Indian Sati Tradition in the Chehelsotoun Palace Wall Painting and Suz o Godaz Mathnavi (The manifestation of cultural relationship between Iran and India in Shah Abbas II and Akbar Shah era)

In some parts of the history of India it has been reported that the Indian woman believed she would become Sati if she burned herself in the fire of her husband after his death. She believed that, through this, the widow would have turned into the goddess of love and would enter heaven. In year 1010 Hijri, Akbar, the king of India, ordered the Iranian poet “Mohammadreza Khoboshani” who resided in India to convert the love and loyalty of the Indian widow in Sati ceremony into a poem. His poetry became pictorial 3 times around 1060 Hijri by artists of Shah Abbas II’s era. Also a wall painting was made illustrating Sati ceremony in “Indo-Iranian” hybrid style in Isfahan Chehelsotoun Palace. To answer the question whether the Iranian Shah Abbas II and the Indian Shah Akbar intended to stabilize political and cultural relations between the two countries through relying on the common definition of love, loyalty and virtue of the Iranian and Indian women in their literature and art, the analyzing method by referring to historical documents of Sati tradition in India and the poetry and wall paintings of Chehelsotoun Palace can help finding ananswer. The present research shows that regarding Shah Akbar’s order to the Iranian poet for composing a poem describing Sati tradition and Shah Abbas’s support for picturing the story in Indo-Iranian style besides two other romantic themes “Joseph and Zuleikha; Khosrow and Shirin” and locating it in one of the major palaces of the king, they intended to establish integration between common themes in the two countries in order to stabilize their political and cultural relations.