Life and Conditions of the People of Hindustan (1200–1550 A.D.) c7.s1.135

c7.s1.135

We will describe here the attitude of the Muslim State towards this honoured Hindu custom. Ibn Batuta tells us that the Sultans of Delhi had enacted a law, whereby a license had to be procured before burning a widow within the kingdom. Probably the law was designed to discourage the use of compulsion or social pressure to force a widow to burn herself, but in the absence of very strong reasons to the contrary, the license was issued as a matter of course.³ Beyond instituting a system of official permits, the State took no further steps until the region of Humayun. The Mughal Emperor Humayun was the first monarch to think of extending an absolute prohibition to all cases where a widow was past the age of child-bearing, even if she offered herself willingly. It was a bold step of social reform and there were no violent protests or demonstrations on the