Sati (satī)

Sati refers both to a virtuous wife and to the practice in which a widow dies on her husband's pyre. The Mahabharata contains the practice without endorsing it as a norm: Madri chooses to burn with Pandu, holding herself responsible for his death, while Kunti lives on to raise all five sons, and after the war the great mass of widows survive to mourn. Gandhari's lament over the field is the epic's real word on widowhood, and it is a protest rather than a consecration.