India’s Sati Stones Commemorate a Macabre Historical Practice - Atlas Obscura Want to see fewer ads? Become a Member. Trips Upcoming Trips All Trips Trips Blog Get the Atlas Obscura book Shop Now » Upcoming Trips View All Trips » Chile’s Atacama Desert: Geology, Geoglyphs & Ghost Towns Tunisia Through the Sands of Time Spain: Avant-Garde Winemaking in Catalonia Sacred Granaries, Kasbahs and Feasts in Morocco Experiences Upcoming Experiences View All Experiences » Members only Inside a Fantasy Coffin Maker's Workshop Members only Monster of the Month w/ Colin Dickey: Werewolves Members only Antiques and Their Afterlives: Stories from the Collection of Ryan and Regina Cohn Members only Not-So-Creepy Crawlies: Making Friends with Bugs w/ Aaron Rodriques Members only Toil and Trouble: Explore the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft Courses Upcoming Courses View All Courses » Stories in the Stones: How to Read a Gravestone With Dr. Elise M. Ciregna Foods of Turtle Island: Indigenous Dishes of North America With Mariah Gladstone Playing Ancient Games: History & Mythology With John Bucher When Walls Talk: Decoding a Building's History With Lauren Northup The History of Color With Carolyn Purnell Places Top Destinations Latest Places Most Popular Places Random Place Lists Itineraries Add a Place Download the App Latest Places View All Places » Fraserburgh, Scotland St Drostan's Well 57.6710, -2.1913 Cambridge, England Snowy Farr Sculpture 52.2051, 0.1194 New Harmony, Indiana Working Mens Institute 38.1287, -87.9364 Chester, England Bridge Of Sighs 53.1939, -2.8934 Top Destinations View All Destinations » Countries Australia Canada China France Germany India Italy Japan Cities Amsterdam Barcelona Beijing Berlin Boston Budapest Chicago London Los Angeles Mexico City Montreal Moscow New Orleans New York City Paris Philadelphia Rome San Francisco Seattle Stockholm Tokyo Toronto Vienna Washington, D.C. Foods Latest Places to Eat & Drink View All Places to Eat » Elliott Street Deli & Pub Dr. Bombay’s Underwater Tea Party The Consulate Tai Tung Tsaghkunk Restaurant Stories Recent Stories All Stories Puzzles Video Podcast Most Recent Stories View All Stories » Can Science Solve the Mystery of the Concrete Book? The Race to Document Prehistoric Art in a Coastal Cave in France Podcast: Libre Intentional Artist Community San Francisco’s Famous Sourdough Was Once Really Gross Sign In Join Sign In Join What's near me? Random Place Icon Random Place India’s Sati Stones Commemorate a Macabre Historical Practice Their challenging legacy has complicated preservation and study. by Kamala Thiagarajan November 30, 2020 India’s Sati Stones Commemorate a Macabre Historical Practice Copy Link Facebook Twitter Reddit Flipboard Pocket An old sati stone visible in Panna National Park in Madhya Pradesh. John Warburton-Lee Photography/Alamy In This Story Destination Guide India 88 Articles 220 Places Every Saturday morning, around 8:30 a.m., Munaivar Muneeswaran, 37, head of the department of history at Saraswathy Narayanan College in Madurai in southern India, gathered his friends. They packed meals and essentials, and then set off on weekend-long archaeological expeditions. These jaunts began in 2002, when he chanced upon an ancient signpost near his home in the village of Kavasakkotai. The sign mentioned a village called Velambur, but it didn’t appear on any map. Ever since, he says, he’s been obsessed with finding the spot where the mysterious village could have been. He decided to comb a radius of 12 miles around his home, reasoning that the village wasn’t likely to be far from the signpost. For many years, Muneeswaran and his friends came up empty. In mid-July 2020, in a village called Chatrapatti, not far from his home, he stumbled on the remains of a defunct post office that carried the name Velambur on a dusty sign. Inside, he found old rubber stamps with the name, too. So he began to search for a statue, an edifice, anything that could possibly confirm that this was the village he had sought for nearly two decades. But in a seemingly abandoned part of the agricultural area, he made a completely unrelated discovery. Munaivar Muneeswaran with two of the sati stones he found. The intricacy of the carvings suggest a royal lineage. Courtesy Munaivar Muneeswaran “People were worshipping in the vicinity, but we couldn’t see an idol or temple,” he says. “Why were they praying here? What significance did the spot have?” Thinking that it could be the key to finding the old village, he recruited locals to search through an area covered in brambles. They hacked away at the wild overgrowth, and in an hour they had uncovered three stones, estimated to be at least 400 years old. Roughly 3.5 by 2.5 feet each, with one slightly smaller than the others. Muneeswaran knew that he had found sati stones, memorials erected to honor the widows of men killed in battle—widows who, by way of both grief and tradition, had immolated themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres. These weren’t the first sati stones that Muneeswaran had encountered. In 2017, in a village called Kasipuram, three miles from his home, beside an old tank overrun by thorns, he found what appeared to be 10 of them, seven of which were still clearly identifiable after centuries of exposure. When he researched the history of the area, he found that it was once part of another lost village, called Madhamamnayaknur, in an area where elephants had been trained for combat in the 16th century. The three stones that he uncovered at Chatrapatti, however, were different. Instead of a sculpted handprint that represents the women who died, a usual feature on most sati stones, these had been intricately carved. Two of the stones had three figures on them—a man flanked by two women—though one was severely weathered. It suggested that these may have a royal lineage. A sati stone depicting a king and his two wives at Orchha, Madhya Pradesh. Courtesy Ameeta Singh “The ornaments on the central male figure were indicative that he was of royal birth, quite possibly King Kausilan who ruled these parts in the 16th century,” he says. “The king was flanked by two of his wives. The figure of the queens are adorned in jewelry, indicating that they died as sumangalis, or married women on his funeral pyre.” The women each carried a lemon in one hand and a mirror in the other, common symbols on sati stones, as women might have carried such items to their deaths. Sati stones have been found across India, says S. Sumathy, head of the department of anthropology at the University of Madras. And they turn up all over, in unexpected places. “The practice was far more prominent in northern and central India, believed to be widely practiced among the Hindu community, particularly the Rajputs, a warrior clan,” she says. “In the states of Rajasthan, and in Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Goa. In south India, it was prevalent in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu.” The practice of sati appears to have been prominent in the early years of the Mughal rule in India—which lasted from 1526 to 1857—when the religiously diverse subcontinent was mostly governed by an Islamic dynasty. As a result, sati stones have a rather contentious history, still fraught with religious and political tension. Preparations for a sati ceremony in 1908, from Harmsworth History of the World. The Print Collector/Getty Images “If we paid attention, there are many tales from our past that these stones could tell—for instance, that this was a society that prized virginity and demonized widowhood, that it was beset by frequent wars and unrest, which drove women to take their own lives rather than end up as prisoners of war or victims of rape by a pillaging enemy,” Sumathy says. Over time, the practice was glorified. The women were praised and worshipped for their bravery and chastity. But the issue of whether they consented to the practice is complicated, she adds. “Even if the women chose to willingly die with their husbands, this isn’t considered real consent. Sati was so much a part of a rigid religious and moral code that prevailed in society at that period in history, and women, especially the elite, were expected to conform, to set an example, or risk being ostracized.” Even today, controversy over sati stones erupts on social media and finds its way into the news. In an India ruled by Hindu nationalists and heavily polarized along religious lines, Muslims have recently been portrayed, in a historical context, as invaders and conquerors, to the extent that cities bearing the names of Mughal kings are currently being re-christened. Sati stones, and the fear of invaders they represent, inadvertently fit into that narrative. “The first clear evidence of sati existed in Eran in Madhya Pradesh in 510 AD,” says Ameeta Singh, a professor of history at the Government Maharani Lakshmi Bai College in Bhopal. Ameeta Singh with one of the sculpted sati stones that she seeks out and documents. Courtesy Ameeta Singh Eran—referred to as Erakaina or Erakanya in Buddhist and Hindu texts—was an ancient city where evidence of the practice was found inscribed on a pillar. (Mentions of the practice go back even further, to the Greek historian Aristobulus of Cassandreia, who wrote of it while traveling with Alexander the Great.) Singh has been documenting sati stones in central India since 2015, ever since she learned that one of her ancestors, a woman named Rupai, had committed sati herself. Her family hails from Falodi in Rajasthan. When Singh visited her ancestral village, she found seven sati memorials, including one for Rupai. Since then, she’s combed the length of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, decoding the inscriptions on thousands of examples. She read many, often disturbing, historical eyewitness accounts, including that of 17th-century Italian traveler Pietro Della Valle. He wrote of a sati procession in the town of Ikkeri in the south Indian state of Karnataka. The widow mounted on a horse, a lemon in her right hand and a mirror in her left, while a band played. “The people in the procession sang her glories and admired her sacrifice,” he wrote. Fanny Parks, a Welsh writer known for her extensive journals of colonial India, sketched many sati memorials that she’d visited during her two decades in the country. “Like Parks, I’m fascinated with its historical value and sketch the memorials, writing my account as a woman and a wanderer,” says Singh. Over the years, Singh has tabulated and mapped sati stones across central India. The stones are often found in clusters, she says, with a higher density in key cities such as Vidisha, Gwalior, Shivpuri, Rajgarh, Sagar, and Orchha. There are fewer sati stones in rural or tribal areas, indicating that the practice was more prominent among the warrior clan. They are also more prevalent near the sites of ancient battlefields, such as Khimlasa, Bangla, Sironj, and Amjhera in the state of Madhya Pradesh. The largest concentrations was found in Udaipur and Jaisalmer in Rajasthan, at royal cremation grounds. A sati stone at a funeral ghat in the city of Varanasi. Didi/Alamy “The inscriptions on the stones written in the Devanagari script [an ancient Indian script] suggests that the custom was widely prevalent from the 10th to 18th centuries, but the maximum number of deaths from sati occurred from the 14th to 17th centuries,” Singh says. “There is still much we don’t know about sati—its ideology, ethnography, culture. All we have are the traces left behind in eyewitness accounts, and in the stones.” The inscriptions might include personal information, such as the names of members of the woman’s family, and her husband’s name and profession. Singh observed in her work that the pillars in north and central India have distinctive features such as cenotaphs, riders, and warriors, and in that way bear similarities to Greek and Roman motifs. Some feature sculpted images of couples and symbols depicting worship of the Hindu god Shiva. Carved into the stones are also suns, moons, mirrors, and waterpots, motifs that span the range of the practice. Researchers assume they represent purity and reference items a woman might have carried to her death. But not all stones carry such detail. In the north Indian state of Maharashtra, very few sati stones have inscriptions, says Pune-based archaeologist Manjiri Bhalerao, a specialist in Indian studies at Tilak Maharashtra Vidyapeeth University. Such less-ornate stones are often subject to vandalism, or could be reused in the foundations of homes, she says. “We need to view these stones objectively, preserve them better, and study them as neutral artifacts that are part of our heritage.” This sati stone at Vidisha Madhya Pradesh is rich in symbolism and hierarchy, possibly depicting a king who died in battle, his two wives, and his horse. Courtesy Ameeta Singh That heritage lingered well into modern history. The practice so horrified the British colonialists that on December 4, 1829, Governor-General William Bentinck passed the Bengal Sati Regulation, a law that made the practice illegal. However, sati stones continued to be worshipped, and it wasn’t until 1987, when an 18-year-old widow named Roopkuvarba Kanwar, who had been married for a mere eight months, was forcibly burnt on her husband’s funeral pyre in the village of Deorala in Rajasthan, that the Indian government stepped in to strengthen laws and enforcement. Any ceremony associated with the stones and attempts to commemorate or honor the women became prohibited. While these laws were welcomed, they complicated archaeological preservation of the stones themselves. Researchers drew criticism for studying them and many of the sites—such as those Muneeswaran encountered—sank into neglect. “These sites are in urgent need for protection and preservation,” he says. He is now petitioning a local museum to help get the area in Chatrapatti village declared a protected site. “The stones are more than memorials. They contain a wealth of insight into pockets of our local history that we can’t afford to lose.” Read next Reintroducing the Big-Game Huntresses of the Ancient World Men hunted, women gathered, right? It's a lot more complicated. firetraditionwomendeathmedieval Want to see fewer ads? Become a Member. Want to see fewer ads? Become a Member. Using an ad blocker? We depend on ad revenue to craft and curate stories about the world’s hidden wonders. Consider supporting our work by becoming a member for as little as $5 a month. Continue Using Ad-Block Support Us Keep Exploring roads Meet Kenya's Sisterhood of Badass Bikers The women-only motorcycle club offers skills learning, solidarity, and support that echoes pre-colonial networks. Peace Mundia March 30, 2022 paintings 6 Groundbreaking Women You Didn’t Learn About in History Class Meet the painter, the pilot, the author, and other "firsts" who paved the way. Sarah Durn March 15, 2022 mystery The Dramatic Life and Mysterious Death of Theodosia Burr The fate of Aaron Burr's daughter remains a topic of contention. Hadley Meares March 9, 2022 santa claus Remembering When Mrs. Claus Cracked the North Pole's Glass Ceiling In the 19th century, the character embodied debates about women’s rights—and occasionally got a sleigh ride of her own. Maura Ives December 20, 2021 List 10 Ethical Animal Places to Visit in 2019 Unique experiences from Nairobi to Chiang Mai. Nikki Vargas December 24, 2018 List A Rat Lover's Tour of the World 15 places where rodents are celebrated, feared, preserved, and studied. Kavya Ram Mohan May 11, 2017 Video Where Scientists Play With Fire 7:22 Video • Gastro Obscura The Chinese Bagel That Helped to Win a War 2:58 Video What It's Like to Take Lessons in Horseback Falconry 4:18 Video • AO Docs The Inspiring Story of Cambodia's First LGBTQ Dance Company 3:58 Video • PinDrop Oaxaca's Intricate Radish-Sculpting Festival 1:16 Video How Chinese Folk Dancers Continue to Practice During Quarantine 5:01 Video Reviving the Lost Art of Cambodian Shadow Puppetry 3:54 Video An Introduction to America's Most Metal Cemetery 6:04 Video • PinDrop Meet the Beard That Killed Its Owner 1:27 Video • PinDrop An Ancient Cemetery, Resurrected 1:51 Video An Emotional Visit to Vermont's Dog Chapel 6:12 Video The Mystery of Hawai‘i’s Doctor’s Pit 4:46 Video Explore the Ruins of a Medieval East African Empire 3:41 Video • PinDrop This Statue of a Decomposing Prince Once Held His Actual Heart 1:15 Want to see fewer ads? Become a Member. From Around the Web Atlas Obscura Trips India: Desert Festivals of Rajasthan View This Trip See Fewer Ads Become an Atlas Obscura member and experience far fewer ads and no pop-ups. Learn More Get Our Email Newsletter Thanks for subscribing! View all newsletters » Follow Us Get the app Download the App Places All Places Latest Places Most Popular Places to Eat Random Nearby Add a Place Editorial Stories Food & Drink Itineraries Lists Puzzles Video Podcast Newsletters Trips All Trips Trips Blog Art & Culture Trips Food Trips Hidden City Trips History Trips Photography Trips Wildlife & Nature Trips FAQ Experiences Experiences Online Courses Online Experience FAQ Online Course FAQ Community Membership Feedback & Ideas Community Guidelines Product Blog Unique Gifts Work With Us Company About Contact Us FAQ Advertise With Us Advertising Guidelines Press Privacy Policy Cookie Policy Terms of Use © 2022 Atlas Obscura. All rights reserved. Questions or Feedback? Contact Us Thanks for sharing! Follow us on Twitter to get the latest on the world's hidden wonders. Like us on Facebook to get the latest on the world's hidden wonders. Follow us on Twitter Like us on Facebook Want a Free Book? Sign up for our newsletter and enter to win the second edition of our book, Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders. Subscribe No Thanks Visit AtlasObscura.com Stay in Touch! Follow us on social media to add even more wonder to your day. Follow us on Twitter Like us on Facebook Follow Us on Instagram No Thanks Visit AtlasObscura.com No purchase necessary. Winner will be selected at random on 10/01/2022. Offer available only in the U.S. (including Puerto Rico). Offer subject to change without notice. See contest rules for full details. Add Some Wonder to Your Inbox Every weekday we compile our most wondrous stories and deliver them straight to you. Subscribe No Thanks We'd Like You to Like Us Like Atlas Obscura and get our latest and greatest stories in your Facebook feed. No Thanks aoc-full-screen aoc-heart-solid aoc-compass aoc-flipboard aoc-globe aoc-pocket aoc-share aoc-cancel aoc-video aoc-building aoc-clock aoc-clipboard aoc-help aoc-arrow-right aoc-arrow-left aoc-ticket aoc-place-entry aoc-facebook aoc-instagram aoc-reddit aoc-rss aoc-twitter aoc-accommodation aoc-activity-level aoc-add-a-photo aoc-add-box aoc-add-shape aoc-arrow-forward aoc-been-here aoc-chat-bubbles aoc-close aoc-expand-more aoc-expand-less aoc-forum-flag aoc-group-size aoc-heart-outline aoc-heart-solid aoc-home aoc-important aoc-knife-fork aoc-library-books aoc-link aoc-list-circle-bullets aoc-list aoc-location-add aoc-location aoc-mail aoc-map aoc-menu aoc-more-horizontal aoc-my-location aoc-near-me aoc-notifications-alert aoc-notifications-mentions aoc-notifications-muted aoc-notifications-tracking aoc-open-in-new aoc-pencil aoc-person aoc-pinned aoc-plane-takeoff aoc-plane passport-plane aoc-print aoc-reply aoc-search aoc-shuffle aoc-star aoc-subject aoc-trip-style aoc-unpinned aoc-send aoc-phone aoc-apps aoc-lock aoc-verified