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I need to begin with my total disagreement with the title itself.

In fact, this talk about self immolation of widows in India is probably the biggest fiction about India created by International journalists looking for spice and stories, guided or misguided by some greedy Indians ready to sell fiction not worth pennies, if they can grab a dollar for it.

NO SECRET

In over four decades that I have been alive, I have come across only one case of self-immolation of a widow in India. Now, having lived in ten Indian cities in India and having visited not less than five hundred villages there, I have reasons to believe that I have travelled through some depth and breadth of that country, and I am yet to hear any reference to any other incident like that during all these years.

Those who understand the concept of 'SATI' will understand that it is absolutely impossible to keep such an event of self-immolation of a widow on the husband's pyre, called 'SATI', a secret in that country.

Forget any reference to 'best kept secret'; it is not even a secret. It has never been one, and could have never been one. Neither has it been a common practice in India at any point of history or tradition.

NOT EVEN A PRACTICE

Even in the most revered ancient Indian epic called 'RAMAYANA' - which is the epitome of all traditions and values - when King Dashratha dies, none of his three queens, each of whom is considered an example of an ideal wife, self-immolates herself. There are, though, some legends of certain women who did commit such an act during the many thousand years this ancient civilization has existed, and most of them are given a very special status, usually by way of a temple where people come to pray to her memory as a great and noble soul who refused to continue life without her beloved husband. Legends of a few rare women over five thousand years of unwritten history is hardly enough to call it a practice in a country with a billion plus people. What is does denote is that in this ancient multi-cultural, multi-traditional society, people have experienced all kind of events, ideologies and view-points. The very fact that such incidents acquired the status of legends is a testimony that they are extra-ordinary rare events, worthy of being told and retold as fables in the oral traditions of the country.

LEGENDS OF SATI : ORIGINS IN MYTHOLOGY

The oldest such legend from which the name 'SATI' was derived belongs to one of the mythological stories in one of oldest religious texts, called

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