This is a collection of new essays on the phenomenon of sati (or suttee), the burning of wives in India. The contributors include both American and Indian scholars, and they address basic questions about this controversial phenomenon and the moral issues it involves.

John Stratton Hawley is Professor and Chair of the Department of Religion at Barnard College, and Director of the South Asian Institute at Columbia University. He is the editor of Songs of the Saints of India (Oxford, 1988) and Fundamentalism and Gender (Oxford, 1993), as well as numerous other books on Indian religion and literature.