Pre-Raphaelite

Pre-Raphaelitism was the first avant-garde movement on British painting. Around 1848 a group of artist openly challenged the prevailing pictorial convention in order to create a visual language for fresh and unusual ways of representing the material world.

It was founded by three students of the Royal Academy: John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Holman Hunt— ages nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one, respectively. The group's intention was to reform art by rejecting what they considered to be the mechanistic approach adopted by the Renaissance and Mannerist artists who followed Raphael and Michelangelo. They believed that the Classical poses and elegant compositions of Raphael in particular had been a corrupting influence on academic teaching of art.

Pre-Raphaelite paintings often addressed subjects of moral seriousness, whether pertaining to history, literature, religion, or modern society.

In 1850, Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti found the journal The Germ, in which they divulge the theories of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.
Pre-Raphaelite

Sati (or suttee) in Indian culture

One of the oldest forms of femicide is suttee, or sati: the Indian practice of burning a woman alive on the pyre of her deceased husband.

Often defined as a form of suicide and glorified as the act of a woman who shows strength of character, it can be placed in the category of ritual femicide.

Sati came to connote the perfect or good wife’s ritual self-immolation either on her husband’s funeral pyre, sahagamana (going together with one’s husband), or by herself if he had already been cremated elsewhere, anugamana (following one’s husband).

The first textual description of suttee is by the Greek Diodorus, who describes how the Indian general Ceteus, fighting in Asia Minor in 316 BC, fell in battle and was cremated together with his two wives.

Suttee spread from some segments of the warrior caste in Bengal, and was abducted by interpretations of religious texts; but Mogul rulers such as Akbar and Aurungzeb, disapproved of it, and it was finally abolished by the British in 1829.

Since Indian independence, suttee has remained illegal, although it still occurs now and then. There is still however, a great amount of stigma attached to widowed women, who often remain single after becoming widowed and very rarely remarry.
Sati (or suttee) in Indian culture