Soon after the battle of Trafalgar I heard a young lady exclaim, ’I could really wish to have had a brother killed in that action’.  There is no doubt that a family in which a suttee takes place feels a good deal exalted in its own esteem and that of the community by the sacrifice.  The sister of the Raja of Riwa was one of four or five wives who burned themselves with the remains of the Raja of Udaipur; and nothing in the course of his life will ever be recollected by her brother with so much of pride and pleasure, since the Udaipur Raja is the head of the Rajput tribes.[7]

I asked the old lady when she had first resolved upon becoming a suttee, and she told me that about thirteen years before, while bathing in the river Nerbudda, near the spot where she then sat, with many other females of the family, the resolution had fixed itself in her mind as she looked at the splendid temples on the bank of the river erected by the different branches of the family over the ashes of her female relations who had at different times become suttees.  Two, I think, were over her aunts, and one over the mother of her husband.  They were very beautiful buildings, and had been erected at great cost and kept in good repair.  She told me that she had never mentioned this her resolution to any one from that time, nor breathed a syllable on the subject till she called out ’Sat, sat, sat’,[8] when her husband breathed his last with his head in her lap on the bank of the Nerbudda, to which he had been taken when no hopes remained of his surviving the fever of which he died.

Charles Harding, of the Bengal Civil Service, as magistrate of Benares, in 1806 prevented the widow of a Brahman from being burned.  Twelve months after her husband’s death she had been goaded by her family into the expression of a wish to burn with some relic of her husband, preserved for the purpose.  The pile was raised to her at Ramnagar,[9] some two miles above Benares, on the opposite side of the river Ganges.  She was not well secured upon the pile, and as soon as she felt the fire she jumped off and plunged into the river.  The people all ran after her along the bank, but the current drove her towards Benares, whence a police boat put off and took her in.

She was almost dead with the fright and the water, in which she had been kept afloat by her clothes.  She was taken to Harding; but the whole city of Benares was in an uproar, at the rescue of a Brahman’s widow from the funeral pile, for such it had been considered, though the man had been a year dead.  Thousands surrounded his house, and his court was filled with the principal men of the city, imploring him to surrender the woman; and among the rest was the poor woman’s father, who declared that he could not support his daughter; and that she had, therefore, better be burned, as her husband’s family would no longer receive her.  The uproar was quite alarming to a young man, who felt all the responsibility upon himself