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Published: March 26th 2011
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I have spent the last three days watching bodies burn along the Ganges. At two points they burn bodies, often as many as ten at a time, twenty four hours a day, every day of the year. The families carry the bodies down to the water on a bamboo stretcher. They lower the body into the river and splash water over the face. Then they carry the body up to one of the many stacks of wood. A man lights long dried grass from the eternal flame which has been burning continuously for three thousand years, and walks around the body a prescribed number of times before setting the stack on fire. Usually the family does not stick around, and there are rarely if ever women present. Most of the Dalit, or untouchables, who oversee this process are in jeans, t-shirts, and barefoot. They smoke cigarettes and shoot long spitoons of paan from their rotten mouths. Dogs bark and growl and wrestle with one another. The area is covered with trash. On one side is a sewage drainage point from the above city, on the other are washing stones where men and women do laundry. The bodies burn, the skin melts
and chars, the eyes overheat and explode, shooting out a gooey substance. Eventually someone comes and knocks in the skull. I read that a family member is supposed to do this to release the soul but I see the same scrawny teenage boy wearing a pink Playboy polo and a popped collar bash in one after another. Often the legs will stick out of the flame and will burn at a slower rate than the rest of the body. A worker will walk over and use a bamboo stick to break off the legs and place them on top of the flame. Eventually the fire burns down and all that is left is a dried and crumpled spinal chord about the size of a fetus. They pick it up using the bamboo pole and fling it into the water. Then someone takes a clay pot, fills it with water and throws the pot and water onto the flame, breaking the pot. Once this part of the ceremony ends the workers use plastic grocery bags to scoop water from the Ganges and put the fire out, before arranging another stack for the endless line of bodies awaiting cremation.
The
bodies are arranged by caste so that the lower caste are closer to the water while the upper castes are on platforms a few meters above. While India may claim to be a secular state, Varanasi is still ruled by tradition and caste consciousness. I have only seen the highest platform used once, by an enormously fat man who had a huge cremation fire. His family struggled to lift him onto it. They arranged his huge pyre with wreaths of flowers and he was burned in a beautiful red robe. On the other extreme I watched a man with no family present burned in a white undershirt. He was very small and at first I thought he must have been a child. They did not take him for a final dip in the Ganges, they used a match instead of the eternal flame to light his pyre, and they barely used enough wood to get more than a small fire going at any one time. Both men ended as ashes either dumped into the river or breathed in through the cloud of smoke by the surrounding observers. Anyone who is having trouble with their own mortality or mourning the death
of a loved one might do well to spend a day watching this endless process.
Varanasi is full of Sadhu, or holy men. I have seen these men all over India, but here they are everywhere. Just like everything else about this country, they do not fit neatly into any single conceptual framework. Most of them are Brahmins, of the highest religious caste. Most chose this calling later in life and abandoned wives and children to spend their time in meditation and contemplating the divine. Their families mourn them as though they are dead, and in many ways they are. The ones I have seen here are dressed either in red or orange, though in the south I saw many dressed in black. They have long beards and dirty unkempt hair. They carry tridents which mark them as followers of Shiva, the god of destruction and rejuvenation. Like Shiva, they are stoned constantly, using drugs and meditation as a way to achieve an other-worldly consciousness. My first impression was that they are the original Hippies, minus the sex, tuning in and dropping out 6000 years before their western counterparts. Most of them seem very poor and tired, and almost
ashes to ashes
For the record, you are not supposed to take pictures of the bodies being cremated. I didn't know this when I took the photo. all have a vague unfocused look in their eyes that speak less of enlightenment and more of decades of drug use and exposure. In the mornings many will sit along the ghats and meditate facing the rising sun across the water before descending for their morning dip in the water. One of them told me he followed “Jesus Baba,” or the holy man Jesus. He was in fact talking about the same Jesus of Christianity though he worshipped him not as a Christian but as a manifestation of Vishnu.
Next to my hotel is an internet café where a young boy named Visha works. He is twelve, and each morning greets me with a “what happenin’ my brotha” like a good American. He hasn’t been to school in three years, instead he works sixty hours a week sweeping out the shop and helping customers set up and pay for internet use. Last night there was a water bottle of green fluid sitting next to the printer. I asked him what that was, thinking it was probably cleaning solution. He said it was his water. I laughed, assuming he was making a joke or had mixed up his words. He
wasn’t joking. He picked it up and poured it in his mouth. The only water he drinks is Ganges water. He has been drinking it his whole life, and usually downs at least a litre each day. I see people dunking themselves and taking small drinks all the time but this is the first person that I’ve seen who survives by drinking only river water. I don’t know how this is possible, and have spent a lot of time wondering what the difference between his body and mine must be so that he can drink a litre or two a day and appears to be in fine health, as where even a drop for me would be possible death. As most people know, the Ganges is the most polluted river on earth. Aside from having bodies thrown into it, it is used as a toilet by a hundred million people and is heavily polluted from industrial and coal mining waste. Amid all the optimistic predictions regarding India’s economic miracle, I can’t help but wonder what future Visha and the millions of kids like him will have in 21st century India.
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