On Death and Dying

Funeral Fire at the Burning Ghat

I visited the Burning ghats twice and it wasn’t what I was expecting. What I was expecting was  more of what I had already observed  - but perhaps more elaborate and solemn - ritual ,  more incense and offerings and candles, more holy men and priests, perhaps a real feeling of awe and religious reality ,and perhaps open expression of emotion and grief, perhaps a feeling that I shouldn’t be there intruding on so sad and personal a moment in the life of the family. I imagined this would be why photos were strictly forbidden. I felt nervous at the prospect of seeing  dead people and bodies being burned.

A little Shiva Temple

In fact what I found was quite shocking but in  a completely different way – the place was as filthy as anywhere else in the city, there was ash and mud coating everything, the edges of the Holy River were knee deep in floating rubbish , there was virtually no religious ceremony taking place, no incense other than the acrid clouds of smoke from the  pyres, and the few mourners hanging around after the fire took hold were men. There were no priests, no chanting, no bells, only the merest of rituals and no emotion. Cows wandered through as they would anywhere, and tough wiry and utterly filthy men unloading barges bringing the timber for the fires struggled past the fires with huge loads, to and from the barges in single file as if the fires were just rubbish burning.

The corpses were brought down to the ghat  strapped onto a sort of bamboo stretcher and were wrapped in  cheap tinsel looking  shiny and glittery cloth. The whole stretcher was taken to the edge of the river and the body immersed completely for a couple of seconds then the stretcher was left unattended on the steps to drain while the pyre was prepared. Eventually the string holding it all together was broken and the tinsel cloth ripped off and chucked onto the rubbish pile  to one side and the body wrapped now in a white sheet was placed on the pyre.  A few more logs were placed on top and after walking round it all in single file 5 times and chanting a few prayers and sprinking a few offerings onto the pyre, it was lit with a bunch of dry rushes, and pretty quickly, especially if the family could afford the best wood, the whole thing was ablaze. Blackened limbs and the shoulders and head could be see burning – a macabre scene to be sure but for me the shocking part of it all was the pragmatic and unemotional way the whole process functioned – it really seemed as if they were just burning rubbish. 
 

Dogs harassing a saddhu

To me this all fits with the Hindu preoccupation with self and an indifference to “the other”  something which was illustrated in even more shocking fashion on my last morning in Varanasi when I went for my last morning walk along the ghats. There is a place where a sort of footbridge about 50 yards long links one ghat to the next but you can walk along under it as well, which is what I did. It was obviously a favourite place for men to piss, such was the stink. 

Halfway along a low pile of rags turned out to be an old woman lying across the path, almost naked, with a large gash on her abdomen, flies crawling over her face and half shut eyes, limbs feebly moving, she was almost dead. I stood before her feeling helpless, there was nothing I or anyone could have done for her, but why was she here dying all alone a few metres from where thousands of pilgrims were coming to perform acts of piety at one of the holiest places in India? I moved on, and looking back saw several people walk past without a glance at her. I spent all the rest of the day thinking about what this all meant.