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 deitie…