suttee the Indian custom of a widow burning 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 certain Brahman and royal castes. It is sometimes linked to the myth of the Hindu goddess Sati, who burned herself to death in a fire that she created through her yogic powers after her father insulted her husband, the god Shiva—but in this myth Shiva remains alive and avenges Sati’s death.
The first explicit reference to the practice in Sanskrit appears in the great epic Mahabharata (compiled in its present form in 400 ce). It is also mentioned by Diodorus Siculus, a Greek author of the 1st century bce, in his account of the Punjab in the 4th century