Lord
William Bentinck on the last day of December, 1832, when the
quicksilver in the thermometer at sunrise, outside our tents, was
down to twenty-six degrees of Fahrenheit's thermometer. The village
stands upon a gentle swelling hill of decomposed basalt, and is
surrounded by hills of the same formation. The Dasan river flows
close under the village, and has two beautiful reaches, one above,
the other below, separated by the dyke of basalt, over which lies the
ford of the river.[2]

There are beautiful reaches of the kind in all the rivers in this
part of India, and they are almost everywhere formed in the same
manner. At Bahrol there is a very unusual number of tombs built over
the ashes of women who have burnt themselves with the remains of
their husbands. Upon each tomb stands erect a tablet of freestone,
with the sun, the new moon, and a rose engraved upon it in bas-relief
in one field;[3] and the man and woman, hand in hand, in the other.
On one stone of this kind I saw a third field below these two, with
the figure of a horse in bas-relief, and I asked one of the gentlemen
farmers, who was riding with me, what it meant. He told me that he
thought it indicated that the woman rode on horseback to bathe before
she ascended the pile.[4] I asked him whether he thought the measure
prohibiting the practice of burning good or bad.

'It is', said he, 'in some respects good, and in others bad. Widows
cannot marry among us, and those who had no prospect of a comfortable
provision among their husband's relations, or who dreaded the
possibility of going astray, and thereby sinking into contempt and
misery, were enabled in this way to relieve their minds, and follow
their husbands, under the full assurance of being happily united to
them in the next world.'

When I passed this place on horseback with Lord William Bentinck, he
asked me what these tombs were, for he had never seen any of the kind
before. When I told him what they were, he said not a word; but he
must have felt a proud consciousness of the debt of gratitude which
India owes to the statesman who had the courage to put a stop to this
great evil, in spite of all the fearful obstacles which bigotry and
prejudice opposed to the measure. The seven European functionaries in
charge of the seven districts of the newly-acquired territories were
requested, during the administration of Lord Amherst in 1826, to
state whether the burning of widows could or should be prohi