INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

thi are only temporary visitors, who sometimes improvise the ritual procedures under
guidance of elderly relatives and the dom, only to be reproved by the Hindu
priests. During one ceremony the funeral priest told the mourners to dispose of the
garlands from the bier by shouting: “Put them in Ganga ji or give them to the cows.”
One of the Sikh men therefore went up to a cow standing beside the pyre and decoratively
hung two garlands over the cow’s horn, whereupon the funeral priest rebuked,
since the flowers should be placed on the ground before the cow as an offering. Another
funeral priest demonstratively ignored the granthi’s performance of Ardas by
repeating mantras aloud at the same time. On another occasion the dom supervised
the young chief mourner all through the ceremony, by telling him where to place the
ghi on the corpse, how many times he should circumambulate the pyre, and so on.
Recurrently the funeral attendant checked if the mourner had completed the acts he
prescribed. The young man followed all instructions but could not speak as he was
unrestrainedly weeping throughout the ceremony. Instead an elderly relative replied
to the dom and encouraged the boy by giving comments like ”well done” and “it’s a
pity that you must experience this at such a young age”.
A current issue of debate is the presence of women at the cremation ground.
More sweepingly scholars have asserted that Sikh women do not participate in the
ceremony nearby the pyre or are forbidden to do so. 630 As Parry (1994) notes, women
from Punjabi communities may be present at cremations, even if “they sit apart from
the men and away from the pyre, weeping and playing no part in the practical arrangements
or ritual proceedings.” 631 Many of my female Sikh informants, but far
from all, claim they had at some point taken part in the cremation ceremonies and
strongly denied their exclusion from this field. Nowadays there are no rules preventing
women from participation, even if the accomplishment of a cremation remains
anchored in the performance of a male chief mourner. In his sociological analysis of
Sikh funerals, Kalsi (1994) claims that rituals are instrumental for the transmission of
social values and the maintenance of power relations between men and women in the
Sikh social structure. In his analysis these rituals confirm a continued subordination
of women and stigmatization of widows. 634
When local Sikhs are explaining the maintenance of traditional gender roles in
the cremation ceremony they often recourse to discourses on the enduring influence
of the Hindu majority society. Cremations in Varanasi remain ultimately a Hindu
ceremony which has been overlaid with a few Sikh acts. The reading of Ardas around
the pyre and the recitation of gurbani hymns are perceived to be the essential Sikh acts
which could be carried out by women, but since cremations are under the control of
Hindu priests they must comply with customs that do not encourage active female
participation. Far from all Sikhs, however, consider it to be proper for women to enter
the cremation ground and sometimes find justification for their exclusion in socially
constructed conceptions of women as the emotionally weaker sex. A middle-aged
630
See McLeod 1997, Kalsi 1996.
631
Parry 1994: 155.
384
Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008