A TERRIBLE CUSTOM IN INDIA.

Western Star, Issue 1387, 7 September 1889, Page 1 (Supplement)

A TERRIBLE CUSTOM IN INDIA.

The terrible custom of suttee, it seems is not yet dead either in India or China. There is no doubt that it is still occasionally practised in remote corners of Indian native States, though the evidence is almost necessarily circumstantial • while in several Chinese provinces suttee by hanging is exceedingly common. A crusade against the practice in the Foochoo Per fecture has been started by the Shen-Pao, the leading native paper in China, and from this journal we gather some melancholy details of the manner in which it is carried out. Is seems that three days before the appointed date for the suttee a feast is given af which all the man’s relations use every art and exhortation to make his widow comply with the custom. Should she consent as she is invariably compelled to do, she is placed in a sedan chair, and carried in a pompous proccession to the sound of gongs and other instruments through all the principal streets to a platform thirty or forty feet high.

The relations and friends down below now kowtow and salute the victim, and it is customary for even officials to proceed thither to make the salutation. When this ceremony is over, a rope is suspended from a beam, the widow places the loop around her own neck, and one of her brothers pulls the rope with all his strength and strangles her. This done she is bnried and an application is made to the Emperor for some mark of honour to be bestowed to commenorate her sacrifice, which is falsely reported as a voluntary one. Hence says the Shen-Pao there Is scarcely a family in Lian Kiang that does not boast of a “virtuous widow,” and the country is studded with p’ailous erected in their honour. Some years ago it seems a new Perfect arrived at Lian Kiang was much horrified when he heard that the suttee was general there, and receiving, soon after his arrival, an invitation to be present at such a function and to make a kowtow in full official dress on the occasion, he at first declined, but being urged by the gentry and alders to go, he determined to be present on this one occasion to see what would happen. As soon, however, as he made his reverence, the widow on the platform began to cry out and stamp, giving every evidence that she died no willing victim. Moved to violent indignation at the sight, the good prefect arrested her elder relations, neighbours, and the tipao, and administered several hundred blows with the bamboo to each, the husband s father being cangued in addition, and the mother being beaten on the mouth. Tae Prefect issued a proclamation strictly forbidding such enforced suttees in future, but this was only enforced in the immediate neighbourhood of the city, and produced no reformation in the country a little removed. This was thirty years ago, and since then the practice has gone on without a protest, thousands of widows being thus sacrificed every year. The young Emperor of China is to be asked to forbid the suttee under pain of banishment to the frontier—and it is believed thst the Imperial edict on the subject will be at once issued.