Cremation, Caste, and Cosmogony in Karmic Traditions.

From my perfect location at the veranda I ordered
another small pot of black coffee, although the fieldmethod
sounds a bit vulture-like, I was rather pleased to
be a distant observer particularly since they were
children; it would have been more ”vulture-like” to
interfere with them.
In front of the bamboo-stretcher they had placed a small
bamboo-basket in which bypassing Hindus as well as
tourists gave some rupees showing their last respect to
the poor fellow (fig. 18.4). Some kids picked up flowers
from the river, which they put on the deceased’s chest;
others were standing around seemingly mourning their
friend. Occasional bypassers offered some money. But
everything took a very long time; after an hour nothing
had happened, and some of the children were not crying
but laughing. It was strange, and I thought that it was
perhaps a way of suppressing their real feelings. But
then they started to carry the bamboo-stretcher around,
not in a normal way, but losing it, throwing it around
while yelling and laughing. I did not know what I was
supposed to think, and left the guesthouse for the city. In
front of the guesthouse next to the river, the children
asked for a donation to their dead brother, but they did
not get any money. Then I asked one of the boatmen
what the children were doing, and he said it was “just a
joke, not real”. The street children had dressed up some
hay as a corpse, wrapped it in golden clothes, which they
used to beg for money. I was impressed by the creativity,
and I had to admit that they were really smart guys and
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girls. Westerners cannot bypass grieving children who
mourn their friends!
Later I came to realise that this incident told me quite a
lot of the impact death has in society, particularly in
Varanasi. It highlighted that natural and cultural worlds
work together and create opportunities and limitations
for the humans coping with the harsh realities in their
daily life, based on real problems and representations of
the world they live in, and webs of meaning are founded
on and constructed from this world of life and death. As
poor children it is natural that they begged and used any
means to get a few rupees. In the City of Light death is
an intrinsic part of everyone’s life, which was evident in
the fact that the boatmen accepted the children’s play
with the “corpse” as a way of begging; they were not
violating any taboos because then adults would have
sanctioned and prohibited the game. What seemed to be
the most disrespectful use of symbols from an outsider’s
point of view was not necessarily so, but the actual life
for street children living in Varanasi. Economy and
religion are inseparable, and it visualised all the
shortcomings if one adapts a Christian ethics regarding
death in other cultures. And finally, it illuminates the
broad scope of material culture studies, from the social
poverty of the children to their use of a “corpse” as a
begging bowl, including the dialectic between the social
and religious cosmos and the natural world they inhabit.
Death matters, particularly for the living.