Bengal

But he accepted a Judgeship in a Court of Justice newly established in Bengal, under an Act of Parliament which reserved to native litigants the application of their own laws and usages in all questions of inheritance and contract;

In the populous province of Bengal Proper, also noticeable for the nearly total disappearance of the Village Community, cognates are largely admitted to succeed, and sometimes in preference to agnates.

The only form of testament, not belonging to a Roman or Hellenic society, which can reasonably be supposed indigenous, is that recognised by the usages of the province of Bengal;

The Hindoos have indeed advanced one point on what was doubtless the antique practice, by allowing the widow to adopt when the father has neglected to do so, and there are in the local customs of Bengal some faint traces of the Testamentary powers.

So, too, the Will of Bengal is only permitted to govern the succession so far as it is consistent with certain overriding claims of the family.

But it was exactly in Bengal Proper that the English, on entering India, found the Suttee, or widow-burning, not merely an occasional, but a constant and almost universal practice with the wealthier classes, and, as a rule, it was only the childless widow, and never the widow with minor children, who burnt herself on her husband’s funeral pyre.

In Asia it has a trace in central India among some of the non-Aryan tribes of Bengal, and in Siberia, and some quarters of China, and the islands of the ocean — and most of these tribes have been brought by the scholars under totemism by analogy, because they hold certain animals or plants sacred even though they do not name themselves after them.