In the face of fierce local opposition, British Governor-General Lord William Bentinck issues a regulation declaring that anyone who abets sati in Bengal is guilty of culpable homicide.

The governor-general of India was the representative of the monarch of the United Kingdom in their capacity as the emperor or empress of India and after Indian independence in 1947, the representative of the monarch of India. The office was created in 1773, with the title of governor-general of the Presidency of Fort William. The officer had direct control only over his presidency but supervised other East India Company officials in India. Complete authority over all of British territory in the Indian subcontinent was granted in 1833, and the official came to be known as the governor-general of India.

Lieutenant General Lord William Henry Cavendish-Bentinck, known as Lord William Bentinck, was a British military commander and politician who served as the governor of the Fort William (Bengal) presidency from 1828 to 1834 and the first governor-general of India from 1834 to 1835.

Sati or suttee is a practice, a chiefly historical one, in which a Hindu widow burns alive on her deceased husband's funeral pyre, the death by burning entered into voluntarily, by coercion, or by a perception of the lack of satisfactory options for continuing to live. Although it is debated whether it received scriptural mention in early Hinduism, it has been linked to related Hindu practices in the Indo-Aryan-speaking regions of India, which have diminished the rights of women, especially those to the inheritance of property. A cold form of sati, or the neglect and casting out of Hindu widows, has been prevalent from ancient times. Greek sources from around c. 300 BCE make isolated mention of sati, but it probably developed into a real fire sacrifice in the medieval era within northwestern Rajput clans to which it initially remained limited, to become more widespread during the late medieval era.