Cremation, Caste, and Cosmogony in Karmic Traditions.

Low-castes in Bangladesh
Chapter 5:
“I am on my dharma, but Kali is on my karma”
This part will analyse death and life-giving waters from
the vantage point of the low-castes in Faridpur in
Bangladesh. Faridpur is a small town located along
Ganges 130 kilometres southeast of Dhaka (fig. 5.1). In
a Hindu minority and Muslim dominated world, lowcastes
have different schemes for perceiving their own
life-worlds compared to high-castes and priests in a
Hindu majority world. Anthropological studies in India
have focused largely on the higher castes or on the lower
castes from the vantage point of the higher (Mencher
1998:37). Any study which only sees the low-castes
from the perspective of the high-castes, and
consequently places them at the bottom of the social and
religious ladder, is biased.
Inden stresses that “persons as agents are themselves
composed of entities that overlap” (Inden 2000:25), and
therefore, “…agents are constituted neither as systems in
the classical mechanical sense nor outside of natural
systems in the opposite, idealist sense. They are
constituted as systems, but the systems…are constructed
along different lines. They consist of overlapping entities
which agents themselves are making, remaking and
relating to one another through a dialectical process into
“scales of forms” “ (ibid:23).
The emphasis on agency softens up the sharp and
hierarchical positions of caste systems as they are
normally presented. “The shift from a quest for essences
to a focus on agency, the shift from the positing of a
substantialized agent to the description of the actual,
transitory agents entails a heightened focus on the
actions of those agents and the constitution of those
agents themselves” (Inden 2000:264). Social sciences in
India have developed from Western rather than Indian
cultural realities, and hence, there is a need for
constructing a theoretical social science that builds on a
general system of concepts from the culture’s own
natural categories that will be analytically powerful
without violating the culture’s ontology, presuppositions,
or its epistemology (Marriott 1990).
Seeing the world from the perspective of the low-caste
enables other insights and perspectives, which challenge
the high-caste’s hegemony of the worldview. The term
“low-caste” is used in the current lack of more
satisfactory alternatives and due my comparative
approach, which is related to the previous voluminous
anthropological debate that has described people and
groups as “low-caste”. I reject as a humanist, of course,
any negative connotation connected to “low-caste.
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Bangladesh is the third largest Muslim country in the
world after Indonesia and Pakistan. Being a Hindu in
Bangladesh is different from being a Hindu in Nepal.
The lives that Allah gives include the water world of
floods, which turn the plains into nothing but water
(Gardner 1997:18). Bangladesh is often flooded and
seventy percent of the country is covered with water
each year. The rivers give life but also take life, and the
relation between life, death, and water is intricately
interwoven and structured around the goddesses Kali and
Ganga.
Although the physicality of death is the same
everywhere – a corpse – the social and religious worlds
in which death are incorporated into are dependent upon
but not determined by the ecological and environmental
factors. A water perspective is therefore an approach by
which it is possible to theorise and develop an
understanding of how humans with the same religion but
living in totally different environments are able to deal
with and handle the same problem: death and the recreation
of further life. Thus, this part is mainly
empirical and the aim is to present a detailed account of
the actual lives of low-castes and their relations to water
and the high-religion’s perceptions. The social and
physical environment challenge the believers to find
radical solutions to the answers provided by the highreligion
and the Brahmans.
The Bangladesh government tried to implement
secularism when the first constitution was passed on
November 4 th 1972, and it abolished all kinds of
communalism, gave political recognition of any religion
by the state, banned exploitation of religion for political
ends and discrimination of anybody on religious grounds
(Moshin 1983:23). Despite the government’s good
intentions, the social realities were different. In
Bangladesh it has been a trend to view caste as solely a
cultural phenomenon and thus limited to the Hindu
minority. In structural aspects caste is applicable to all
religions despite the cultural variation. Although it is
stated in the Quran that God created all men and
preached equality, the followers of Islam have partly
neglected this doctrine, and the Muslims are classified in
hierarchical orders (Ali 1992:3). In a traditional caste
society the individual’s status stems basically from the
status of the caste, whereas in a class society the
individual’s status is a result of his own attributions
(ibid:23). Nevertheless, Ali argues that in Bangladesh
both caste and class hierarchy are mostly determined by
economic and political powers of the occupations and
therefore, “there is no difference between caste and
class. In other words, caste is class” (ibid:31).