HUNDREDS of villagers watched as Vidyawati Singh threw herself into the flames of her husband’s funeral pyre. She was dead within minutes, leaving behind three children.

The 35-year-old widow’s death last week has stunned India, and police investigating whether she was driven to commit sati have arrested more than a dozen villagers, including three of her brothers-in-law.

The case has also added to growing pressure on the Indian Government to pass new legislation making it possible to prosecute whole communities for failing to prevent the practice of sati, in which a widow kills herself on her husband’s funeral pyre.

The present law prescribes a life sentence or death for anyone convicted of abetting sati, but convictions are hard to secure because villagers refuse to be witnesses. The proposed new legislation, due to go before parliament this summer, would automatically assume sati was committed under duress, and that the woman’s family could have stopped her.

Mrs Singh threw herself into the flames because villagers egged her on, according to police in the Fatehpur district of Uttar Prades.

Her husband, Lakhan Singh, had been missing for a fortnight from the village of Rari Bujurg. As relatives and villagers carried his corpse to the cremation ground, Mrs Singh accompanied the procession. Soon after the logs began crackling she leapt into the flames, watched by 400 villagers. “The family blamed her for his death because they hadn’t been getting on,” Superintendent Siraj Ahmed Khan, of the Bingkdi police station, the nearest to the remote village, said.

“They made her feel that, as a widow, her life would be so dishonourable and unbearable that she was better off committing sati.”

A farmer in Rari Bujurg, who refused to give his name, gave an even more harrowing account. “She climbed on to the pyre initially on her own but then changed her mind and tried to save herself,” he said. “She tried to jump off, but her three brothers-in-law beat her back with sticks. They said she had no business to live without her husband.”

Sati was banned 175 years ago by Lord Bentinck, the Governor-General of India, who condemned it as “inhuman and impious”, but it continues in pockets of rural India. Last month Sita Devi, 77, died on her husband’s funeral pyre in Bihar, eastern India.

“These villagers are cut off from the world,” Ranjana Kumari, of the Centre for Social Research, in Delhi, said. “They have had no education. For them a husband is god, someone to be worshipped. The tradition of a woman sacrificing everything for her husband is embedded in Indian culture. It won’t change overnight.”

There are about 250 makeshift temples in India that mark places where sati took place. Hindu pilgrims flock to worship at them. Streets are named after women who have committed sati, and audio cassettes that extol their sacrifice are popular, despite government attempts to ban glorification of the practice.

According to Hindu texts, sati is supposed to be voluntary, but there is usually an element of coercion.

“Women are pressurised into it or drugged or dragged on to the pyre,” Girija Vyas, the chairwoman of the National Commission for Women, said. “Often it’s because no one wants to bother looking after an old widow — or her family want to grab the dead husband’s property.”

But Madhu Kishwar, a prominent feminist, said that the problem was a failure to implement existing laws. “We can’t even enforce traffic laws,” she said. “It’s up to the police to use the existing law; we don’t need more amendments.”

'VIRTUOUS DEATH'

The Meherangarh fort’s walls in Jodhpur bears 15 hand prints of the widows of Maharajah Man Singh. They threw themselves on to his funeral pyre in 1843

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