The word satī has three basic meanings:

1.  a proper name, Satī, the goddess, a previous incarnation of Pārvatī;

2.  an honorific term for a married or saintly woman; and

3.  from the British colonial period onward, a wife who dies by immolation on the funeral pyre of her deceased husband, or the ritual thereof (see below).

This article will briefly note the narratives around Satī and related…