Cremation, Caste, and Cosmogony in Karmic Traditions.

only in India, but also South Pacific islands, particularly
Fiji, and even in Egypt, Persia, ancient Greece, and
Rome (Hocart 1950).
So far, I have followed Hocart’s line of argument, but I
have limited the analysis to Nepal and Kathmandu,
where the empirical facts suggest an interpretation of
castes as a ritual organisation structured around the
king’s sacrifice. In part 2 I will analyse Hindus in a
small town named Faridpur in Bangladesh, located close
to the mighty Ganga. The emphasis on the Hindus’
concern with purity and pollution during death rituals,
and the role of the Brahman as a funeral priest at
Pashupatinath, is highly contrasted by the Bengali
example. At the Hindu cemetery there is a Muslim
woman devoted to Kali who cremates and works as a
Cremation priest: a fact that in religious theory should be
impossible both from a Hindu and Muslim perspective.
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In this community there are hardly any Brahmans and
the few priests who live there are without real religious
power. Bangladesh is not a Hindu kingdom, and the
Hindus are, although a minority in a Muslim world,
comprised almost solely of low-castes. But still, they
believe in a caste system, and hence, I will agree and
conclude so far with Quigley that “If ever there was a
Pandora’s box, caste is it. Immediately one is drawn into
every sphere of anthropological concern: ritual, kinship,
politics and economics, ethnographic and historical
analysis, the nature of comparison and the difficulties
which arise when trying to understand another society
whether through indigenous or imported concepts. The
central problem facing any explanation of caste is that,
in the end, one is not confronting one question but
several, and any form of reductionism is bound to fail”
(Quigley 1995:158).