Bengal Sati Regulation, 1829 (Regulation XVII of 1829)

The Bengal Sati Regulation of 1829, Regulation Seventeen, promulgated by the Government of the Bengal Presidency under Governor-General Lord William Bentinck on 4 December 1829 and shortly afterward extended to the Madras and Bombay presidencies, is the primary colonial legal instrument declaring the burning or burying alive of Hindu widows to be culpable homicide. As the statute itself, it is the direct and authoritative source for the law's actual wording and formal legal effect. Its limit is that it is the legal text rather than a historical account of the reform movement, the colonial politics and the Indian social debate, both supportive and opposed, that surrounded its passage and its later enforcement, which a dedicated history of the period addresses on its own terms.