Thread: Widow Burning

John Crawfurd, an English explorer of the Malay archipelago, was the first westerner to witness such a sacrifice when he took part in a Dutch mission to the Balinese kingdom of Gelgel in 1633. Crawfurd’s description of the cremation suggests that it was a sacred religious ritual that provoked no opposition from the masses. Everybody was involved, their duties assigned in accordance with their social rank, as would be the case in any other ceremony of state. Following Crawfurd, Dutch scholar Friederich was the next westerner to document his observations of the cremation of Dewa Manggis, the King of Gianyar on 22 December 1847 and the subsequent sacrificing of his widow queen and concubines. According to Friederich the hundreds of Balinese present at the cremation showed no signs of fear or grief, and when the time came for the widows to throw themselves onto the funeral pyre they seemed to do so hypnotically, almost methodically. And moreover, the widows were under no obligation to undertake the mebela (the sacrificing of widow concubines) or mesatia (the sacrifice of the widow queen). Following the death of the king, they had eight days to decide whether they would agree to be sacrificed or not, and had the right to go back on a decision as long as it was within the eight days. Needless to say, the incentive to agree was an assured ride on the expressway to heaven, where the soul of the sacrificed widow queen was immediately transformed into the angel Satiawati.

In the end, the practices of mesatia and mebela were banned by the Dutch colonial administration in the 1930s, who considered it barbaric.


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