I once knew this girl who thought she was God. She didn't give sight to the blind or raise the dead. She didn't even teach anything, not really, and she never t

Before a crowd of several thousand people, mostly men, a young woman dressed in her bridal finery was burned alive on her husband's funeral pyre. The apparent r

Sati--the burning of a widow on her husband's funeral pyre--has for centuries been one of the few ways in which women of India could achieve renown, respect, an

Contentious Traditions analyzes the debate on sati, or widow burning, in colonial India. Though the prohibition of widow burning in 1829 was heralded as a key s