“Missionaries And The Debate On Sati In Colonial India”, Indica Today, January 2021, 2023:

“In the popular mind, sati was one of the ills of Hindu society that was abolished by the colonial Government on persistent pressure from British Baptist missionaries. It is not sufficiently recognized that sati was a rare act, performed by a very small number of Hindu widows over the centuries.

It enjoyed no religious sanction. In the nineteenth century British Evangelicals and Baptist missionaries grossly exaggerated the occurrence of sati for two reasons.

Firstly, they wanted to secure permission of the British Parliament to proselytize in the East India Company’s territories in India, which was denied to them till 1813. Secondly, to justify British presence in the country, they presented remarkable accounts of what they described as the evils of Hindu society, topmost among them widow immolation…..”

Read the full article at Indica.today