01-22-2006, 08:18 AM
<!--QuoteBegin-Sushmita+Jan 21 2006, 04:22 PM-->QUOTE(Sushmita @ Jan 21 2006, 04:22 PM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->Acharya,
Before accepting the inventions of ambedkarite.org (this should be the actual name, they'd wrongly named their site after Ambedkar who they often misquote; they also tend not to present all his opinions nor any of them wholly), here's another article on sati which also quotes historic personages who witnessed the event.
Excerpted from a translation of Koenraad Elst's article "Sati en andere zelfdoding" (Sati and other suicide). I suppose the article was meant for Belgian and Dutch people, as Elst himself had provided no English translation on his site or elsewhere. The translator is uncredited in the article I'd saved.
<b>Excerpt #1 of 3</b>
<!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><span style='color:purple'>Origin</span>
People sometimes say that widow-burning was brought into India in a later migration from Central-Asia, that of the Shakas or Scythians, in the middle or end of the first millenium B.C. These Scythian tribes are then supposed to have been the ancestors of the martial Rajput caste in Rajasthan, the caste to which Rup Kanwar and the most famous satis belonged. This seems to me an attempt to push away from oneself a difficult to defend custom. Of the Scythians, it is indeed known that they sent widows to their death with their husband, as well as servants and horses with their master â whether burnt with them or buried with them. From archaeological excavations in Southern-Russia it appears that widows were already climbing the funeral pyres of their deceased husbands in the fourth millennium before our chronology, in the so-called Kurgan-culture, an apparantly proto-Scythian and definitely Indo-European culture.
<i>[The connection with India should however not be sought in the Scythian invasion of the 1st century B.C., but in the much older common Indo-European roots, because the custom also occurred among the Celtic and Germanic people. So we hear in the Edda, in the book Sigurdarkvida, that Brunhilde stabs herself after the death of Siegfried in order to be buried with him; in addition she first has her slaves killed and she also invites free servants to voluntarily die with her. So she doesnât climb the funeral pyre, but nevertheless follows her husband into death. Also among the Celts did this custom occur in large scale. Great power and wisdom are ascribed to a woman about to commit sati, which is why for e.g. Brunhilde predicts the future at the last moment for next of kin.
Bernard Sergent (Les Indo-Européens, Payot, 1995, p.223), observes a connection between sati and the status of a woman. In spite of feminist claims that this custom once again proves the male contempt for woman, it in fact occurred the least in those Indo-European societies where the woman was most disparaged in both practice as well as mythology, like the Greek {society}. A woman who does not have much honour to maintain, wonât accompany one to the pyre; itâs precisely the proud and relatively free/liberated/emancipated Celtic and Germanic women who did this.]</i>
In India, besides the Rajputs, the martial Marathas and Sikhs also knew this custom, though to a lesser extent. Other castes did not know this practice at all or specifically disapproved of it, in particular the brahmans (although they too practised sati in British-Bengal, in particular after the modernisation of the law of succession). In most duty-prescribing books (400 B.C. to 200 A.D?), among others of Manu and Yajnavalkya, there is no mention of widow-burning at all. Only the Vishnu-dharma-shastra gives the widow the choice between celibacy and self-immolation.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Elst wrote the article in 1994 and added parts to it (like the section in italics above) in or after September 2000. It therefore does not take into account the results of recent genetics research which shows that neither Rajputs nor any other Kshatriya tribe comes from outside of India but are in fact just indigenous. Even though we've had an influx of Shakas (Iranian-speaking people*), they've just dissolved into the country's population and don't appear to have been so significant in number as to have left much of their imprint either genetically, culturally or otherwise.
*See http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/reviews/sergent.html which states <!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->every testimony we have of the Scythians, including the Haumavarga ones in whose sites traces of the Soma ceremony have been found, is as an Iranian-speaking people.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
[right][snapback]45297[/snapback][/right]
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Before accepting the inventions of ambedkarite.org (this should be the actual name, they'd wrongly named their site after Ambedkar who they often misquote; they also tend not to present all his opinions nor any of them wholly), here's another article on sati which also quotes historic personages who witnessed the event.
Excerpted from a translation of Koenraad Elst's article "Sati en andere zelfdoding" (Sati and other suicide). I suppose the article was meant for Belgian and Dutch people, as Elst himself had provided no English translation on his site or elsewhere. The translator is uncredited in the article I'd saved.
<b>Excerpt #1 of 3</b>
<!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><span style='color:purple'>Origin</span>
People sometimes say that widow-burning was brought into India in a later migration from Central-Asia, that of the Shakas or Scythians, in the middle or end of the first millenium B.C. These Scythian tribes are then supposed to have been the ancestors of the martial Rajput caste in Rajasthan, the caste to which Rup Kanwar and the most famous satis belonged. This seems to me an attempt to push away from oneself a difficult to defend custom. Of the Scythians, it is indeed known that they sent widows to their death with their husband, as well as servants and horses with their master â whether burnt with them or buried with them. From archaeological excavations in Southern-Russia it appears that widows were already climbing the funeral pyres of their deceased husbands in the fourth millennium before our chronology, in the so-called Kurgan-culture, an apparantly proto-Scythian and definitely Indo-European culture.
<i>[The connection with India should however not be sought in the Scythian invasion of the 1st century B.C., but in the much older common Indo-European roots, because the custom also occurred among the Celtic and Germanic people. So we hear in the Edda, in the book Sigurdarkvida, that Brunhilde stabs herself after the death of Siegfried in order to be buried with him; in addition she first has her slaves killed and she also invites free servants to voluntarily die with her. So she doesnât climb the funeral pyre, but nevertheless follows her husband into death. Also among the Celts did this custom occur in large scale. Great power and wisdom are ascribed to a woman about to commit sati, which is why for e.g. Brunhilde predicts the future at the last moment for next of kin.
Bernard Sergent (Les Indo-Européens, Payot, 1995, p.223), observes a connection between sati and the status of a woman. In spite of feminist claims that this custom once again proves the male contempt for woman, it in fact occurred the least in those Indo-European societies where the woman was most disparaged in both practice as well as mythology, like the Greek {society}. A woman who does not have much honour to maintain, wonât accompany one to the pyre; itâs precisely the proud and relatively free/liberated/emancipated Celtic and Germanic women who did this.]</i>
In India, besides the Rajputs, the martial Marathas and Sikhs also knew this custom, though to a lesser extent. Other castes did not know this practice at all or specifically disapproved of it, in particular the brahmans (although they too practised sati in British-Bengal, in particular after the modernisation of the law of succession). In most duty-prescribing books (400 B.C. to 200 A.D?), among others of Manu and Yajnavalkya, there is no mention of widow-burning at all. Only the Vishnu-dharma-shastra gives the widow the choice between celibacy and self-immolation.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Elst wrote the article in 1994 and added parts to it (like the section in italics above) in or after September 2000. It therefore does not take into account the results of recent genetics research which shows that neither Rajputs nor any other Kshatriya tribe comes from outside of India but are in fact just indigenous. Even though we've had an influx of Shakas (Iranian-speaking people*), they've just dissolved into the country's population and don't appear to have been so significant in number as to have left much of their imprint either genetically, culturally or otherwise.
*See http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/reviews/sergent.html which states <!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->every testimony we have of the Scythians, including the Haumavarga ones in whose sites traces of the Soma ceremony have been found, is as an Iranian-speaking people.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
[right][snapback]45297[/snapback][/right]
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