Soon after the battle of Trafalgar I heard a young lady exclaim, 'I
could really wish to have had a brother killed in that action'. There
is no doubt that a family in which a suttee takes place feels a good
deal exalted in its own esteem and that of the community by the
sacrifice. The sister of the Raja of Riwa was one of four or five
wives who burned themselves with the remains of the Raja of Udaipur;
and nothing in the course of his life will ever be recollected by her
brother with so much of pride and pleasure, since the Udaipur Raja is
the head of the Rajput tribes.[7]
I asked the old lady when she had first resolved upon becoming a
suttee, and she told me that about thirteen years before, while
bathing in the river Nerbudda, near the spot where she then sat, with
many other females of the family, the resolution had fixed itself in
her mind as she looked at the splendid temples on the bank of the
river erected by the different branches of the family over the ashes
of her female relations who had at different times become suttees.
Two, I think, were over her aunts, and one over the mother of her
husband.
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