but only widows of royal descent could burn themselves alive (others were stabbed to death by a kris knife first). At Lombok, a high bamboo platform was erected in front of the fire and, when the flames were at their strongest, the widow climbed up the platform and dived into the fire. Live burials Most Hindu communities, especially in North India, only bury the bodies of those under the age of two, such as baby girls. Those older than two are customarily cremated. A few European accounts provide rare descriptions of Indian sati that included the burial of the widow with her dead husband. One of the drawings in the Portuguese Códice Casanatense shows the live burial of a Hindu widow in the 16th century. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, a 17th-century world traveller and trader of gems, wrote that women were buried with their dead husbands along the Coast of Coromandel while people danced during the cremation rites. The 18th-century Flemish painter Frans Balthazar Solvyns provided the only known eyewitness account of an Indian sati involving a burial. Solvyns states that the custom included the woman shaving her head, music and the event was guarded by East India Company soldiers. He expressed admiration for the Hindu woman, but also calls the custom barbaric. The Commission of Sati (Prevention) Act, 1987 Part I, Section 2(c) includes within its definition of sati not just the act of burning a widow alive, but also that of burying her alive. Compulsion Sati is often described as voluntary, although in some cases it may have been forced. In one narrative account in 1785, the widow appears to have been drugged either with bhang or opium and was tied to the pyre which would have prevented her from escaping the fire, if she changed her mind. The Anglo-Indian press of the period proffered several accounts of alleged forcing of the woman. As an example, The Calcutta Review published accounts as the following one: Apart from accounts of direct compulsion, some evidence exists that precautions, at times, were taken so that the widow could not escape the flames once they were lit. Anant S. Altekar, for example, points out that it is much more difficult to escape a fiery pit that one has jumped in, than descending from a pyre one has entered on. He mentions the custom of the fiery pit as particularly prevalent in the Deccan and