Source: TW
I’ve observed anti-hindus (esp. christians) attack “sati” (properly - anugamana), and hindus going on the defensive. A response I prefer is to proudly accept that practice as a noble choice in certain rare circumstances and point to famous non-hindu dramatizations. In this thread, let us collect such (Please add further high-quality ones).
Europe
- Noble Brünnhilde after Siegfried in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung YT
Diódōros
- Diódōros’s account - Perseus
- Note that Diódōros described the Greeks as condemning the practice (calling it ἄγριος “wild” and χαλεπός “savage”), but the fact that Greek soldiers in the vicinity of India adopted this practice demonstrates that many non-Indians did indeed see something beautiful and noble in the practice, and it was not a practice forced upon people.
The most striking account, from the years after the death of Alexander, is the case of the wife of the general Ceteus. 53 Ceteus died in the first major battle between the two successor generals, Antigonus and Eumenes, in late 317 BCE, which took place somewhere in the desert of central Iran. He was in charge of the Indian troops, and had two Indian wives, both of whom vied for the honour of being burned alive with his corpse. The younger asserted that the elder was pregnant and therefore could not be burned, while the elder demanded that as the senior wife she should have the right to carry out the sacrifice. Midwives were fetched to determine that the elder was indeed pregnant, on which she departed weeping, rending the wreath that was about her head and tearing her hair? The younger wife rejoiced, and advanced on the pyre dressed as if for a wedding, with ribbons in her hair; she gave away her jewellery – rings set with precious stones, necklaces and a circlet for her head, of golden stars studded with jewels - mounted the pyre, assisted by her brother, and, after the army had marched three times around the pyre, submitted calmly to the flames.
diodorus 19.33 as quoted in stoneman, 2019
Japan
- Lt. Shinji Takeyama and his wife Reiko YT (For mature viewers only. A very moving and noble classic short film- incidentally involving anugamana.)
Ms Asada - see separate page.
Another e. g. is General Hajime Sugiyama’s wife committing ritual suicide after dressing in all white a day before he is supposed to have killed himself after Japan’s surrender
Qing
- True to Her Word - The Faithful Maiden Cult in Late Imperial China - By Weijing Lu · 2008
Ambivalence toward widow suicide was nothing new in the eighteenth century. Mark Elvin demonstrated a “conflict between fidelity and filiality” in Chinese attitudes at least by the Ming, and Mann detailed it further for the early Qing 35 But the source of this ambivalence was different for the Manchus. When it came to suicide among Han widows, the issue had mainly to do with the uneasy place suicide occupied within a Confucian order in which filiality imposed a duty to preserve and respect one’s body as a gift from one’s parents “Treating life lightly” (Ch., qingsheng) was a serious ritual transgression.
The suicides of Manchu widows, on the other hand, sent a message of another nature, for the reason that their suicides represented the continuation of an older Inner Asian custom, unrelated to Confucian practice. Once this point is grasped, we can see that the posthumous awarding of jingbiao distinctions to Manchu women in the early Qing amounted to little more than a Confucian whitewash of “barbarian” Manchu ways and that, more than anything, discouraging a “barbarian” practice like following-in-death represented a politically wise choice for the court.
There are a number of ways to get beneath this Confucian whitewash. One is to go back to the tabulation of widow suicides in Table 2.1. It was mentioned earlier that Manchu women accounted for over 60 percent of all jingbiao awards in the first century and a half of Qing rule. But in the category of widow suicide the predominance of Manchu women was even more overwhelming-almost 90 percent, if one assigns a portion of the bondservant figures to the Manchu column. The minuscule number of jingbiao awards to Chinese bannerwomen in this category is especially striking.
- Manchu Widows and Ethnicity in Qing China Mark C. Elliot
Historians have long described notions of womanhood and the social conditions of women during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) with reference to the so-called cult of female chastity. In its narrowest meaning, the term chastity cult refers to the state system of awarding honorific plaques and money for the construction of ceremonial arches and shrines for widows who refused remarriage or committed suicide upon the deaths of their husbands, and for women who committed suicide to prevent a violation of their chastity.
Construed more broadly, the notion of the chastity cult in the late Ming and early Qing encompasses a society-wide movement to extol chaste women as cultural heroes and promote the norms of feminine behavior they symbolized by building shrines to them, publishing their biographies, and recording their names in the thousands in local gazetteers. Chastity discourse did not monopolize the construction of femininity in the Qing, but, as this chapter will demonstrate, chastity lay at the heart of the paradigm of virtue that informed notions of gender difference and norms of proper behavior in mid-Qing China.
- Chinese Femininities, Chinese Masculinities: A Reader edited by Susan Brownell, Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Thomas Laqueur