The painful spectacle of 47 wives of the Ramanathapuram king committing sati

J.H. Nelson records in his The Madura Country: A Manual that the women threw themselves on the pyre of Kizhavan Sethupathy in 1710, some distance away from the Ramanathapuram palace. Another sati was performed in 1720 when Tanda Devan, son-in-law of Vijayaraghunatha Sethupathy, was executed, writes historian S.M. Kamal