet even here there are limits. No civilized state would tolerate a religion demanding human sacrifice. The English in India put an end to suttee, in spite of a fixed principle of non-interference with native religious customs. Perhaps they were wrong to prevent suttee, yet almost every European would have done the same. We cannot effectively doubt that such practices ought to be stopped, however ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell
... striking is the growth of a moral sentiment in connexion with such usages as the Hindoo suttee. It is known that the Hindoo widow, if prevented from burning herself with her husband's corpse, often feels all the pangs of remorse, and leads a life of misery and self-humiliation. The habitual inculcation of ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... will they not?—and who would have married any presentable woman: but women do want asking, and John never had the word. The rape of such men is left to the practical animal. So John sat alone with his old flame. He had become resigned to her perpetual lamentation and living Suttee for his defunct rival. But, ha! what meant those soft glances now—addressed to him? His tailor and his hairdresser gave youth to John, but they had not the art to bestow upon him distinction, and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith |
