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It would probably be in bad taste to refer to this as an old chestnut in need of roasting....
The Brits certainly milked sati for all the propaganda value it was worth, but any notion that they "suppressed" it has to be taken with all the grains of salt you can afford, given the heavily taxed imperial salt monopoly. It's simply an urban legend that sati was anything like a universal practice, even in Bengal, before the Brits got there. Even the Brits saw it from the first as a practice of particular high-caste groups. And there's the rub. Since the Brits were also engaged in sorting out who was high-caste and who was low-caste (and treating them accordingly), they created perverse incentives for the more widespread practice of sati. After all, if your widows threw themselves on funeral pyres, it was prima facie evidence for the Brits that your caste was twice-born.
Michael McIntyre