India’s Vanishing Vultures

tion. We’re more invested than those armchair
conservationists.”
Even with his dismissal of BNHS’s breeding
work, his acknowledgment of how irreplaceable
the vultures are echoed what Prakash had told
me in Pinjore. “Vultures play such a beautiful,
natural role in our death ritual,” said Mistree.
“To replace them is a unique challenge.”
While the Panchayat struggles with the burdensome
bodies in theory, the Parsi undertakers
are presented with a more tangible mess. For
generations, their job was to carry an intact body
up and lay it on the tower roof, a sloped circle
tilting in toward a central well from which three
concentric rings radiate out like ripples. Men
are on the outside, women in the middle, and
children on the inside, each ring smaller than
the last. The vultures would set to their task,
and within days, the nasarsarlas could push the
bones into the ossuary at the center.
46 VQr | SPrIng 2011
The nasarsarlas are the poorest of Parsis, and I
imagine they might miss the vultures more than
anyone else on the subcontinent. Farmers have a
dead cow every now and again that needs to be attended
to, and the dogs at the carcass dump have
to be treated with caution, but every single day
the nasarsarlas have to face a new batch of bodies
when the old ones have not yet disappeared.
Like Baria, others are ready to allow burial
or cremation into the Parsi parameters of worship,
eager to find their own way to adapt to the
vultures’ absence. Some Parsis have suggested
they move from the ancient to the cutting-edge
of green technology, using gasification, which
involves high heat, but not in direct contact with
the body, or promession, a technique catching
on in Sweden that uses liquid nitrogen to deep
freeze a body before vibrating it into a fine dust.
One prominent bird breeder suggested they try
insects, but all the recommendations have been