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 …