ong as she lives.
The greater number of these unfortunate beings become a prey to the
seducer, and a disgrace to their families. Not long since a bride, on
the day the marriage ceremony was to have been performed, was burnt on
the funeral pile with the dead body of the bridegroom, at
Chandernagore, a few miles north of Calcutta. Concubinage, to a most
awful extent, is the fruit of these marriages without choice. What a
sum of misery is attached to the lot of woman in India before she has
attained even her fifteenth year!

"In some cases as many as fifty females, the daughters of so many
Hindoos, are given in marriage to one bramhun {u-caron}, in order to
make these families something more respectable, and that the parents
may be able to say, we are allied by marriage to the kooleens...

"But the awful state of female society in this miserable country
appears in nothing so much as in dooming the female, the widow, to be
burnt alive with the putrid carcase of her husband. The Hindoo
legislators have sanctioned this immolation, showing herein a studied
determination to insult and degrade woman. She is, therefore, in the
first instance, deluded into this act by the writings of these bramhuns
{u-caron}; in which also she is promised, that if she will offer
herself, for the benefit of her husband, on the funeral pile,
she shall, by the extraordinary merit of this action, rescue her
husband from misery, and take him and fourteen generations of his and
her family with her to heaven, where she shall enjoy with them
celestial happiness until fourteen kings of the gods shall have
succeeded to the throne of heaven (that is, millions of years!) Thus
ensnared, she embraces this dreadful death. I have seen three widows,
at different times, burnt alive; and had repeated opportunities of
being present at similar immolations, but my courage failed me...

"The burying alive of widows manifests, if that were possible, a still
more abominable state of feeling towards women than the burning them
alive. The weavers bury their dead. When, therefore, a widow of this
tribe is deluded into the determination not to survive her husband, she
is buried alive with the dead body. In this kind of immolation the
children and relations dig the grave. After certain ceremonies have
been attended to, the poor widow arrives, and is let down into the pit.
She sits in the centre, taking the dead body on her lap and encircling
it with her arms. These