The body is traditionally bathed, anointed, and carefully wrapped in white cloth at home, then carried ceremonially, in a procession, by the local community to the cremation grounds. In the Rig Veda, a hymn, traditionally recited by a priest or an adult male, urges Agni, the Vedic god of fire, to “ carry this man to the world of those who have done good deeds.”įrom the perspective of Hindu, Jain, and Sikh rituals, the act of cremation is seen as a sacrifice, a final breaking of the ties between the body and the spirit so it may be free to reincarnate. The earliest writings on Indian funerary rituals can be found in the Rig Veda – a Hindu religious scripture orally composed thousands of years ago, potentially as early as 2000 B.C. However, Indians living in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Trinidad often had to fight for the right to cremate the dead in accordance with religious rituals because of the mistaken and often racist belief that cremation was primitive, alien and evironmentally polluting. But they were unable to ban it given its pervasiveness. In the 19th century, British colonial officials viewed the Indian practice of cremation as barbaric and unhygienic. The act of cremation has not always been without controversy. The workers who run shmashana often belong to the Dom ethnicity and have been doing this work for generations they are lower caste and subsequently perceived as polluted for their intimate work with dead bodies. Jains – who have traditionally given significant consideration to humanity’s impact on the environmental world – bury the ashes as a means to return the body to the Earth and ensure they do not contribute to polluting rivers. Many shmashana are therefore built near the banks of a river to allow for easy access, but many well-off families often travel to a sacred city along the banks of the river Ganges, such as Hardiwar or Benares, for the final rituals. Hindus and Sikhs will dispose of the remaining ashes in a river. Many Americans think of cremation happening within an enclosed, mechanized structure, but most Indian crematoriums, known as “shmashana” in Hindi, are open-air spaces with dozens of brick-and-mortar platforms upon which a body can be burned on a pyre made of wood. There are six of us eating just one meal of rice each day”, he explains.As a scholar interested in the ways Asian societies tell stories about the afterlife and prepare the deceased for it, I argue that the coronavirus crisis represents an unprecedented cultural cataclysm that has forced the Indian culture to challenge the way it handles its dead. No one is giving us work and we have no other option. Naushad Ansari, 25, who lost his job as a food delivery driver when Mumbai went into lockdown two weeks ago approaches me at the traffic lights: “I am on the streets begging because we hope the vehicle drivers will spare us some money. Over the last two weeks, the pavements have suddenly filled with newly unemployed workers and their families, hands outstretched, begging for crumbs and money. In just a five-minute journey to my nearest supermarket, I pass dozens of people looking for food. “People have not recovered financially from last year’s losses and again things are becoming very difficult.” “A bulk of the livelihoods in urban India depend on working on the streets and in the informal sector, whether in vending or doing a small job, like transporting goods,” says Professor Amita Bhide, Dean of School of Habitat Studies at Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai. The latest surge in the virus means India’s informal workforce is once again on the brink.Ī mass cremation of Covid victims in New Delhi Thousands of them – like the woman in front of me last night – are now going hungry. Approximately 90 per cent of India’s 500 million-strong workforce are employed informally, living hand to mouth, day to to day.Ī draconian two-month lockdown from March to June last year pushed an estimated 400 million Indians into further poverty and resulted in around 32 million Indians dropping out of the country’s burgeoning middle-class. Unable to keep up with the soaring number of deaths, mass cremations are taking place in parking lots and others are having to keep the bodies of their loved ones in their homes.īut beneath the headlines a wider hunger crisis is building, one that if left unchecked could start to engulf large parts of the country. Uncounted thousands are dying outside hospitals and in their homes. The focus has naturally been on the sickening drama of the health system’s collapse the shortage of drugs, ventilators and oxygen. Cemetery workers in full PPE sort logs of wood for the funeral pyres
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