How to Do Things With Words

Traditionally cremations in Nepal are performed with open pyres. These cremations are fluid public events organised and managed by relatives, local communities and ritual specialists. Traditional cremation practices are full of cosmological, eschatological and soteriological significance. The main purpose of the cremation practice is to purify and free the soul from the body of the deceased in order to secure a rebirth in another realm, render the soul a safe journey to heaven, and to turn the soul into a benign ancestor instead of a haunting ghost. On the 24th of January 2016, Pashupati Area Development Trust inaugurated the first functioning modern electric crematorium in Nepal at the traditional cremation site near the Pashupatinath temple, at the holy river Bagmati, 5 km northeast of Kathmandu. The main incentive for Pashupati Area Development Trust to establish an electric crematorium was to diminish river pollution, carbon dioxide emission and to curb deforestation. How do Hindus in Nepal co...

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Establishment of electric crematorium in Nepal: continuity, changes and challenges

The link between values and technologies is well established. The concept of sustainability here includes the desire to dispose of the dead in an easy, eco-friendly manner. Many authors have discus...

Sustainable disposal of the dead: A study of Nigambodh Ghat in Delhi

Aghor Medicine: Pollution, Death, and Healing in Northern India

Deaths provide an important setting for Dimasas in Assam to engage in collective ritual performance. These rituals not only allow the people to affirm their identities, but also provide a space to create strategies to adapt to the changing urban landscape. This paper is an attempt to understand the shift in Dimasa death ritual processes in contemporary Assam. The essay has traced how people mobilize resources as a community to ensure the smooth journey of the deceased from this world to the afterlife, within the constraints of an urban environment. A small but critical part of this process is engaging in bodily techniques that recreate the unique cultural practices of meser-moso and collective grieving, called grasimang. By using ethnographic methods, the paper highlights the perseverance of the people as a functioning collective, and the meanings and symbols that are shared to ensure a successful ritual. 

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Dimasa Rituals of Death and Mourning in Contemporary Assam

The article seeks to redraw some key discussions on death in Banaras by focusing on the subject matter of the ‘dead’ rather than that of death. Pitched in the shadow of select earlier works on anthropology of death pertaining to Banaras, the general probing centres on the query whether the three realms of dying, death and dead can be delinked and thus seen in a certain relative autonomy from each other. Further, how do the anthropological accounts of death get refracted when seen from the vantage point of the dead? Based on ethnographic fieldwork at intertwined field sites of the home and the hospital, manual and electric cremation ghat and the shaivite aghorashram (hermitage) in relation to the river Ganga, the descriptions involve discussion over declaration of death versus discovery of the dead, distinction between touching and handling of the dead and latent implications of the varied names of the dead. The core concern of the article is to explore the nature of the social vis-a-vis the dead. I show h...

Ravi Nandan Singh

Papers

Many lives of the dead in Banaras: Towards an anthropology of the indefinite social