Suttee is the Indian custom of a wife immolating herself either on the funeral pyre of her dead husband or in some other fashion soon after his death. Although never widely practiced, suttee was the ideal of womanly devotion held by certain Brahman and royal castes.
Suttee or "widow-burning," as the British called it, became a subject of much concern to the new administrators. As time went by, it acquired a peculiar resonance for them, and for those in the home country as well. As well as raising uncomfortable and challenging issues about the role and duties of the British in India, it called into question the self-abnegation expected of women in Britain itself, prompting some reflections on the very nature of service and self-sacrifice, especially in the colonial context. Today, thanks largely to the Kolkata-born cultural theorist Gayatri Spivak, it has again become a hot topic among postcolonial and feminist critics.
