All Things Considered

Standing here at steep steps and gazing through through the blaze, one sees how prosaic death is. Seen from the riverfront, here the city of Benaras raises and looms tall behind the smoulder and crackle of the firewood. This is Manikarnika, where death is considered auspicious. The place where the funeral pyres burn day and night, rain or shine. Where everywhere else in the Hindu world a crematorium is cordoned off city limits, here at Kashi – where Hinduism was cradled, patronized and is being practiced for the last 3000 years – a burning ghat presents itself right in the middle of the city.

The water’s edge at the ghat is surrounded by moored boats , boats that bring the wood stock for the cremation from downstream. Wrapped in a simple red cloth or shiny expensive silk or both (depending on how rich the family of the deceased is), the newly arrived bodies - sometimes from places as far away as Mumbai or the Middle East - await in a long queue at the waterfront waiting its turn to be doused in the Ganges before the final rites begin. There is an incessant inflow of bamboo litters carried by doms, a group of outcastes who hold the fort at Manikarnika ghat.

This burning ghat in Benares is exclusively a dom’s territory. Transporting the dead bodies to the ghat, maintaining the supposedly sacred fire from which all funeral pyres are lit, chopping up the wood, weighing them, hauling up the huge logs to the cremation place, calculating the taxes, kindling and upkeep of the pyre to ensure proper burning, dousing the embers after the rites are over – everything that happens here is done by the doms. One of dom men I’ve been talking to says that it takes a minimum of 4000 rupees and 3 hours to burn a body. For the financially less fortunate, the body is taken to the middle of the river and drowned with a stone tied to it – The water currents are supposed to do the rest. But, in this season, the river current takes it no further than the few hundred meters to the sandy bank opposite, where the large packs of starved dogs bank on this meat for survival.

‘All these tons of ash and flesh everyday, don’t they pollute the river ?’, I ask him. With an incredulous look , he demands- ‘Aap Hindu hain na’? When I answer in the affirmative, he explains in a touchy tone that the ‘great Ganges is the miraculous Shakti and she is capable of cleansing her waters. It is not within the means of mere mortals to pollute her’. I cannot help but notice the testimony that the filth-ridden waters at Varanasi hold to this miracle in action. But, I talk no more of pollution to him.

In this cremation ground, no one is wailing, screaming,weeping. But there is a hurried solemness about this place. It is a constantly bustling scene: The bodies being bathed in Ganga, cremation ground cleared, firewood stock being managed, little children idling time on a boat moored nearby, a group of boys drying their clothes in the heat of a funeral pyre, snap-happy foreign tourists – No one cares about anyone else’s presence, except for an odd self-proclaimed ‘fireman’ of the ghat trying to make some money out of the tourists.

At Manikarnika, death seems to have been reduced to a sequence of logistics to be taken care of. Right here at Manikarnika ghat, the place where death is considered most auspicious, is also probably the place death is most clinical.

Firewood making its way to Manikarnika ghat

Cremation at Harishchandra ghat