20 September 2013, 02:31 PM IST
I could hear the falling of the dew drops on the leaves. It was early morning. The sun was just over the horizon. The birds too were silent. The thick canopy of trees and vines overhead made it very claustrophobic. In the predawn, very little light penetrated through the forest cover. We were in a jeep and the driver had promised to show us something special, but did not reveal it to us. At some places there was no proper road. We went over shrubs and tall grasses. We brushed past branches and the leaves that reached up to the wind screen of the jeep that we were traveling in. I was at the Dudwa Nationl Park in the eastern part of UP close to the Nepal border.
After a while we stopped and the driver switched off the engine. The silence was complete and felt ominous. It reminded me of the movie Jurassic Park. Any moment I expected to see Tyrannosaurus Rex to crash through the undergrowth at us.
The driver told us to get down and we followed him through the dense undergrowth, which led to a clearing. At the center of the clearing there was a cemented stretch cordoned off with a fence. Pointing to it, the driver informed us, "this was the place where Sati was committed about 200 years ago!" We looked at it, some in wonder, and some in horror. Here in the deep, almost impenetrable part jungle a girl....a young lady or an old woman was forced into the funeral pyre of her husband. The place was chosen with obvious care to its remoteness. In the deep recess of the jungle, the thick foliage would have effectively muffled the shrieks of her extreme agony.
This abhorrent practice has been there from the Vedic times. Author Abraham Eraly in his meticulously researched book, 'The Mughal World', writes 'Sati was usually voluntary.... There were, however, numerous recorded incidents of forced Sati'. He quotes chroniclers of that time of a young beautiful widow of no more than 12 years of age with her hands and legs tied forced on to the funeral pyre of her husband. Long sticks were used to push the women back into the pyre. It was always the girl's parent who forced her into Sati because it was her bad luck that brought the untimely death of her husband and shame to the family! The women leaving her home for the last time would dip her hands in a red pigment and lay it on the door post- an eerie testament to her last act. The gates to the Junnagadh fort has hand prints of women who committed Sati.
When Raja Bhao Singh died, two of his wives and 8 concubines immolated themselves in the fire. The irony here was that he did not die valorously in the battle field, but of excessive drinking!
Historian Abul Fazal penned these lines on the practice of Sati:
"Being saturated with love they burn together,
Like two wicks caught by one flame."
Whether it was love or coerced only the trees around could reveal. I looked at the site once again. It did not appear to be frequented by people. We quietly filed back to our vehicle and back to the camp, glad to be in the sunshine and civilisation. But somehow I could not stop my thoughts from straying back to that remote, comfortless and abandoned cemented patch buried deep in the jungle.
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When skeletons tumbled out at Dudwa National Park
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