Regulation XVII of 1829 was promulgated on 4 December 1829 by the government of the Bengal Presidency under Lord William Bentinck. It declared the burning or burying alive of Hindu widows culpable homicide, punishable in the criminal courts, and it applied to those who abetted the act as well as to those who performed it. It was extended to the Madras and Bombay presidencies shortly afterwards.
The campaign behind it was not a single-sided colonial imposition. Rammohan Roy, the Bengali reformer, had argued against sati in print for a decade in Bengali, Persian and English, and had done so largely on scriptural grounds, contending that the texts did not require it. British evangelical opinion pushed from the other direction. Hindu orthodox petitioners opposed the Regulation and carried an appeal to the Privy Council in London, which was dismissed in 1832.
What is striking about the argument, and what has occupied historians since, is the ground it was fought on. Almost the whole debate turned on whether scripture enjoined the practice. Colonial officials, reformers and orthodox petitioners alike argued from texts, and the state positioned itself as the arbiter of what Hindu tradition properly required. The condition of the women concerned, and what they wanted, is very nearly absent from the record on every side.