Among the foreign tribes who are near the outskirts of India are the Mongolian races, among which a similar custom prevails even to day. In Japan and the allied nations, the custom still prevails under the name of Hara-kiri, in which a person commits suicide as a pledge of his devotion and faith fullness to his master. The underlying motive of it is to join his master in the next world.

However barbarous it may seem, the sanctity of the custom cannot, be doubted for a moment. The faith, the devotion and the spirit of self-sacrifice underlying it are astounding. The Anumarana, as found in India in the 11th and 12th centuries, is a variety of this custom.

The Hindu lawgivers, when they adopted it in society, sanctioned it at first as an alternative course for a widow to follow. But gradually the virtue implied by the custom seems to have appealed to their imagination, and we find them attaching to it an additional value of unlimited bliss in. heaven. The verse of Parasara clearly indicates this change in the outlook.

Later, however, the self immolation is thought to give a power of redemption, i.e. a Sati or a woman who immolated herself could lift her husband up from hell by virtue of her deed, and the eschatological notion that rendered imperative the birth of sons, in the earliest literature, determined the lot of a widow now. It was adopted in society as the safeguard of a man for his life after death and was finally prescribed as the only path to be, followed by a widow.

We thus see that the end of the later law- period is marked by a complete change in the outlook on life, especially on the life of a woman. The influence of the reformatory movements, like Buddhism and Jainism, modified to a great extent the standard of life. The extreme ascetic tendency set up by Buddhism bad its natural reaction on society, and it restricted to no small extent the freedom of women.