Travels in India (Tavernier) 124.7

124.7

In the Kingdom of Bengal women are burnt in another manner. A woman in that country must be very poor if she does not come with the body of her husband to the margin of the Ganges in order to wash it after he is dead, and to bathe herself before being burnt. I have seen them come to the Ganges more than twenty days’ journey, the bodies being by that time altogether putrid, and emitting an unbearable odour. There was one of them who, coming from the north, near the frontiers of the Kingdom of Bhutan, with the body of her husband which she had conveyed in a carriage, travelled all the way on foot herself, without eating for fifteen or sixteen days, till she arrived at the Ganges, where after having washed the body of her husband, which stank horribly, and having bathed herself also, she had herself burnt with him with a determination which surprised those who saw it. I was there at the time. As throughout the length of the Ganges, and also in all Bengal, there is but little fuel, these poor women send to beg for wood out of charity to burn themselves with the dead bodies of their husbands. There is prepared for them a funeral pile, which is like a kind of bed, with its pillow of small wood and reeds, in which pots of oil and other drugs are placed in order to consume the body quickly.