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…