Cremation, Caste, and Cosmogony in Karmic Traditions.

Nigel Barley remarked in Dancing on the Grave “…in
Africa, my constant presence at funerals was rapidly
noted. “You are like a vulture”, one man remarked
coolly. “I see you climbing the hills and I know someone
else must have gone” “(Barley 1995:13). Western
attitudes towards death can be understood by a
comparison with pornography, as pointed out by
Geoffrey Gorer; “in the twentieth century there seems to
have been an unremarked shift in prudery; whereas
copulation has become more and more mentionable,
particularly in Anglo-Saxon societies, death has become
more and more unmentionable” (Gorer 1965).
Most people ask me, often with a petrified and an
astonished disbelief, what it is like to study death. Death
is allegedly something one is not supposed to study or be
concerned with, at least not from an academic point of
view; only form a deep ontological search for the truth.
So far I have witnessed or participated in approximately
600 cremations, funerals, or observed exposed corpses in
various ways. Obviously, what it is like to study death is
a major concern for me, which I have been constantly rethinking,
and it raises both universal ethical questions in
general and research ethical questions in particular.
Therefore, the answer to the question might be a bit
surprising; it is quite easy to study death, I like it, it is
not scary, rather the opposite, it is highly interesting, and
sometimes it might even be fun and a pleasant and social
event (and a cold beer after many cremations, when the
clothes are reeking of burnt flesh, and ashes from the
pyre are still in my hair, cannot taste better). Of course,
there have been a lot of dreadful sights and awful smells
at cemeteries, but personal emotions regarding human
decomposition is not a major part of research ethics
regarding death. However, the smells and sights are what
shock most Western or Christian observers of death
rituals since we have been accustomed to live in a
society without seeing dead people at all.
My ethical concerns do not start at the cemetery, after
all, when people finally arrive there as corpses they are
dead. Hence, seeing dead people is not really a problem,
and dying with one’s feet in the river and thereafter
being cremated at Pashupatinath where the ashes are
scattered into the river seems like quite an attractive and
a glamorous funeral, at least if the Bagmati River is
clean. Thus, my main ethical concerns are not so much
on the cemetery, but on the way to the cemetery. The
miseries of the world evident in the poverty and the
gutters people are crawling in, the crippled who beg for
money and those without arms to carry the begging
bowl, the sick and the insane without any social
networks, the street children without any opportunities;
it is all these “almost” dead people who touch my ethical
Appendix B
Ethics and ethnography
305
consciousness. Those who are cremated at for instance
Pashupatinath are fortunate for two reasons, firstly, they
are dead and the sufferings in this world have ended, but
more importantly, they have relatives who mourn their
death, or in other words, they have had the possibility to
be cremated at the most auspicious place in Nepal. The
poorest do not even find salvation in death, and these are
not given the last obsequies at Pashupatinath unless
some volunteer pays for their rituals, which only rarely
happens.
Thus, by participating in death rituals at Pashupatinath
one has bypassed the real problems in samsara – or the
round of birth and death, and thereby all the ethical
concerns regarding the miseries of the world. In this
sense there are some Christian and capitalistic
projections when the attention is directed towards the
dead and not how people are treated in this life. The
truism in Hinduism that death is life and life is death has
become more evident for me, and the study of death has
to be seen in relation to life. More important in this case,
the ethics involved in the study has to be adapted to the
real world and to the descendants’ own perceptions and
emotions towards death. Starting with the last first,
namely emotions. Distinguishing different layers and
levels of interacting emotions, grieves, and personal
motivations for performing various rites is a difficult
task, and I will only emphasise that such perceptions are
often determining and overpowering both tradition and
religious structures, but at the same time they are
dependent upon these structures. In some funerals the
sons and daughters cry in despair and may collapse of
sorrow; parents who mourn the loss of their children are
emotionally touching everyone, and some react with
hysteria to the death of their beloved. In such cases,
which are the exceptions, instinctively one steps aside
and refrains from interfering and asking questions.
Everyone has feelings and grief for the social personae
that is dead regardless of soteriology and religious
explanations. Although it might be written in religious
texts that crying and wailing by the mourners is of no
avail, “they should abstain from shedding tears while
giving the water-offerings after cremation. But if they
shed tears and vomit cough, the departed spirit consumes
the same helplessly” (Garuda Purana II, II.4.80), often
people express some feelings. In other cases I have been
tempted to believe that the mourners were without
emotions and did not care how the carcass was disposed
of. In one cremation I witnessed, the majority of the
funeral procession and all the sons except one were
playing cards, drinking alcohol, and smoking at the
cemetery while their mother lay naked on the pyre in a,
lets say, “gynaecological” position, and it did not look