Burning the Dead: Hindu Nationhood and the Global Construction of Indian Tradition [1 ed.] 2020026923, 2020026924, 9780520379343, 9780520976641

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Burning the Dead

Burning the Dead Hindu Nationhood and the Global Construction of Indian Tradition

David Arnold

UNIVERSIT Y OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press Oakland, California © 2021 by David Arnold

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Arnold, David, 1946- author. Title: Burning the dead : Hindu nationhood and the global construction of Indian tradition / David Arnold. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020026923 (print) | LCCN 2020026924 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520379343 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520976641 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Hindu funeral rites and ceremonies—India. | Cremation— Religious aspects—Hinduism. | Death—Religious aspects—Hinduism. | Cremation—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Hinduism—Customs and practices. | India—Religious life and customs. | India—Death and burial—History—19th century. Classification: LCC BL1226.82.F86 A76 2021 (print) | LCC BL1226.82.F86 (ebook) | DDC 294.5/388—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026923 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026924

Manufactured in the United States of America 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Juliet

C onte nt s

List of Figures and Tables Preface Acknowledgments

ix xi xvii

Part one. The Spectacle of Fire 1. Burning Issues

3

2. Colonial Necro-Politics and the Polysemic Corpse

26

Part Two. Questing Fire 3. The City and Its Dead

49

4. Consuming Fire

76

5. The Global Dead

98

Part Three. The Fire Triumphant 6. The Rebirth of Cremation

123

7. Cremation and the Nation

146

Epilogue: Rethinking the Hindu Pyre A Note on Weights and Currency List of Abbreviations

167 175 177

vii

Glossary Notes Bibliography Index

179 181 223 243

Li s t of Figure s a n d Ta bl es

F IG U R E S

1. The iconic pyre: Gandhi’s cremation, January 31, 1948 6 2. Gandhi’s cremation, January 31, 1948 7 3. Tourists watching a Hindu cremation from the deck of a boat on the Ganges at Benares, ca. 1911–13 21 4. Hindoo Cremation 23 5. The Burning Ghaut at Calcutta 36 6. View of the burning ghat, Benares 40 7. Hindu Burning Ghat (from inside), Nimtala, Calcutta 58 8. Cremation at Sonapur, Bombay, during the plague epidemic 66 9. Incinerating the Bodies of the Victims of the Plague in Bombay 71 10. Burning Ghat, Benares 83 11. Wood for the pyre: Gandhi’s cremation, January 31, 1948 85 12. Cremation in Calcutta 93 13. Monument to the Maharaja of Kolhapur, Parco delle Cascine, Florence 105 14. The Chattri memorial, Patcham Down, near Brighton, Sussex 115 15. Burning Pile of the Late Maharajah Tookaji Rao Holkar 140 16. Loading corpses into a truck for cremation during the Bengal Famine, 1943 156 17. Gathering the ashes from Gandhi’s cremation 162 18. The cremation of Indira Gandhi, November 1984 166

ix

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List of Figures and Tables TA B L E S

1. Deaths and Cremations in Bombay City, Selected Years, 1850–1903 73 2. Deaths and Cremations in Calcutta, Selected Years, 1907–1938 74

P re face

The “modern cremation movement” is a phrase normally reserved for the rise of the funerary practice of cremation in Western societies since the early 1870s. It signals a radical departure from the long-established practice of burial in favor of a technique for the disposal of human bodies that in the minds of its supporters was scientific, sanitary, and largely secular, and that used modern industrial technology to ensure the rapid and efficient but respectful destruction of corporeal remains. By contrast, preexisting modes of cremation, including the open-air cremation on a wood pyre practiced by Hindus, Sikhs, and some other South Asian communities, were castigated by critics as anachronistic, barbaric, inefficient, and offensive alike to morals and the senses. It is the argument of this book, however, that India also had a modern cremation movement, one that was roughly contemporaneous with that in the West, but which assumed substantially different characteristics, including, most definitively, retention of an open-air funeral pyre. Not only did the “traditional” Indian mode of cremation survive and adapt under British rule; in a remarkable process of strategic reconfiguration, in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century India cremation became fiercely emblematic of new political, religious, and social movements. It came to serve as a vehicle for the articulation of an assertive, often defiantly militant, Hindu nationalism and a means of incorporating low-caste and “untouchable” Hindus, many of whom had previously interred their dead, into a more inclusive and homogeneous Hindu community. Cremation helped define opposition to an external foe—British colonialism—while also refashioning Hindu identity in contradistinction to India’s burial-practicing Muslims and Christians. In the nineteenth century Indian cremation was widely reviled by xi

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many Western observers, especially missionaries, and associated with the outlawed rite of sati (the immolation of a Hindu widow on her husband’s funeral pyre); some even called for its abolition. However, there were political and sanitary reasons why the colonial regime, in pursuing a pragmatic strategy of accommodation and containment, began to tolerate, and even to favor, cremation for use in its own institutional practices and regulatory spaces. In cremation Hindu reformers and colonial sanitarians thus, to a degree, found common cause. And yet, as a channel for political zeal and public ardor, cremation refused to be tamed and confined, instead displaying a remarkable capacity to challenge and unsettle colonial rule. Cremation in the manner discussed in this book was a journey—certainly from the place of death to the funeral pyre, perhaps from the earthly to the ethereal, but also outward from its Indian epicenter to its transimperial, near-global, postcolonial presence, and then back to India again. Although it was anathema to some, even at the height of empire there were Westerners who viewed Indian cremation with curiosity, empathy, and affect, who praised it as a sanitary practice worthy of emulation, found it morally and spiritually uplifting, or simply regarded it as one of India’s more engrossing “spectacles.” Indian cremation played a salient role in Western debates about the merits (or otherwise) of burning the dead, especially in Victorian Britain. But the intense desire for funerary fire—“the call of the funeral pyre,” as Gaston Bachelard once described it—was deep seated among Hindu and Sikh travelers and sojourners in the West and among Indians across the diaspora from Australia to the Caribbean.1 This internationalization of Indian cremation and the process of visualization and memorialization that accompanied it reached its global apogee in the years following Indian independence with the widely circulated reports and images of the cremation of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948 and further echoed in global television coverage of the cremation of prime minister Indira Gandhi in 1984. Indian cremation both informed and contrasted with cremation in the West; in becoming a global phenomenon it showed how a practice widely presumed to be “traditional” and immutable in fact responded to, incorporated, and reworked a long sequence of cumulatively momentous social, technological, and political factors stretching from the 1830s to the 1980s, and beyond into the present. Cremation in its Indian manifestation was thus more than a qualifying footnote or a casual aside to an essentially Western story; it was an integral and dynamic part of the story of cremation itself, an argument against any simplistic assumption that modernity and globality simply replicated Western norms and aspirations. Indian cremation practices conventionally fall within the domain of anthropology, sociology, and religious studies. They have rarely been history. Burning the Dead seeks to enlarge and augment that disciplinary agenda by making a historian’s contribution to mortuary studies and the culture of the dead. It aims to

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situate Indian cremation within an intersecting narrative of environment, public health, and technology as measured out over the colonial (and to a degree, postcolonial) longue durée. Cremation in India was self-evidently a religious rite, a signature practice through which individuals and communities announced their faith and affirmed their identity. It was a means by which they connected with their past and projected their future, by which they evaluated their selfhood and made judgments of others. But the culture of the Indian dead was neither uniform nor immutable within a Hindu community that was itself undergoing profound change. Hinduism contained a diversity of funeral practices, of which cremation was only one. In origin a high-caste practice, and one primarily honoring the deceased male, cremation gained immensely in religious authority and social inclusivity over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But the effective—or ineffective—incineration of a human corpse needs to be understood as an environmental event and a technological encounter as much as a ritual performance. Burning the dead raised challenging questions about the physical relationship between the living and the dead, even between the human dead and nonhuman, animal actors. It had material effect as well as moral significance. Our sense of the environmental impact and technical possibilities of human cremation has grown more acute in recent decades, but without succumbing to reckless teleologies, it is important and illuminating to see how these concerns played out at an earlier time, a century or more ago when many questions pertaining to cremation first came under close and critical scrutiny. Burning the Dead addresses itself historically to a period of accelerating change from the 1830s to the 1980s, but it also focuses on the far shorter temporal span required to transport a body from the place of death to the site of burning and the stages, once there, by which a human corpse is reduced to ashes. Geographically, it is a study of funerary spaces and of what is now termed necro-mobility. It engages with the movement of the dead through space, whether materially—as corpse, ashes, and burned bone fragments—from one location to another in an increasingly globalized world, or as an idea, which in the course of its itineration was variously lauded, reviled, and revisited. This mobilization of people, ideas, practices, and physical objects is, I believe, best understood against the changing backdrop of Indian society, Western empire, the transition from colonial rule to nation-state, and the making of modern Hinduism. Maxine Berg has recently remarked that “global historians have not given the attention they might to local spaces.”2 Cremation of the kind discussed in this book was both intensely local and prodigiously global. It brought together in one relatively short moment in time and in one small place people—mourners, priests, funerary attendants, a participant public—but also religious beliefs and ritual practices, a human body and all the combustible material needed for its consumption by fire. As the body burned and was physically destroyed, people

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(with their grief and memories) dispersed; verbal reports, newspaper stories, and obituaries and hagiographies began to circulate; the smoke escaped into the ether (or, viewed alternatively, remained to pollute the atmosphere); and ashes and bone fragments were gathered up and cast into a sacred stream or placed in an urn or casket to be transported elsewhere—often very distantly—for immersion or burial. From India a certain way of disposing of the dead traveled around the globe, through the cultural and demographic medium of the Indian diaspora, through itinerant priests and expansionary sects, via travel narratives, didactic tracts, and the modern media. For some, a privileged few perhaps, the ashes of the diasporic dead found their way back to India to be laid to rest at some monumental shrine or cast upon the sacred Ganges. This complex and serial interweaving— this gathering in and dispersing out, this restless movement from the local of the Indian cremation ghat (burning ground) to the global of modern funerary rites and practices—makes up the warp and the woof of this funerary tale. The book’s primary remit is India—not Europe, not America. The book argues for the importance of seeing “the global”—the world of the global dead—from an extra-European perspective rather than from the kind of Eurocentric orientation that has for too long dominated scholarly discourses of the dead. But this is not a purist, essentializing history in which only India matters. In the unfolding necropolitics and necro-geography of Indian cremation, these two outliers of Eurasia, India and Europe, lay locked in almost constant embrace. Without Europe, cremation in India would not be what it has come to be; without India, cremation in the West would surely have followed a different path. What moves—ideas about the dead, the best or most fitting means of their disposal and commemoration, the bodies and ashes of the dead—shuttles back and forth between these geographical (but also cultural and political) poles. The restless story of Indian cremation is not confined to a single subcontinent; it spills over into Australia, North America, South Africa, and all the lands of South Asian diasporic sojourn and settlement. It erupts wherever Hindus and Sikhs (and others from the subcontinent who historically follow fire-burial) have come to settle since the early nineteenth century or have died while working, fighting, or laboring in penal servitude abroad. But the transnational, pan-imperial peregrinations of the dead do not exhaust the sense in which this is a narrative about space as well as time. Cremation unlocks other historical spatialities: sensory as well as sacred geographies, the arenas of municipal authority and urban governance, the geographical imaginary of the exile, the siting of India within a world of difference. In its modern career, Indian cremation became lodged in many different places, nestling in a great miscellany of archival existences. It became the subject of parliamentary debates in London, newspaper articles in Australia, municipal controversies in Calcutta and Bombay, and memorials to the “fallen” of the Western Front. Cremation lent itself to airy metaphor and pungent metaphysic.

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It dwelled in literature, the visual arts, and the realm of the senses. There is a passage in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick in which the author seeks to convey to readers the atrocious smell of boiling whale blubber on board the Pequod. It had, he declares at last, “an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funeral pyres.”3 That Melville ever visited India in person I doubt, but in the early 1850s, when he was penning his epic of Ahab’s obsession with the elusive white whale, that train of association, linking horrific smell to human cremation and hence to Hindu India, had already taken wing around the world. Descriptions of Indian cremation by hostile observers repeatedly returned to the affront to the senses of the onlooker or the passerby: to smell, to sight, to hearing, to taste and touch. We might, with reason, put this down to raw prejudice and the bad press given in the West to the reputed “horrors” of Hinduism. But it is important to recognize that cremation as practiced in India, in contrast to the enclosed, “industrial” cremation increasingly prevalent in the West, was a highly visible, frankly sensory, process. Because cremation in India was so visible, or, more accurately, became so visible over the course of the nineteenth century, to India and to the West, this book necessarily engages with visuality as one of cremation’s most memorable tropes and emotive agencies. The images linger. Nineteenth-century photographs of the burning ghats at Benares and the funeral pyres of sages and maharajas, like the twentieth-century pictures of the cremation of Mohandas Gandhi and later of Indira Gandhi, register and reflect the extraordinary symbolic power, the immense affective force, and the vast transnational reach of modern Indian cremation.

Ac knowle dgm en ts

Not everyone cares for cremation. Some people to whom I have tried to explain the nature of this project have responded with enthusiasm. Others, for whatever reason, have found it an unpalatable subject for discussion, and I respect that. I am therefore all the more thankful to those who have helped me in various ways with this study. My sincere thanks go to Clare Anderson (for a clutch of splendid references), Mukulika Banerjee, Nandini Bhattacharya, Moritz von Brescius, Jane Buckingham, John Darwin, Martin Dusinberre, Manikarnika Dutta, Harald Fischer-Tiné, Shruti Kapila, Prashant Kidambi, Christos Lynteris, Polly O’Hanlon, Mriganka Mukhopadhyay, Robert Peckham, Sanjay and Pragati Sharma, Giles Tillotson, and Jennifer Tucker, all of whom provisioned me with ideas and information, illustrations, challenging thoughts, and morale-boosting support. I am immensely grateful to Tanika Sarkar for reading a draft of the manuscript, for encouraging me to think more about sati, and for reminding me of Tagore’s death. My thanks, too, to Stephen Tobin (through the good offices of Therese Tobin) for the Kolhapur photograph, and to my erstwhile colleagues in the History Department at Warwick, for being such an engaged, friendly, and stimulating bunch. The anonymous readers for the University of California Press were most helpful to me in rethinking the manuscript in several places and curbing my “recursive” style. Reed Malcolm as commissioning editor at the Press showed a keen interest in this work from the outset, and for that I am most grateful. I am much indebted, too, to my helpful and supportive editor Archna Patel for her advice and prompt responses to my many queries, and for so ably seeing the book through to publication.

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Acknowledgments

Presentations made at Zurich, Konstanz, Oxford, and St. Andrews from 2016 through 2018 substantially helped to advance and refine the arguments made here, and I am most grateful to those who participated in those discussions and added to my fund of anecdotes and ideas. I am particularly appreciative of the help received from the archivists and their assistants at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in Maidenhead and at the University of Durham library on Palace Green for use of the records of the Cremation Society. Also special thanks to the British Library, especially the obliging staff of the Asia, Pacific, and Africa reading room, the Wellcome Library, the National Archives of India, and the University of Warwick Library (whose online resources have been invaluable). I gratefully acknowledge, too, the assistance to this project provided by various online sources of visual material, including Alamy (with thanks to Rosie Saracino), British Library Images Online, Getty Images, Imperial War Museum Images Online, Magnum Photos (with thanks to Ruth Hoffman), the National Army Museum’s Picture Library Online Collection (with thanks to Emma Mawdsley), the University of Chicago’s Digital South Asia Library, the Visual Plague Database at CRASSSH, University of Cambridge, and Wellcome Online Images. Most of all, I want to thank Juliet Miller for taking with me the long trek—spread over fifty years and many journeys—from Varanasi to Mandore and from Arno’s Vale to Patcham Down, for putting up with my incipient pyrophilia, and helping me (and us) survive some near-death episodes. To her, with my deep and enduring love, this book is dedicated.

1

Burning Issues

C R E M AT IO N S T O R I E S

In March 1895 two cremations were held on the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia. The first was of an Indian Sikh named Charam Singh. Having left behind his wife and young child in Punjab, Charam Singh had traveled to Australia to seek a living as a hawker of small goods. While working in Victoria he caught a cold and developed pneumonia. Although admitted to hospital in Melbourne, he soon died. Despite being thousands of miles from home, Charam Singh was not entirely friendless or without compatriots. He had made the acquaintance of a fellow Sikh, Mett Singh, who ran an import business in Melbourne, and it was at Mett Singh’s direction that Charam Singh was taken to hospital. Mett Singh approached the city’s commissioner of police for permission to cremate his friend’s remains. Somewhat surprisingly, permission was granted, and on the morning of March 15, 1895, Charam Singh’s body, enclosed in a wooden coffin, was removed from the hospital and driven to the beach at Sandringham, ten miles from the city center.1 Coffins were not used in Sikh and Hindu funerals in India because any kind of confinement was thought to inhibit the freeing of the soul from the body, but the authorities in Melbourne probably insisted on one being used on sanitary grounds or from a sense of “public decency.” Charam Singh’s corpse was accompanied by several other Sikhs, who as the van made its way to the coast “maintained a low discordant ululation, rising at times almost into a chant, but dying away after an interval into a wail.”2 Upon arrival at the beach the body, swathed in colored cloth, was perfumed with attar of roses and adorned with tiny pieces of gold, silver, and copper, in 3

4

The Spectacle of Fire

the belief that these would “assist the spirit in its passage to eternity.” It was then strewn with chips of sandalwood and anointed with myrrh, and the coffin lid was fastened down. The casket was laid on a pyre consisting of a ton and a half of wood, arranged in crossbar fashion, with each log smeared “in accordance with the Sikh rite,” though with butter replacing the customary ghee. The Sikh mourners crouched on their haunches “in Eastern fashion”; in the absence of any close relative, Mett Singh kindled the pyre (in a most un-Indian manner) using matches and paper. The mourners sat in silence for the two and a half hours it took for the coffin and body to be consumed by fire before returning to Melbourne. Mett Singh remained, however, to collect the ashes of his deceased friend. These were to be sent to Charam Singh’s parents in Punjab, “that they may cast them into the Ganges.” The other remains—the unburned fragments of teeth and bones—were cast into the sea.3 There was much that was culturally anomalous about Charam Singh’s cremation: the use of an enclosed coffin in place of an open bamboo bier to carry the dead to the burning-ground, as well as the substitution of butter for ghee and of paper and matches for the sacred fire brought from the home of the deceased. There were no relatives on hand to carry the corpse, no priests to chant the sacred verses, and no son or male heir to light the pyre. And yet enough remained—from the conduct of the mourners and the token chips of sandalwood to the blazing pyre and the disposal of the ashes and bones—for this to be recognizable thousands of miles from the subcontinent as an Indian cremation. According to the newspaper in which this event was reported, Charam Singh’s cremation was “a scene, common enough in India, but strange and rare in Australia.”4 However, as the same article disclosed, a few days later, on March 19, 1895, the body of an eighty-three-year-old widow, Elizabeth Inger Henniker, who had lived with her married son in nearby Richmond, Victoria, was taken in a coffin to the secluded beach at Half Moon Bay, Sandringham, where it was laid on an awaiting funeral pyre. Three tons of wood were placed around the coffin and, to the accompaniment of Christian hymns, kerosene was sprinkled on the wood to aid its combustion. At a signal from the undertaker, Mrs. Henniker’s son struck a match; almost immediately the logs were ablaze and the coffin was immersed in flames. In minutes the “whole pile was a mass of fire.”5 There is no indication in the newspaper report of why Mrs. Henniker, or her relatives, chose this (for white Australians in the 1890s) unconventional means of disposing of her body.6 Perhaps it was a matter of personal conviction or family choice; possibly she came from a Protestant community in northern Europe (“Inger” suggests Scandinavian ancestry) that had adopted cremation in preference to a standard Christian burial.7 Despite their superficial similarities—the open-air pyre, the singing of hymns, the body encased in a coffin—the Melbourne funerals of 1895 represent two distinct strands in the history of modern

Burning Issues

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cremation that temporarily coexisted in time and place—one originating in India and anciently grounded in the religious traditions of Hindus and Sikhs, the other dating only from the 1870s and emanating from modern Europe. The history of cremation in Australia conventionally begins not with a dead Sikh on a beach near Melbourne, but with the struggle of a small group of white Australians to establish cremation as a legitimate funerary practice.8 Even where, as in South Australia, permissive legislation was passed as early as 1891, the prevailing view has been that it was only after World War I that cremation made significant progress in Australia.9 Yet Charam Singh’s cremation was not a solitary event. In Adelaide in October 1903 the body of another Sikh, Bishin Singh, was also burned, in this instance under the provisions of South Australia’s recent cremation act and through the intercession of the local cremation society. Witnessed by two hundred onlookers and to the sound of Sikh prayers, his body, sealed in a coffin, was cremated in a specially erected enclosure. The ashes were collected by Bishin Singh’s friends to be sent to India for “burial.”10 As this book tries to show, there are many individual cremation stories that can be used to inform and nuance our understanding of the Indian practice of burning the dead in modern times. What these somewhat eclectic episodes in Australia in the 1890s and 1900s do is help to pose the question of how the bodies of Sikhs, Hindus, and others for whom cremation was said to be an obligatory rite were disposed of outside India. Australia was only one instance of a much wider phenomenon. During the imperial era the proper disposal of the dead was an issue of mounting social and political significance for the many countries of the British Empire—including Britain itself—in which Indians worked, traveled, or had come to settle by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of the most compelling images of Hindu cremation are those of the funeral of Mohandas Gandhi following his assassination in Delhi on January 30, 1948 (see figures 1 and 2). Photography made both explicit and universal the manner in which Hindu cremation was performed, rendering it a highly visual spectacle and a very public process. The global impact of the photographs, showing the destruction of Gandhi’s body by fire and the emotional responses of mourners and onlookers, was supplemented by the many written accounts of the cremation; by contemporary newsreels (Britain’s Pathé News); and by scenes painstakingly reconstructed for the cinema in the film version of Stanley Wolpert’s Nine Hours to Rama in 1963 and, more famously, in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi in 1982.11 In presenting to the world a seemingly definitive image of what customary Hindu mortuary rites entailed, Gandhi’s cremation was not the least instructive aspect of his “didactic death.”12 The scenes of the Mahatma’s funeral—especially the iconic pyre—might seem to represent a paradigmatic statement of what constituted Hindu cremation. It must, however, be recognized that in form and function this “traditional” ceremony was in many respects the culmination of several decades

6

The Spectacle of Fire

Figure 1. The iconic pyre: Gandhi’s cremation, January 31, 1948. Fox Photos, Hulton Archive © gettyimages.

of evolution and transformation in the history of Indian cremation (chapter 7 considers this more fully). It should further be recognized that forty years earlier, when Gandhi lived in South Africa, one of the causes he identified himself with was the right of Hindus to be cremated. Around 1908 he began a long struggle to persuade the Johannesburg city council to allow resident Indians to cremate their dead. But still in thrall to Western sanitary notions, rather than demanding openair cremation, Gandhi sought approval to erect a modern crematorium for the purpose. He enlisted the help of his friend, the Jewish architect Hermann Kallenbach, who designed a brick-built crematorium, complete with a wood-burning furnace and tall chimney, that looked and operated much like those recently erected in Britain, Germany, and the United States.13 Gandhi had left South Africa by the time the crematorium opened in 1918 and so never saw it himself. Now preserved as a national monument, a stopping-off point on the Johannesburg Gandhi tour, the “Hindoo Crematorium” survives as

Burning Issues

7

Figure 2. Gandhi’s cremation, January 31, 1948. Photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson © Magnum Photos.

a tribute to Gandhi’s cultural eclecticism in South Africa and his simultaneous concern to uphold Indian rights overseas.14 There is some evidence to suggest that even after his return to India in 1915, Gandhi remained committed to the idea of “scientific cremation,” regarding modern crematoria, like the one in Johannesburg, as the most sanitarily efficient and culturally acceptable means of disposing of the Hindu dead.15 If Gandhi’s cremation in 1948, conducted in the open air on a blazing wood pyre, appears to present one image of “traditional” Hindu cremation, his earlier engagement with the Johannesburg crematorium suggests quite another, far more overtly “modern,” means by which to burn the dead. As with so much else in Gandhi’s life, but also in the history of Indian cremation, it is not always easy to discern what is “traditional” from what is “modern” and whether the former precedes or follows the latter. To speak of the “disposal of the dead,” as did many nineteenth- and twentiethcentury commentators, might seem to imply indifference, even casual disrespect, toward the body of the deceased, a perfunctory act of corporeal removal, concealment, and obliteration. Perhaps the phrase suggests a sanitary, rather than a social, act, requiring technical proficiency and a presumption of objectivity among those accustomed to deal dispassionately with the dying and the dead. An early American advocate for cremation in the modern Western manner remarked: “Although cremation may have been regarded by some people . . . as

8

The Spectacle of Fire

a religious rite or superstitious custom, it is unquestionably—when pursued by the most enlightened nations—a sanitary measure.”16 Possibly disposal does no more than gesture toward a universal preoccupation with what happens to the human body once life is extinguished.17 But for many of those who followed the practice of cremation or argued, often fervently, for its retention or adoption, this was much more than a technical question of how most safely or expeditiously to remove the dead from the sight of the living. Between its several faiths, India observed at least four means of disposing of the remains of the dead, encompassing between them earth, air, fire, and water.18 Many Indians—Muslims, Christians, and Jews—followed the practice of earth-burial. The Zoroastrian Parsis, who originated in Iran and held fire sacred, exposed the bodies of their dead on the circular funerary “towers of silence” (dokhma), where the flesh was eaten by vultures and the bones left to decay into nothingness.19 It was widely assumed in the West in the nineteenth century that cremation was “all but universal” among Hindus, but this was far from being the case.20 Historically, many Hindus, especially of the lower castes, chose to bury their dead, could not afford such costly ceremonies, or were denied access to so prestigious a practice. Some Hindus committed the bodies of their dead to water, releasing them, perhaps from poverty and for want of affordable alternatives, into rivers like the sacred Ganges. But the most prestigious rite among high-caste Hindus, as well as among Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jains, was cremation or “fire-burial,” feuerbestattung to use the expressive German term.21 For many Indians in South Asia and across the diaspora, cremation in what is understood to be the traditional manner, lit by sacred fire, with the body on a wooden pyre, open to the air so as to allow the spirit (atman) to escape into the ether, was (and is) more than a rite. It was also a right, dictated by custom and enjoined by religion. Yet within the common compass of burning the dead, there was no single authoritative form of open-air cremation. Sometimes the upper half of the body was laid bare; at other times it was enclosed within a cotton winding-sheet. At Benares (Varanasi), but perhaps nowhere else, the feet were dipped in the waters of the Ganges before the corpse was laid on the pyre. Normally, but not always, the body was laid face up on the pyre and pointing north. In some instances the legs were bent under the body. The wood used varied greatly in quantity and type, from prized sandalwood to “common fuel,” sometimes supplemented with cow-dung cakes or doused in kerosene rather than ghee. The place of cremation might also vary, from the banks of a river or by the seashore to the desolate margins of a village or the walled enclosure of a municipal burning-ground. Yet despite this diversity, cremation in the Indian manner still seemed to define a profound difference from cremation in the modern West. The growth of crematoria in Europe and North America since the 1870s, with the corpse doubly sequestered first within a wooden coffin and then inside a purpose-built crematorium

Burning Issues

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and with gas jets or an electric oven as the means of combustion, has left many Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jains feeling deeply uncomfortable with, and emotionally and culturally estranged by, this seemingly peremptory, impersonal, and godless means of disposing of the dead.22 While both modern and ancient modes of cremation used the common element of fire, the rapid, enclosed, industrial variant provided scant opportunity for the idealized fire of purity, respect, and reverence, for reverie and reflection quite as much as ritual and faith. Further, as Shirley Firth observed in her ethnography of death and bereavement in a Hindu community in England who were struggling to reconcile the requirements of their faith with the constraints of contemporary British funeral regulations, “arguably nowhere is the question of identity raised more acutely than in the face of death.”23 Out of legal necessity British Hindus and Sikhs have been given no practical choice but to commit their dead to a modern crematorium, though in the new necropolitics of the diaspora, there have been sustained attempts to overturn statutory restrictions on open-air cremation and to argue for its compatibility with existing legislation.24 While this demand revisits historic resistance to colonial attempts to regulate and restrict Indian cremation, it is ironic that it comes at a time when urban Indians have increasingly been obliged to accept the use of electric- or gasfired crematoria. SI T UAT I N G T H E D E A D

Global history has neglected the dead.25 It is not so much the cause of their dying and the reasons for their passing that have been ignored, for mortality from war, famine, disease, and disaster has been one of the mainstays of global history and of world history before it.26 But until recently, remarkably little has been written about what happens to the dead once they die; the manner of their disposal; and the celebration, memorialization, and on occasion the deliberate desecration, that accompany the burial or the burning of an individual’s earthly remains. If the movement of people, ideas, and objects around the world is a hallmark of the global in history, if global history is intended to embrace a transformed sense of mobility, spatiality, and identity in the modern age and to explore afresh the multiple processes of exchange and interconnectedness that link places and cultures, then cremation, and not least the Indian practice of cremation, must be deemed a highly eligible subject.27 Yet this possibility has barely been recognized. There are, though, precedents. Thomas Laqueur’s landmark study, The Work of the Dead, provides one of the most comprehensive historical accounts yet published of the way in which the physical disposal and memorialization of the dead has changed since the early eighteenth century.28 His resonant phrase—“the work of the dead”—is invaluable in directing attention to the ways in which the dead served the cultural needs of the living. In his words, the work of the dead is

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a history of “how they [the dead] give meaning to our lives, how they structure public places, politics, and time.” Such a history is “a history of the imagination, a history of how we invest the dead . . . with meaning.”29 In Laqueur’s view “bodies matter; they are always much more than they seem.” Among the living they “create a community of memory,” to the extent that the dead (or how the living respect and memorialize the dead) become a foundation for civilization itself.30 In a similar manner, in describing recent acts of memorialization in eastern Europe, Katherine Verdery has observed: “A dead body is meaningful not in itself but through culturally established relations to death and through the way a specific dead person’s importance is (variously) construed.” She further adds, “A body’s symbolic effectiveness does not depend on its standing for one particular thing[,] . . . for among the most important properties of bodies, especially dead ones, is their ambiguity, multivocality, or polysemy.” It is that ambiguous, multivocal, polysemic quality of the dead that this study seeks to capture with respect to Indian cremation.31 At its most ambitious, Laqueur’s book is about how the dead make the modern world, and yet in actuality it concentrates almost entirely on only two Western societies, France and Britain, recognizing that “the meaning of any necrogeography can only be grasped locally” in relation to the literature, history, politics, and even botany of a given location.32 When Laqueur turns from burials and graveyards to the subject of cremation, it is treated as an abrupt intrusion into a hallowed and mellowed funerary scene, an intervention characterized by the harshly incongruous use of the industrial technology of steelmaking and blast furnaces to effect the speedy destruction of the dead.33 In a history so grounded in Europe, it is perhaps not surprising that India receives barely a mention and that, when it is cited, it is in terms of the European dead of Park Street cemetery in Calcutta (Kolkata).34 There is no evidence in Laqueur’s book that India, too, had a civilization in which the dead were set to work for the living, no indication that India possessed an alternative, ancient, and distinctive mode of nonindustrial cremation. Absent, too, is any suggestion that India might have served as a global exemplar and epicenter from which flowed a form of funerary practice very different from that of Europe, but which was also, after its own fashion, distinctly modern. In common with other death rites, cremation has long attracted the notice of anthropologists. As discussed in chapter 2, cremation was an exemplifying feature of colonial ethnographies and of some of the village-based studies that followed thereafter.35 Anthropological accounts of Indian communities abroad, in the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, and the South Pacific, especially those based on 1950s and 1960s fieldwork, provide further, if tantalizingly brief, insights into funeral rites and observances, usually within the context of immigrants’ ritual activities, their life cycles, and rites of passage.36 More recent anthropologists like Shirley Firth have turned to considering cremation among Britons of South Asian descent or among diasporic communities elsewhere in the world.37 For South Asia

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itself the classic study remains Jonathan Parry’s Death in Banaras, based on fieldwork conducted in Benares in northern India between 1976 and 1983. Parry not only gives an in-depth account of the funeral rites involved but also illuminatingly treats the cremation ghats, where bodies are burned alongside the Ganges, as a place of work requiring an elaborate division of labor between different specialists, and presents cremation as a significant business activity, or as he neatly puts it, “death as a living.”38 Not unlike Laqueur, Parry’s concern is with how death plays out among the living: what those who are alive make of the rituals that accompany death and the fate of those who have died. He makes a point, important to the present study, that cremation is construed as ultimately a form of sacrifice, the corpse a ceremonial offering to Agni, the Hindu god of fire. Burning the dead is necessary to ensure the continuing cycle of death and rebirth, destruction and regeneration. Without the liberating force of fire, the souls of the dead are entrapped and return to haunt the living.39 Although Parry’s task is not historical, he is conscious of the process of change affecting cremation, a process symbolized by the establishment of an electric crematorium at Harishchandra ghat in Benares soon after the completion of his fieldwork there. As he aptly observes: “The illusion of timelessness which so much in the mortuary rites [at Benares] is concerned to create is just that—an illusion.”40 It is the ambition of this book to show the progress of that “illusion” over the course of the past two hundred years, but to extend and complicate the discussion by moving from the Benares of Parry’s study to India as a whole and to the diaspora. While Benares is undeniably central to the performance and perception of modern Indian cremation, that history cannot be told from Benares alone. Rather, as chapter 3 argues, the narrative needs to encompass colonial India’s two main metropolises, Bombay (Mumbai) and Calcutta (Kolkata), as well as the movement of Indians overseas and their memorialization abroad (see chapter 4). To a degree unrecognized by Laqueur, among others who have written about death in the modern world, India has occupied—and still occupies—a place of singular importance with respect to the disposal of the dead in general and in relation to cremation in particular. The history of cremation in India is far more than the history of traditional rites and practices that it is conventionally taken to be—if tradition is assumed to mean “timeless” custom and immutable belief. On the contrary, cremation in modern India and across the South Asian diaspora is a history of contestation and change, of longing and denial, adaptation and innovation. India, too, has gifted to the world a modern cremation movement, though its meaning, form, and global resonance necessarily differed substantially from the Western cremation movement with which it was nearly contemporaneous. The modern cremation movement in the West dates only from the early 1870s, with Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia, the United States, and Britain

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among its pioneers.41 In Germany, where the first crematorium opened at Gotha in 1879, there were ninety such establishments in operation by 1930. By the latter date Italy had thirty-six crematoria and Switzerland nineteen.42 In Britain, following the publication in 1873 by Sir Henry Thompson, an eminent surgeon and sanitarian, of an influential article advocating cremation and decrying “graveyard pollution,” the Cremation Society was established in London, with Thompson as president and a Scottish engineer, William Eassie, as secretary.43 While questions about the legality of cremation persisted into the 1880s and were not finally resolved until the passing of the Cremation Act in 1902, the first British crematorium opened at Woking in Surrey in 1878 (though it was not actually used until 1885). By 1914 there were thirteen crematoria across Britain, increasing to fiftyfour by 1939.44 The number of cremations, however, rose only slowly. By 1907 fewer than seven thousand cremations were performed in the whole country, and an article in the British Medical Journal the following year regretted that the adoption of cremation had been “disappointingly slow” despite its being “undoubtedly the best method of disposing of the bodies of the dead.” Cremation no longer aroused such impassioned protests as it had in the 1870s and 1880s but now met with “an attitude of indifference” that was “yet more inimical to progress.” Far from attaining widespread popularity, cremation was “almost wholly confined to persons of some intellectual distinction.”45 By 1934 the total number of cremations performed in Britain since 1885 had reached eighty thousand, and for the first time there were more than eight thousand a year.46 However, even by 1939 cremation in Britain accounted for less than 4 percent of all deaths, only reaching the same number as burials in 1967. By 2000 cremation in Britain accounted for 70 percent of all deaths, or nearly half a million bodies a year.47 Cremation progressed gradually in other parts of northern Europe and among populations of European descent in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada. In southern and eastern Europe cremation was strongly opposed among Catholic and Orthodox communities. Condemned by the pope in 1886, cremation was only given qualified approval in 1963.48 In the United States, human cremation was first performed in 1876. By 1901 there were twenty-five crematoria, and more than thirteen thousand bodies had been cremated, the largest numbers being in New York, San Francisco, Boston, and St. Louis, especially among German and Scandinavian immigrants and their descendants.49 A century on, in 2000, there were approximately 600,000 cremations annually in the United States: this figure, though set to increase, still represented only about a quarter of total deaths.50 Outside the West, Japan provided the most striking example of the growth of modern cremation. The ancient Buddhist practice of cremation, previously reviled as barbaric and unfilial, was reinstated in 1875 following the Meiji Restoration, less for religious reasons than as a mark of Japan’s modernity, as a desirable sanitary policy, and as a means of saving urban space from sprawling graveyards.

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According to a report in the Indian press, which followed the global progress of cremation with proprietorial interest, in the early 1880s some nine thousand cremations a year were performed in Japan.51 By the 1930s cremation in the Western manner—not, as traditionally, on wooden pyres open to the sky—had overtaken burial as the main means for disposing of the dead. It now accounts for almost every Japanese death, apart from the emperor.52 In the opinion of some international observers, Japan provided a model for cremation movements around the globe. Visiting the country in 1878, the seasoned traveler Isabella Bird praised the “simplicity” of Japanese cremation, its cheapness and efficiency, adding that it served “the purpose of the innocuous and complete destruction of the corpse as well as any complicated apparatus (if not better).”53 India, by contrast, appeared bent on a regressive path; its burning-grounds were dubbed “primitive” and chaotic and the number of its cremated dead was unknown and unknowable. In short, India, in the opinion of critics, had “no connection whatsoever with the modern cremation movement.”54 Yet India was hard to ignore. The number of dead cremated there far exceeded those anywhere else in the world. If in Britain in 1907 it was a matter for some celebration (among cremationists) that there were 732 cremations, in Calcutta alone that year there were close to 21,000.55 While there are no comprehensive statistics for India as a whole, there were probably at the time in excess of a million cremations a year (see chapter 3). D E AT H A N D E M P I R E

The modern history of Indian cremation can be said to begin with two events early in the annals of British colonial rule. One was the outlawing by the government of India in 1829 of the practice of sati, by which a Hindu widow was involuntarily burned or committed self-immolation on the funeral pyre of her dead husband. This prohibition did not, in fact, signify the end of sati, which lingered on in some of India’s semiautonomous princely states and more secretive locations for decades thereafter; nor did it spell the end of the idea of sati and of the funeral pyre as a symbolic site of self-sacrifice and devotion. But the formal abolition of sati did create a discursive space in which the critical attention of the West, and of some Indian reformers, could shift from the death of widows to the funeral pyre itself and to the deceased male who occupied it. The second event resulted from the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade and the recourse to Indian indentured labor to work on plantations around the British Empire (and beyond), beginning with the first shipment of Indian “coolies” to Mauritius in 1834. This initiated an out-migration of Indian labor that lasted until World War I. It also signaled the start of the movement abroad of Indians more generally, from hawkers like Charam Singh in Victoria to lawyers like Gandhi in South Africa, as well as the Indian convicts and soldiers sent to destinations overseas. Some of these

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individuals died abroad, and their passing posed compelling questions about the proper disposal of the Indian dead. At precisely the time that cremation was passing under unprecedented scrutiny in India itself, it also was becoming an issue for Indian migration and imperial practice overseas. Both conduit and critic, empire was implicated in India’s cremation story in other ways, too. The challenge to Hindu and Sikh cremation in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century, as British rule was consolidated and as India was transferred in 1858 from the East India Company to the British Crown, also came from European residents and travelers, Christian missionaries among them, who saw the burning of human bodies as barbaric and vile. For political and cultural reasons, examined more closely later in the book, Hindus were able to mount a successful defense of cremation against its imperial critics, though not without having to make compromises, including submitting to sanitary regulations and a new regime of urban governance. From this (as chapter 6 shows) there emerged a remarkable revalidation of cremation, as Hindu reform movements like the Arya Samaj identified themselves with cremation as an essential and ennobling rite. As Indians began to innovate around “traditional” forms and procedures, cremation emerged as a central element in the celebration and memorialization of Indian nationalists and in the defiant commemoration of patriots executed by the British for participation in revolutionary terrorism (see chapter 7). At the same time, Western sanitarians in India advocated cremation as preferable to burial, and a new wave of Westerners, departing from their censorious predecessors, identified with cremation as part of the religious appeal and spiritual superiority of “the East.” Cremation after the Hindu fashion—in the open air on a blazing pyre—more than held its own against the kind of enclosed, industrial mode of cremation established in the West and even—on a minor scale—was imported into India’s metropolitan cities. In the debates and controversies surrounding cremation in Europe and North America in the late nineteenth century, India was a frequent reference point—whether by those who sought to condemn the seeming barbarity of Hindu cremation or by those who conversely regarded the Indian practice as sanitarily sound and morally uplifting.56 Indians were among the first individuals to be cremated in the West, sometimes, through a series of eclectic cultural crossovers, in a manner more conventionally Indian than European. Cremation in India was an evolving practice, but it was also an idea constantly trafficked between India and the West. Necro-mobility implied not just the physical movement of bodies, bones, and ashes, but also the circulation and dissemination of crematory ideas and practices. As argued in chapter 6, this occidental awareness of India calls into question Laqueur’s assertion that the cremation movement in the West in the 1870s represented “no new attitude—not toward death or the dead, in any case—that favored cremation, no sudden turn to Hinduism or Buddhism,

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which believed in cremation on religious grounds.”57 It also, from a South Asian perspective, qualifies historian Christopher Bayly’s observation, made in 1981, that “no abrupt and widespread changes in attitudes to[,] or institutions of[,] death occurred in Hindu India over the past three centuries or so.” Bayly did note however that there were “significant changes of emphasis” in response to Christian missionary teaching, Western rationalism, and “intrusive government.”58 In republishing his essay in 1998, Bayly revised his earlier statement, adding that Hindu death rites now seemed to him an illustration of how an “old” but “continuing tradition of social practice” was “taken up and recast by the modernizers and nationalists of the twentieth century, by Dayananda Sarasvati of the Arya Samaj and by Gandhi.”59 It is precisely that modern “recasting” of Hindu cremation that this book seeks to address.60 In certain respects, the modern history of Indian cremation resembles other aspects of what scholars now see as a changing, revalorized, and reconstituted Hindu tradition. In her account of the Hindu bathing festival, the Kumbh Mela, held every twelve years at Allahabad (Prayagraj) at the sacred junction of the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers, Kama Maclean has shown how the mela evolved from a relatively minor, local event into a mass religious gathering, attracting millions. In tracking the mela over the longue durée from the 1760s to the 1950s, she rejects any simplistic distinction between ancient “tradition” and modern “invention.” For her what is significant “is the extent to which the festival changed in character as interest groups gathered around it and responded to the pressures of the modern state.” Analysis of these changes “reveals the extent to which colonized people understood and made sophisticated use of the dynamics and constraints of colonialism.”61 Among the colonial-era factors Maclean cites as fueling the rise of the modern mela are the abolition of the pilgrim tax in the 1830s, the building of the Indian railroads, Queen Victoria’s proclamation of November 1858 (which, following the suppression of the mutiny and rebellion of 1857–58, promised to safeguard Indian religious beliefs and customs), and the imposition of sanitary regulations in the wake of cholera outbreaks in the 1860s and 1870s. Maclean adds that as the British tightened their control over the mela in order to make it safer and more accessible, pilgrims responded by attending in evergrowing numbers. Hence “the mela was redefined significantly as those interested in its defence found that the best way to do this was to create something that the British would recognize as essentially religious (and not economic or even social in nature).” Once this had been achieved, defenders of the mela could then “demand non-interference in matters of religion and reference it with Queen Victoria’s 1858 proclamation.”62 Several of the factors Maclean cites (including Queen Victoria’s proclamation and the imposition of sanitary regulations) have a direct bearing on the modern history of cremation in India, but her case study also illuminates a wider symbiotic

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relationship between colonial policies, on the one hand, and on the other, the creative ingenuity of Indians in following their own notions of what tradition required and colonialism allowed. Cremation, however, was a far more pervasive phenomenon than the Kumbh Mela. As Indians traveled or settled overseas, they carried cremation—or the desire for funerary fire—with them, across the empire and beyond, obliging suspicious governments and wary local authorities to accede to some extent to their demands, as in Australia and South Africa in the 1890s and 1900s. Both in India and abroad cremation began to be normalized as the funerary rite to which Hindus, Sikhs, and others were entitled, even though historically a significant proportion of Hindus had buried rather than burned their dead. Far from suppressing cremation, or outlawing it like sati, empire aided its global spread, giving it new opportunities and (sometimes with reluctance) fresh license. In the West, as “scientific” or “mechanical” cremation took hold, India became a kind of universal exemplar, model, and guide to why (and possibly how) human remains might be committed to fire. In India, without any legislation either to authorize or to ban it, cremation posed an awkward question for colonial biopolitics.63 Who had sovereignty over the bodies of the dead? Who should take responsibility for the disposal of the dead, especially for the indigent and dependent dead who lacked the family and friends to ensure proper death rites? How far could the state extend (or want to extend) its colonizing power over the corpse? How far could Hindus, Sikhs, and others claim for themselves the right to dispose of the dead—their dead—in the manner they deemed most fitting? Out of the political struggles of the mid- and late nineteenth century emerged two seemingly contradictory trends. One was the incineration of the dead as a matter of sanitary expediency or even as an instrument of corporeal punishment and deterrence. There always was a degree of ambiguity about burning bodies. Did it signify the ritual and reverence of a formal cremation, or did burning merely provide a means of destroying the inconvenient corpse, of obliterating the unwanted or dishonored dead? A second, to some degree opposing, development was cremation’s move from private event to public occasion. As the nationalist era in India progressed, the bodies of the celebrated dead came to be publicly commemorated, mourned by vast crowds as the corpse was borne through packed city streets to the burning-ground, where it was further garlanded and eulogies were delivered over it, and with the cremated body becoming a source of patriotic relics. The British responded by trying to ban such nationalist displays while holding cremation ceremonies of their own to honor Indians killed in the service of the British regime, thus making the cremation ground simultaneously a site of state rhetoric and anticolonial propaganda. To cremation, a rite long associated with India’s warrior elites, the Rajputs and Marathas, both the British and their nationalist adversaries brought a new militarization of the dead: gun carriages or weapon carriers to transport the body to the burning place, soldiers bearing

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arms or volunteer militias marching alongside the funeral cortege, gun salutes fired over the body as the pyre was lit, and a bugler sounding the Last Post (see chapter 7). From this intense politicization of cremation and the reconfiguration of “the public” it signified there emerged a new communalization of the dead. The bodies of those killed in riots (and in plane crashes and railroad accidents) were quickly claimed for their respective communities: Hindus for cremation, Muslims for burial. At a time of mounting tension, the procession to the burningground, accompanied by loud music, provocative jibes, and angry gestures, repeatedly sparked Hindu-Muslim clashes. Like the cow-protection movements that emerged in late-nineteenth-century north India, cremation became fiercely emblematic of Hindu rights, identity, and ownership.64 Whether as part of their own determination to advance their social and ritual standing or through efforts to ensure their more complete integration into the Hindu fold, “untouchable” (Dalit) and low-caste Hindu communities that had not previously practiced cremation began to agitate for the right to cremate their dead and, crucially, at the same burning-grounds used by high-caste Hindus. As India emerged from empire into autonomous nationhood, so the patriotic capital invested in cremation increased. At home it developed as an ever-grander, more fervent celebration of those who, like Gandhi or the victims of Portuguese repression in Goa in the 1950s and early 1960s, died in the service of the nation. In Africa, in the Middle East, and in the looming confrontation with China, Indians’ right to cremation became a mark of the respect demanded for the bodies of the dead and for the nation that wished to honor and reclaim them. The exigencies and experiences of empire thus helped shape the way in which cremation became further valorized after independence and the Indian nation defined as a Hindu nation. T H E P L AC E O F T H E D E A D

A criticism once made about cremation was that it reduced human remains to a nullity.65 There was no body (or even parts of a body) left to bury and revere. There was no site of burial that could be visited, that could serve as a lasting memorial to the dead and so satisfy the basic human desire, as old perhaps as the Neolithic revolution, to be rooted, through the interring of the dead, in one particular place.66 Tombstones and graveyards were sites of remembrance, prompting melancholy reflections on the dead and reminding the living of the transitory nature of an earthly existence. It was in such places, among such memorials, that the dead most actively did their “work.” Conversely, with cremation, so skeptics claimed, nothing solid resulted except ephemeral fire, smoke, and ashes. The dead retained no place among the living. In such a view, cremation ran counter not only to memorialization but also to common affect: it suggested indifference, neglect,

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the incineration of corpses as if they were unwanted waste. As the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer wrote in 1965 in representing contemporary opinion in Britain: “To choose cremation is to reject the cult of tombs and cemeteries as it has developed [in the West] since the beginning of the nineteenth century.” The cemetery was a place of memory and mourning. Cremation extinguished the dead; it did not honor them.67 As far as India is concerned this was, and is, a gross misrepresentation. In South Asia the cremated dead have long been remembered and memorialized— especially through ritual observances maintained long after death (the shraddh or postcremation rites for the dead).68 Among the revered or regal dead this work was also done materially, through the brick and earth mounds (stupas) that contained the cremated remains of bones and teeth (the phul or “flowers”) of the Buddha and his disciples, and in the sati stones, still found in many parts of India, that marked the immolation of “devout” Hindu wives. This memorialization remains evident, too, in the solemn, haunting beauty of the sandstone and marble cenotaphs (known as chattris for their umbrella-shaped cupolas) built to house the ashes of the deceased Rajput rulers of Rajasthan at such places as Mandore (Jodhpur), Bada Bagh (Jaisalmer), and Ahar (Udaipur).69 In recent times the chattri in its simplest domed form—the symbolic chattri complementing the iconic pyre—has become a universal emblem of Hindu cremation. It serves as a way of honoring the dead but also as a means—we might call it Rajputization—by which modern Indian cremation has become fused with the martial attributes of the Rajputs and pride in their warrior traditions. When the British architects Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker were tasked at the end of World War I with commemorating the Indian dead of the Western Front, they were presented with a proposal that the Hindus should be memorialized with a Rajput chattri and Muslims with a scaled-down Taj Mahal.70 While they did not accept this suggestion, the final design of the Indian cemetery at Neuve Chapelle, unveiled in 1927, contained more subtle allusions to Indian funerary architecture, including four cupolas “similar to the chattris which are found in the sacred burial places of India.”71 Cremation grounds (burning ghats) as places set aside for the burning of the dead had long existed on the outskirts of Indian towns and villages, where they were usually located next to a stream, reservoir or tank, the seashore, or some other body of water where ablutions could be performed and the ashes scattered. Burning-grounds were a feature, often a contentious one, of colonial cities in India almost from the outset of British rule. Since there was little desire or incentive to ban them outright, where they were situated and what kinds of rules should govern their use became salient issues of urban governance. If annoyance and nuisance were not to be caused to other communities and residents through the conveyance of bodies along city streets, through the smoke issuing from funeral pyres, and through the disposal of the ashes and other remains, how were these

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urban sites to be accommodated and managed? In the tackling of such issues, cremation helped define modern civic space in India. Some burning-grounds were pragmatically incorporated into the cityscape or became barely tolerated reminders of the dead among the living. Others, long established, might form obstacles to the physical expansion and material rejuvenation of the city or, as also in the countryside, they might stand in the way of major engineering and construction projects.72 Some of the most famous Hindu cremation sites—at Benares, at Hardwar where the Ganges enters the northern plains, and at Nasik on the Godavari—bore the aura of antiquity and the sanction of long-accustomed use, but over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries many new cremation grounds were created or substantially changed character through the erection of memorials to political leaders and public figures. Among these sites of epic memorialization, the cremation of the Hindu nationalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak in August 1920 on Bombay’s Chowpatty beach, outside any established burning-ground, set an important precedent. New or old, the places where the dead were burned became populated with funeral monuments (described, following Buddhist precedent, as samadhis), an aspect of urban memorialization that rivaled and rebuked the many statues and monuments to British monarchs, governors, and generals. Following Gandhi’s cremation in 1948, a national site of memorialization was constructed at Raj Ghat on the banks of the Yamuna in Delhi, where the ashes of other leaders, including prime ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, were also later interred. Like the chattris of Rajput rulers on the outskirts of many Rajasthani cities, in Raj Ghat the modern Indian nation has created its own memorial deathscape. The question of where and how the dead of the diaspora should be cremated has long been a critical issue. Should they be burned, and so memorialized, abroad? Or should their bodies or ashes be “returned” to India? What did it mean for the conceptualization of India’s sacred geography for the remains of Charam Singh, cremated in Victoria in 1895, to be sent “home” to India (if indeed they were) for immersion in the Ganges? Real or imaginary, this notion of return or restoration had profound symbolic and emotional significance. For many Indians abroad, especially those who felt themselves to be exiles, unable to return in person to their place of birth or the country of their ancestral belonging, cremation was a spatial idea as well as a ritual concept. It made it in some sense possible, even from a distant place like Fiji, to realize the desire, in Sudesh Mishra’s eloquent phrase, of “dying into India.”73 The global journeying of cremation as an Indo-centric idea and aspiration thus needs to be reckoned alongside the actual physical movement of bodies and ashes, within South Asia and across the oceans and continents. When Kamala, the wife of Jawaharlal Nehru, later India’s first prime minister, died from tuberculosis in Switzerland in 1936, she was cremated in Lausanne, but as had by then become common, her ashes were sent back to

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India for dispersal.74 Far from obliteration, cremation fashioned a powerful sense of connectedness: between dispersed families and communities, between exiles and their real or imagined homeland. It expressed a visceral attachment to origins, place, and a shared identity. B E NA R E S , M AY 1 9 6 9

I first visited Benares in May 1969. At the time I was eight months into a twoyear stay in India as a postgraduate research student enrolled at the University of Madras. That summer I was on my way to join a gathering of international students in Kashmir and stopped off in Benares en route from Calcutta to Agra and Delhi. I arrived in the late afternoon and arranged to take a boat out on the Ganges the following morning. Before I went the Bengali owner of the guesthouse where I was staying, Mr. Mukherjee, warned me that whatever else I might see and take pictures of, it was strictly forbidden for foreign tourists to photograph the cremation ghat where bodies were burned. I was out early the next day, the sunlight dancing on the bright water, the steps leading down to the Ganges already alive with priests, worshippers, and bathers. The boatman rowed me slowly upstream past several teeming ghats, the crowded assortment of palaces and temples rising steeply from one side of the river while the other lay languidly bare and blissfully free of any sign of human activity. Having reached the end of the long line of ghats, the boatman then let his creaking boat drift gently back downstream. We passed a landing stage and a huddle of large wooden boats moored along the bank. One of these was being used as a diving platform for a bunch of schoolboys, their lithe bodies glistening as they plunged in and out of the water. As we passed one of them shouted out (in English): “Hey, mister, please suck my penis.” I pretended not to hear; the boys giggled with delight at my evident embarrassment and resumed their diving.75 The current carried us past Manikarnika Ghat, smoke issuing from the remains of several almost extinguished funeral pyres; dogs plashed in the shallows, a cow nonchalantly munched a garland of marigolds.76 I followed Mr. Mukherjee’s injunction and didn’t take any photographs of the ghat, but anyway, there wasn’t much to see, let alone photograph. A man was pulling bones out of an ash heap with two bits of bamboo and throwing them into the river; following my gaze, the boatman signaled to me that these were thighbones, parts of the body that didn’t easily burn. One thing, though, did catch my eye. A man, evidently a mourner, naked to the waist and standing close to one of the piles of smoldering ash, picked up a heavy earthenware pot and hoisted it onto his left shoulder. He then let it fall and smash on the ground behind him, and without turning back, walked away.77 I have seldom been so moved as by that single, eloquent gesture and the profound sense of finality it conveyed. I remembered it, and spoke of it, when my father was

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Figure 3. Tourists watching a Hindu cremation from the deck of a boat on the Ganges at Benares, ca. 1911–13. Photograph by Oswald Lübeck © dpa picture alliance/Alamy Stock Photo.

cremated, years later, in the utterly different surroundings of a municipal crematorium in Ramsgate, Kent. The memory of it stays with me still as I write this book fifty years later, sitting at my desk in London. I now know much more about that scene, about Hindu cremation, and about the people who have witnessed something similar on the banks of the Ganges. I have read, as I had not then, dozens of accounts of Europeans, much like myself, being rowed upstream past the ghats and then (perhaps without the erotic schoolboys) back down past the place of cremation, or rather the two ghats—Manikarnika and Harishchandra—at which cremation is now performed.78 For some observers the burning ghat was a place of utter abomination; for others it was a moving spectacle that captured much that was noble and inspiring about India (see figure 3). “The whole scene,” wrote E. B. Havell, principal of the Government School of Art in Calcutta, on visiting Manikarnika Ghat in 1905 and observing the smoking pyres; the waiting corpses; and the colorful assembly of people and animals, worshippers, and bathers, “presents a wonderful picture of the Hindu conception of the Divine essence.”79 Two years later the English artist and illustrator Walter Crane described the “spectacle of Benares from a boat on the Ganges” (which he

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had previously known only from photographs and travel books) as “a wonderful scene” and “perhaps the most extraordinary sight in all India.”80 By contrast a correspondent for the Detroit Free Press, who witnessed the scene in 1884 from “the deck of a boat slowly propelled along the bank,” railed against the “crude cremation” at Benares, conducted in a “mean and ignoble manner, with scant supply of fuel, and scanter mourners.”81 Yet others were frankly disappointed and wondered what the fuss had been all about. Touring India in the 1890s, the British journalist Mary Billington remarked of the burning ghat: “The scene is neither impressive nor repulsive, and as a spectacle may take rank among one’s disappointments of travel.” She saw smoke and sniffed an odor of burned fat on the breeze; otherwise there was “absolutely nothing to tell one that cremation of human remains [was] going on.”82 The repeated use of the term spectacle in these observer accounts (and in many other commentaries throughout this book) calls for some comment. For whom was cremation a spectacle? And what did such an expression imply? For many Western travelers and sojourners in India, spectacle did not necessarily imply a pleasing sight or a welcome scene. Rather, it suggested something animated and attention grabbing, a phenomenon startling or astonishing to the eye, exciting but also strange or unsettling. As used in relation to cremation, it often signified a sight that was particularly alarming or distressing. But however horrific to some spectators, to others it was moving, edifying, a rare aesthetic experience. The literature and iconography of Indian cremation reflect this diversity of responses. Representations range from the appalled or indifferent to the intensely curious, from the respectful and reflective to the grossly voyeuristic and the crudest Orientalist caricature. But cremation was also a spectacle, or was becoming a spectacle, a tamasha (a sight or show), as much to the Indian eye as to the European. As this book will demonstrate, Hindu cremations and the activities surrounding them became closely observed events, recorded and celebrated not only through words but also through image making. Along with the many individual cremation stories, photographs represent a remarkably rich—and largely unexplored—archive for Indian cremation. I now realize, Mr. Mukherjee’s injunction notwithstanding, that the cremation ghats, in Benares or elsewhere, have been the subject of countless photographs since the camera first came to India in the 1830s.83 Cremation in India was (and is) an ocular event, whose cultural meaning, political significance, and historical evolution have long been bound up with its visibility and the capacity of images to render it accessible and intelligible to others.84 Cremation was central to the outsider narration of Indian identity. By the late nineteenth century it had become part of a burgeoning trade in necro-tourism. When Thomas Cook began his round-the-world tours in 1872, the Indian itinerary included visits to the memorial sites of the 1857–58 uprising at Lucknow and Cawnpore (Kanpur) and the “abominations” of Benares.85 When the Prince

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Figure 4. Hindoo Cremation. Postcard, The Phototype Co., Bombay, ca. 1910. © Chronicle/Alamy Stock Photo.

of Wales visited Bombay in 1875, he was taken to see the Parsi towers of silence and the Hindu cremation ground at Sonapur.86 European and American winter visitors toured the burning ghats of Bombay, the Parsi towers, the Taj Mahal, and Akbar’s tomb. In the 1920s Americans in Bombay saw, among other tourist attractions such as Elephanta Island and the Prince of Wales Museum, the towers of silence and the burning bodies at Sonapur.87 Bizarrely and distastefully, photographs of Hindu cremation were reproduced as postcards for European consumption and amusement. One of a set of eight color postcards issued by the Calcutta firm Thacker & Co. in 1901 showed “The Great Cremation Place in Benares.”88 Some cards displayed the half-naked bodies of men laid out on a pyre just before the fire was lit (see figure 4); others revealed cremation grounds littered with the bodies of the waiting dead. Perhaps they were intended, half-jokingly, to show “native” manners, curious customs, and ethnic oddities. Some amounted to nothing less than a “pornography of the dead.”89 For many in and from the West—French, German, American, as well as the imperial British—Indian cremation and the funerary fire had an abiding fascination, the recurring theme of numberless sketches, paintings, and photographs. Yet cremation and its visual representation was not merely a foreign fixation. Many

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of the photographs were taken by Indians, and not solely for a European clientele. In 1897 a well-known photographer, Shivshanker Narayan, held an exhibition in Bombay of sixteen photographs illustrating various scenes from the plague epidemic in the city. According to Bombay’s Times of India, the series would have been incomplete if Narayan had not included images of the cremation of plague victims at Sonapur.90 From the early 1920s onward, in the era of high nationalism, newspapers and journals repeatedly presented for mass consumption images of the garlanded dead, of funeral processions winding through crowded streets, of blazing pyres surrounded by distressed mourners and reverential onlookers. Indian photographers, including the celebrated Lala Deen Dayal in the late nineteenth century, as well as Western photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Margaret Bourke-White at Gandhi’s funeral in 1948, recorded a number of cremation scenes, a small sample of which appear in this book.91 The burning pyre speaks—as it has long spoken—not only to Hindu sensibilities but also to something deep in the Western psyche.92 Fascinating spectacle or appalling sight, cremation was a trope, a reverie, to which India watchers and the purveyors of India tales repeatedly returned. The Hindu pyre entered almost routinely into Western accounts of travel and residence in India in the 1920s and 1930s. In World War II and its aftermath, at a time of famine and deadly communal violence, cremation captured the photographic attention of American servicemen in Calcutta.93 Perhaps reacting not just to the immediate “spectacle” of India but also to the after-image of Nazi death camps, the devastation in Europe, and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, cremation appeared with insistent regularity in the novels and travelogues of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. A novel by the Dane Ralf Oppenhejm stirred the ire of an Indian reviewer, who conceded that while much of what the author wrote about Benares was “painfully true,” “his morbid descriptions” of cremation at Manikarnika Ghat were “in grossly bad taste.”94 Perhaps no one has ever so graphically and obsessively described what actually happens to human bodies on a funeral pyre as the American poet Allen Ginsberg, in 1962, as if he found in the cremation grounds of Calcutta and Benares a ghastly analogy to, or tortured redemption from, the corporeal horror of the Vietnam War.95 For Indians and Westerners alike, the cremation pyre is a site, an idiom, around which curiosity and fervor, reverence and repulsion, have constantly swirled. Gandhi’s funeral featured in contemporary newsreels, in films about his life and death; the cremation of India’s national leaders has since figured prominently in the press and on television. A 2015 Hindi film, Masaan (the cremation place), wove a contemporary story of love and loss against the backdrop of the burning ghats of Benares. Its fictional narrative complemented the documentary Forest of Bliss, made by American Robert Gardner in 1986, which focused in remarkable ethnographic detail on daily life on the ghats. No small part of the potency of

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cremation lies in its iconography, its rendering into visual form, and the dissemination of that imagery in India and beyond, informing while transforming the national and transnational imaginary. Any history of modern Indian cremation needs to address that compelling visuality and the sensory domain that connects us to, or repels us from, the disposal of the dead by fire.

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Colonial Necro-Politics and the Polysemic Corpse

In India between 1830 and 1890 cremation became a subject of growing public interest and mounting state concern. The reasons for this are explored over the course of the following chapters, but in focusing primarily on European attitudes to cremation in the mid- to late nineteenth century, this chapter examines a central strand in that larger engagement. Westerners’ often contradictory and divergent responses—ranging from pragmatic accommodation and tacit acceptance, through outright condemnation and profound repugnance, to assigning cremation an authoritative and exemplary role within the Hindu caste hierarchy—were constitutive elements in a wider colonial politics of the dead. Within this discursive domain, it was not only the disposal of corpses that was subject to hostile scrutiny but also the morality of a people who seemed to critics to live in the shadow of the cremation pyre and the worth of a civilization that so visibly burned its dead. The “work of the dead,” to echo Thomas Laqueur’s phrase, was to castigate the living.1 The formal abolition of sati by the East India Company in 1829 shifted critical attention away from the fate of widows to the funeral pile itself, though the association, often condemnatory, sometimes pure whimsy, between Hindu cremation and sati, remained entrenched in the European imaginary. To some Western observers, Hindu cremation grounds were deeply repugnant places, their repulsive sights and smells, their seemingly gross and insensitive rituals, adding to the profound abhorrence already felt by Christians accustomed to the idea of burial as the only acceptable means of disposing of the dead. If, to some European residents and travelers, cremations were simply an unpleasant nuisance to be skirted or shunned, to others they were a sordid reenactment of scenes from hell. Cremation thus contributed in a highly emotive and profoundly sensory way to expressing 26

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a more general European unease with, and loathing of, India. It was hard to feel “at home” in a land where funeral pyres were constantly burning. And yet, alongside the intensely adversarial Western view of cremation, there also existed a degree of colonial pragmatism, recognizing that cremation was too widespread and established a practice ever to be expunged and acknowledging its significance as a marker of identity and status for many Indians who held positions of social, political, and religious authority. For colonial rule itself to survive and prosper, cremation had somehow to be accommodated. A N C I E N T A SH E S

When the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, died at some still undetermined date around 480 BCE, his body was burned on a sandalwood pyre. The surviving fragments of his teeth and bones (the phul) were collected and distributed to the several clans among whom his teachings had already spread. Funerary stupas were built over the relics of the Buddha and later those of his leading disciples and followers. Buddhism flourished for centuries across great swathes of India and in neighboring lands, then lapsed into a long decline. By the twelfth century CE Indian Buddhism had been incorporated into a revitalized Hinduism, and the ancient centers of worship and learning were either destroyed or fell victim to the effects of “time, neglect, or barbarous and greedy hands.”2 The ancient history of Buddhism in India was largely forgotten until, in the nineteenth century, Western Orientalists began to translate Buddhist texts and inscriptions and archaeologists investigated sites like Sanchi in central India, rediscovered in 1819. One element in this process of rediscovery was the realization of how central cremation had been to early Buddhists and their veneration and memorialization of the Buddha. Some uncovered sculptures and friezes showed scenes of his cremation. At Sanchi in 1851 Alexander Cunningham, later the first head of India’s Archaeological Survey, found what appeared to be the bones of several eminent followers of the Buddha, and it was speculated that in excavating such major sites archaeologists might even be uncovering skeletal remains of the Buddha himself.3 In 1916 an excavation by the Archaeological Survey of the Buddhist university of Taxila unearthed a gold casket believed, from its inscription, to contain fragments of the Buddha’s cremated bones. In 1931 these remains were reburied at Sarnath, a place near Benares closely associated with the master’s life and teachings, in a ceremony hosted by the government of India and attended by representatives from Japan, Cambodia, Siam (Thailand), Japan, China, Burma (Myanmar), and Ceylon (Sri Lanka).4 Whether these remains were actual relics of the Buddha or not, the public veneration and political respect afforded to them emphasized the prominent place of cremation among early Buddhist worshippers and devout rulers at a time when both Buddhists in Ceylon and Hindus in India attached renewed

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importance to burning the dead. Buddhism lent its ancient authority to a revived and revitalized modern practice. Cremation was an ancient rite, though when and why it was first adopted is impossible to say. It has been suggested that the burning of the dead was first done for sanitary reasons in a country where heat and humidity made the rapid disposal of a decomposing corpse a matter of urgency; this, as we shall see, was an argument later shared by colonial sanitarians.5 The vast forests of ancient India yielded plentiful fuel for burning; even so, burial rather than cremation (or as well as cremation) appears to have been the norm in the Indus Valley Civilization in northwestern India between about 2500 and 1500 BCE.6 Beginning around 1000 BCE, with the spread of “Indo-Aryan” or Vedic culture, a change set in, as inhumation began to be supplanted by incineration.7 Burning the dead was linked with ritual sacrifices and the veneration of fire, evident in a number of Rig Veda hymns and elevated to divine status in the Vedic fire god Agni. The cremation of kings and warriors found an exalted place in the Hindu epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. The identification of fire and the burning of human remains with sacrifice and purification, ideas that became central to the religious and political refashioning of cremation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, could thus claim ancestral authority.8 However, the form of cremation practiced in early India remains obscure. A passage in the Rig Veda suggests that both cremation and burial were practiced at the time of its composition, or that the purpose of the cremation fire was not to destroy the body entirely but to “cook” it sufficiently to eliminate the fleshy parts of the body while leaving the bones intact.9 Some Western critics of cremation decried the “very embarrassing residuum” of ashes and bones from the burning of the dead, but in the Indian tradition such relics were preserved as objects commanding particular reverence.10 By the dawn of the Buddhist era references to cremation and burning-grounds were becoming common across northern India, though burial may have survived much longer in the south through the slower penetration of Indo-Aryan culture.11 In the nineteenth century Western Orientalists and ardent cremationists shared a keen interest in the ancient evidence revealed through excavations and texts, believing that cremation had originated (along with much else of merit in race, religion, philosophy, and science) in northern India, among the Aryan tribes thought to have settled there from central Asia. From the banks of the Ganges, “fire-burial” was then believed to have migrated into other regions of Eurasia, gaining ascendancy over burial in the honoring of the dead in the Mediterranean world among the Greeks and Romans and farther north, among the Germanic tribes, until it was ousted and reviled by the early Christians.12 While in the West earth eclipsed fire in the disposal of the dead, in India in medieval and early modern times cremation remained a prestigious rite among Hindus of the three highest “estates” or varnas: the Brahmins as the priestly caste

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and ritual specialists, the Kshatriya as warriors and rulers, and the Vaishyas as merchants and traders. For all of these “twice-born” castes cremation bore a profound ritual significance: fire purified, fire ennobled, and fire secured a passage into another life or an escape from rebirth. But in its costliness and the elaborate rites that accompanied it, cremation also signaled high social standing, privilege, and authority. Among low-caste Sudras and untouchables the status of cremation was more equivocal, because they were denied access to such a cherished rite or because as menials, servants, and laborers they could ill afford such a costly rite. The need for cremation was also a matter of dispute among some of the communities that sought to break free from Brahminical orthodoxy and seek a new social path and a fresh religious orientation. Thus, in the twelfth century Basava, whose home lay in what is now the southern state of Karnataka, rejected caste and other aspects of the Hindu social and ritual order—despite being a Brahmin himself. He and his followers (known as Lingayats from their worship of the lingam emblem of the god Shiva) eschewed cremation in favor of burial. In a funeral ceremony presided over by their own priests, the body was interred in an upright, sitting posture.13 However, for many emerging socioreligious communities in South Asia, cremation remained the default funerary rite. Unlike the Lingayats, but in common with many later reform movements that departed from Hindu orthodoxy or forged a new or syncretic path, Sikhism adopted cremation from the outset. The founder, Guru Nanak, born in Punjab in 1469, came from the high-status Khatri caste of merchants. While drawing inspiration from the Hindu bhakti tradition of devotional worship and vernacular verse, Nanak sought to move in a direction that followed neither the Hindu Vedas nor the Muslim Koran. He rejected the principle of caste and the social compartmentalization it entailed. However, while spurning other aspects of the Hindu tradition, he and his followers adhered to the rite of cremation, though it was said, perhaps apocryphally, that on his death in 1539 Muslims, wanting to claim him as their own, sought to bury him, while Hindus declared their right to burn his body.14 A similar story was told of another inspirational figure, the poet and mystic Kabir. Born shortly before Nanak, Kabir, a low-status Muslim weaver, drew on both Islamic and Hindu tradition without wanting to be subject to either. “Cremation,” he declared in his frank and earthy manner, “turns you to ashes, burial into a feast for an army of worms.”15 On his death, Muslims and Hindus were again said to have disputed whether his body should be buried or burned.16 After Nanak’s death, the later Sikh gurus opposed sati and many other Hindu observances, but with respect to cremation they clung to high-caste Hindu tradition. As Sikhism expanded to embrace new communities, some of which (like the Jats) may not previously have practiced cremation, so the burning of the dead spread with it. Cremation was retained as a valued rite, especially so as the religion and its followers took on more martial characteristics. A Sikh ethos of honor, pride,

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and defiance was strengthened by persecution at the hands of the Mughals, with memorial shrines erected over the cremated remains of the martyrs who had suffered and perished for their religious beliefs.17 This veneration of the dead persisted long after the succession of gurus came to an end in 1708, and cremation passed as an emblem of the faith to an embattled Sikh military and political elite. When Ranjit Singh, the Sikh maharaja who carved out a kingdom for himself in northwest India and effectively resisted British encroachment, died in 1839, his body was cremated in Lahore on a huge sandalwood pyre. Although this was ten years after the formal abolition of sati in British India, the burning of his corpse was accompanied by the “concremation” of his nine wives and concubines.18 Late nineteenth-century Sikh reformers sought to distance their community still further from Hindus by expunging Hindu rites from Sikh mortuary rituals. In future the bones and ashes of the cremated dead should not, in common with Hindus, be cast into the Ganges but rather consigned to any convenient river, tank, or canal.19 Clearly this injunction had not reached—or perhaps impressed—the friends of Charam Singh in Melbourne in 1895, whose cremation was described at the start of chapter 1. For Hindus, as well as Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs, cremation released the spirit or soul of the deceased, freeing it from physical entrapment in rotting flesh and crumbling bones. If the soul were not liberated in this way or was entombed by burial in the prison house of the soil, it would remain eternally restless, wandering the earth without a home, and might become a malevolent spirit, haunting the still living. Cremation, to be performed as soon as possible after death, preferably before dusk on the day of death and at most within twenty-four hours, was thus a spiritual necessity. But cremation also functioned as a marker, symbolic and corporeal, of the division between Hindus, at least those practicing the burning of the dead, and Muslims, Jews, Parsis, and Christians, who regarded it as abhorrent to their religious customs and beliefs. At the same time, cremation served to delineate Lingayats and some other breakaway sects from other Hindus and to accentuate the ritual and social divide between Sikhs and high-status Hindus on the one hand and low-caste Hindus and untouchables on the other. In all of these social and doctrinal struggles, the practicalities of cremation were seldom at issue. What counted was cremation’s emblematic significance, what it indicated about belonging, as an individual or a community, to one religious entity or another. While this remained broadly the case under British rule, cremation itself—the funeral pyre, the burning ghat—came under closer and more critical scrutiny. T H E O R IG I N S O F C O L O N IA L AC C OM M O DAT IO N

For most Western writers the history of modern cremation begins in Italy in the early 1870s, when experiments were first made with burning animal and human corpses in enclosed furnaces, able to generate enough heat to reduce a human

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body to ashes within a few hours or less. While Europe’s cremationists might glance back to ancient Greece, Rome, and Germany for their inspiration, or even (more equivocally) to contemporary India, it was modern science and industrial technology, a new sanitary awareness of the disease hazards of overcrowded urban graveyards, and the growth of a more secular attitude toward death that drove this innovation.20 For India, however, one might begin such a history not with the late nineteenth century but with the middle decades of the seventeenth century, taking two historical episodes as a salient point of departure. One of these was the cremation of the Maratha warrior-king Shivaji Bhonsle in 1680. The Marathas had their origins among a caste of peasant cultivators, the Kunbis, who inhabited a large tract of the southern Deccan. Under Shivaji they emerged as an adventurous warrior caste, taking on the might of the Mughal empire while still at the height of its power, wealth, and prestige. Briefly held hostage at the court of the emperor Aurangzeb, in May 1666 Shivaji escaped from Agra to return to the almost impregnable hill fortresses he had created in the mountainous Western Ghats and resume his defiance of Mughal suzerainty. As part of his assertion of independence and in furtherance of his status as a Hindu monarch, Shivaji organized his own coronation on June 6, 1674, at the hillfort of Raigad. A celebrated Brahmin was summoned from Benares to bestow on him the sacred thread of the “twice-born” castes and to initiate him as a Kshatriya of the Rajput Sisodia clan. Accompanied by the chanting of Vedic hymns, the coronation was conducted according to Brahminical rites and under the symbolic umbrella that proclaimed Shivaji’s royal status and commitment to defending the Hindu faith.21 But what concerns us here is not so much Shivaji’s enthronement as the far less ostentatious cremation that followed his death in 1680 and the erection of a memorial samadhi—or chattri—to mark his funeral site inside Raigad fort.22 Cremation confirmed Shivaji’s identification with the martial tradition of the Rajputs while distancing him and his royal line both from the tomb culture of his Mughal adversaries and from the lowly Kunbi agriculturalists, many of whom still practiced burial.23 Conducted at a time of war, Shivaji’s cremation was a modest, even secretive, affair. Under his successors, however, and throughout the many kingdoms and principalities that Maratha expansion subsequently spawned, cremation became a grand ceremony, presided over by Brahmin priests and celebrating the Marathas’ proud status as warriors, rulers, and defenders of the Hindu faith. In their cremation Maratha warlords and rajas created a model of funerary conduct and display to which over the centuries other militant Hindus came to aspire. Indeed, there is a long arc of connectivity that links the cremation of Shivaji at Raigad in 1680 to the Maharastrian Brahmin and Hindu patriot Bal Gangadhar Tilak in the 1890s, one of whose most effective political moves was to raise funds for the restoration of the Maratha chief’s neglected and dilapidated samadhi, and whose own cremation

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in Bombay in 1920 marked an important stage in the politicization of modern Hindu cremation rites.24 Between 1775 and 1818, the British fought three fiercely contested wars against the Marathas, their closest rivals for political hegemony in India, ending in the defeat of the latters’ political and military chief, the Peshwa of Poona (Pune), and the final eclipse of Maratha power. The displays of wealth and power that accompanied the cremation of Maratha princes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries remained a very visible means by which to glory in their erstwhile ascendancy (see chapter 6). Further, as we will see (in chapter 5), in dying abroad and having their bodies burned on foreign soil and their ashes repatriated to India, Marathas chiefs and their followers were also instrumental in extending the practice of Indian cremation overseas. If Shivaji’s cremation spoke to an adopted Rajput kinship and a rekindled Kshatriya spirit, the second episode we can identify as marking the beginning of modern cremation and its colonial accommodation was of a singularly different, if ultimately complementary, nature. In 1660 the English East India Company acquired the island of Bombay from the Portuguese as part of the marriage settlement between Charles II and Catherine of Braganza. Keen to expand the island’s mercantile prospects and promote it as a center for trade and navigation, Gerald Augier, the governor of Bombay, sought to attract the “flourishing” caste of Bania merchants from the neighboring Mughal province of Gujarat and the Portuguese enclave of Diu.25 Among the overtures Augier made to them was a promise that the English would recognize and protect Hindu rites and customs, including cremation; this was a significant gesture as the Portuguese, spurred on by the Inquisition, had grown fiercely intolerant of such un-Christian practices.26 Augier’s offer had important historical ramifications. As Bombay’s chronicler James Douglas observed in 1883, “from that day to this, [the Banias] have burned their dead on the edge of Back Bay [on the western shore of Bombay island], and have performed their ceremonies without let or hindrance.”27 If Shivaji’s cremation helped identify the Marathas with the Kshatriya tradition, and acceptance of that proud rite by the British facilitated their incorporation into the Raj, so Augier’s tactical overture to the Banias of Gujarat likewise prefigured the assimilation of the Hindu merchant classes into the colonial political and economic order. Augier’s conciliatory gesture can further be seen as a precursor to the proclamation issued on behalf of Queen Victoria in November 1, 1858, as the mutiny and rebellion stuttered to a close, which similarly promised that British rule, far from seeking to impose Christianity, would not interfere with Indians’ religious beliefs and observances. Cremation thus served as a site of pragmatic accommodation, a means by which, with regard to India’s Hindu warrior and merchant classes, and by extension the Brahmin priests who presided over such ceremonies, to shore up British rule. In allowing cremation to continue—or even encouraging its practice—the British had struck a deal with the “twice-born.”

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S AT I A N D T H E P O L I T IC S O F L OAT H I N G

The lengthy debates over sati, in which the Bengali reformer Rammohan Roy played a pivotal role, culminated in its prohibition across British India by the governor-general, Lord Bentinck, in December 1829.28 The decision on sati did not, however, subvert the broadly permissive attitude toward cremation already adopted by the British administration.29 In the many Western accounts of sati, it was the self-immolation, or as some observers insisted the murder, of widows that was the crux of outraged attention: the barbarity and the savagery of a woman’s “premature and cruel death.”30 Cremation itself was not singled out for condemnation; sati was vicious and cruel, not the funerary fire by which it was enacted. Significantly, in most of the English-language literature up to the 1830s the place of burning was simply referred to as the “funeral pile.” Only thereafter, through an almost inaudible shift, was the nondescript noun pile replaced by the emotive term pyre with its classical associations. Likewise, in all the reams of material on sati assembled for publication in the Parliamentary Papers in London in the 1820s and 1830s, there were few references to the physical nature of the “funeral pile.”31 Perhaps the most complete description comes from R. H. Kennedy’s account of the sati he witnessed at Baroda (Vadodara) in western India in November 1825. Apart from giving a detailed account of the Brahmin widow, Ambabai, her demeanor, the priestly rituals, and the mood of the assembled crowd, Kennedy described the making of the “funeral pile.” This consisted first of unhewn timber; only wood in its natural state was permitted. On this foundation of “huge, solid logs” were laid “faggots, or sheaves of brushwood,” and finally a layer of dry cow-dung cakes as fuel—the “whole heap thus prepared forming a compact mass, about seven feet long, six broad, and three in height.”32 As this was a sati rather than an ordinary cremation, the attendants built a superstructure of perpendicular wood beams around the pyre, which was then filled with brushwood and dried flax and covered with a roof of dried millet and hemp stalks. Into this “vault” the widow made her way, all but concealed from onlookers. As the flames took hold, more brushwood and ghee were added, along with chips of “black sandalwood” from Malabar. The pyre burned so fiercely that Kennedy had to step back; he doubted that the widow could have survived for long in such intense heat and suffocating smoke.33 Once the fire had burned out and only a pile of ash remained, the widow’s relics were gathered up, either to be taken to a sacred river—the Narmada or Ganges—for dispersal or to be buried on the spot in a shallow grave.34 The prohibition in British India did not automatically apply to the princely states and to territories outside direct British control. For decades after 1829 women continued to be burned on funeral pyres. Among them were the eight wives and concubines of the Maharana of Udaipur in Rajasthan in August 1838, amid scenes of popular excitement which, in the words of one contemporary,

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made it “a spectacle more thrilling than mere pomp could render even a royal funeral.”35 Although satis came from different sections of Hindu and Sikh society, the rite had a particularly strong and enduring appeal to India’s warrior elites and princely households, and only gradually during the 1840s and 1850s were Rajput and Maratha rulers dissuaded from performing sati.36 Mention has already been made of the cremation of Ranjit Singh of Punjab in 1839 along with his wives and female slaves. The death of Jang Bahadur of Nepal in 1877 saw similar “ghastly” scenes, with three of his ranis mounting the funeral pyre.37 By undertaking the supreme sacrifice of her own mortality, the self-immolating widow was revered as a goddess; her death also conferred an exceptional honor and blessing on her late husband. The “spectacle” of sati attracted large crowds and occasioned scenes of great emotion and religious fervor.38 The idea of “suttee” as a highly laudable act, as a singular demonstration of devotion and self-sacrifice, did not end with Bentinck’s interdiction; it was still alive in parts of India in the 1880s and 1890s. A newspaper report on a sati in Lahore district in Punjab in 1899 referred to the “feeling of solemn and profound enthusiasm” expressed by the local Hindu community.39 Occasional reports of satis continued to surface in the Indian press into the 1920s and 1930s, decades that seem to have been marked by a partial revival of the practice (see chapter 5). It is one of the contentions of this book that some of the attributes of sati, of its public performance and the ethos of devotion and self-sacrifice it evoked, were transferred to, or reenacted through, the subsequent celebration and cremation of Hindu nationalists and other public figures. In Western minds, too, the outlawing of sati created contradictory impressions. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century descriptions of Hindu cremation tended to be brief, matter-of-fact, and without allusion to sati.40 But thereafter, in travel writing, historical narratives, and depictions of Indian religion and society, especially those intended for a popular audience, accounts of Hindu cremation slipped readily into clichéd depictions of sati.41 Recounting one provided an almost irresistible opportunity to reference the other, if only as a chance to celebrate British humanitarianism. Thus, the account of a “Hindoo Funeral,” published in 1835, gave a lengthy and broadly empathetic description of a cremation as seen by a British traveler in Bihar. But the writer went on to remark: “There was no suttee in this instance, although the deceased left a young widow; that barbarous custom having been almost abolished in this part of the country.” He then appended a description of sati written sixty years earlier by the Frenchman Pierre Sonnerat.42 In an illustrated history of India in 1859, E. H. Nolan followed a brief statement on Hindu funeral rites (“the scene at the pyre is affecting and solemn”) with a paragraph on the horrors of sati, described earlier in the work as the “most terrible of all the religious cruelties of India.” The British had “nearly” suppressed sati, Nolan observed, even if it continued “to a limited extent” in some princely states.43

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Western descriptions of Benares, even late in the nineteenth century, often conflated the present-day burning of the Hindu dead with the outlawed practice of sati. Arthur Parker of the London Missionary Society, whose Benares handbook appeared in 1895, began his description of the burning ghat by noting (as did many others) the presence of old sati stones at the rear of the site. He reproduced a long, but undated and unattributed, eyewitness account of sati, as if the practice were still extant in India, and without once mentioning its prohibition seventy years earlier.44 In the Western imaginary sati remained a familiar idiom through which to attack Hinduism and to question its funerary rites. India was still “the land of suttee and the funeral pyre.”45 However, the politics of loathing, when directed at cremation rather than sati, inclined, as we have already seen, far more toward pragmatic accommodation. For all the hostile talk identifying cremation with sati, the prevailing attitude among colonial administrators was that prohibition of the relatively small number of satis had been a necessary, but exceptional, act of state intervention.46 It had been impelled by humanitarian repulsion at such a “dreadful and demoralizing spectacle” and by the obligation of a civilized government to end such barbaric cruelty.47 It was not a precedent for banning the tens of thousands of cremations carried out across India every year or for interfering with other funerary rites. Any such suggestion was dismissed as utterly impractical.48 The regulation by which sati was banned assured the public that the regime did not intend to “depart from one of the first and most important principles of the system of British Government in India.” All classes of the population could feel secure in “the observance of their religious usages,” so long as those practices and beliefs could be “adhered to without violation of the paramount dictates of justice and humanity.”49 So long as sati was abjured, cremation was safe. D IA L O G U E S W I T H T H E D E A D

“The Hindoos,” declared a London weekly in 1898, “burn their dead in a very objectionable and primitive fashion, simply laying the body on a stack of wood . . . and setting fire to it.”50 (See figure 5.) Over the course of the nineteenth century many Western accounts purported to show Hindu indifference toward, or positive mistreatment of, the dead. This hostile representation of the disposal of the dead in turn suggested that India was barely civilized (by the standards of the Christian West) and that the Indian landscape itself was polluted and soiled by the torment inflicted on the bodies of the dead. These colonial dialogues with the dead, these arguments over morals, mortality, and the shocking or unseemly treatment of the dead, took many different forms.51 Western attitudes to Indian cremation were complicated by the existence of funerary practices among some Hindus that did not involve either destruction by

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Figure 5. The Burning Ghaut at Calcutta. Engraving by an unknown artist, 1879. Alamy Stock Photo.

fire or conventional earth-burial, but the commitment of corpses to a third element, water. The extent of this practice is hard to determine. Sometimes, during droughts, famines, and epidemics, when fuel and labor were scare and the bodies of the dead too numerous for burning, corpses were taken to the nearest river and dumped.52 Set adrift on the current and tide, stranded on sandbanks and mudflats, these exposed bodies were attacked by crocodiles, fish, and carrion crows, or, as they drifted landward, by vultures, dogs, and jackals. This all too visible exposure of the Indian dead met with deep European revulsion. The sight of corpses afloat in rivers, often amid scenes of luxuriance and grandeur that were otherwise pleasing to the Western eye, constituted a kind of anti-picturesque aesthetic.53 Here was a salutary reminder of what one physician described as the “always unwholesome East.”54 Writing in 1852, the Benares-based missionary William Buyers described the burning of the dead as being “with a few exceptions, universal among the Hindoos of all sorts.” But he then went on to recount how he had often seen unburned bodies floating down the Ganges, drifting with the current, attacked by dogs and jackals, “snarling and screaming” over their “horrid feast,” turning the riverbank and shallows into “a complete Golgotha.”55 Hindus, he believed, were inured to such scenes and seemed “to think nothing of them,” believing that the sacred

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Ganges “purifies all things.” No less disconcerting to him was the demoralizing effect on his fellow Europeans. Every day bodies, in an advanced state of putrefaction, drifted past, “but such is the effect of familiarity that even European ladies of the most delicate minds, and of the utmost sensibility of feelings, after a short time, look on such scenes with apparently little emotion, though it is impossible that they can ever cease to be most disagreeable.”56 Why, he wondered, were Hindus “so careless about the mortal remains of their friends and relatives?” Were they, as a people, “entirely destitute of feelings and affections?”57 Still more frequently written about, and in tones of deep repugnance and dismay, were the corpses seen floating on the River Hooghly as it flowed past Calcutta. Some of the bodies may have been those of the uncremated poor, for whom no wood and fire could be provided; some were possibly the corpses of individuals who had been murdered or committed suicide. But, so it was claimed, many more were the bodies of high-caste Hindus, taken to the banks of the Hooghly to die and then, on their deaths, committed uncremated to a river that devout Hindus revered as Bhagirathi, the sacred Ganges.58 Early nineteenth-century accounts of Calcutta, the “city of palaces,” were replete with tales of bodies caught in the ropes and anchor chains of ships moored in the river, “rotten and torn by fishes,” plundered by birds and animals. (As we will note again later, the association of predatory birds and scavenging animals with the human dead struck European observers as a particularly offensive part of the Hindu disposal of the dead.) Others bodies beached alongside the European gardens and stately villas that lined the riverbank and had to be pushed away by Indians servants wielding long bamboos.59 After a lengthy sea voyage from Europe, the gruesome sight of bodies floating down the Hooghly was almost the first scene that greeted travelers on arrival at Calcutta. For some British middle-class observers, who had perhaps little awareness of the fate of the poor in their own country, it was possibly the first time they had seen a dead body, let alone one that was naked and partially decomposed. In 1810 Maria Graham complained: “I cannot see, without disgust and horror, the dead indecently exposed, and torn and dragged about through streets and villages, by dogs and jackals. Yet such are the daily sights on the banks of the Hooghly.”60 For others, long resident in India, this offensive sight was reason enough to want to escape the corruption of Calcutta for the clean air of a Himalayan hill station. In the early 1870s Elizabeth Mazuchelli, setting out on a journey into the mountains, described Hindu cremation grounds and, worse still, dead bodies adrift in the Hooghly, as among the many oppressive sights and “painful scenes” she was delighted to be leaving behind.61 All these observers attested to the horror of what they saw, but it is also possible that the real driving force behind such hostile and disparaging descriptions was not Hindu funeral practices, or the lack of them, as much as the consternation felt (again especially among the middle classes) at the great mortality India

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caused among their own kind. There was enormous sensitivity in the early colonial period around death and its memorialization among Western residents and travelers, acutely conscious of India as “a land of death.”62 Whether in the cities or at upcountry stations, the “numberless” European tombs and graveyards gave disturbing proof and melancholy reminders of the “terrible mortality” they endured in India, their fatal vulnerability to accidents, fevers, and hardships of all kinds.63 As one missionary wrote on visiting Calcutta in 1851, “There is something deeply affecting in those large, crowded burial-grounds of India, where so many of our countrymen rest.”64 The travel writers of the period repeatedly returned to the subject of death and of young lives lost to climate and disease.65 This persistent call to affect and remembrance with respect to their own dead jarred with what Westerners saw as the gross insensitivity of Indians. Their bodies could, so it seemed, arbitrarily be burned, buried, dumped in rivers, or exposed to the birds of the air, without that intense anguish and deep mourning, that open and public display of emotion, that prevailed in bourgeois Victorian society, and which the British saw as a mark of their superior civilization and nobler sensibilities. Perhaps unaware that much of the grieving of Indians went on privately at home before the corpse was carried to the burning ghat (unlike white women in India, caste Hindu women seldom attended a funeral), Europeans condemned Hindus for their apparent want of feeling for the dead. Bengalis, wrote the sanitarian J. R. Martin in 1837, showed “none of the tender feeling cherished in burying the dead among Christians.”66 In 1824 Bishop Reginald Heber of Calcutta had been even more censorious, claiming that Indians displayed no more emotion at a sati or cremation than “would have been called forth by a bon-fire in England. I saw no weeping and heard no lamentations.”67 “ T H I S F I E RY C E M E T E RY ”

Benares stood at the epicenter of these adversarial claims and bitter utterances.68 Increasingly represented by Europeans in the nineteenth century as the headquarters of Hinduism, the city was regarded as the nearest Hindus came to possessing a Holy See. This view was epitomized by M. A. Sherring, a London Missionary Society (LMS) missionary resident in the city, who in 1868 wrote: “Her thousands of temples, her myriads of idols, her swarms of pilgrims, her hosts of daily worshippers, together with the pomp and circumstance and multifarious representations of idolatry, in their vast aggregate, cause the Hindu religion to be visible to the eye, in this city, in a manner and degree unknown elsewhere.”69 However, Benares only became “visible to the eye” and central to Western repugnance at Hindu cremation by stages. Many early nineteenth-century writers made little or no mention of cremation ghats along the Ganges. When Bishop Heber visited the city in 1824 he found it “peopled . . . with bulls and beggars,”

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but made only passing reference to cremation.70 Another Anglican, the Reverend Hobart Caunter, gave a lengthy account of Benares and its (to Christian eyes) horrific sights in the mid-1830s, but failed to include cremation among them.71 The more discerning Emma Roberts, also visiting in the 1830s, exalted in Benares as a “city of light,” and while identifying it as “the seat of Hindu superstition,” delighted in its river views and picturesque scenes.72 “Few cities,” she wrote, “however splendid, present so great a variety of attractive objects as Benares.” For her the “absence of all regular plan, the great diversity of the architecture, the mixture of the stern and solemn with the light and fantastic,” gave “a grotesque appearance to some portions of the scene; but the effect of the whole is magnificent, and many of the details are of almost inconceivable beauty.” She noted the crowded ghats but nowhere mentioned cremation.73 Where itinerant artists like William Hodges and Thomas and William Daniell in the 1780s and 1790s fostered a Western taste for the Indian picturesque, including elegant and luminous scenes of the Benares ghats, later generations of writers and travelers crafted a counter-aesthetic, an anti-picturesque, in which the gothic “horrors” of Hindu cremation appeared front of stage.74 Yet graphically as well as textually, the transition was only gradual. When James Prinsep published a series of sketches of Benares in 1831, he included several views of the Ganges, the buildings along its banks, and the ghats, including Manikarnika, the burning ghat. Only one of these images even hints at cremation. On the extreme left of a drawing showing a crowd of worshippers gathered to witness an eclipse of the moon, a thin wisp of smoke is visible. This, Prinsep explains in the accompanying text, “points out the spot on which the dead are burned.” But it is sati rather than cremation that is here alluded to, for this is the place where “many a widow has undergone the severe trial enjoined by her religion, with a constancy to be admired while shuddered at.” Since then, Prinsep explained, sati had been outlawed, for which later generations would “applaud the resolution which has in our time abolished a practice so abhorrent to human nature.”75 As the century progressed, the identification of Benares with its cremation ghat and the rhetoric of repulsion that accompanied it grew exponentially. Photography played no small part in this. The first European photographs of the cremation ghat appear to have been taken in the 1850s or 1860s by Felice Beato and Francis Frith. Indian photographers, like Lala Deen Dayal, soon followed suit (see figure 6). In 1863 when Samuel Bourne, one of the pioneers of scenic photography in India, stopped at Benares, he declared it “well worth the attention of the photographer.” He made several images of the ghats; one of these shows a landing stage and a river barge heavily laden with wood for the cremation fires. Frequently reproduced, this photograph often carries the title Burning Ghat (see figure 10 in chapter 4). Bourne’s written description of the burning ghat is still more striking. “Five or six savage looking men were heaping wood on the blazing piles,” he

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Figure 6. View of the burning ghat, Benares. Photograph by Lala Deen Dayal, late nineteenth century. © Historic Images/Alamy Stock Photo.

wrote, “but I could discern through the flames, the roasting skull and feet of one of the bodies.” These belonged to a woman, “whose husband stood by evidently regarding the horrid spectacle with the highest satisfaction.” Bourne could not resist adding of Benares: “On every hand you are reminded of the religious zeal of this deluded people. Their gods—hideous, shapeless monsters—are daubed on every wall, and on hundreds of little dirty so-called temples.”76 Some writers were still more outspoken in their repugnance, making it clear that the Western imaginary engaged not merely with the visual spectacle of cremation but with the whole gamut of the senses. In the late 1870s an unnamed Englishwoman, apparently long resident in India, visited Benares with her husband, already persuaded that the city was the seat of “Brahminic superstition” and exhibited “the lowest forms of sensuality, idolatry, and depravity.” Even so, she found the views from the river and the curving line of buildings along the ghats full of “Oriental fancy” and pleasing from a distance. But then, after half an hour on the “beautiful, smiling Ganges,” as their boat approached Manikarnika Ghat her mood abruptly changed. “It might,” she wrote, “for its sudden transformation from beauty and sunlight to deformity and gloom, be Satan’s own metropolis.”77 The ghat was “shrouded on all sides by a dense atmosphere of lurid flames, darting

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upward through volumes of thick, curling smoke. It was . . . the Brahmin valley of the shadow of death.” “Dazzled, blinded, almost suffocated,” she, her husband, and an Indian guide alighted at this “dread, funereal spot” and made their way up the steps. She immediately wished she was anywhere else than in the “holy of holies of the Brahmins.” “Sick, faint, oppressed, loathing the sunlight and appalled” at the scene before her, she struggled to contain her “horror and disgust.” On every side there were “huge cremation pyres, darting their lurid flames toward the serene, tranquil, blue sky.” On every pyre were piled “heaps and heaps of human bodies, brought thousands of miles, and from every quarter of the Eastern world, to be burned within the scared precincts of the Ganges.”78 At Benares one could see, smell, hear, touch, and (in a kind of involuntary cannibalism) almost taste the unwholesome demolition of the dead. “What a sight it was! and what a situation! Amid the crackling of human bones in the flames, the foetid odour that arose, and the countless piles of swathed corpses lying all around me, waiting their turn to be cremated, were seen the semi-nude bodies of living men, begrimed with human soot, and blackened with human charcoal, looking more horrible than even the piled-up heaps of the dead.”79 Appalled to find herself walking on soil that was “nothing more or less than the accumulated human dust and ashes of the countless myriads who had been cremated on this spot,” she concluded: “Through all the darkening sights and scenes which I have witnessed in my numerous journeyings and long residence in India, this fiery cemetery of the city of Benares looms ever before my memory, as if an enemy had been empowered to drag me through Tophet, and to transform for the moment the face of the fair and beautiful earth into a hideous place, at which the heart sickens and the mind turns away with loathing.”80 Such descriptions clearly had their place in the larger inventory of European repugnance at Indian rites and ceremonies and in Christian representations of Hinduism as barbaric, cruel, and ungodly. And yet it is only fair to say that this was not just a question of European imagining. For Hindus, too, cremation sites were places of horror and disgust, threatening ritual pollution through contact with corpses and with the “untouchable” Doms who stoked the fires and tended to the burning of the dead. For Hindus, too, the cremation ground gave a terrifying glimpse into the hideous realm of Yama, the god of the dead. Fearsome ghouls and fiery goddesses inhabited the cremation ground, glorying in human skulls, relishing in dismembered bodies and discarded bones.81 Strange, abhorrent, unnatural things happened there.82 Ordinary mortals were meant to be sickened by such scenes and hasten to scurry away.83 ETHNOLOGIZING THE DEAD

As cremation in India began (in part) to emerge from sati’s shadow, the ceremonial burning of the Hindu dead began to acquire further significance, this time as

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an ingredient in colonial ethnography. There were two aspects to this development. One strand, drawing on travel narratives, religious texts, and archaeological remains, and encouraged latterly by the growth of the cremation movement in the West, sought to explore, from a position of supposedly scientific objectivity, or from the rigor of ethnographic research, how other people, elsewhere in the world or distant in time, regarded dying, death, and the disposal of the dead. For this exploration India, with its Muslim graveyards, Hindu cremation grounds, and Parsi towers of silence, provided abundant illustrations and examples, but ethnographic interest ranged far more widely over the death rites of classical Greece and Rome; the funeral beliefs of the Egyptians, Etruscans, and Vikings; and the mortuary practices of the “native” peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Americas.84 This first type of inquiry favored broad, often highly speculative, cross-cultural connections and comparisons, but a second ethnographically inspired enterprise, generated this time from within India itself from the mid-nineteenth century onward, was concerned, as an aspect of colonial power and knowledge, with internal differentiation, with the appearance, customs, rites, and classification of the subcontinent’s myriad tribes, castes, races, and religions. Although birth-rituals and marriage ceremonies commanded greater descriptive attention and analytical interest, death practices were also extensively documented and discussed as being both of interest in their own right and a practical guide to social differentiation.85 This ethnography of Indian cremation did not seek an individualization of the dead; rather, it viewed the dead as a collectivity and an index of the overriding importance of caste and community. In a pioneering work of this genre dating from 1872, the Reverend M. A. Sherring sought to depict the Hindu “tribes and castes” of Benares and the adjacent regions of the North-Western Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh). Working his way down the social and ritual hierarchy, Sherring began with the Brahmins, describing their death rites and cremation, before moving on to the Rajputs and other high-caste communities.86 In this, like many other colonial observers, he was replicating the top-down Brahminical view of the established order of Hindu society.87 However, it was in relation to the lowest castes that the manner of disposing of the dead became a more interesting question. Thus, Sherring noted that the Doms, who worked at the cremation ghats at Benares and elsewhere, were regarded with extreme disgust by the higher castes because of their involvement in this ritually polluting and socially demeaning labor: “No language,” he wrote of the Dom, “can properly designate the social degradation of his position.”88 And yet there was a paradox here because the Doms, though themselves of the lowest castes, were indispensable to the performance of high-caste cremation. They supplied the logs from which the funeral pyre was constructed, they (sometimes) provided the lighted straw that was given to the chief mourner to ignite the fuel, and they kept the pyre ablaze for as long as it needed to burn. As Jonathan Parry noted

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in his discussion of 1980s Benares, the Doms were representative of the extreme “division of mortuary labour” at the cremation ghat.89 Indeed, the presence of the Doms encourages us to reflect on the history of cremation in modern India as something more than a narrative of high-caste death practices, for cremation touched intimately, too, on the life, labor, and status of those ranked lowest in the Hindu caste hierarchy. Sherring, however, could not suppress a shudder of racial repugnance in describing the Doms. “Dark complexioned, low of stature, and somewhat repulsive in appearance, they are,” he wrote, “readily distinguishable from all the better castes of Hindus. From their aspect they seem to have sprung originally from the jungles rather than from civilized regions.”90 He did not remark on whether the Doms themselves buried or cremated their dead. But embedded within a more general ethnography of caste hierarchy and “racial” difference, so extreme as to negate any idea of a shared Hindu or Indian nationhood, his description of the Doms sufficed to identify the incineration of the dead with the most demeaning occupation, the very lowest social stratum, while at the same time acknowledging cremation as a rite and privilege belonging to the highest castes. In contrast to the way in which cremation at a later date might be seen precisely as epitomizing Hindu national identity, for Sherring cremation seemed instead to highlight the extremes of difference and division within Hindu society and to substantiate his claim that “the proper description of the Hindu race” was a “nation divided against itself.”91 Behind this observation, echoed by later colonial ethnographers like H. H. Risley, lay a more general politics of India as a deeply fractured society, inherently incapable of attaining true nationhood.92 Accounts like Sherring’s, with its missionary ethos, were followed over the course of the following half century by descriptions that aspired to greater ethnographic objectivity. Some referenced cremation for the sake of completion—as the last, and perhaps not most noteworthy, of life-cycle rituals. Others were more obviously utilitarian, adding to the knowledge of how selected groups of colonial subjects—soldiers, convicts, “coolies”—might best be managed and ruled over. Practically and polemically, such authoritative narratives helped to define difference among Hindus as well as between Hindus and other communities. Some of the most detailed of these ethnographic descriptions are to be found in the district gazetteers of the Bombay Presidency, published under government auspices between the 1880s and early 1900s. One of the earliest of these, on Sholapur, gives a lengthy description of the funeral rites of the Komti caste of traders, culminating in the cremation of the dead on a pyre of wooden billets and cow-dung cakes. There followed brief notices of other castes, indicating a wide variety of practices even within a single community. Hence, the Lingayats are reported as burying their dead, the Marathas “as a rule burn their dead,” and the Kunbis “either burn or bury.”93 Among the lower castes, Chambhar leather workers “bury the

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dead” while “those who can afford it burn them.” Kosti weavers burn the married dead but bury the unmarried. Dhangar shepherds mostly burn their dead, “but those who can afford it burn them,” while a woman dying in childbirth “is always buried.” Buruds (bamboo workers) normally bury their dead, as do Telis (oil pressers) and Kumbhars (potters). Other laboring and artisan castes—blacksmiths, indigo dyers, fishermen—either bury or burn the dead, without clear reasons being assigned for the choice of one practice or the other.94 Of the very lowest castes, “depressed classes” such as the Mahars, Mangs, and Halalkhors, burial is stated to be the norm.95 Thus, caste status, sectarian allegiance, wealth, and gender all enter into this complex ethnographic mix.96 But where several pages are devoted to the death rites and cremation practices of a high-status community like the Chitpavan Brahmins of Poona, the burials of Mahars and Mangs are summarized in a few lines.97 These ethnographic descriptions, registering the importance of cremation as a high-caste rite and indicating the far more mixed funerary practices of the lower castes, were supplemented by a wide range of other colonial texts and official records produced from the mid-nineteenth century onward. For instance, in Bombay in 1848, when Dr. A. H. Leith began to analyze data from the city’s mortuary returns, he divided up the population according to several criteria. One was by race, in order to differentiate Europeans from “natives”; another was by diet, separating the “sarcophagous” (meat-eating) from the “asarcophagous” (vegetarian) castes. Yet another means of categorization Leith employed, and which remained in municipal returns for decades afterward, was according to the manner in which communities disposed of their dead: whether by cremation like high-caste Hindus; by burial like Christians, Muslims, and low-caste Hindus; or by “skyburial,” that is, “exposure to vultures” on the Parsi funeral towers. Leith recorded that from the start of February 1848 to the end of January 1850, 9,126 of Bombay’s dead had been buried, 3,320 cremated, and 821 placed on the Parsi’s dokhma.98 In 1865, Leith’s successor, Dr. T. B. Johnstone, reported that 19,226 bodies in Bombay had been buried, 7,651 cremated, and 1,018 “exposed to carrion birds.” In that (fairly typical) year just under half of deceased Hindus had been cremated; the rest were buried. Among the latter were Lingayats and members of “outcast” communities, like the Mahars, Mungs, Dheds, Chamars, and Halalkhors.99 As Johnstone further pointed out, even among Brahmins and other high-caste Hindus, the stillborn and infants dying under the age of two, or before their name-giving ceremony (nam kurun), were also buried.100 This early exercise in mortuary analysis again makes abundantly clear that cremation was by no means “universal” among nineteenth-century Hindus. Other sources having a bearing on cremation and other funeral rites were the topographical and ethnographic surveys produced in the middle and later decades of the century. For instance, in 1871 James Forsyth, an army officer and forest

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conservator for the Central Provinces (Madhya Pradesh), published an account of the region that ranged widely over landscape and vegetation, history, ethnography, and hunting. He described a region heavily forested, inhabited by tribal (Adivasi) communities, and still on the frontier of “Aryan” Hindu civilization. Cremation was one measure Forsyth employed to assess the progress of “Hinduization” or “Aryanization” by which low-caste Hindus and tribal populations adopted the customs, rituals, and lifestyles of the highest castes.101All the tribal communities in central India, he averred, had once practiced burial, but those that had been “much Hinduized” had started to adopt cremation. “The process being an expensive one, however, it is not lavished on all alike, women and children being still mostly buried, while adult males are burnt.” And he added, in a not insignificant aside, “during the rainy season, when burning is inconvenient, burial is often adopted for all alike.”102 C O N C LU SIO N

From a European perspective, Indian cremation became a matter of intense fascination and repellant concern from the 1830s onward. The official abolition of sati helped direct attention away from the fate of Hindu widows to the funeral pyre itself. Influential, too, was the growing number of Christian missionaries stationed in India after it was opened up to them in 1813 and of European residents and travelers, who both absorbed and themselves produced critical accounts of Hindu death rites. In this way, and centering on the burning ghats of Benares, cremation became part of Europeans’ personal encounters, cultural brief, and political agenda, a widely referenced trope that made of India both ordeal and spectacle. In discussing this emergent discourse of Indian cremation and Hindu funerary practices, this chapter has identified three main strands. One was clearly a politics of loathing and repugnance, analogous to that which had accompanied colonial debates over sati, thugi, female infanticide, and hook-swinging.103 But here the focus was on the horrors of the Hindu pyre and the contrast this seemed to Westerners to present to the reverential treatment of their own honored and cherished dead. Yet passionate though this rhetoric of repugnance clearly was, it needs to be set against two other discursive strands. One of these was the politics of pragmatic accommodation by which the colonial regime saw it as in its own best interests to tolerate cremation as a rite of undeniable importance to the priestly, warrior, and mercantile elites—the “twice-born” Hindus—on whose political collaboration and economic enterprise the regime’s power and profitability ultimately rested. Equally, in a third strand, articulating the politics of division and primarily constituted through colonial ethnography, cremation came to be recognized as a highly prestigious rite among high-caste Hindus, while in a complete reversal of

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European Christian values, it was burial that signified low-caste identity and status. One consolation for the British, who otherwise found themselves (in terms of their mortuary practices) ranked among the lowest social strata, was that cremation also illustrated a seemingly wide gulf between high and low castes, between “pure” Aryans and “tribal” aboriginals, and hence demonstrated how internally fragmented Hindu society actually was. In the colonial politics of divide and rule, the rift between the cremation pyre and the burial ground epitomized the extent to which India was not yet a nation, and perhaps might never be.

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The City and Its Dead

Chapters 3 through 5 of this book turn from a general discussion of cremation issues to examine in greater detail three parallel narratives within the larger story of Indian cremation—urban history and the politics of colonial spatial governance in chapter 3, environmental history and material culture in chapter 4, and global and diasporic history in chapter 5. Each of these narrative strands presents its own trajectory; together they advance the story of Indian cremation from the 1830s to the 1920s and from the local and microcosmic in the cremation politics of metropolitan Bombay and Calcutta, through the India-wide search for fuel and the transformative agency of fire, to the global dissemination of Indian cremation practices and the diasporic quest for funerary fire. B E NA R E S A N D T H E C O L O N IA L M E T R O P O L I S

First it is necessary to return to Benares, which, as the two previous chapters have indicated, was the perceived epicenter of Hindu cremation practices and the most accessible site for Western observation of the Hindu pyre. The indolent traveler had only to drift downriver past the burning bodies or set foot on Manikarnika Ghat to witness cremation in all its much-publicized horror. Here might cremation most conveniently be photographed, or the world-weary travel writer pause to refresh his or her pen in a lurid (but still lingering) description of the waiting corpse and the burning cadaver.1 And yet paradigmatic though cremation at Benares might appear, it is also necessary to reflect on the manner in which the same basic rite was performed elsewhere, in the newer and more populous cities of British India and in Bombay and Calcutta in particular.2 49

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Without wishing to exaggerate the contrast, we might see a continuing divergence or tension between cremation in Benares and cremation in the two colonial metropolises. Despite passing under East India Company rule as early as 1775, Benares remained the principal stage on which a “traditional” version of Hinduism continued to operate. Even though it experienced multiple changes in its social composition and urban morphology, although it thrived as a center for the production of textiles and brassware and profited from the coming of the railroad and the consequent increase in pilgrim traffic, Benares remained in Hindu perception—and to a degree in that of the Western visitor—a city that stood outside conventional notions of space and time.3 In this sanctified role the city was a kind of living tableau, a “spectacle” representative of all that was sublime and spiritual, unsettling or obscene, about a religion that, nowhere more than on the banks of the Ganges, seemed to exemplify a quintessential “otherness.” By contrast, Calcutta and Bombay—the sprawling, populous cities of the Indian littoral, wedded to commerce, industry, and administration, the showpieces of a modernity that was simultaneously colonial, Indian, and transnational—had little time for the aspic of antiquity. Certainly they, too, had their sacred sites, their melas and festivals, shrines, and processions. But as the history of urban cremation suggests, these religious and social practices had to be accommodated, woven somehow into the fabric of modern city life, and reconciled, however uneasily, with a scientific and technocratic understanding of life and death, one that commanded an imperious (if not always realizable) authority of its own. Benares was not immune to the imperatives of municipal reform and sanitary governance. It, too, needed clean water, sewage works, regulated markets, street lighting, hospitals for the sick, and asylums for lepers. As the number of visitors and pilgrims grew and the number of the dead to be disposed of increased, there were even suggestions (never acted upon) that for reasons of public health, cremations should be moved to a new site, away from the crowded, cholera-prone ghats.4 Even the cremation platform at Manikarnika Ghat, hailed as the most sacred in India, had to be rebuilt from time to time; the old, burned-out structure was replaced, for instance, in 1912 by a new concrete plinth.5 Further restoration of the masaan (burning place) followed in 1937, on the somewhat curious grounds that its dilapidated condition had become “the laughing stock of tourists and a disgrace to India.”6 But in a city dedicated above all else to religion and its performance, these renovations were secondary issues, matters of material renovation, not of fundamental belief.7 One could perhaps see what happened with respect to funeral pyres not in Benares but in metropolitan Bombay and Calcutta, as a demonstration of the exercise of Foucauldian biopower. Here in the urban arena lay an opportunity for a colonial (more precisely, municipal) regime of power to exercise its authority—through surveillance, enumeration, regulation, and the “disciplining” of the dead—over a

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subject population, and in a way that was, from a colonial perspective, neither very practical nor politic on the burning ghats of Benares. As this chapter tries to suggest, there is some validity in this biopolitical approach. And yet any analysis of India’s urban cremation needs to take into account (to a greater extent than a strictly Foucauldian analysis might imply) the resistance of the living, the accommodative strategies of those who spoke for the dead, the fractured and fractious politics of municipal governance, and the growing disposition of the local sanitary authorities to favor cremation over other means of disposing of the dead. Moreover, such an analysis has to engage with an evolving relationship between sacred and sensuous geographies and the manner in which sanitary awareness itself entailed a sensory, as well as scientific or materialistic, ordering of municipal spaces.8 S A N I TAT IO N A N D T H E SE N SE S

In pre-British India, and away from the towns and cities of the colonial era, cremation was a largely unregulated practice. By convention cremation sites were situated away from inhabited areas, on waste ground and beside a river, lake, or reservoir, where ablutions could be performed and the ashes dispersed. Benares was exceptional in having its cremation ground in the center of the city rather than on its margins.9 Funerary sites were normally located to the south of a settlement, the south being the direction associated with Yama, the god of death. Some towns had several burning-grounds, each for use by a different caste, as did some large villages.10 Similarly, in Calcutta and Bombay cremation sites initially lay outside the city on a deserted shoreline or on the edge of marshes and riverbanks, in the liminal space between river, sea, and solid ground. However, as cities grew the surrounding creeks and swamps were reclaimed; embankments and roads were built; and houses, factories, railroads, and civic amenities annexed land for their own intensive use. In these circumstances, burning-grounds had either to be moved further out—a practice to which Hindu opposition was intense—or the city had to accommodate the cremation sites within its expanded territory. Incorporation created its own inconveniences. Thus, the reclamation of Back Bay on the western shore of Bombay island in the second half of the nineteenth century left the Hindu burning-ground at Sonapur cut off from direct access to the sea, though the ashes of the dead were still taken there for disposal. But the ever-growing numbers of urban dead, and the new proximity of the burning ghats to places where city dwellers lived or passed on their daily way to and from work, prompted frequent complaints from non-Hindus. Conceivably, among Europeans in India by the mid-nineteenth century there existed a new sensitivity to the sights, the sounds, and more especially the smell, of the burning dead, just as conversely “smelling good” served as a recognized sign

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of urban progress and sanitary improvement.11 This attachment to the olfactory sense was powerful enough in Europe; in India unpleasant smells and nauseating stenches were almost obsessively identified with potent disease and malignant miasmas.12 To judge by their odors—and they were repeatedly so judged by colonial sanitarians and the general public—Bombay and Calcutta were cities in dire need of progress. For the resident European the smell of the cremation ground and the burning dead was one compelling reason to want to escape from the stinking city to the pure air of a Himalayan hill station or the Nilgiri hills of south India. In 1851 one army officer stationed in Bombay wrote that when the wind blew in from the sea “the breeze is loaded with the effluvia of dead animals, . . . of the mud of Back Bay, mingled with that peculiar smell, the result of burnt Hindoos.”13 In this or some similar source we might suspect the origin of Herman Melville’s observation in Moby-Dick, noted in the preface to this book, about the repulsive smell of boiling whale blubber having “an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funeral pyres.”14 Having touched on this rhetoric of repugnance in the previous chapter, it is only necessary here to cite a few examples of the way in which the sensory critique of Hindu cremation was voiced in metropolitan India, with respect to both burning bodies and the conveyance of corpses to the cremation ground. In part it was the visible exposure of the dead that Europeans found so offensive and so alien to their own funerary tradition. Bodies were carried by mourners through the streets to the cremation ground, not conveyed, as in the West, by horse-drawn hearses. Thus, in late June 1857 (when their thoughts might otherwise have been focused on the rebellion in north India), European residents in the fashionable Byculla district of Bombay complained to the police magistrate about the carrying of Hindu bodies along Bellasis Road to the city’s cremation and burial grounds. These processions occurred, the petitioners stated, at all hours of the day and night and were often accompanied by “bands of noisy music” so that “the privacy of our houses does not guard us or our families from the feelings of disgust and horror caused by the shocking exposure of the corpse which takes place on these occasions.” The “carelessness of every caste of Hindoos with regard to their dead” was, they said, too well-known to require further comment. To most Christians this sight was “most offensive and disgusting,” nor was it “entirely free from serious danger in seasons of sickness.”15 The upper part of the body was “entirely exposed,” the face “besmirched with red ochre and other pigments,” giving the corpse “a most horrible appearance.” Often the body was slung between two poles, “merely wrapped up loosely in a piece of matting not sufficient to cover it, and too slight to screen it from view, or to prevent the secretions from the corpse escaping to infect the air.” Nor was that all. Such repulsive scenes were bound to be detrimental to the value of residents’ properties “upon which large sums of money have been expended.” Urgent action was called for, and “speedy relief.”16

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This wide-ranging condemnation of cremation as an intolerable invasion of Europeans’ urban space; as a threat to their privacy and property; and as a religious affront, health hazard, and public nuisance, was repeated many times over in Bombay and other Indian cities during the nineteenth century, even after the authorities had taken steps to bring cremation and funeral processions under stricter control. Sonapur burning-ground on Queen’s Road, a major thoroughfare between the commercial and administrative precincts of Bombay and European residences on Malabar Hill, sparked repeated complaints.17 While acknowledging that this was “a very delicate subject,” the Times of India proposed in 1887 that all the burial and cremation grounds along Queen’s Road should be erased and replaced by a park, “a fine, uninterrupted space in the heart of the city, which might be surrounded on all sides by good houses.”18 Nothing came of the suggestion, but it underscores the way in which cremation sites and burial grounds stood at the center of many disputes over urban access, land use, and property values. Historians once stressed the separateness of the European quarters (“white town”) of colonial cities from their Indian counterpart (“black town”). But cremation and its sensory geography—loud and highly visible processions, the sight and smell of human incineration—deny any simple partitioning of urban space along purely racial lines.19 Or, indeed, those of religion. The objection to Hindu cremation came not from Europeans alone, but also from Indian Christians, Parsis, and Muslims, who shared the same repugnance and keen sense of the violation of their physical and cultural space.20 Nor were residents the only ones to complain. A critical view of cremation often reflected officials’ personal experiences as much as their sanitary convictions. Between April 1857 and August 1859 F. J. Mouat, Bengal’s inspector-general of prisons, pursued a long-running dispute about the cremation ground on Strand Road in Hooghly, twenty miles north of Calcutta, which was located only 175 yards from the town’s prison. On visiting the jail in the course of his official duties, Mouat found “the smell . . . nauseous and disgusting to the last degree.” Prisoners, their guards, the civil surgeon—all complained at being exposed to these “foul emanations” and “vilest of stenches.”21 At times the smell was so repulsive prisoners could not bear to eat their meals. But the Hindu community stood its ground, claiming that the site had long been used and that there would be “many inconveniences and difficulties” in moving the cremation ground elsewhere. Mouat raged on about “humanity” and “justice,” but the burning ghat remained exactly where it was.22 S A N I TA RY C R E M AT IO N

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century cremation entered the professional realm of the colonial sanitarian in India. A central figure in linking cremation with sanitation was Edmund A. Parkes. Born in England in 1819, Parkes

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went to India in 1842 as an assistant surgeon with the British Army; during his three years’ service he was stationed in the Madras Presidency and Burma. He then resigned his army post and returned to England, where he became a leading authority on hygiene and public health. In 1864 he published his Manual of Practical Hygiene, which was issued in three more editions by the time of his death in 1876 and eight in all by 1891. From the start this seminal work contained a short chapter on “the disposal of the dead” in which Parkes was highly critical, from a sanitary perspective, of earth burial, remarking: “If the dead are buried so great at last is the accumulation of bodies that the whole country round a great city becomes gradually a vast cemetery.” Decaying bodies released carbolic acid, ammonia, hydrogen, and other gases, “some of which,” he explained, “are very foetid.”23 Parkes conceded that the disposal of the dead in densely populated countries was always a difficult question but suggested that means other than burial were preferable. “Accustomed as we are to land burial, there is something almost revolting, at first sight, at the idea of making the sea the sepulcher, or of burning the dead.” But from a strictly sanitarian view either was preferable for the health of the living.24 India was not directly cited in this discussion, though elsewhere Parkes used his subcontinental experience to support his views about military hygiene and the threat the tropics posed to European health. In the 1873 edition of his Manual, he added a note about the recent Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) and discussed the value of “incremation” for the hygienic destruction of large numbers of human and animal battlefield corpses.25 Later editions referred to the growth of the modern cremation movement in Europe, without mentioning India.26 It can therefore only be a matter of conjecture whether Parkes observed cremations during his time in India and whether, if so, this had any direct bearing on his thinking about the sanitary disposal of the dead. What can be said, however, is that Parkes was often quoted approvingly on the subject of cremation and was in close contact with British cremationists, including William Eassie.27 Whether India inspired his views on cremation or not, coming from someone with such solid Indian credentials and contacts, they may well have helped cement the authority of the procremation movement among local sanitarians. The first edition of the Manual of Practical Hygiene was published in 1864, a decade before the cremation movement in Britain found its evangelist in Sir Henry Thompson with his highly influential article on the subject in 1874.28 But in India’s cities the debate about cremation was already in train well before Parkes’s book appeared and some years before the cremation movement in Europe gained any momentum. In India, moreover, cremation was from the outset a practical matter, not merely a theoretical possibility, an issue that pertained to millions of the dead and not just (as initially in Europe) to a small number of artists, atheists, and intellectuals. As noted in the previous chapter, from 1848 Dr. A. H. Leith

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began to analyze data from Bombay’s mortuary returns, and in his reports cremation and other funerary practices were extensively recorded and discussed.29 In 1855, following Leith’s lead and with a growing sense of sanitary urgency, the authorities in Bombay compiled a list of sixty-seven “places of internment, exposure, and cremation,” covering Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Parsis, Jews, and Chinese. Although some burial and cremation sites, like Sonapur on Back Bay, had been in existence for more than a hundred years, no law governed their use. Now careful consideration was given to the need to close or relocate some of these sites and to regulate those that remained.30 Leith was incensed by the “awful state” of Hindu and Muslim burial grounds in Bombay. He described Back Bay, where an estimated five thousand bodies a year were interred, as an alarming source of putrefaction and “poisonous gases,” but like many Victorian sanitarians, he also expressed concern at the moral effect on those who became “habituated” to such “horrors.”31 Among other remedial measures, the burial of bodies in the sands of Back Bay was prohibited and a new site found in Colaba at the southern tip of the island for burying dead infants.32 In the 1860s urban public health reform received further impetus from the Royal Commission on the Sanitary State of the Army in India and the subsequent appointment of provincial sanitary commissioners.33 Bombay, a city of 800,000 inhabitants with an area of nearly twenty square miles, acquired a new municipal corporation and a health officer who saw it as his duty to transform the deplorable sanitary situation. “In its growth,” wrote T. G. Hewlett, the newly appointed health officer, “no care was taken for the future requirements of a city now risen to the proud position of being the second largest in Her Majesty’s dominions.” Until recently sanitary science “had made no impression on the minds of men, and Bombay was as backward as any other part of the world in recognizing the truth of its doctrines, or the good results of its practice.”34 This zealous agenda of sanitary reform encompassed not just markets, slaughterhouses, and slums, but also the city’s many Christian and Muslim burial sites and the Hindu burningground on Back Bay. Attempts were soon underway to remove such offending sites as far as possible from the city center and relocate them to the urban periphery or, where this was not practicable, to reduce the “nuisance” presented by those that remained. But it is important to stress that critical sanitary concern was as often directed at Muslim and Christian graveyards, of which there was a far greater number than the half dozen or so Hindu burning-grounds, impelled by fear of the dangerous miasmas generated by decomposing bodies and the distressing sight of dogs and jackals scavenging corpses from shallow graves. In 1866 Hewlett complained about an old and overcrowded Goan cemetery, which in its present state “cannot fail to exert the most prejudicial influence on the health of the inhabitants in [its] immediate vicinity.”35 He was still more scathing about the Parsi towers of silence on Malabar

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Hill, urging that they should be closed down immediately. “It is,” he wrote, “disgusting to see the vultures swooping down and carrying away pieces of flesh and bones, and it is not right that one of the best situations in the Island for building [on Malabar Hill] should be devoted to this purpose.”36 As in Victorian Britain, the case for cremation was as much about urban land use and overcrowding as it was about the perils of zymotic diseases. Expanding populations and land shortages in the cities made it hard to justify the opening of new cemeteries and the gobbling up of space that might more profitably be allocated to growing food, or, more likely, to residential and industrial use. When the metropolis became a necropolis, when the dead left little room for the living, when earth, air, and water became tainted beyond bearing by the exhalations of the dead, was not cremation a better solution than burial? The municipal health officer in Calcutta later echoed this view, claiming that the city was “fortunate” in having a large Hindu population, which, while “somewhat wasteful in other matters,” was “economical” in its disposal of the dead. The same ground could be used year after year to burn the dead without encroaching on the space needed for the living.37 Hindu cremation grounds might accordingly seem, from a sanitary and civic perspective, no worse than other places for the disposal of the dead and were more capable than most of redemption. Practical proposals quickly followed. Writing in 1866 of the Sonapur cremation ground, Hewlett deplored the lack of fuel, which resulted in bodies being only half consumed by fire. He suggested that an incinerator be built instead, a solution to the problem of the disposal of the dead that he believed would soon be adopted in Europe.38 Six years later, Hewlett described cremation as “this cleanly mode of disposal of the dead.” He urged wealthy Hindus to raise funds for the cremation of low-caste and pauper Hindus rather than have them interred, as many currently were, in burial grounds from which the “gases of decomposition” escaped to infect entire neighborhoods.39 Rather than outright prohibition, colonial pragmatism and sanitary wisdom favored the containment and seclusion of existing cremation grounds. Subject to suitable regulation and technical modification, the burning ghat might thus be accommodated within the modern, sanitary city and even become one of its exemplary sites. Cremation grounds might yield other benefits, too. Lacking a more effective system of death registration, they were one of the few locations where the authorities could number the dead, record causes of mortality, and so track the effectiveness of their public health reforms.40 Burning-grounds could also be instrumental in detecting suspicious deaths; there were numerous instances over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when cremations were halted and mourners detained while the police examined bodies for evidence of poisoning and injury. In Bombay in the 1880s twenty policemen were assigned to burning ghats and burial grounds largely for this purpose.41 The examination of suspicious corpses was a significant issue, as one of the principal objections to cremation

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in the West was that, while a buried body could be exhumed, incineration precluded all subsequent criminal investigation and so might allow poisoners and murderers to evade detection. In India, where poisoning was allegedly widespread and corpses were cremated within hours of death, the argument carried even greater weight.42 This municipalization of mortality clearly drew upon British precedent, especially the sanitary reform movement that began in the 1830s. But at the same time, it was shaped in India by specifically colonial considerations of health, prestige, and the local physical and cultural environment. In Calcutta, as in Bombay, by the mid-nineteenth century cremation had become a question of great sanitary significance, but the circumstances there were somewhat different. Unlike Bombay, the foremost concern was with the depositing—or dumping—of dead bodies in the Hooghly. As president of Bengal’s sanitary commission in 1864, John Strachey deplored the way in which an estimated five thousand bodies a year were thrown into the river. A nuisance to those who lived along the riverbank, decaying corpses were also a hazard to shipping and, in an age fearful of cholera, a putative source of disease, not least for those who drew drinking water from the river. The dumping of bodies was one of the factors that made the health of Calcutta “a scandal and a disgrace” to civilized government.43 Cremation therefore began to impress India’s sanitarians as preferable to most other means of disposing of the dead, and certainly superior to the depositing of unburned corpses in the Hooghly and other rivers. But they called for a more efficient and less offensive form of cremation than that currently employed in India, and various schemes were proposed to improve urban cremation practice. In 1864 Major Thomas Martin of Poona designed a five-chambered crematorium capable of incinerating up to ten bodies at the same time. The separate chambers were intended to allow Hindus of different castes to be burned simultaneously but independently, so that their ashes could be collected unmixed with, and uncontaminated by, those of other castes.44 Fear of the promiscuous mingling of ashes and bones from different castes was an enduring Hindu concern and one of the arguments used (and still used) in India against modern crematoria. Martin’s scheme was never implemented, but in the same year fresh measures were proposed to deal with the crisis in Calcutta, including building a light railroad to transport corpses from the city to a more distant burning-ground. Calcutta’s health officer, Dr. Tonnerre, further suggested that a series of large furnaces be constructed at Nimtala, the city’s principal burning ghat.45 In the face of determined Hindu opposition, the rail scheme was scrapped, but a “cinerator” was constructed on the banks of the Hooghly in the late 1860s, some years before the first purpose-built crematoria were erected in Italy, Germany, and Britain. It is described as having a walled enclosure, a chimney, and “a large oven.” When orthodox Hindus showed no appetite for this manner of burning the dead,

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Figure 7. Hindu Burning Ghat (from inside), Nimtala, Calcutta. Postcard, ca. 1910. © Chronicle/Alamy Stock Photo. The River Hooghly lies beyond the columns to the left of the picture.

the crematorium was abandoned.46 But over the course of the nineteenth century the burning-ground at Nimtala Ghat underwent substantial change. Originally an open site on the banks of the Hooghly, it later acquired a screening wall on two sides to shield it from the gaze of passersby. Rebuilt in 1865 with Rs. 35,000 in donations from the Hindu community, the place of cremation was then relocated to enable a light railroad to be built along the Strand. By the 1870s Nimtala Ghat had assumed the form in which it appears in many contemporary photographs: a structure of brick and crumbling stucco, with a colonnade of arches opening onto the Hooghly and wall lanterns for nighttime illumination (see figure 7). Within this enclosed but roofless space, and largely concealed from road and river traffic, bodies were burned and the ashes taken down to the river for dispersal.47 From the mid-1870s, the Indian Medical Gazette, India’s premier medical journal, campaigned energetically for “scientific” cremation, arguing that “destruction by fire, or cremation, which entirely abolishes all the offensive and perilous stages of decomposition, is infinitely preferable to any other mode of disposing of the dead.” Besides, the editor reasoned in 1887, as the established custom of “a large majority of the population,” cremation already enjoyed far greater support in India than it did in the West.48 In 1894 a further editorial stated that from a sanitary and environmental perspective, incineration was much the best means of disposing of human bodies in conditions like those in India, where putrefaction was rapid and the risk immense of disease passing from the dead to the living. If

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an infected body were buried, the “germs of disease” would infect the air, soil, and groundwater. The only effective way to prevent this was the “destruction of disease germs by heat.” This “speedy, effectual and easy method” not only conveniently disposed of the dead; it also ensured that their remains inflicted “the minimum of harm upon the living.”49 The principal target of these strictures was cholera, a disease that caused thousands of deaths every time an epidemic struck Calcutta or Bombay.50 Without any clear understanding of how cholera spread, burning bodies seemed the most effective way to curb the contagion. By 1914 cremation had become the new orthodoxy among India’s sanitarians. While stressing the need for burning-grounds to be sited well away from highways and human habitation, they presented cremation as the quickest, most effective way of disposing of the dead.51 Some went so far as to positively commend cremation, despite the continuing “prejudice” (ironically a term more commonly used to condemn the backwardness of Hindu beliefs) against it in Europe.52 Even though miasmatic theories of disease causation and transmission were on the wane, cemeteries had, so it was claimed, “repeatedly been proved to be injurious to the health of the population dwelling around them.”53 In the 1920s, McNally’s Sanitary Handbook stated that cremation was “the most sanitary method of disposal of the dead. . . . When properly carried out [i.e., in a modern, brick-built crematorium], the method is without objection.”54 However, the “more primitive method of cremation practiced by Hindus” was “not without objection,” even when it was “properly performed and the corpse is entirely consumed,” as “the foul gases from the body pass freely into the air and pollute the surrounding atmosphere.”55 C A N T O N M E N T S , P R I S O N S , A N D T H E HO SP I TA L D E A D

In the cities cremation could be justified on sanitary grounds and incorporated on public health grounds into routine municipal practice. But elsewhere, in army cantonments and among prison populations, cremation was also being institutionalized. Early cantonment regulations in India were remarkably vague about how the bodies of Indian soldiers were to be disposed of, leaving it to the sepoys themselves to follow their own “rites and customs,” provided they did so in a “peaceful and orderly manner.”56 But by the 1860s the cantonments that had sprung up across British India had become among the most highly regulated enclaves in the country, and this regulatory regime affected the dead as well as the living.57 Space was allocated at, or in close proximity to, the cantonment, for burial sites for Muslims and Christians and burning-grounds for Hindus. The 1867 cantonment rules in Bombay Presidency stated that there was to be no burying or burning of the dead in cantonments without a license from the military authorities. The cantonment magistrate alone had the authority to decide whether

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and where a cremation was to be allowed. All bodies taken to cremation grounds were to be disposed of within four hours of being removed there and were to be completely reduced to ashes. No corpses, or parts thereof, were to be thrown into rivers within cantonment limits.58 Among prisoners the official treatment of the dead followed a somewhat different trajectory. In 1819 Indian convicts at Prince of Wales Island (Penang) were left to bury their dead in a patch of waste ground in the absence of any formal burial site; no reference was made to their cremation.59 Likewise, in India until the 1830s it was the practice for the prison authorities to release the bodies of deceased prisoners to family members but to bury the unclaimed bodies of Hindus who died or were executed in prison.60 In some instances, as in Calcutta’s Alipore Jail, which housed nearly seven hundred inmates in the early 1860s, the bodies of executed Hindus were taken outside the prison walls and no more than notionally burned (or not burned at all) before being dumped in the canal known as Tolly’s Nullah. There they drifted about until they decomposed, were devoured by birds and fish, or were flushed out by the incoming tide. It was partly this offensive and scandalous treatment of the dead that prompted moves to regulate cremation in Calcutta in the 1860s.61 Alipore Jail may have been an exceptionally egregious—and given its urban location, offered a particularly visible—example of the colonial mistreatment of the Hindu dead. But in 1836 six Hindu prisoners at Broach (Bharuch) in the Bombay Presidency petitioned jail officials for the right to cremate their dead, claiming that it was the custom for many high- and middle-ranking castes, including Brahmins, Patidars, and Banias, to do so. The costs of the ceremony, they proposed, could be defrayed by the sale of the late prisoner’s clothes and other possessions. The prisoners asserted that the current practice of burying Hindus violated a Bombay regulation of 1827, which required that caste customs be respected. The registrar of Bombay’s criminal court recommended that approval be granted to this request given “the importance the natives attach to burial customs.” The provincial administration, however, was more reluctant to accede to what it saw as a novel demand and one that might set an undesirable precedent. In the end the Bombay government agreed, so long as there was sufficient property to cover the cost of the ceremony and prisoners of “like caste” could be found to conduct the cremation. Otherwise the body should be buried.62 Yet it soon became the norm across British India to cremate all deceased Hindu prisoners, regardless of caste (and of the crime for which they had been convicted), unless relatives requested the body’s return. For instance, at Agra Central Jail in the 1850s the bodies of executed prisoners were given over to relatives; otherwise Muslims were interred and Hindus cremated on the banks of the Yamuna.63 The question of funding from the prisoner’s effects was apparently dropped, though in the Andamans as late as the 1920s attention was still given

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to finding prisoners from the “correct” caste to perform the ceremony.64 It is a striking aspect of this normalization of cremation, and the wider colonial accommodation of Hindu rites and customs it implied, that in 1859, within months of becoming a penal settlement for the rebels of 1857–58, Port Blair in the Andamans was assigned a burial site for Muslims and a cremation ground for Hindus.65 By the 1860s the practice of burning the bodies of Hindus and Sikhs who died in prison and whose bodies were unclaimed (or not required for “anatomical purposes”) became enshrined in provincial jail manuals. Just as Muslims and Christians were to be “decently” buried, so were all Hindus and Sikhs to be cremated.66 Institutional practice thus reinforced the idea of cremation as a distinguishing mark of Hindu or Sikh communal identity; in death as in life, the body of a soldier or convict “belonged” to a particular caste or religious community. As shown in chapter 7, the treatment of dead prisoners and the release of their bodies for cremation subsequently posed enormous political difficulties for the colonial authorities. For the present it is worth noting that the institutionalization of cremation by prison officers had parallels in other areas of state activity. Over the course of the nineteenth century provincial administrations and their local agencies began to accept responsibility for the proper disposal of those who died in their charge or whose poverty and dependent status made them needful subjects. Thus, from the 1840s onward the bodies of Hindus who perished during epidemics or famines were, according to official instructions, to be cremated by the village menials normally charged with removing and burning the dead.67 How far this directive was followed in practice is unclear, especially given the shortage of firewood and dearth of human labor in famine times. It seems likely that many bodies were simply dumped on waste ground or in riverbeds. Sometimes European officials, doctors, and other residents took the personal initiative to collect and burn bodies.68 Equally problematic was the fate of the many bodies, usually of prisoners or urban paupers, taken to medical colleges for research, dissection, and anatomical demonstrations. There is a more general issue here in that it was sometimes stated by colonial physicians that “the body of the Hindoo is almost unobtainable,” meaning that Hindus in general were fiercely opposed to the carrying out of postmortems on the bodies of their relatives and friends and that Hindu corpses were anyway unavailable because they cremated their dead.69 The not insignificant number of bodies used for anatomical purposes in Indian medical schools and hospitals—between seven hundred and fifteen hundred a year in Calcutta alone in the 1850s and 1860s—were therefore obtained from the police, pauper hospitals, and jails.70 Bizarrely, some even came from cremation ghats.71 After use in the medical colleges, the cadavers, or what remained of them, were to be buried or cremated according to the rites of the community to which they had belonged (when it was possible to know this). It is clear from the archival evidence that this

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did not always happen, and in Calcutta into the 1860s many of these bodies, or body parts, ended up being unceremoniously dumped in the Hooghly.72 The problem of disposal persisted into the 1920s. The remains of the bodies of unclaimed paupers who had been taken for dissection to Calcutta hospitals were sent “in a very decomposed state” to be incinerated at the city’s only modern crematorium on Lower Circular Road, in the expectation that this would ensure their quick and inoffensive destruction. However, members of the public complained that the “foul stench” emanating from the site was “intolerable,” and the practice was resumed instead of sending the bodies out to Kashi Mitter ghat in the north of the city for open-air cremation.73 This, too, occasioned protests about the public nuisance caused by the transportation and burning of putrid remains. In order to find a different solution, a new crematorium, equipped with a coal-burning furnace, was commissioned in 1926 to be built alongside the low-caste burial ground at Topsia. Objections from “the orthodox community” further delayed the opening of the crematorium (Calcutta’s second), and it did not finally begin operations until 1930.74 By the late 1930s, two thousand corpses a year were being burned at Topsia, many more than the twenty to thirty at the crematorium on Lower Circular Road, still almost exclusively patronized by Europeans (see chapter 6).75 Cremation in its modern, industrial form had by then come to span an extraordinarily wide social spectrum, from affluent Europeans to destitute Indians and their dismembered bodies. R E SI ST I N G C HA N G E

India can be said to have had a modern cremation movement from the mid-1860s, a decade before the founding of a cremation society in England in 1874 and twenty years before the first incineration was performed at Woking crematorium in 1885. But such a movement existed largely in the minds and aspirations of colonial sanitarians. Schemes to build crematoria failed or, as we have seen in the case of Calcutta in the 1860s and 1870s, proved short-lived, and sanitarians had to content themselves instead with reforming existing open-air, wood-pyre cremations. One reason for this apparent lack of progress was the opposition reformers faced from Hindus, aided by the political reluctance of the colonial regime to confront its Indian subjects over an issue as perennially sensitive as the disposal of the dead. Despite criticism from missionaries and sanitarians, Hindus strenuously defended their cremation practices and proved highly effective in doing so. Adopting the very language of their critics, those who defended open-air cremation argued that the smell was “hardly perceptible at a short distance” and that if the site were enclosed by a perimeter wall “the nuisance to the neighbourhood” was “reduced to a minimum.”76 When “properly carried out,” they claimed, cremation was preferable to burial, and certainly to the Parsis’ dokhma. Indeed, it was “the best of all systems.”77

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In 1855, when the government of Bombay, at Leith’s behest, drafted legislation for the control of cremation and other funeral sites, including their relocation outside the city, this move drew strong protest from one of the city’s leading Hindus, Jagannath Shankarshet. The proposed act, he declared, would be “the most unpopular measure . . . ever attempted in this place” and “ought to be well considered before it is adopted.” The burning or burying of Hindu bodies on Back Bay was an “immemorial custom,” one that the British should not rush to overturn.78 Shankarshet particularly objected to the idea that Hindu corpses would be taken by rail from Back Bay to a more distant location. To even suggest such a thing, Leith “could not have been acquainted with the prejudices of the Hindoos.” They would not tolerate such a plan: “[T]he near relatives and friends of the deceased will never allow other castes to touch the body, which they are obliged to carry on their own shoulders until it is laid on the [funeral] pile.” Leith’s recommendation was simply “not in consonance with the religion of the governed.”79 However, while insisting on the principle that the religious rights and privileges of all communities be respected, Shankarshet remained conciliatory, pointing out that Hindus had already raised Rs. 25,000 for improvements at Back Bay, including the building of a high perimeter wall to make cremations invisible to passersby. Here was a demonstration, as at Calcutta’s Nimtala Ghat, that leading Hindus were prepared, as a matter of philanthropy and religious duty, to carry out substantial improvements to existing cremation sites. As a result of these changes, Shankarshet said, echoing the sanitarians’ language, cremation at Back Bay was now in no way a “nuisance” to others; the corpse was rapidly destroyed, and any gases released were safely carried away high into the air.80 Coming from such an influential figure, these views needed to be heard. Impressed by his arguments, the governor, Lord Elphinstone, questioned whether any cremation ground currently in use was an actual danger to health.81 A member of his council, J. G. Lumsden, went further, observing: “There is always a point up to which you may go, but beyond which you cannot safely venture, in dealing with prejudices based on bigotry or religious belief.” He proposed that nothing be done without further public consultation.82 Another adviser, Arthur Corfield, disagreed, arguing that public health was paramount. “I am as loath as any of my colleagues,” he wrote, “to interfere with the religious or caste prejudices of our Native fellow subjects.” However, “where measures affecting the health, indeed the existence, . . . of the whole community, are concerned, I need not point out that it is the duty of all to waive those prejudices as far as possible for the public good.”83 Despite this objection, Leith’s proposal to transport corpses out of the city by train was scrapped and the interventionist legislation shelved. Hindu cremation had won a major victory. Nearly ten years later a similar dispute arose in Calcutta. Alarmed at the continuing disposal of bodies in the Hooghly and incensed by the insanitary state of

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the cremation ghat at Nimtala (where dead animals were also skinned and their carcasses thrown into the river), the Bengal government recommended closing the ghat and replacing it with a new site several miles away, outside the city boundary. An attempt by the authorities in 1854 to remove this “intolerable nuisance” had failed, partly, it was said, because Hindus had seen it as unwarranted interference with their religious observances.84 At a meeting of the municipal corporation on March 7, 1864, the proposed transfer of the cremation site was vigorously condemned. One speaker, Ramgopal Ghose, said he had no objection to banning the skinning of animals at Nimtala, nor to stopping the practice of depositing human corpses in the river, but it was unacceptable to meddle with the existing place of cremation. Personally, he didn’t care whether his body was burned after death or not, but it was his duty to speak up for the “vast majority” of his countrymen, who would regard it as a “dire calamity” if they could not cremate the bodies of relatives and friends on the banks of the Hooghly. It was a subject on which Hindus cared “beyond this world.” He warned of mass discontent throughout eastern India, a second mutiny, if the British dared to persist with such a scheme and in violation of Queen Victoria’s “ever memorable proclamation” of 1858.85 According to another speaker, Ramanath Tagore, Hindus would not allow a corpse to be touched by anyone except their own relatives, who must carry the body on their shoulders, walking barefoot to the burning-ground. It was impossible to do this if the cremation ground lay, as proposed, miles outside the city. Such a suggestion could only incite “suspicion, jealousy and discontent.” Indians were, he said, “living under a free Government, which represents freedom of thought and expression and liberty of conscience.” It was surely not the intended policy of that government “to carry out its behests by the sword or at the point of a bayonet.”86 Degamber Mitter then questioned the sagacity of a government that seemed intent on suppressing cremation in favor of burial at a time when sanitarians in the West were themselves coming to regard the burning of bodies as “less objectionable than interment.”87 In the end the resolution was defeated; so soon after the suppression of the 1857–58 uprising, the government was anyway wary of trying to enforce its sanitary rule against determined Indian opposition. The proposal was withdrawn, the corporation merely promising to “devise means for making the burning of human bodies” at Nimtala “as unobjectionable as possible.”88 There were, however, those who scoffed at the idea of an uprising by “un-martial” Bengalis and regretted that the sanitary moment had been lost. A correspondent for The Times deplored what he saw as capitulation to “religious fanaticism.”89 M A NAG I N G C R E M AT IO N

Resisting change did not necessarily imply preventing change. While concerted opposition like that seen in Bombay and Calcutta in the 1850s and 1860s might

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stem the first reforming impetus of those who would have done away with Hindu cremation entirely or radically changed its nature and location, the survival of the practice owed much to adaptation and accommodation within the Hindu community itself. In other words, cremation in its modern, urban sense entered not only into the domain of the colonial sanitarian but equally into that of civic leaders like Jagannath Shankarshet and an emerging Indian public. The stages by which that mutual adjustment occurred were admittedly slow and piecemeal, but cumulatively they left cremation in the cities by 1914 very different from the way it had appeared even half a century earlier. In 1882, for instance, leaders of the Hindu community in Bombay sought permission from the municipal authorities to reopen a cremation ground in Colaba in order to spare Hindus the three-mile walk to Sonapur. But they made a point of stressing that if this were allowed, cremations at the site would be shielded by a screening wall to ensure complete invisibility.90 In 1885 Natesa Sastri, a south Indian pandit visiting Bombay, praised the Sonapur burning-ground for its “simplicity of construction, the easiness of cremation and the beautiful arrangements made . . . for the convenience of the public.” The site was, he explained, surrounded by a wall ten to twelve feet high, which enclosed an area more than a mile in length and half a mile wide, “gravelled nicely and divided into several quarters (each with its own gate in the main wall), for the use of different castes of people.” In each of these sectors there were fifty to a hundred patches of ground “paved with thick iron sheets, over which the funeral pile for the cremation of the dead body is spread.”91 The pandit was mistaken in believing that all this was the work of the municipality; in actuality, the burning-ground was run by an independent board of trustees. Sastri also claimed that each body was weighed on arrival, to assess how much wood was required, but I have seen no other reference to this practice. He observed that iron stakes were driven into the ground at each corner on the pyre to keep the wood in place and chains attached to hooks on the ground “in order to keep the pile tight . . . during the process of cremation.”92 Photographs taken of Sonapur in the 1890s and 1900s (see figure 4 in chapter 1 and figure 8 in this chapter) support Sastri’s impressions; they show a high perimeter wall, benches for visitors, a few shrubs and trees, lamps to provide illumination, iron brackets and chains to hold the pyre in place, and a perforated iron screen to shield each corpse or aid combustion.93 Apart from being in the open air, very little of this conforms to the appearance of a conventional Hindu cremation site. Writing in 1899, a correspondent of the Times of India noted that the iron brackets and other “appliances” had been met with “suspicion and alarm” when first introduced at Sonapur, but now they were regarded as essential, “so much so that their disappearance tomorrow would be taken as a real grievance by the Hindoo public.” As a European, he wanted still more—a roof of galvanized iron to keep off the rain, a chimney to disperse the smoke, covered carts to convey

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Figure 8. Cremation at Sonapur, Bombay, during the plague epidemic. Photograph, ca. 1896, by Captain C. Moss. Image courtesy of Wellcome Collections Online.

corpses to the burning-ground—but he clearly believed that, especially following the mass mortality caused by plague, Hindus would be amenable to further change.94 However, the outsider’s impressions might remain much as before. In the early 1900s James Ricalton described for those Americans who only saw India through stereoscopic images the appearance of the cremation ground in Bombay. He stressed that it contained funeral pyres of the “ancient type” and was not a “modernized crematory,” and yet much of what he and his image depicted— the perimeter fence, the separate plot for each body, the sheds and benches for mourners—was far removed from tradition.95 Sonapur was managed by a committee of wealthy high-caste Hindus from both the Gujarati- and Marathi-speaking communities. Among those cremated there in the 1870s was Narayan Vasudev, a prominent businessman who had himself, and “at considerable cost,” “erected a place of shelter for mourners, planted trees, and in other ways shown his munificence.”96 Later patrons and trustees included Raghunath Narayan Khote, Vishvanath Narayan Mandlik, and Munguldar Nathgoobhoy, men who also sat on the municipal council or provincial legislative council and thereby aligned the management of the Hindu cremation ground with the activities of Bombay’s commercial and industrial elite and with provincial and

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civic governance.97 The managing committee made detailed arrangements for the site, such as fixing the pay of the attendants and the cost of firewood for the pyres (see chapter 4 for discussion of a dispute arising from this). But especially in times of fuel shortages and high prices, the municipality might intervene here and at other city burning-grounds to provide loans for the extension of an existing site and for the construction of perimeter walls, or, as in 1899–1900, contribute funds from its emergency plague budget for fuelwood.98 Calcutta, too, saw far-reaching changes. In 1905 the corporation spent Rs. 25,000 on improvements at Nimtala Ghat. Since private contractors had failed to provide sufficient wood for cremation there, the municipality stepped in temporarily to take over the supply and sale of fuel at the site.99 Six years later, in 1910–11, there was a further round of repairs and embellishments at Nimtala, including a latrine by the men’s waiting room and a tap supplying drinking water for male mourners; similar provisions were made for female mourners. Gas lighting was installed, as at many other urban cremation grounds across India. Drinking water was provided for the Doms who worked at the site, though theirs came from a standpipe, and their meager accommodations were upgraded. The Doms successfully petitioned the authorities for the restoration of their pay, which had recently been reduced as a measure of economy.100 They were not municipal employees, being paid only a fixed sum for supplying wood and for preparing and stoking the pyres, but when complaints were made against them for demanding excessive payments for fuel, the corporation appointed overseers to superintend their work.101 B OM BAY P O L I T IC S

In the cities cremation was a question of both caste and class. One of the most contentious issues in Bombay concerned the disposal of the corpses of low-caste and pauper Hindus. Given their remoteness from the lives of the city’s laboring and indigent poor, there was some perplexity among high-caste Hindus and elite Europeans about why the low castes and untouchables practiced burial rather than cremation. It was sometimes suggested that this was purely for reasons of poverty, and hence it would not be too difficult to persuade them, if funds were made available, to adopt cremation instead.102 The counterclaim was that this was their custom, and that fresh provision had accordingly to be made for Hindu burial grounds, like that at Haines Road in Bombay (a bleak site, devoid of any funerary monuments, with the smoke of factory chimneys rather than funeral pyres rising in the distance), as well as for new and better-managed cremation ghats. The question was of considerable importance because the municipality was faced with the difficulty of how best to dispose of low-caste paupers who perished, for example during famines and epidemics, without family members to take care of the bodies or without funds to do so. A related and increasingly urgent issue

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was again that of property: in a crowded city burial grounds gobbled up valuable space. Many low-caste dead were buried in swampy flats in the north of Bombay, land that was subsequently reclaimed at taxpayers’ expense and was in great demand for housing and industrial expansion. As city rents and property values rose, cremation for the poor offered a less land-hungry alternative to opening new burial grounds or expanding existing ones. It was more economical to burn the pauper dead than to bury them.103 We can glean some idea of the complexity of the cremation issue in municipal politics by looking more closely at Bombay in the 1880s. In March 1883, in the wake of the 1876–78 famine, which had left thousands of famished and diseased migrants from the stricken countryside dead and dying on the streets, Bombay’s town council (the corporation’s standing committee) met to consider a proposed grant of Rs. 30,000 for burning the bodies of Hindu paupers. Frank Souter, the municipal commissioner, explained that some sixty-five hundred Hindus a year were currently interred at a Hindu burial ground on Arthur Road and at neighboring sites. He believed that burial was not a ritual requirement for low-caste Hindus but a consequence of their extreme poverty. Given the chance, they would burn their dead. But the cost to the municipality for providing for low-caste and pauper cremation was substantial—Rs. 7 per body—and for the municipality to meet this cost would entail an estimated additional outlay of Rs. 30,000 a year. Raghunath Narayan Khote, one of the trustees of the Sonapur burning-ground, supported the motion, declaring that cremation was “the best mode of disposing of the dead in the civilized world.”104 Dr. H. J. Blanc then intervened. He did not repeat the suggestion he had made on an earlier occasion that pauper bodies be taken out to sea and dumped (Parkes’s “sea sepulchre”), but he did reiterate the familiar sanitary arguments against burial, especially given Bombay’s marshy, miasma-generating soil. However, he did not favor existing Hindu cremation practices either. Anyone who passed along Queen’s Road, close to Sonapur, on a sultry, windless evening, soon became aware, he said, of “a thick foggy vapour falling upon them” and began to smell burning flesh. Along with the smoke came “particles of burnt flesh which floated about in the air and passed into their breath.” Instead of this highly “disagreeable” practice, he urged Hindus to adopt the mechanized cremation now being promoted in Europe and called on “enlightened Hindoo gentlemen” to help their fellow citizens by encouraging acceptance of the “machinery . . . used in other civilized countries.”105 Others, too, opposed the motion. Pherozeshah Mehta, who as a Parsi might have had reasons of his own to discourage municipal interference in funerary practices (lest the towers of silence be targeted next), argued against the cost involved. “Why,” he asked, “should the Municipality take upon themselves the task of burning these Hindu paupers?” If cremation were so desirable, it should be done solely at the expense of the city’s many wealthy Hindus. Vishvanath Narayan Mandlik also questioned why the municipality should turn

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“philanthropic” and spend taxpayers’ money in this way. Besides, what right did the municipality have to dictate whether Hindus should be cremated rather than buried? The motion was lost by eight votes to ten.106 The matter did not end there. Blanc’s comments in particular sparked a lengthy debate in the corporation and in the press over the Western system of cremation. A meeting of the full corporation council in May 1883 took up the issue, trying to decide whether it was a financial or sanitary question, and whether, as one speaker put it, the disposal of the dead was “part and parcel of the religion of the people” and so outside the corporation’s jurisdiction. It was agreed, however, to refer the matter back to Souter, as municipal commissioner, for further consideration.107 Meanwhile other issues came to the fore. As Pherozeshah Mehta surely feared, critical attention turned once more to the Parsi dokhmas: weren’t they an even greater menace to the city’s health and well-being than cremation ghats and burial grounds? It was disgraceful, according to the Times of India, that Parsis were allowed, simply because they were “one of the most energetic and loyal sections of the Bombay community, . . . to expose their dead on the so-called Towers of Silence.”108 This ignited a debate within the Parsi community that lasted into the 1920s as to whether they too should adopt cremation, as some reformers proposed, or continue to regard it, like more orthodox Parsis, as abhorrent to their beliefs.109 Proposals to expand existing Hindu cremation grounds to accommodate the low-caste dead created further intercommunal friction. In May 1886 the management committee at Sonapur, led by Raghunath Narayan Khote, sought to improve access to the Hindu burning-ground since entry from Queen’s Road was now prohibited and corpses could only be brought to the site by a circuitous route. But this improvement meant encroaching on the narrow lane that divided the cremation ghat from the adjacent Muslim cemetery, and the municipal council refused to accept this.110 Finally, in June 1887 Bombay corporation agreed to investigate the possibility either of building a mechanical crematorium at municipal expense or of expanding Sonapur to make additional space for the cremation of pauper Hindus.111 F. L. Charles, the acting municipal commissioner, was charged with collecting information and opinion on the matter. In compiling a list of eighteen questions about what constituted permissible cremation practice among Hindus, he highlighted the many obstacles that confronted the introduction of Western-style crematoria in India. Was it, he asked, essential that each body be cremated separately? Would individuals from a higher caste object to using a cremation oven in which the body of a lower-caste Hindu had been burned? Must the relatives of the deceased have direct access to the fuel so as to be able to light it themselves? Was there any objection to the dead body or the ashes after cremation being touched by persons of another caste from the deceased? Was it essential to have the place of cremation open to the sky? Was there any objection to the use of coal or coke

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instead of wood as fuel? Could iron be used at the cremation site? And so on.112 The questionnaire stirred up a storm of controversy that raged for months and in the course of which many different, often conflicting, claims were made, based on widely differing interpretations of the Hindu scriptures.113 After months of wrangling, the plan for a modern crematorium was shelved, but funds were sanctioned in May 1888 to close as many existing Hindu graveyards as possible and encourage low-caste cremation by more traditional methods instead.114 These measures had barely been adopted when in 1896 Bombay was confronted by a devastating epidemic of bubonic plague and an unprecedented upsurge in the number of bodies in need of disposal. T H E B OM BAY P L AG U E

Bubonic plague triggered the greatest crisis faced by Hindu cremation during the entire colonial era. The epidemic, and the measures taken by the colonial authorities to try to curb its spread, created an unprecedented need for cremation but also generated acute anxiety and sparked sustained hostility over restrictions on when and how plague corpses could be disposed of.115 Plague pushed the capacity of cremation sites in Bombay close to collapse; there were too many bodies, too little affordable fuel, and too little space for the burning of yet more corpses. Burning-grounds were almost overwhelmed by the shocking number of dead arriving and awaiting cremation. At 11 o’clock on a January morning in 1897 there were nineteen corpses undergoing cremation at Sonapur; six more were waiting. By 12.30 another eleven had arrived. One cadaver was barely reduced to ashes before another was put in its place.116 A European resident recalled seeing “day by day and night after night . . . the sky above the Queen’s Road crimson with the glow of funeral-pyres.”117 “The burial or burning of the dead,” wrote another, “became a hideous spectacle.” Bombay had morphed into “a city of the dead.”118 Europeans, whose hostility to open-air cremation had never entirely abated, saw fresh cause to argue that the practice should be banned or exiled to the outskirts.119 Brigadier-General William Gatacre, soon afterward appointed to oversee the city’s anti-plague measures, called for the closure of Sonapur (and most Muslim burial grounds), the prohibition of all further cremations, and strict regulations to control the movement of plague corpses through the streets. All this was necessary, he claimed, in order “to save the city.”120 Residents’ distaste and discomfort at the constant cremations in the city, and the fear that the Black Death might once again threaten both India and the West, were reflected in the iconography of the period. Dramatic sketches appeared in the Western press showing the incessant flow of corpses being carried to the burning ghat or lurid night scenes of Doms stoking the blazing pyres (see figure 9). Photographs circulated in India and abroad of near-naked corpses, cast

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Figure 9. Incinerating the Bodies of the Victims of the Plague in Bombay. Harper’s Weekly, June 3, 1899. Image courtesy of U. S. National Library of Medicine, Digital Collections.

onto pyres, awaiting burning, attended by weary Doms, and around them scattered all the debris and paraphernalia of an overworked, open-air crematorium.121 Some perhaps were intended to convey relatively objective information about how Hindus disposed of their dead; others were riddled with deep revulsion and primitive dread.

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For Indians too, the fear and confusion of the plague and the disruption it caused to customary funerary rites and procedures signaled a world turned upside down. Those who could fled Bombay, only to find the disease and the government’s draconian anti-plague measures pursuing them wherever they went. For those who remained in the city, there were constant alarms and distressing scenes, not least the frequent passage of the plague dead through the streets on their way to burial or cremation.122 In March 1897 the Bombay government declared it unlawful to remove any corpse for burial or cremation until an official death certificate had been issued. This might entail delay in the proper disposal of the dead beyond the requisite twenty-four hours. Since the medical experts believed that a plague corpse was “a focus for infection,” the government decreed that “all religious rites and ceremonies should . . . be curtailed as much as possible.”123 This left many Hindus feeling their religious rights were being systematically violated. In what officials termed “the secret disposal of corpses,” rather than comply with such regulations, some smuggled the bodies of plague victims out or concealed them within houses—until they were roughly uncovered by search parties of soldiers. Rumors circulated that policemen and petty officials were demanding bribes to allow bodies to pass for cremation.124 There were no mass plague pits, as in medieval Europe during the Black Death, but bodies seized were promptly and peremptorily buried or burned.125 The great mortality often meant that there were no family or caste members alive or able to carry the body to the cremation ghat. In such abnormal times, even high-caste women were obliged to take or accompany corpses to the pyre.126 By 1901, overall mortality had fallen, but the proportion of cremations in Bombay still exceeded 50 percent of those who died, with nearly a hundred bodies a day incinerated at the city’s burning ghats. The increase in the number and percentage of cremations by the 1900s compared to earlier decades in Bombay (see table 1) reflected the enormous scale of the plague crisis and the increased recourse by the municipal authorities to incineration as the safest and speediest means of disposing of corpses, especially those of the poorer classes, among whom mortality from the disease was exceptionally severe. C OU N T I N G C O R P SE S

In the absence of all-India data, it is impossible to calculate how many bodies were cremated in any given year. In 1913 Patrick Hehir referred to the “several hundred thousands of cremations that take place annually in India,” but he offered no evidence to support this impression and, as I suggest shortly, the true figure may have been substantially higher.127 Cremation did not figure in the statistical accountancy of British India, and only for India’s two leading cities do adequate data exist. From the annual municipal reports for Bombay from the 1860s onward it is clear that between a third and a half of all Hindu bodies were buried, not burned. Thus, in

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Table 1 Deaths and Cremations in Bombay City, Selected Years, 1850–1903

Year

Total Deaths Recorded

Number Cremated

Cremations as Percentage of All Deaths

1850 1867 1873 1877 1878 1879 1880 1886 1891 1893 1897 1899 1900 1901 1902 1903

17,279 16,088 16,450 34,828 28,097 23,640 22,399 21,232 25,241 24,652 49,264 58,389 81,412 61,648 50,431 52,331

4,191 3,354 4,786 8,858 7,060 5,885 5,569 6,354 8,040 7,987 22,818 28,623 35,480 33,672 22,108 23,623

24.26 20.85 29.09 25.43 25.13 24.89 24.86 29.93 31.85 32.40 46.32 49.02 43.58 54.62 43.84 45.14

Source: Deaths in Bombay during 1850 (Bombay: Education Society’s Press, 1851).

Bombay in 1867 just over a third (34.16 percent) of all Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains were cremated. In 1880 only 43.31 percent of Hindu corpses were cremated—5,569 out of the 13,037 Hindu deaths recorded that year.128 This figure in part represents those classes of Hindus whose bodies were not cremated: children under the age of two, adults who died from smallpox and other eruptive diseases, and ascetics. In addition, some Hindu communities did not burn their dead, such as the Lingayats, as well as low-caste and untouchable Hindus who practiced burial. However, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the bodies of more and more low-caste Hindus were being sent by the municipal authorities for cremation: in 1901 73.02 percent of all Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists were cremated.129 Apart from municipal policy, a further factor in the increasing rate of cremation was that as low-caste groups gained in wealth or aspired to higher status in the Hindu hierarchy, they abandoned burial for cremation. Behind this latter shift one can see an extension to death practices of what has been termed Sanskritization, as lower castes adopted the prestigious rites and social practices of the higher castes—the Brahmins, Rajputs, and Banias for whom cremation had long been the norm.130 Although mortuary rites are seldom mentioned in the scholarly literature on upward social and ritual mobility, some specific instances

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Questing Fire Table 2 Deaths and Cremations in Calcutta, Selected Years, 1907–1938

Year

Total Deaths Recorded

Number Cremated

Cremations as Percentage of All Deaths

1907 1908 1911 1912 1918 1919 1925 1926 1931 1932 1937 1938

37,285 30,519 25,933 27,252 33,847 36,575 39,721 43,885 35,302 35,550 40,435 45,782

20,783 18,000 16,807 18,143 22,549 24,831 21,326 25,013 20,882 21,388 24,651 31,876

55.74 58.98 64.81 66.57 66.62 67.89 53.69 57.00 59.15 60.16 60.96 69.63

Source: Report on the Municipal Administration of Calcutta, 1907–38.

have been cited, for example the untouchable Mahars of Maharashtra and lowcaste Nadars of Tamil Nadu.131 Hence, plague was not the only factor in increasing the demand for cremation. In its annual reports between 1907 and World War II, Calcutta’s municipal administration also provided information about the disposal of the city’s dead. Here the proportion of cremations to burials was consistently higher than in Bombay, accounting for well over 50 percent of deaths in most years and rising to almost 70 percent by 1938 (see table 2). The high percentage of cremations in Calcutta probably reflects the large share of the city’s population belonging to highcaste (bhadralok) communities—Brahmins, Vaidyas, and Kayasthas. However, as in Bombay, many low-caste and untouchable Hindus practiced burial rather than cremation. For instance, in 1910 there were 14,876 cremations in Calcutta. Of these only 4 (all of Europeans) took place in the modern crematorium recently opened on Lower Circular Road (see chapter 5). Of the remaining cremations more than half were at Nimtala Ghat (8,602) in the northern half of the city, close to the main area of Hindu and high-caste residence, with a further 3,808 at Kashi Mitra (north of Nimtala), and 2,462 at Shanagar (in the south, near Kalighat). Apart from these cremations, there were 3,421 Hindu burials at Kassia Bagan (to the east of the city) and at a few other locations, Hindus thus accounting for roughly a third of all burials (9,562) in the city that year.132 In a striking instance of corporeal mobility, each year a number of corpses were brought into the city’s cremation grounds from outlying towns and villages to be burned by the banks of Hooghly—4,220 alone in 1918, the year of the influenza pandemic.133

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C O N C LU SIO N

Shortly before World War I, forty to fifty thousand bodies were cremated each year in Calcutta and Bombay. By contrast, in the whole of Britain in 1923 there were fewer than two thousand cremations. However, given the demographic peculiarities of big-city life and the atypical social composition of India’s urban population, it would be extremely risky to extrapolate from the municipal data for Bombay and Calcutta to estimate the total number of cremations in India in any given year. City dwellers were generally more affluent than villagers and so better able to meet the costs of cremation, they included a disproportionate number of highcaste Hindus, the dumping of bodies in rivers and on waste ground had become less permissible in cities than in the countryside, and the municipal authorities increasingly turned to incineration to dispose of the pauper dead. But given that across the whole of India between 1904 and 1913 there were 7 to 8 million deaths a year in a population of around 315 million, of whom about 212 million (70 percent) were Hindus, even if only half the Hindu dead were cremated, that would still amount to two million cremations a year.134 Given the several other ways in which Hindus disposed of their dead, it is unlikely that the actual figure was really that high, but Hehir’s previously cited remark about several hundred thousand cremations a year may have been well short of the mark. Any such figure must remain highly speculative, but what the urban data do suggest is that cremation, far from diminishing, was on the increase—as populations grew, as the burning of the dead became more widely adopted among lowcaste Hindus, and as provincial governments and municipal authorities turned to it as the most culturally acceptable and sanitarily sound means of disposing of the Hindu dead. This was not, to be sure, modern cremation as it emerged in its mechanized, industrial form in Europe and North America from the 1870s onward, but neither was it—in the cities at least—the uninterrupted continuation of an ancient and immutable practice. As Bombay and Calcutta show, open-air cremation was undergoing significant changes even as it was being incorporated into a modern regime of urban governance. The experience of those cities suggests the enormous scale of the cremation enterprise in India and the immense material resources the incineration of so many corpses must have required.

4

Consuming Fire

What does it mean to burn the dead? Along with the body it consumed, fire was the essential ingredient in any Indian cremation. But fire, in India especially, had many different meanings and usages. As the preeminent historian of fire, Stephen Pyne, has fittingly observed, “Perhaps nowhere else [than in India] have the natural and the cultural parameters of fire converged so closely and so clearly.”1 In India’s igneous civilization fire was revered; elevated to divine status; and incorporated into countless ritual acts of devotion, dedication, purification, and sacrifice. Fire was essential to the rites of Brahminical Hinduism and to popular worship. It was no less so to modern Hindu reform movements like the Arya Samaj, for whose followers the fire rite (homa) was symbolic, ancient, and indispensable. Nor was the reverence given to fire confined to Hindus alone. For instance, while Parsis did not, as many outsiders assumed, actually worship fire, rather regarding it as an emblem or manifestation of the divine, fire for them, too, had a necessary role in both domestic rites and the “fire temples” of the Zoroastrian faith. “Fire worship” in whatever form was taken to be one of India’s defining characteristics.2 The ritual significance of fire is well documented.3 But this chapter argues that cremation and the funerary fire merit consideration within the context not just of religious beliefs and practices but also in relation to the economic, environmental, and technological history of modern India. Through its multiple engagements with fire, fuel, and flame, the cremation pyre has had a significant and distinctive place in the region’s ecology and material culture.4 Cremation gives potent expression to the “transformative power of fire, its fundamental ability to change worlds and affect our experience of its materiality.”5 Fire, as Gaston Bachelard put 76

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it, “links the small to the great, the hearth to the volcano, the life of a log to the life of the world.”6 This chapter accordingly essays a social ecology of fire in the modern Indian world, following a path that leads from the countryside to the city, from burning forests to domestic hearths and urban conflagrations, and hence to bodies condemned to fire or honored by the funerary flame. In all of this—the peregrinations of fire—the cremation ground is never far distant, materially or imaginatively. F I R E I N T H E F O R E ST

Fire has a long-established history in the human exploitation and anthropogenic transformation of the South Asian environment. Its power of destruction is incorporated in myth and imprinted in religion, as in the Mahabharata, where the god Agni consumes with fire the Khandava forest and all the creatures that dwell within it.7 The early and sustained use of fire to clear forests or convert savanna grasslands for grazing and settled agriculture is well attested and clear from the archaeological and epigraphical record.8 In much more recent times, forest fires, whether accidental or as a consequence of incendiarism, featured prominently in India’s colonial forest policy as one of the main dangers, if not the principal threat, to woodland conservation and commercial management. Some tree species, including those most prized, like sandalwood, teak, sal, and Himalayan pine, were regarded by foresters as particularly susceptible to destruction by fire and so in need of special protection. Forest fires had many reasons and causes: lightning strikes, unextinguished campfires, discarded cheroots. In 1876 a third of a plantation of casuarina trees near Bangalore was destroyed by fire caused by a spark from a passing train.9 Far more frequently in the mindset of the colonial forester, responsibility lay with the peasants and tribal communities living in the forest or at its margins. Patches of woodland were sometimes torched to facilitate hunting or scare off predatory beasts, but the main perpetrators were thought to be the practitioners of “slash-and-burn” or swidden cultivation, who burned the tree cover to clear the ground and fertilize the soil with its ashes, or peasants and pastoralists from the forest fringes, who during the dry season fired the old grass in order to encourage fresh growth for their grazing animals after the rains.10 A report presented by India’s foresters to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1851 deplored the “almost uncontrolled destruction of the indigenous forests” due to the “careless habits of the native population” in India.11 A Bombay government resolution in 1858 squarely blamed shifting cultivation, calling it “this destructive system of cultivation.” Officials deplored the fact that, even in Thana district close to Bombay, there was “not a night during eight months of the year in which fires are not seen blazing on the hillsides.” Sometimes these conflagrations were “very

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extensive, consuming several square miles of forest.”12 Here, to the mind of the trained forestry officer, was fire at its most senseless and destructive. From its inception in 1864, the Indian Forest Service regarded fire as out of place in the forest, inimical to its scientific management and profitable exploitation. For reasons of climate and vegetation, as well as invidious local practice, forest fires were seen as a problem of exceptional gravity in India, far more so than in temperate Europe.13 At a conference convened in Simla in 1875, Dietrich Brandis, India’s first inspector-general of forests, complained that “jungle fires” during the hot season were so predictable as to be “an annual institution.” He put fire control at the top of the agenda; “fire conservancy” was the forest department’s “most important task.” It was essential “to keep out fires from our forests,” he declared; no measure was of greater importance for the “improvement” of India’s woodlands.14 Firing the forest, remarked one of Brandis’s successors, Berthold Ribbentrop, in 1900, might be an “immemorial custom” in India, but it was “incompatible with increasing civilization.”15 To read the account of an early forestry officer, like that of James Forsyth in the Central Provinces (Madhya Pradesh), is to enter a world in which fire was abhorred. A single swidden clearing could, he averred, ruin three or four acres of valuable teak forest, reducing it (in terms eerily suggestive of the Hindu pyre) to “a heap of ashes, strewn with the charred remains of the larger limbs and trunks.” Once the “virgin forest” had been felled and burned, it would never fully recover, leaving only tangled thorn scrub “impenetrable to man or beast.” Thus, “for untold ages,” he believed, the “wild tribes” of central India had been “devastating the forests” by fire.16 Forsyth was writing in the early 1870s. For decades thereafter colonial foresters sought to ban swidden cultivation and bring the annual cycle of forest firing and grass burning under control. Firebreaks, some three hundred feet in width, were cut through state forests to prevent or contain the spread of fire and were systematically cleared of their vegetation.17 But as tighter restrictions were imposed on the forests and the grass, timber, and grazing lands they contained, so resentment mounted among local communities accustomed to regard the forest as their own resource. Fees levied on the collection of wood from state forests for domestic fuel and building purposes were particularly resented. In a petition especially germane to this discussion, villagers in Godavari district in the Madras Presidency complained in 1913 that due to the heavy taxes on forest produce, they could only with difficulty obtain or afford the wood they needed to cremate their dead.18 But even within colonial forestry policy, fire was not without its ambiguities. While writers like Forsyth imagined that there had once been pristine woodlands in India, unspoiled by anthropogenic fire, research showed that fire had long been integral to the natural regeneration of the country’s forests. There followed a protracted debate among foresters as to whether forest fires were really as destructive as previously claimed. Some tree species appeared relatively fire tolerant and

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might even benefit from periodic exposure to low-intensity fires, while others, such as sandalwood, suffered irreparable harm from fire.19 While fire was denied a legitimate place in the forest in some contexts, it was afforded appreciative recognition in others. Fire, as used by the cattle keeper and shifting cultivator, might be counted as destructive (though even there it had its logic), but fire was also written into the colonial taxonomy of trees—through scientific studies of the calorific properties of different timbers or through their varying suitability for use as domestic fuel, for iron smelting and charcoal making, and as raw material for torches and incense.20 Alongside the negative representation of charred trunks and smoldering tree stumps, a scene so akin to the wreckage and rhetoric of the cremation pyre, there existed a very different fire aesthetic. Although the deliberate firing of the forest was condemned outright, the resulting conflagration, particularly at night when the hills were lit up with a fiery glow, elicited a very different sensibility.21 Richard Temple, who as chief commissioner of the Central Provinces in the 1860s had been an early advocate of forest conservation, was one of many Western observers to regard forest fires as one of India’s most dramatic sights. In a lecture given in London in 1881 he recalled such fires as among “the most magnificent spectacles” it was possible to witness: “The way in which the devouring element rushes over the country, travelling sometimes at the rate of several miles an hour—the wild animals fleeing before it in terror, the native inhabitants of the forests sometimes even being caught in the flames and burned to death, poor men, and occasionally even mounted Europeans having to gallop away to escape from the vast rushing conflagration—all these things constitute a wonderful sight.”22 How Temple could regard the burning to death of Indians trapped in forest fires as a “wonderful sight” is hard to fathom; deaths from this cause were real enough.23 But, not least when applied to fire, spectacle (a term already encountered in relation to the cremation pyre) implied both physical danger and ocular delight, an aesthetic of distress and horror but also of fascination and excitement. FUELING CITIES

India’s forests were more than a source of “big timber” of the kind that could be used for shipbuilding, gun carriages, furniture making, and house construction. Forests also provided firewood for the everyday needs of village communities as well as for transport, industry, and domestic consumption. Among historians of South Asia firewood has been a neglected commodity and yet, however seemingly humble, it was essential for a great many economic and social activities. Anxieties about the dwindling supply and soaring costs of firewood in India date back to the 1830s. In Madras in 1852—still a modest-sized city with a population below half a million—the annual consumption of firewood and charcoal was estimated at

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around 99,000 tons a year.24 In 1863 wood for fuel was said by the provincial conservator of forests to be scarce in Bombay and to have more than doubled in price in recent years, from Rs. 3 to Rs. 8 a candy or Rs. 24 a ton. Despite rising costs, the urban population was consuming firewood at the voracious rate of 300,000 tons a year.25 In some north Indian cities the poor were reckoned to spend an eighth of their income on firewood alone, and charcoal (used in many crafts and industries) cost as much as wheat.26 The creation of hill stations like Simla in the north or Ootacamund in the Nilgiri hills in the south, and the rise by the middle decades of the nineteenth century of a fuel-hungry regime of railroads, river steamers, and factories, made colonial observers acutely aware of the difficulty of maintaining adequate supplies of firewood, a problem exacerbated by the use of wood rather than coal (as in industrial Britain) to meet burgeoning energy needs. With few alternative sources available and costs soaring, fears of a firewood “famine” became acute, impelling provincial governments and incentivizing private speculators to act.27 In order to augment the rapidly dwindling supply of wood from local forests and native scrubland, Australian exotics were introduced, transforming the landscape and reshaping the ecosystem. Stands of fast-growing eucalyptus were planted across the Nilgiris, and extensive plantations of casuarina were established among coastal dunes north and south of Madras. In the mid-1870s a third of all land directly under the forest department in the Madras Presidency was assigned to “firewood reserves.”28 Elsewhere, plantations dedicated to producing firewood were created alongside irrigation canals and railroad tracks.29 Until they belatedly switched to coal and coke, railroad locomotives devoured between 250 and 300 pounds of wood for every mile they traveled; as late as 1891 India’s railroads burned 340,000 tons of wood in a single year.30 Other high-consumption users included river steamers, brickworks, sugar boilers, and limekilns.31 The full extent of the firewood trade is difficult to measure, but some local examples help suggest the wider picture. Bombay city drew its supplies by road, rail, and sea from a vast hinterland. Increased restrictions on access to forests and forest products in Thana district, to the north of the city, provided added incentives to import firewood from far more distant locations.32 Much of it, shipped by Muslim and Parsi contractors, came from the forests of the Western Ghats and was transported by boat from Goa and other ports along the Konkan and Kanara coast to jetties in Bombay dedicated to handling firewood and timber. It is indicative of the scale and commercial value of this trade that in 1882 Bombay municipality issued 523 licenses for wood sold in bulk (including firewood), 888 for wood sold in bundles, 195 for sandalwood (some of it used for cremation pyres), and 217 for timber in general, worth in all Rs. 10,000 in license fees.33 In 1898–99, at a time of high commodity prices due to concurrent famine and plague, the municipality received Rs. 67,832 in revenue from the sale of firewood and a further Rs. 121,375

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from sales of timber.34 Modern Mumbai has been conceived of as a “hydraulic city,” dominated by the social lives and political usages of water.35 But considering how much imported wood ended up as fuel for domestic hearths, for transport, industry, and cremation pyres, colonial Bombay might no less be considered a city founded on, and lived through, fire. Calcutta, too, imported wood from a huge hinterland—from the forests of Burma and Assam, from the foothills of the eastern Himalaya and the Andamans. It also drew large quantities of timber and firewood from the tidal forests and mangrove swamps of the Sundarbans in the Bengal delta, where the principal tree harvested commercially was sundri (Heritiera minor). Yielding a timber suited for shipbuilding, house construction, and furniture making, the slow-growing sundri forests were said to be “among the most valuable of the Government forest properties in India,” but by the 1870s they were being stripped of their best timber, and the state had to intervene to protect remaining stands.36 Unlike the interior plains and hills, these estuarine forests were seldom threatened by fire, though they were periodically devastated by cyclones from the Bay of Bengal. Small amounts of sundri were used locally as fuel; far larger quantities were shipped to Calcutta, where the wood commanded a high price and was particularly prized for funeral pyres.37 Firewood was big business. Of the 5.2 million cubic feet of sundri extracted from the Sundarbans in 1909–10, 1.5 million cubic feet was for use as firewood. In 1915 sundri firewood sold for between Rs. 35 and 40 per 100 maunds.38 Across British India in 1892–93 the value of timber extracted from state forests was Rs. 54.3 million, but the value of wood sold for fuel was nearly double that figure, Rs. 106.8 million.39 In 1907 the outturn of wood amounted to 4.7 million tons; of this roughly 84 percent was for use as fuel.40 Although fire had been practically outlawed in the forest, consumption by fire was the ultimate destiny of a large part of the wood taken from those same forests. P R OV I SIO N I N G T H E P Y R E

The funeral pyre was an assemblage of many different things—most obviously a human body, but also wood and other combustible matter, ghee, oil, camphor, and cloth. Each of these “things” had a material history and a cultural provenance of its own.41 For instance, in India’s textile-rich culture, and without a coffin to contain and conceal the body, the cloth used in connection with cremation was a significant marker of wealth, identity, and status.42 In some places, as at Benares on the banks of the Ganges, bodies were shrouded from head to foot, cocooned in calico cloth: men in white, women in red. Elsewhere the dead were carried through the streets to the burning ghat, the upper body exposed, but with the lower parts wrapped in cotton, which for twentieth-century nationalists might be the handspun, handwoven khadi cloth so favored by Gandhi. For paupers in India and

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across the diaspora a simple winding-sheet was used, made from the cheapest cloth available. Conversely, for the rich and revered this simple wrap might be replaced by white silk; in the case of princes, the body might be draped in gold-embroidered fabric or fine-woven Kashmiri shawls. At the burning ghat, the cloth with which a body had been covered might sometimes serve as payment for the Doms who tended the pyre. Thus, each ingredient involved in provisioning cremation offered its own point of entry into a wider material culture. But wood and the means of igniting and burning it were clearly among the most essential components. While human incineration in Europe and North America quickly turned, even in the 1870s, to other means combustion—coal, coke, gas, and ultimately electricity— in India cremation continued to follow the customary practice of a wood pyre, piled three or four feet high with logs and brushwood. Nineteenth-century photographs of Benares, like that taken by Samuel Bourne in 1865, show moored boats and landing stages stacked high with wood for the pyres on Manikarnika Ghat (see figure 10). Western visitors to Bombay’s Sonapur cremation ground were shocked by the sheer quantity of wood they saw stacked up, ready for burning, and hence by implication the great number of human bodies consumed by fire.43 It followed, too, that timber merchants often occupied premises close to the ghats where so much of the wood they supplied was burned. In Bombay the landing stages assigned for the unloading of wood lay conveniently close to the burning-ground on Queen’s Road. In Calcutta many of the main timber yards nestled close to Nimtala cremation ground, on Nimtala Ghat Road and Upper Chitpore Road.44 Merchants supplying wood to the ghats, as in Benares, were reputed to be prosperous.45 As Jonathan Parry reminds us, death in that city was “very big business.”46 Except among the poor, who might have no choice in the matter, the wood used was not randomly selected. What Hindu cremation might lack in terms of technical sophistication was compensated for by great cultural sensitivity when it came to the ingredients of the pyre. In relation to European mortuary history, Thomas Laqueur has referred to the “necrobotany” of trees such as churchyard yews and weeping willows, redolent of associations with death, mourning, and remembrance.47 Hindu India had its own equivalent to this in the kinds of firewood and timber desired for the funeral pyre. Cremation tapped into South Asia’s rich biodiversity, with the wood selected, where possible, for the heat it generated as well as for its fragrance, costliness, and religious connotations.48 Equally, some unfavored woods were avoided.49 So, too, at first was Australian eucalyptus, despite its combustibility, on account of its foreignness; in time, diminishing supplies and the soaring cost of wood made the use of this now nativized timber inevitable. In Calcutta, as we have seen, the preferred fuel for funeral pyres was sundri wood, extracted from the Sundarbans and shipped to the city in huge quantities.50 Less costly, locally available woods, such as babul (Acacia arabica) or in rural Punjab dhak (Butea frondosa) and ber (Sizyphus jujuba), were frequently used.51 In

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Figure 10. Burning Ghat, Benares. Photograph, ca. 1863, by Samuel Bourne. BL Images Online © British Library Board.

Kathiawar in western Gujarat Sinclair Stevenson identified bavala (babul) as the wood preferred for cremation.52 Like many other funeral woods, such as tamarind and mango, babul had homely, domestic, culinary, and medicinal associations; its twigs were used as tooth cleaners. These, however, were ideal prescriptions. In practice, given the shortness of time between death and cremation, almost any available or affordable wood might have to be used. In Bombay, too, the wood chosen for cremation pyres came, wherever possible, from certain designated species, the management committee stipulating the size and quality of the wood desired. In the 1880s contractors for Sonapur were asked to supply Goan dukut or amlee logs no shorter than the average length of a corpse (taken as being 4½ to 5½ feet).53 Both the quantity of the timber supplied and the price at which it was sold to mourners were fixed, and the contractor was expected to hold at least one month’s supply of wood in reserve at the burningground; this was set at five hundred candies for the dry season and two thousand for the monsoon months, when considerably more wood was needed to burn a corpse. However, in one instance the contractor failed to meet his obligations, claiming that he had had to increase the sale price to mourners because of higher

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than anticipated rates at the dock where the timber was unloaded. The management committee took the contractor, a Parsi named Dorabjee Jeewajee Choksee, to court, where the judge concluded that Choksee had broken his agreement by overcharging purchasers. He was directed to pay the plaintiffs’ costs and to vacate the premises he had been renting from the Sonapur management committee.54 Throughout India and in the diaspora, families who could afford it used at least some quantity of sandalwood (Santalum album), if only a token chip or billet. The most prized and prestigious of all India’s aromatic woods, to be cremated on a pyre consisting, even in part, of sandalwood was “a very high distinction.”55 A small, “delicate” tree, sandalwood was largely confined to the deciduous forests of Mysore and Coorg. The fragrant yellow-brown heartwood was among the most expensive and sought-after timber anywhere in the world. Depending on quality and size, in the 1890s and 1900s sandalwood sold for Rs. 300 to Rs. 500 a ton, with exports annually valued at more than Rs. 1 million.56 Some of the best-quality material was exported to China for carving and to make incense.57 As with sundri, colonial foresters took exceptional measures to protect sandalwood from destruction and overexploitation, thereby contributing, however unwittingly, to the sustainability of India’s most esteemed funeral timbers. If Hindu cremation pyres caused olfactory outrage among Westerners, among Hindus the cool, cleansing scent of sandalwood conveyed very positive sensory and scriptural associations. Vulnerable to fire in its natural habitat, with its high oil content sandalwood burned with a fierce flame, emitting a dense and pungent smoke that was said to make it “more or less unfit . . . for fuel,” but which conveniently disguised the smell of burning flesh.58 The quantity of wood consumed by cremation varied widely according to affluence and availability; the rich could afford to burn more wood, of better quality and at greater cost, than the poor or the municipal authorities who paid for pauper cremations. Estimates suggest that between 300 and 500 pounds of wood were required to cremate an adult body, but figures range as high as 800 pounds.59 Parry cites a figure of 5 maunds (410 lbs.) as a minimum in 1980s Benares, with those who could afford it using up to 15 maunds (1,230 lbs.).60 When Dayananda Sarasvati, founder of the Arya Samaj, was cremated in 1883, his funeral pyre consisted of 2 maunds of sandalwood as well as 8 of “common fuel,” or roughly 820 pounds of wood in all.61 The pyre on which Mohandas Gandhi was cremated in 1948 (see figure 11) required 15 maunds of sandalwood, 4 maunds of ghee, a maund of coconuts, plus large quantities of camphor and incense.62 In 1961 when Govind Ballabh Pant, a Brahmin and home minister in the government of India, died in Delhi, his pyre contained a monumental 21 maunds (nearly a ton) of dhak and a further two tons of sandalwood.63 Such Homeric pyres were rare. If we take a more modest figure of 500 pounds as closer to the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century norm, then almost 5,100

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Figure 11. Wood for the pyre: Gandhi’s cremation, January 31, 1948. Photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson © Magnum Photos.

tons of wood would have been required in Bombay for the 22,818 bodies cremated there in the plague year 1897, or nearly 3,500 tons for the 15,489 bodies consumed in Calcutta in 1917.64 In 1953 it was estimated that the four burning ghats in Calcutta disposed of a hundred corpses a day, the cremation of which required 600 maunds of wood, on average 6 maunds for each body or roughly 8,000 tons of wood over the course of the year.65 It was often argued in the West that cremation was, as we would now put it, “environmentally friendly” since it took up less space than the ever-expanding cemeteries and left land free for more productive purposes. But in colonial India cremation was (like many of its industries and modes of transport) a fuel-hungry technology reliant on the consumption of vast quantities of wood. In terms of the volume of wood consumed and its wholesale (and often wasteful) extraction from the countryside, the amount of smoke produced, and the quantity of ash and other detritus that passed into tanks and rivers, openair cremation bore a heavy environmental cost. T H E K E R O SE N E R EVO LU T IO N

Wood was not the only funeral fuel. Hand-pressed cakes of dried cow dung, brattis, were also used in cremation. According to one source, more than a thousand

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of these were brought by the village Mahar to a Maratha’s cremation and laid alongside the body, with mourners adding more to the pyre as it was lit.66 This prodigious use of cow-dung cakes appears to have been a practice largely confined to Maharashtra and the Deccan, though recent attempts to reform cremation in India have returned to cow dung as a possibly less polluting and environmentally destructive alternative to wood. As well as having sacred associations as one of the five products of the cow, brattis brought an element of domestic life and women’s labor to the funeral pyre. While men cut timber in the forest and transported it to towns and cities for sale, it was mainly women who gathered firewood for household use. They also collected cow dung, mixed it with chaff and straw, and pressed it by hand into flat, round cakes that were then left on walls and the sides of buildings to dry in the sun. Unlike firewood, brattis were not a traded commodity and had no commercial value, but they nonetheless supplied up to a third of domestic fuel needs.67 Without them, the demand for firewood—at home or at the pyre—would have been even greater. The most innovative nineteenth-century addition to India’s urban fire regime was kerosene (paraffin). A product of the emerging petroleum industry, kerosene was at first produced only in small quantities in India, supplies coming mostly from the United States and southern Russia. In 1887, thirty million gallons entered India’s ports, with a value of Rs. 12 million.68 Six years later, in 1893, sixty-four million gallons were imported; by 1911 this had risen to more than seventy-five million gallons, with a value in excess of £2 million, even though by that date India’s kerosene increasingly came from oilfields in British Burma.69 It is indicative of kerosene’s growing popularity and widespread distribution that in 1882 Bombay municipality issued 23 licenses to wholesale kerosene vendors and 672 to retail outlets.70 One of kerosene’s many practical uses was to provide lighting for streets and homes, and in this role foreign oil rapidly displaced traditional sources of illumination such as coconut and vegetable oil.71 As a means of lighting streets (and cremation grounds), kerosene was soon superseded by gas and electricity; as early as 1910 the kerosene oil streetlamps in Calcutta were regarded as an anachronism, but at their peak, ten years earlier, there had been more than two thousand of them.72 In other areas of everyday life kerosene, cheap, convenient, and efficient, more than held its own. It was so extensively used that it became known, from its proximate source, as “bazaar oil.” In 1888 one British visitor remarked that kerosene was “now almost universally used for lighting by the native population.”73 A few years later the Times of India declared: “We seem to be approaching the time when kerosene will displace every other fuel for cooking by sheer force of economy.”74 So crucial had kerosene become, to urban life especially, that at the end of World War I, when it was in short supply, the oil figured alongside food grains and cloth as one of the essential commodities city dwellers lacked or, at a time of exorbitant prices, could no longer afford.75

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Kerosene had other uses. It was recommended as a disinfectant, and by the 1900s, as the role of anopheles mosquitoes in the transmission of malaria began to be understood, it was sprayed on stagnant pools and watercourses to kill their larvae.76 Even the tins in which kerosene was sold entered everyday use, as water carriers and as cladding for slum dwellings.77 However, as a modern means of fire making, kerosene, strictly speaking, had no place in funerary practice. A claim made in 1884 that attendants poured “10 bottles of kerosene oil” over a pyre at Sonapur to get it to burn was angrily dismissed as untrue.78 In reality, though, in India and abroad it was sometimes used, especially when the wood was damp or rain made it difficult to ignite, a purpose for which coconut oil or ghee would previously have been used. But kerosene, a highly volatile fuel, also brought new hazards to the city. As elsewhere in the world, urban India had long been prone to fierce conflagrations in which lives were lost and property destroyed. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries all of India’s major cities, including Bombay in 1803 and 1876, experienced destructive fires. But the arrival of kerosene, its sale, storage, and home use, added greatly to the fire risk. Municipal authorities responded by prohibiting the storage of large quantities of kerosene or by restricting it to locations where it might pose less of a danger.79 Nevertheless, house fires and accidental deaths due to burning kerosene proliferated from the early 1870s. To cite just one of many instances, in 1875 at a wedding in Meerut, a case of kerosene left near a burning wick exploded, killing two people and injuring five others. Such deaths were certainly not confined to India; when the Times of India remarked in 1876 that kerosene-related accidents were “daily becoming more numerous,” it was referring to recent fatalities in London as well as in Cawnpore.80 At work, in the home, even in their religious observances, men, women, and children were all vulnerable. In one bizarre and tragic episode in 1898 in Maulvi Bazaar, Sylhet, a man dressed as the monkey god Hanuman, with a tail stuffed with jute waste and rags, accidentally collided with a kerosene lamp and, being unable to remove his costume quickly enough, burned to death.81 Across India as a whole the growing number of fires and accidents caused by burning kerosene was also increasing common domestic incidents, often involving women. When lighting a kerosene stove or lamp or sprinkling kerosene on a reluctant fire, women accidentally ignited their clothing—a sari or shawl caught fire—and they suffered serious burns or fatal injuries.82 THE GENDERED FLAME

These tragic deaths demonstrated the ever-present danger that accompanied the use of kerosene as a domestic fuel, but its propensity for explosive violence and destructive ferocity was also manifested in cremation and, still more,

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in self-immolation and murder. Most of the domestic incidents reported were recorded as being accidental, but many were not. On investigation not a few kerosene-related deaths were shown to be cases of wife murder, and the husband or in-laws were charged with intentionally causing the wife’s death.83 The sheer number of such deaths aroused suspicion. In 1906 there were eighty-nine reported deaths from burns in Calcutta alone, the great majority of women. But alongside these supposedly accidental deaths, or murders, there were many other incidents ascribed to self-immolation and suicide. In Calcutta in 1918–19 there were twenty recorded deaths or serious injuries due to burns; some were of men but most were women, who poured kerosene over their clothes and set themselves alight.84 Such deaths, or near-deaths, by fire return us to the violent scenes and savage ambiguities of sati, a rite that, despite its formal abolition in 1829, had never entirely ceased to exist or to be lauded in some quarters (see chapter 2). These deaths raise, once more, complex questions of means and intent, coercion and desire, of women’s agency and female victimization. Sati, as Ania Loomba put it, was “one of the most spectacular forms of patriarchal violence,” and all three of those terms—spectacle (though perhaps not quite as Loomba meant it), patriarchy, and violence—are highly relevant to this discussion.85 And yet, as Tanika Sarkar reminds us, until the mid-1820s “suttee” was described by the British as “self-immolation,” as a self-willed act, and only subsequently as “widow burning.” And, as she further notes, in Bengal satis were commonly referred to as women who consumed or ate fire, and not, passively, as “women who were devoured by fire.”86 In these late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century deaths sati was resurrected in a new form, the kerosene-fueled flame a surrogate for, or adjunct to, the conventional funeral pyre. In highlighting the role of fire in the destruction of women’s lives, these deaths further illustrate a pattern, appallingly still found, in which women in India have been far more likely to die from burns than men.87 Under the headline “Suttee in Calcutta,” the Times of India carried a report in March 1913 about the widow of a man who had been an assistant in a city firm. Aged forty-five at the time of his death, she was said to have been left “inconsolable,” and while preparations were being made for the removal of his body to Nimtala Ghat, she “quietly went on to the terrace of the house and after saturating her body with kerosene oil set fire to herself.” The building was “practically burnt to a cinder before the inmates . . . became aware of her terrible fate.”88 Another article four months later referred, quite casually, to the “revival of suttee,” which the author took to mean “voluntary suttee,” or female suicide by means of kerosene.89 In 1929 the Times of India reported that a “grave suspicion” now existed in “semiofficial circles” in Poona about the alarming number of cases in which young girls and widows had burned to death, supposedly while lighting or trimming kerosene lamps. At least twenty-five deaths due to burns had been registered at the Sassoon Hospital over the previous twelve months. The understanding was that these were

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not in fact accidents but domestic murders or sati-like suicides: “Those acquainted with the religious customs of the country,” the writer observed, would be aware that “the victims have either voluntarily or at the persuasion of others adopted a variation of the now illegal custom of suttee.” Ignoring the fact that many of these cases concerned city-dwelling wives and widows (as was also the case in Calcutta), the article went on to suggest this was a problem of rural backwardness, as “among a large proportion of the illiterate peasantry” there persisted “the same horror of widowhood as there was 50 years ago.” Sati might be illegal, but widows still “considered it a religious duty,” and one which, with the aid of kerosene, they “now performed in such a manner as not openly to violate the law.”90 But sati, in its new incarnation, was clearly both a rural and an urban phenomenon. In Kathiawar in 1920 Sinclair Stevenson described the horrendous fate of young widows burned to death. “We English,” she wrote, “believe sati to be extinct; [Indian] reformers in certain districts of India will tell us differently.” Some were poisoned, others burned to death. “It is quite simple to soak a heavy wadded quilt in paraffin, to tie a young widow up in it, pour more oil over her, set fire to it and lock her up in a room.” The neighbors were then told that the woman’s clothing had accidentally caught fire while cooking or, “like a faithful wife,” she had committed sati. A simple but chilling phrase was used to allude to this widow murder: “paraffin is cheap.”91 The scale of this “revival” is startling. In what is bound to be an imperfect guide to an undoubtedly much wider phenomenon, the Times of India reported only one case of sati (or “alleged” or “attempted suttee”) between 1900 and 1909, but thereafter the number of cases began to rise. There were five cases—all resulting in the woman’s death—between 1910 and 1919; a further five between 1920 and 1929 (including one in which a woman, foiled in her attempt to commit sati on her husband’s pyre, died by jumping down a well); and thirteen cases between 1930 and 1939 (four of which failed). Of the twenty-four satis, or attempted satis, reported between 1900 and 1939, seventeen occurred between 1926 and 1938, suggesting a strong upward trend either in the actual incidence of sati or in the reporting of such incidents, many of which only reached the press because they resulted in the trial of relatives or others charged with murder, abetting suicide, or unlawful assembly.92 It should be borne in mind, too, that these cases did not include the sati-like deaths or suicides from kerosene burns in Calcutta noted earlier, so the overall scale of such incidents must have been substantially greater than these figures alone suggest. Some of the episodes reported in the press recall the horrific and violent scenes identified in the sati debates a century earlier, and while some were private, secretive, self-inflicted deaths, of which even family members had no prior warning, others re-created the very public spectacle of many earlier satis.93 However, they also suggest novel influences, of which the quick-burning, savage power of

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kerosene was one conspicuous example. Also, even though contemporary reports seldom present it as such, this resurgence of sati and sati-like deaths in the early twentieth century can be seen as part of a growing political phenomenon and not merely evidence of the strange persistence of an outdated superstition. The death of women by fire reflected the domination, physically and discursively, of men over women’s lives and women’s bodies, a domination that in certain respects was growing rather than diminishing in the modern age. This can be linked to the “masculinist ideology” propagated by the Hindu revivalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the growth of a militant nationalism that celebrated what were represented as traditional Hindu values concerning the ideal wife and self-sacrificing widow.94 PUNITIVE FIRE

Clearly, burning did not always signify a reverential rite and the respectful disposal of the dead. In certain contexts in India as elsewhere, it represented quite the reverse: the deliberate desecration and punitive obliteration of the human body. An act that might otherwise be intended to honor was deployed instead to rain punitive violence upon the body and to preclude, rather than nurture, any display of reverence toward the relics of the dead.95 This is what Laqueur refers to as the “willfully brutal disposal of the dead” and, citing Achilles dragging the body of Hector, the slain Trojan, through the dust behind his chariot, as the “degradation of the corpse.”96 In India, in a calculated inversion of customary cremation rites, fire was one of the principal means by which this abusive and violent degradation was enacted and communicated to the community to which the victim or victims belonged. Two examples of this use of funerary fire to serve the purpose of vengeance and deterrence can readily be cited. The first relates to British acts of retribution during and following the 1857–58 mutiny and rebellion. Many illustrations of violence against the bodies of rebels have been noted by historians, including firing captured sepoys from the muzzles of cannon.97 Another instance was the avenging army of General James Neill of the Madras Fusiliers in July 1857 as he entered the recaptured city of Cawnpore, where European men, women, and children had earlier been massacred by insurgents. In a deliberate reversal of Indian funeral custom, Neill ordered that the corpses of Hindu rebels were to be buried and those of Muslims burned. The fire that might in other circumstances have sanctified Hindus’ death was denied them and used instead to desecrate Muslim bodies and prevent their memorialization as heroes and martyrs. To add to the victims’ horror, the rebels were told “to their certain damnation” of their fate before being executed.98 A second example also relates to the burning of Muslim bodies, this time following the periodic revolts of the Mappilas (“Moplahs”) of Malabar in present-day

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Kerala.99 Concerned at the way in which the interred bodies of the “fanatics” who died in the outbreaks of 1841 and 1843, or were executed for participation in the disturbances, were “held in honourable remembrance” in mosques and shrines, the government of Madras and its local officials pondered ways to prevent further manifestations of this “dangerous feeling of reverence.” Some bodies were denied veneration by being thrown into disused wells.100 Another proposal following the 1841 uprising (and, I believe, not actually implemented) was for the rebel’s body to be defiled by being buried with a dog or some other “unclean” animal. In fact, the corpses, interred by the army, were exhumed by Mappilas and, in defiance of the British, given a martyr’s burial.101 The issue of how best to dispose of Mappila bodies and at the same time break the community’s “proud spirit” assumed fresh urgency in September 1859, when the district magistrate, H. V. Conolly, was hacked to death by a party of escaped Mappila prisoners, who were then tracked down and killed or executed by the authorities. District officials in Malabar recognized the intensity (“the horror” as they described it) of Muslim feeling about the burning of bodies—an act of deliberate desecration—but the provincial government insisted that this was “the most complete method of annihilating the remains” and of ensuring that nothing remained to be enshrined at a site of veneration or inspire future outbreaks.102 The bodies of five Mappilas were accordingly hung in chains near where they had been captured and killed. Their corpses, greatly decomposed, were transported under armed escort to Calicut (Kozhikode), the district headquarters, where, on a vacant plot but within sight of Muslim onlookers, they were unceremoniously burned by low-caste Hindus. Even this was not enough for the authorities. The ashes and bone fragments that survived the fire were carefully gathered up and buried in the walls of Calicut jail. Malabar’s joint magistrate reported: “There is, I trust, not a chance left of the remains of these men ever receiving any mark of respect.”103 This calculated annihilation did not, though, prevent a rumor circulating among Muslims that the “bodies of the murderers when thrown into the fire were miraculously taken up into heaven unpolluted by the flames.”104 The punitive treatment meted out to the bodies of Mappila insurgents was the more striking in that the British were wary of appearing, even on otherwise compelling sanitary grounds, to interfere with the chaotic state of the crowded Mappila burial grounds in Calicut.105 The burning by the British of Mappila bodies had a clearly political rationale and was intended as a visible deterrent to others. But it was not only the bodies of Muslim “fanatics” that were treated in this way. In the early 1920s a prolonged guerrilla insurgency, known as the Rampa rebellion, flared up among the predominantly tribal population of the Agency tracts in the northern districts of the Madras Presidency. When rebel leader Alluri Sitarama Raju was finally captured and killed in 1924, his body was first sent to the British officer in charge of Agency

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operations and an Indian tahsildar (district officer) for identification and then burned without rite or ceremony; this, however, failed to scotch rumors that he was still alive.106 The use of cremation to obliterate the dead and intimidate the living has persisted into the postindependence era. In 1955, for example, a gang of dacoits in central India, led by Man Singh and his son, was finally broken up and its members captured. The two bandit leaders were executed at Gwalior and their bodies “exhibited” on the parade ground for twelve hours before being taken by truck to the town’s burning ghat for cremation. No members of the public were allowed to witness the cremation, and their ashes were disposed of secretively.107 More recently a crude recourse to burning the dead has been used following extrajudicial killings by the police and army to destroy the evidence of their unauthorized action. For instance, in April 1981, thirteen insurgents belonging to the tribal Gond community were shot by armed police in Adilabad district in Andhra Pradesh; the bodies were not handed over to relatives but burned in a mass cremation. “This,” notes historian Bhangya Bhukya, “was seriously against Gond tradition. Gonds bury their dead.”108 I N C I N E R AT IO N A N D T H E N O N H UM A N D E A D

There are other histories of fire to which the modern history of human cremation in India might be connected. One of these relates to the possibility of cremation (or alternative means of disposing of the dead) as creating its own ecological niche. As we have seen in the previous chapter, to the disgust and dismay of colonial sanitarians, the Parsi corpses exposed on the towers of silence gave food to vultures and kites; the shallow graves of Muslims, Christians, and low-caste Hindus were plundered by jackals and dogs; and the bodies disposed of, sans burial or cremation, in rivers and on waste ground fed fish, birds, and beasts that feasted on human flesh. The physical identities of the dead—as body, corpse, cadaver, carrion—sat in uneasy proximity to each other. Times of severe famine or epidemic mortality propelled the human dead into the hungry world of nature. In his book about the man-eating tigers of Kumaon, Jim Corbett described how during the 1918–19 influenza epidemic in northern India large numbers of bodies that could not be cremated or otherwise disposed of were abandoned in jungles. They were eaten by leopards, who thereby acquired a taste for human flesh. As notorious “man-eaters,” they were then hunted down and shot.109 Other accounts of the epidemic, remembered in parts of the Central Provinces as garbar, “the confusion,” refer to thousands of unburied and uncremated dead deposited in dried-up riverbeds, eaten by crocodiles and river turtles, the remains discovered by startled Europeans while out hunting snipe.110 Animal life also haunted the cremation ghat. Nineteenth-century Western illustrations of cremation grounds in Calcutta (see figure 5 in chapter 2 and figure 12

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Figure 12. Cremation in Calcutta. Nineteenth-century engraving by an unknown artist. © Historical Images Archive/Alamy Stock Photo.

in this chapter) repeatedly show adjutant birds, vultures, kites, and carrion crows perched on adjacent walls and fences, outnumbering the human corpses and awaiting their share of imperfectly cremated flesh. In purely ecological terms, one factor in the decline of the once familiar adjutant may have been the greater efficiency with which animal offal and human corpses were disposed of by the late nineteenth century, much as, in the reverse manner, the recent poisoning of vultures with the livestock anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac has seriously imperiled the Parsis’ disposal of their dead on the towers of silence.111 But the insistent presence of predatory birds and animals in nineteenth-century visual (and textual) representations of Indian cremation also alludes to its perception as a kind of feral act, and hence an uncivilized means of disposing of the dead, the corpse abandoned (as if halfalive) to the savagery of beasts rather than being humanely entrusted to interment. Much the same horror attended the seemingly promiscuous mingling or “confusion” of the human and animal dead at Back Bay and Nimtala Ghat, where the remains of dead animals, skinned for the leather and hide trade or simply removed as carcasses from the city streets, were dumped alongside human remains.112 To Western minds, and surely to many Indians, this was anathema: alive or dead, animals had no place beside the human dead. And yet, from a more objective or purely technical perspective, the burning of the human dead was not unlike the burning of dead animals. We have become

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accustomed in English usage to reserve the term cremation for the respectful and ritualistic destruction by fire of human remains. This contrasts with the idea of incineration as a utilitarian means of using fire to reduce or destroy urban waste, animal carcasses, and other unwanted remains. However, in the late nineteenth century cremation was commonly applied in India as in Britain to the burning of garbage and municipal rubbish.113 If it made sound sanitary and environmental sense to burn human bodies, so was it fitting and effective to dispose of other noxious or hazardous matter, from dead animals to street sweepings and urban detritus, in a similar fashion and with much the same technology. Between those now relatively discrete terms—cremation and incineration—there were many connections and crossovers.114 One of the problems faced by modern sanitarians and military authorities in the wake of the American Civil War (1861–65) and the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) was how best to deal with the large numbers of animals that were killed in battle, perished during campaigns, or simply died from old age and disease.115 Incineration offered one solution. While the army seems not to have made any funds or fuel available for the cremation of Indian soldiers who died during the Second Anglo-Afghan War of 1878–80, it did make a modest donation of Rs. 200 for 300 maunds of wood to burn the dead transport camels whose reeking carcasses lined the route of the army’s ill-fated advance.116 In 1883 James Mills, the government inspector of cattle diseases in Madras, published a tract on the “proper disposal of the dead,” in which he recommended the “cineration” not of humans but of horses and cattle. His main concern was with animals who had died from anthrax, glanders, and other equine or bovine diseases. Summarizing his experiment with cremating eleven horse carcasses at St. Thomas’ Mount near Madras, he observed: “I see no better or more effectual mode of getting rid of disease germs than by fire.”117 But in making his case for the incineration of animals the example of human cremation was not far from Mills’s mind; he had seen brattis used at Hindu burning ghats and remarked how such a simple, effective, and inexpensive fuel might similarly be used to destroy infected animal carcasses.118 Fear of disease among animals, or spread by them to humans, informed other colonial fire practices. The killing of stray dogs, to curb a perennial urban “nuisance” and halt the spread of rabies, and the trapping and poisoning of rats, once their role (and that of their fleas) in the transmission of bubonic plague had been established, resulted in huge numbers of unwanted animal corpses. For these, in their thousands, destruction in a municipal incinerator was a common end.119 Fire, a cause for consternation in the forest and when it erupted in towns, was equally essential to the “sanitary city” and its modern governance.120 Here the discourse of human cremation intersected with discussion of the disposal of inanimate waste. Laqueur quotes Ludovico Brunetti, one of the pioneers of cremation technology in Italy, as observing that cremation was about “burning a special

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sort of rubbish: the human body.”121 Likewise, an editorial in the Indian Medical Gazette in 1887 passed rapidly from advocating the burning of human corpses to favoring, on identical sanitary grounds, the burning of Calcutta’s huge mounds of stinking municipal waste.122 Such a brusque connection was often made, perhaps suggesting that to some colonial sanitarians the bodies of Indians, especially the low-caste and pauper dead, were little more than additional forms of urban waste in urgent need of disposal. In the sanitary textbooks and manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the disposal of the human dead sat unapologetically alongside discussion of removal and burning of urban waste, the regulation of “dangerous trades,” and the control of other environmental “nuisances” such as smoke from factory chimneys.123 What happened in the countryside was of less immediate concern, but in the crowded, million-strong cities of Calcutta and Bombay, the disposal of the dead and the destruction of rubbish were matters of equally pressing concern and presented not dissimilar social and technical problems. Until the 1870s much of the street litter and human sewage collected by municipal scavengers was dumped in Bombay harbor or tipped into the Hooghly in Calcutta, as were human corpses. When this proved highly objectionable on health and moral grounds, urban waste and “night soil” were transported to the outskirts of the cities—as some reformers also wanted human remains to be and by much the same convenient mode of transport, the railroad. Street rubbish was then burned or used to reclaim swamps and waste ground, despite the swarms of flies this attracted and the stench of rotting or smoldering debris that drifted back over the city. The objections raised about the improper disposal of urban waste were not unlike the complaints nonHindus made about the unpleasant sight and unacceptable smell of inner-city cremation grounds. Neither problem of disposal proved easy to reform or to bring under effective sanitary control. As with cremation, the mounting sense of crisis surrounding urban waste and sewage disposal was intensified by the catastrophic outbreak of bubonic plague in the 1890s and the conviction that “filth” contributed to its generation and transmission. Much as fire was called upon to consume wholly unprecedented numbers of corpses at the cremation ghats, so was the consuming, purifying power of fire summoned to destroy plague “germs,” the rats that carried plague, and the infected clothing and possessions of the human plague dead.124 The contents of houses suspected of harboring plague were set on fire; floors were dug up in order to be cleansed by fire. Like floors and house timbers, the corpses of diseased rats were doused in kerosene and burned. This was “disinfection by burning.”125 Among the mechanical means municipalities introduced to cope with the growing problem of garbage were incinerators. When burning waste in the open air resulted, like human cremation sites, in vociferous complaints about the atrocious smell and harm to human health, mechanical incinerators, known as

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“destructors” and fueled by coal and coke rather than wood, promised a more efficient, less odoriferous solution. In 1889 the Indian Medical Gazette welcomed trials in burning Calcutta’s waste in incinerators, as had already become common in many European and North American cities, rather than dumping it in the nearby swamps. Indeed, the Gazette anticipated a time when “every town and townlet, hospital and prison” in India would have its own incinerator, “not only for garbage, but also for all forms of refuse.”126 Six years later the Gazette was far less sanguine, citing as objections the smell and the smoke pollution produced by incinerating wet, bulky waste and the high costs involved. Like cremation ghats, incinerators struggled to function effectively during the monsoon.127 At a time when the municipal authorities were concerned about the “smoke nuisance” and introduced strict measures to try to curtail it, the smoke emanating from cremation pyres added to existing anxieties about the pollution from factory chimneys, burning brattis, and charcoal braziers. Bombay and Madras, too, experimented with “destructors,” but within a few years the trials were abandoned, or the use of incinerators scaled down, because of smoke pollution and the stench of unprocessed garbage awaiting burning. A partial return was made to dumping waste on landfill sites.128 As with crematoria, India seemed resistant to, or easily disenchanted with, such modern, mechanical means and reverted, in whole or part, to modified versions of preexisting technologies. Although urban incinerators also faced many technical difficulties and financial as well as environmental objections in Britain and North America, there was a repeatedly stated conviction that India, by virtue of its climate and the socioreligious practices of its inhabitants, presented problems uniquely its own or that it shared with other “eastern” or “tropical” countries.129 C O N C LU SIO N

Fire entered in manifold ways into the history of modern India. Fire and its governance figured prominently in the colonial imaginary and in the attempted regulation alike of forest and city. When it appeared unnatural and out of place, fire was a rogue element, to be feared, abhorred, and if possible suppressed. Despite this, fire found an accepted place in the modern sanitary city, whether through the open-air cremation of the human dead, the incineration of urban waste, or the destruction of dead animals. Fire seemed one of the sanitarian’s most potent tools, whether it was to kill germs, annihilate bodies, or obliterate garbage. While fire was constrained and proscribed in the forest, wood from India’s forests and firewood plantations provided essential fuel for the cities, industries, and transport. It was a valued source of revenue for the cash-strapped state and of profit for the merchants and contractors who traded in it. Wood fueled the funeral pyre, and as other means of disposing of the human dead were challenged or prohibited,

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as the number of urban cremations grew exponentially and cremation grounds were incorporated into the modern city, so the demand for wood rose steeply, especially since, unlike in the West, human cremation in India continued to rely on wood rather than other means of combustion. Wood, though, was not the only commodity by which fire was brought to the funeral pyre: there were also cow-dung brattis and, in one of many departures from tradition, kerosene oil. Kerosene use underscores the scale and importance of technological innovation in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India. But it also provides a connecting link between women and fire and the resurgence of sati (or sati-like suicides and murders) in early twentieth-century India. Kerosene might be added to the funeral pyre; for all too many women it became the funeral pyre. For Hindus and several other religious communities in India fire upheld notions of sanctity, purity, and sacrifice, but fire was also a powerful cultural tool, a technological instrument, and a political resource that could be actively deployed in relation to the human body, alive or dead, in strikingly different ways: to honor or to destroy, to cleanse or to desecrate. The history of modern Indian cremation cannot with justice be separated from the changing material means and moral ambiguities of fire itself.

5

The Global Dead

India was not the only example of cremation that Westerners could turn to in the late nineteenth century. Schooled in the classics, educated Europeans were familiar with the burning of the heroic dead in ancient Greece and Rome; Homer’s description in the Iliad of the cremation of Patroclus on a “noble pile of wood” was frequently cited.1 Archaeological remains from pre-Christian funeral sites, and folk epics like the Norse sagas and the German legends that inspired Richard Wagner, offered numerous other illustrations. “Teutonic cremation” had a particular relish for artists and intellectuals seeking the deep historical and cultural origins of an ancient funerary tradition.2 Extra-European ethnographies, scholarly studies of comparative religion, travel writing, and contemporary journalism yielded added information about cremation practices in Burma, Bali, Thailand, and Japan. These accounts of fire-burial abroad might be academically and technically instructive; more often, appearing at a time when cremation remained widely disparaged at home, they were an exercise in Eastern exoticism, mock horror, and lurid sensationalism.3 Perhaps it was easier for Western classicists and cremationists to invoke bardic depictions of the ancient practices of Greeks and Teutons than it was to contemplate the present-day burning of bodies on the banks of the Ganges. But even so, India’s place in the cremation prospectus was exceptional and distinctive. India— the “pure” and “noble” land of the ancient Aryans—provided an alternative classical model, one to rival Greece and Rome, and one that could be regarded as having unique authority as the original source of the cremation that then proliferated across Eurasia.4 Here, in the 1870s, as Europe again looked East for inspiration, was another instance of that ancient axiom, ex oriente lux (from the East, 98

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light—or, in this case, fire).5 In a reiteration of the familiar story of a “timeless” and “unchanging” Orient, cremation was said to have survived in India for untold centuries, long after it had been extinguished almost everywhere else, and on a scale that utterly dwarfed modern Europe’s modest experiments with burning the dead. “In no other country of the world,” wrote Aubrey Richardson in 1893, “has the ancient Aryan practice of incineration of the dead . . . been so persistently adhered to throughout the centuries as in India.” There, he declared, it had remained “inextricably allied to the fundamental laws of Hindu social and family life.”6 But as well as being cremation’s mother country, the place where the burning of the dead was most anciently established and still most visibly practiced, India was an abundant source of contemporary testimony: travel narratives, missionary tracts, colonial administration reports, newspapers, letters, memoirs, and the growing body of ethnographic data alluded to in chapter 2. India could speak to cremation debates, not least in Britain, with an immediacy and an authority that far exceeded that of ancient Athens or contemporary Siam. But what kind of cremation did India present to the world? And to frame the issue more widely, what kind of India was reflected in cremation’s “mirror of mortality”?7 How did cremation favor or further taint the Western understanding of India? I N D IA A S E X E M P L A R

As far as cremation debates in Britain itself were concerned, the period from the 1870s to the 1890s was India’s moment.8 It was in these decades that the example of India seemed most pertinent and familiar, whether to the advocates of cremation or to its vociferous critics. Thereafter, even before the passing of the 1902 Cremation Act set out to legalize and regulate the practice, the value of India, rhetorically and practically, had been largely exhausted or rendered irrelevant. By the 1920s and 1930s India hardly figured at all in British cremation debates. As acceptance of the practice became more widespread and its social constituency grew, cremation became much more a matter of personal choice and sectarian preference, a subject for local politics and municipal affairs: where, and whether, new crematoria should be opened; how they impacted local communities and smalltown environments. Only occasionally did the cremation of a visiting maharaja catch the fleeting attention of Britain’s national papers, otherwise intent on more newsworthy stories.9 But half a century earlier it was very different. British cremationists turned to India almost from the start of their campaign. William Eassie, secretary of the Cremation Society of England from its founding in 1874 until his death in 1888, collected the large number of newspaper notices from or about India that now form part of the society’s archive at the University of Durham. Some of these news items he incorporated into his book Cremation of the Dead, published in

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1875. As well as citing the example of the ancient Aryans to show that cremation was “neither new in theory nor in practice,” Eassie also commended current Indian practice, citing from the Bombay Times the funeral in 1865 of Jagannath Shankarshet (whose role in defending Hindu cremation was noted in chapter 2), and from a more recent issue of the same paper (now titled The Times of India), that of another Bombay luminary, Narayan Vasudev.10 Eassie, who never visited India himself but believed cremation there to be “all but universal,” found in such newspaper extracts confirmatory evidence that the practice could be dignified, efficient, and in a modern, cosmopolitan city like Bombay, not excessively larded with religion.11 Eassie admitted that not all Indian cremations were as “sumptuous” as these and that the poor sometimes followed the “disgusting custom” of throwing partly burned bodies into rivers. But, echoing the views of his sanitarian friend Edmund Parkes, he believed that cremation, properly performed, was greatly superior to the Christian and Muslim graveyards in Calcutta, which were “nurses for cholera, fever, and dysentery.”12 Elsewhere Eassie noted that in “Hindoostan” cremation was practiced by “millions of people.” It was, he added in a more critical vein, as well that they did; “otherwise, the whole world would suffer, far more than it does, from epidemics born in this region.”13 He must have had cholera in mind. Many other Western writers were more cautious or equivocal than Eassie. Writing in 1887, Dr. Hugo Erichsen, one of the pioneers of the American cremation movement, noted that cremation had been known to Hindus from the earliest times, though its practice had been confined to the Brahmin and warrior castes. From India it had spread to Europe and been adopted by the Germanic tribes. He cited a lecture given by Professor Jacob Grimm to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin in 1849 in which that eminent philologist and folklorist had highly commended the practice. But with respect to present-day India, Erichsen sounded a wary note. He observed that the burning ghat in Calcutta was now surrounded by a walled enclosure to hide its most offensive sights from public view; but, he added with a shudder, Europeans rarely visited the place, “for they regard this rude cineration . . . [as] far too horrible to witness.”14 For many in the West cremation remained an ineluctably “heathen” practice. As a correspondent of the Times of India remarked in 1890, weighing up Western opinion on the matter, “There will be a reluctance to adopt a practice which is connected with religions which European missionaries are striving to obliterate.”15 We saw something of this evangelical hostility in chapter 2. Through their written works and public utterances, returned British travelers, physicians, and administrators, as well as missionaries, with Indian experience became de facto experts on Hindu cremation. But many of them spoke or wrote with a degree of equivocation, some with outright disapproval. Joseph Fayrer, until his retirement from India in 1872 Calcutta’s most eminent surgeon, was quoted as saying that

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while cremation was almost universal among the highest Hindu castes and those of “true Aryan descent,” it was far less common among the low-caste and tribal population.16 Back in England in 1885, he declared himself only “half converted” to the idea that Europeans should adopt cremation; he could not “entirely get rid of the sentimental prejudices [in favor of Christian burial] that had so long swayed his judgement on the matter.”17 William Moore, another renowned physician with a long Indian career, spoke at a discussion on cremation at the annual meeting of the British Medical Association in 1891. He recounted his personal observations of Hindu cremation and the death practices of other religious communities in Bombay and believed that Britain would one day adopt cremation itself. But, judiciously juggling East and West, he thought that conditions at Indian burning ghats would vastly need to improve, just as the present high costs of cremation in Britain would need to fall substantially, if cremation were ever to be taken up by the British masses.18 Moore’s commitment to cremation was real enough. When he died in 1896 his body was burned at Woking crematorium, one of the first of many prominent Britons with India connections to be cremated.19 It did not take long before India entered parliamentary debates on cremation. When the subject was first discussed in the House of Commons in April 1884, one of those who rose to speak in support of the Disposal of the Dead (Regulation) Bill was Sir George Campbell, now MP for Kirkcaldy but previously lieutenantgovernor of Bengal (1871–74). A respected voice on Indian affairs, Campbell explained that he had lived for a long time among Hindus for whom cremation was “habitual.” He described how, in order to overcome the dumping of corpses in the Hooghly, his administration had urged Indians to accept modern methods of cremation instead. This was done “simply and easily” by erecting an enclosure “almost in the centre of Calcutta,” with a furnace and a chimney to dispel the smoke (see chapter 3). However, this innovation had to be abandoned “as somehow the scientific process did not commend itself to the Hindoos, and they were allowed to return to the historic funeral pyre.” But philosophically (here meaning scientifically), as well as practically, he could see no objection to adopting cremation in Britain as well.20 If Campbell intended to use his India expertise to lend authoritative support to the bill, his ploy backfired. For the opposition, the former Conservative home secretary R. A. Cross remarked that “as we were not all philosophers nor all Hindoos, we could not argue this matter as if we were either the one or the other.” Indeed, Cross found it “curious” that even those in India who habitually burned their dead would not accept the scientific method of cremation but reverted to the “somewhat crude and unphilosophical method of burning on the funeral pyre.” India, in other words, was an argument against the acceptability (even to Hindus) of modern crematory practice.21 Cross also seized on a remark made by Campbell that cremation might sometimes conceal cases of poisoning and murder. Little

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enough was known, the former lieutenant-governor had said, about how widespread poisoning was in Britain; “still less did we know how far it might be common in India.”22 This unguarded admission played into the hands of those who argued in Britain against cremation on the grounds that it facilitated the concealment of murder. It also fueled the idea of India as a land awash with dacoits, thugs, and poisoners, for whose crimes and deceits cremation was a convenient cover. The bill was lost by 79 votes to 149. In the British press and, as far as one can tell, in popular imagination and debate, India was more often cited to oppose cremation than to favor it. This was sometimes done by reawakening hostility to sati and the many barbarous acts associated with Hinduism in the missionary discourse of earlier decades. In 1864 The Times carried a long article from a Calcutta correspondent that described in graphic detail the horror of bodies floating in the Hooghly. “Scarcely less disgusting,” the article continued, was the scene at the Nimtala Ghat, “where the Hindoo dead are burnt, and whence the acrid and sickening fumes are blown over the city.” Hundreds of pariah dogs gathered at the spot, “feasting greedily on any portion that may fall to them, while troops of vultures and carrion crows overhead are attracted by the horrible stench which poisons the air.” Not surprisingly, the author continued, the city had more than once fallen victim to cholera. Cremation was not just offensive; it was deadly.23 Little more than a decade later, a correspondent of the Illustrated London News wrote that the cremation in Calcutta “cannot fail to remind the student of classical literature of similar scenes described by the Greek and Latin poets of antiquity,” then quickly added that the “actual sight of the Burning Ghaut” was “too shocking for the majority of our countrymen.”24 Negative reports from India continued to appear in the British press as the cremation debate intensified.25 Did Britain really intend, critics asked, to follow the example of India and go down that abhorrent, uncivilized, un-Christian route? In October 1874 a particularly inflammatory broadsheet appeared on the streets of London entitled: “Cremation or Humanity. Horrible Disclosures of Burning Bodies. Terrible Atrocities on Women and Children.” India featured prominently. Central to the text was an apparently firsthand account by an unnamed European of a cremation near Mhow in Central India. This described the burning of a body in repulsive detail and ended, “I hurriedly left the spot, being thoroughly disgusted with my first experience of cremation in India.” By a wild anachronism, but as if to clinch the point, there then followed an extract from François Bernier’s account of sati written two hundred years earlier.26 In 1879, shortly after the Woking crematorium opened (to bitter local opposition), an anonymous poem appeared in the Surrey Advertiser. One stanza ran: Let funeral pyres blaze on Indian soil; From its practice in England our feelings recoil;

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And we should do best, as a civilized nation, To help our new subjects abolish cremation . . .27 “Civilization” and “nation” stood on one side of the argument, India and cremation on the other. DY I N G A B R OA D

Until the late nineteenth century cremation was illegal in most Western countries; no statutory provision existed for burning the dead. So when Hindus and Sikhs died abroad, they presented a problem to their relatives, friends, and the local authorities as to how their bodies were to be disposed of. Burying them as if they were Christians was one expedient. When Rammohun Roy, founder of the Hindu reform movement the Brahmo Samaj and a vigorous opponent of sati, died at Stapleton near Bristol in 1833, he was buried without any religious rites in the grounds of the house where he had been staying. This was apparently in accordance with his own wishes.28 But as a Brahmin in his native Bengal, Roy would have been cremated, as were two later leading Brahmos, Devendranath Tagore and Keshab Chandra Sen.29 Ten years after Roy’s death, his body was exhumed and transferred to Arno’s Vale cemetery in Bristol for reburial. Roy’s remains were commemorated with a stone mausoleum, modeled on a Hindu chattri but designed by a Briton formerly resident in Calcutta, and erected at the expense of the Samajist Dwarkanath Tagore. When Dwarkanath himself died on a visit to London in August 1847 he was buried at Kensal Green cemetery, the tombstone simply inscribed “Dwarkanath Tagore of Calcutta.”30 Many Indians who died in Britain in the nineteenth century did not command the prestige of Rammohun Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore or belong to their privileged class. Among these were Indian lascars or sailors. According to a report in 1876, many lascars died every year at the Seaman’s Hospital in Greenwich and were buried in the parish cemetery at nearby Shooters’ Hill. Friends were said to prostrate themselves on the ground in front of their graves and left offerings of dates and other fruit on their tombs, only for these to be filched by uncaring schoolboys.31 A clearer picture of the fate of Indians who died in Europe or while en route there—and the eclectic, cross-cultural funerary encounters and exchanges that resulted from their deaths—begins to emerge in the 1870s. This is partly because by then the debates over cremation in the West had stimulated interest in the matter and partly because a growing number of Indians were working, traveling, and hence dying abroad. In April 1870, Randhir Singh, ruler of the Sikh state of Kapurthala in Punjab, died at sea near Aden while traveling to England. In an early example of a soon to be common practice of repatriation, his body was

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brought back to India and taken to Nasik, on the banks of the Godavari, to be cremated. By 1875 the site of his burning was transformed with a riverside promenade, a fountain, and a rest house to commemorate the former ruler.32 A more celebrated case concerned the twenty-year-old Maharaja of Kolhapur, Rajaram Chhatrapati, a Maratha chief claiming descent from Shivaji, who in 1870 became the first Indian ruling prince to visit Britain. When he died unexpectedly at a hotel in Florence on November 30, 1870, while returning to India, his attendants “shrank from the idea of the body being embalmed or disposed of in any way but that prescribed by their religion, namely, cremation.”33 Remarkably, the civic authorities in Florence agreed to allow this.34 Shortly after 1:00 a.m. on the day after his death, and watched by a small crowd of onlookers, the body of the maharaja was transported through the streets of the city to a corner of the Parco delle Cascine alongside the Arno. Dressed with pearls and wrapped in a gold-embroidered shawl, his body was placed on a wood pyre three feet high, his face uncovered and turned east toward India. More wood was added around the sides of the corpse; his face was anointed with ghee, camphor, and sandalwood paste; and a gold coin and betel nut were placed in his mouth. Soon after 2:00 a.m. the pyre was lit, the flames carried skyward by a brisk wind. At 5:00 a.m. the skull was still visible, “bare and blackened,” and not until 10:00 a.m. was the cremation complete. The next day fragments of charred bone (the phul) were gathered from the site and placed in a porcelain vase. Covered with a red cloth and sealed with wax, these remains were to be taken back to India for immersion in the Ganges. The ashes were committed to the Arno.35 It may be that there was a prior history of the repatriation of Hindus’ cremated relics back to India, perhaps by traders resident in ports around the Indian Ocean, from East Africa to Southeast Asia. But the cases described here are among the first documented instances in the modern era. They attest to the reverence Hindus afforded to corporeal remains; they also provide evidence of the manner in which ashes and bone fragments were placed in various receptacles—ceramic jars, wooden boxes, metal urns—for storage, transportation, and further commemoration. This technique was much like that used to preserve ashes in modern Western cremation, though that procedure looked back to Greco-Roman precedent rather than Hindu tradition.36 In 1874 a mausoleum, designed by an officer of the Royal Engineers, was erected at the site of the Kolhapur cremation in Florence (see figure 13), its architecture an eclectic mix of Victorian Gothic, complete with a bust of the turbaned prince, and a fanciful approximation of a Hindu chattri. The English inscription on the side of the monument recorded that the prince had died while returning from England to India; the Italian text was identical except in stating, in a manner more in keeping with newly unified Italy, that the maharaja was returning “alla patria.” The technical details of the funeral pyre, the time taken for fire to consume the

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Figure 13. Monument to the Maharaja of Kolhapur, Parco delle Cascine, Florence. Photograph by Stephen Tobin, 2018.

body, the strange rituals performed, and the “enlightened” attitude of Florence’s municipal authorities in permitting a ceremony so “entirely novel” to Italy all attracted considerable comment at a time when the morality, legality, and practicality of cremation were being hotly debated in Europe.37 For some commentators the burning showed the nobility of cremation, this exotic episode becoming a landmark in the early annals of Italian cremation.38 For others, the length of time (nearly eight hours) it took for the body to burn and the grim sight it presented in doing so, as well as the great expense involved, made the maharaja’s cremation both “tedious and costly.” It demonstrated the difficulties (on a winter day in Europe) of open-air cremation and recalled the disastrous burning of the body of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley on an Italian beach in 1822.39 A still more dramatic incident occurred in northern France in September 1884. Kanderao Chatjay (or Ghate), a member of the party accompanying the brotherin-law of the Gaekwad of Baroda, died at the fashionable resort of Étretat in Normandy. Asked for permission to have the body cremated, the mayor sought authorization from the prefect of the department, adding that if he did not hear to the contrary by telegram that evening he would allow the ceremony to proceed. There was no immediate response, and at midnight the corpse was carried down to the beach and laid on a pyre, three feet high, of hastily gathered timber. One

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of the essential ingredients for a high-caste cremation was sandalwood, but none could be found at such short notice until an Englishwoman, presumably traveling with the party, volunteered a carved sandalwood box she had brought as a souvenir from India. This was added to the pyre and at 2:00 a.m., with twenty witnesses in attendance, the fire was lit by Sampat Rao, the Gaekwad’s relative. Incense and kerosene were added to the pyre, and as the flames roared up the chalk cliff, cries of “Ram! Ram!” echoed into the Normandy night. By dawn there was nothing much to see; a few pieces of bone and ash were gathered up to be taken back to Baroda, and the rest was thrown into the sea. Only now did the prefect’s response arrive, saying: “Cremation absolutely forbidden.” The incident created a sensation. The American artist Henry Bacon, who was present, painted a lively watercolor of the nocturnal scene, with huge flames leaping up and the firelit shadows of the Indian mourners stark against the cliff-face.40 The writer Guy de Maupassant was there, too; he wrote afterward of how he had found the ceremony “grand, beautiful and solemn,” and thought that when he died he would like his body to be disposed of in a similar fashion.41 But when news of the cremation reached Paris, the episode was given a more fanciful spin. Melodramatic images of the moonlit scene, the carrying of the corpse, and the blazing pyre appeared in the press, and some frivolous disappointment was expressed that the death of “the prince” had not been followed by a widow’s sati, as was the “Hindu custom.”42 In Britain, despite the formation of a cremation society and growing support for the movement, the legal status of cremation remained uncertain. In 1877 the society’s president, Henry Thompson, was approached by Raja Rampal Singh of Kalakankar, who asked whether it was possible to cremate the remains of his wife, who had died in London. Thompson passed the enquiry on to Eassie, who could only refer the raja to the German state of Gotha, where cremation had been legalized and a crematorium opened the previous year.43 However, following the initial debates in Parliament and the construction of the first British crematorium at Woking in Surrey in 1878, it became possible for deceased Indians to be burned in Britain.44 Despite having had no active part in setting up the crematorium, Indians were some of its earliest beneficiaries, including an unnamed Brahmin woman.45 In 1886, a Brahmin called Chandan, who had been resident in England for four years as a servant of the Raja of Chamba, died in poverty at London’s University Hospital. Lutchmi Narayan, secretary of the local branch of the Arya Samaj, anxious that Chandan should not suffer the indignity of a “pauper burial,” paid for him to be cremated at Woking. Accompanied by about fifteen men and women, his body was taken to the crematorium in a carriage bearing the inscription: “Om Arya Somaj ki jai” (“Victory to the Arya Samaj”). His ashes were preserved in case his relatives wanted them sent to India.46 Chandan’s cremation provides an early example of the role of Arya Samajists abroad in taking responsibility for cremating the otherwise unclaimed Hindu body and for repatriating the remains.47

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The opening of modern crematoria in Britain and elsewhere in the West and the gradual legalization of cremation established a route by which Indians could be cremated in ways acceptable to them, even if not in a conventionally Indian open-air fashion, and to which could be added some elements of their own religious rites. By the early twentieth century cremations of Indians in Britain were increasingly common, among businessmen, students, and educationalists, as well as princes. In 1908 Mrs. Gupta, a member of the Brahmo Samaj and proponent of female education in India, died while visiting London. In a funeral service attended by colleagues from the India Council, Mrs. Gupta was cremated at London’s Golders Green crematorium, which had opened in 1902 and replaced Woking as the place where the bodies of Indians (and Britons with India connections) were thereafter most likely to be burned.48 Five years later, in 1913, the Maharaja of Cooch Behar in north Bengal was also cremated at Golders Green, at a funeral attended by Sir James Dunlop Smith representing the secretary of state for India, Lord Crewe. In Britain as in India, cremations were increasingly political events, serving in this instance as a public demonstration of the British government’s support for loyal princes. The burning of the maharaja’s body was preceded by Hindu religious rites and his ashes dispatched to India in a silver casket.49 The cremation in London in 1911 of the previous Maharaja of Cooch Behar, Nripendra Narayan, had been even grander, with an escort of 150 Grenadier Guards, 250 Coldstream Guards, and the band of the Irish Guards playing funeral marches by Mendelssohn and Chopin. Following prayers and addresses eulogizing the maharaja as a modernizer of his state, the ceremony ended with a bugler sounding the Last Post.50 This, so the Cremation Society noted, was the first “person of note” from India to be cremated in Britain.51 D E AT H I N T H E D IA SP O R A

Such grand funerals at London crematoria and the legal recognition given to cremation in the imperial metropolis contrast starkly with the situation in many other parts of the British Empire.52 This was especially so in places where cremation in any form remained illegal or where modern crematoria had yet to be built or were too expensive for ordinary Indians to use. We saw in chapter 1 how Sikh hawkers and traders in Australia were cremated in the 1890s and 1900s, but their treatment was accommodating and respectful compared to the fate of many Indians who died abroad. It is not sufficient to see cremation as simply an example of “cultural persistence,” as Morton Klass did in relation to Indians in Trinidad, or to remark, like K. Hazareesingh in his account of Mauritius, that “the ceremonies associated with birth and death were performed in much the same way as in the motherland.”53 Diasporic cultures do not simply replicate or retain as “survivals” the characteristics of the country from which they originate. Indeed, some

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traits—like cremation—acquired a novel value or added importance precisely because they signified belonging to, or identification with, that distant place of origin.54 In many cases it required a protracted struggle and a sustained effort of cultural self-assertion for cremation in the colonies to gain legal status and social recognition. Beginning in the mid-1830s, following the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, many thousands of Indians were recruited as indentured laborers, numbering over 1.3 million by the time the government of India ended the exodus in 1916.55 Most worked initially on sugar plantations in places like Mauritius and Natal or on the coffee and tea estates of Ceylon on terms and in conditions that have been likened to a “new system of slavery.”56 Drawn from the lower agricultural castes and communities, as well as from tribal populations, driven to migrate by poverty, debt, and landlessness, many migrant workers returned to India on the expiration of their contracts, some little more prosperous than when they had left. But others remained, struggling to eke out a living as servants, laborers, petty traders, and small-scale landholders, joined, in some instances, by clerks and merchants from outside the ranks of the indentured poor. In the eyes of administrators and white residents, Indians, despite the importance of their labor to colonial economies, formed an underclass of undesirables—feckless, dirty, given to immorality, drunkenness, crime, and disorder—and they opposed attempts by Indians to establish a right to trade, own land, or even to have their marriages and property rights recognized.57 Large numbers of Indian laborers perished abroad—from accidents and disease, the effects of poverty and hard work, or from old age. But what became of the dead? Given the social background of many migrants, coming from lowcaste, Dalit, and tribal communities that seldom practiced cremation in India, burial may have been an acceptable means of disposing of their dead. But even burial, perfunctory and enacted with “scant ceremony,” might suggest, along with a neglect of caste and religion by migrants themselves, the indifference of planters and officials toward the bodies of the indentured dead.58 For those who might have practiced cremation in India, legal prohibition and Christian hegemony put the ritual burning of the dead beyond realization. Yet for others of Indian origin, Hindus and Sikhs, the prohibition of cremation, or the lack of funds and facilities for its observance, created a keen sense of grievance and denial, just as, conversely, recognition of a right to cremation might go some way toward compensating for a brooding sense of geographical isolation and cultural rootlessness. In Mauritius, which received more than 450,000 Indian migrant workers, cremation was prohibited; “coolies” were buried, with minimal religious rites, either on the plantation or in unmarked graves in an obscure corner of a churchyard. This casual disposal of the dead appears to have provoked little outright opposition or adverse comment in the early years of Indian migration. Other issues—survival

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and subsistence—were more pressing. But in the 1870s, that seminal decade in the history of cremation, a view began to emerge that Hindus might, after all, want or be allowed cremation rather than burial. The royal commission appointed in 1872 to investigate the conditions of Indians in Mauritius shed some light on this. Its report showed how Indian paupers found lying by the roadside were, for what were stated to be sanitary reasons, given a coffin burial, regardless of their religion, by the island’s General Board of Health. It was remarked that both Muslims and Hindus “appear to bury their dead in the same burial-ground.” Attempts had previously been made by Hindus to cremate their dead, most recently in the 1860s; this was now banned. Here was cremation—or attempted cremation—in a “ritually hostile environment.”59 In the commission’s view, “It is not probable that among the natives who emigrate to this colony there are many, if any, with whom it is a point of religion that their bodies should be burned, so probably none of their prejudices are injured by its being prohibited.” However, in switching from an idiom of cultural choice to one of sanitary concern, the report conceded that “otherwise it would be a matter of regret that so easy and complete a mode of disposing of the dead” should be prevented (so long as it was conducted away from inhabited areas) on an island that was “so small, and in which space free from impurities” was “so much required.”60 As so often in its modern history, in the diaspora as on the subcontinent, Indian cremation was viewed as a question of hygiene as much as one of religious preference or obligation. Sometimes the sanitation argument worked in cremation’s favor; often it did not. A decade after the Mauritius report a commission of inquiry in Natal found that in rural areas “free Indians” (those not working as indentured labor) generally buried their dead “in places selected by themselves. No person in authority controls such selection.” In Durban, the colony’s principal settlement, they were interred in a portion of the general cemetery that was poorly kept, where pigs and cattle rooted around and human bones lay scattered. The place was, in the words of the European sergeant in charge, “a disgrace to the town and dangerous to health.”61 It was no part of the Natal commission’s brief to reflect on the disposal of the Indian dead, but other views surfaced in the oral evidence given to its members. Aboobakker, an “Arab” (i.e., Muslim) merchant who had lived in Natal for eight years, remarked: “Cremation is not practiced in Natal amongst Indians, as it is in India.” However, Teluck Singh, a “free Indian” storekeeper in Durban, gave a fuller response. “I think,” he said, “that cremation should be allowed here amongst the Hindoos, and that a place should be set aside for the purpose of cremation.” In India, he averred, all Hindu bodies were burned, “but in Natal we have to bow to the law.” And he added: “It is believed among the Hindoos that, if their bodies are buried instead of being burnt, their souls are converted into devils. We have not complained, because we came to a new country and under different laws; therefore, we did not like to raise the question.”62

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The commissioners in Natal did not respond to these concerns, yet we may see in them a more general trend. Indians, whether from communities that in India would have buried or cremated their dead, did not on their first arrival in a new colony openly defy laws that banned cremation or prescribed burial, though they may have discreetly modified the latter, as in Trinidad, where a “little camphor is burned at the grave to symbolize cremation.”63 As Indian immigrants became more established and confident in their new homes, their discomfort at the mistreatment of the dead began to find fuller expression. A stage beyond that described by Teluck Singh in Natal in the 1880s was to cremate bodies regardless of the law, as had been attempted in Mauritius in the 1860s, in locations away from the public eye and likely state intervention.64 In this covert manner cremation might begin to thrive and be tolerated. A positive desire for cremation as the most fitting means of disposing of the dead might be further nurtured by the growing status and affluence of Indian residents and, after 1900, by priests or gurus from the Arya Samaj and other Hindu and Sikh reform organizations arriving from India.65 Eventually, if the local Indian community were influential and assertive enough, or the attitudes of the dominant white population toward the disposal of the dead were sufficiently flexible, cremation might be formally recognized, and as in Johannesburg, a modern crematorium might follow.66 However, for many Hindus and Sikhs, even as late as the 1930s and 1940s, cremation could remain only an aspiration or a secretive practice, a grievance far down the long list of “disabilities.” Even where cremation was not branded illegal, colonial administrations found reasons to discourage the practice on the grounds that it posed health hazards, would cause offence to other religions, or facilitated poisoning and murder. A report into the conditions of Indians in the Caribbean in the late 1930s noted calls for the legalization of cremation among Trinidadian Hindus but struggled to assess the strength of that demand. Its author proposed that cremation be permitted at selected sites along the coast, close to the main concentrations of Indians. In his view, like that of many colonial commentators, cremation was primarily a public health issue, though he did note that in recent years there had been a “rekindling of interest in Hindu ritual and custom” and that the desire for cremation was bound to increase as a result.67 The grievances of Indians in the Caribbean were further taken up by a royal commission in 1938–39. But it was only in the final paragraph of the report’s recommendations that cremation was addressed. The commission had received “numerous complaints” from Hindus that they were “unable to dispose of their dead in accordance with their religious custom, by cremation.” However, it had failed to find any legal prohibition, and colonial officials stated that they had no intention of imposing one, so long as “reasonable sanitary and other conditions” were observed. Hindu complaints were based on a “misunderstanding,” the commission believed, but it urged Caribbean governments to take steps “to make the legal position plain” and ensure that, “subject to

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necessary safeguards, no obstacle should be placed in the way of the practice.”68 Even so, it was not until the 1950s or 1960s that the law was changed in many of the colonial territories inhabited by people of Indian descent.69 Even then cremation was subject to detailed regulations that might still leave open-air cremation of the kind practiced in India without legal sanction.70 This yearning for funerary fire might be understood as a kind of atavistic geography, in which migrants looked back from Mauritius, the Caribbean, South Africa, or Fiji, to the sacred sites of Hindu India for a lost, or yet to be recovered, ideal of cremation. But there was much about this diasporic phenomenon that was modern—the recruitment of Indian “coolies” in the service of a global labor system; the railroads and steamships, telegraph and postal networks that facilitated such mass migration; and the re-creation or reinvention of cremation as an honored or obligatory rite that was only allowed to function within modern sanitary rules and tight legal frameworks. That by the early twentieth century Indian cremation had become a global issue can further be demonstrated by the numerous requests made to the India Office in London for remuneration for the cremation of Indian paupers who died overseas. In 1906 it agreed to pay the modest sum of $61 for the cremation of three impoverished Sikhs who had been employed as watchmen in Shanghai, only to lose their jobs and die destitute in hospital. Their cremations were starkly minimal—a few bundles of wood, a calico winding-sheet, a cheap coffin, a hired hearse—and appear to have been devoid of any religious rites. While insisting on the most economical funerals possible, the India Office agreed to pay only because of British obligations to the international settlement in Shanghai and because of a precedent in 1903 when $26 had been paid for the cremation of another Sikh pauper.71 However, this frugal concession opened the way for further requests from elsewhere. In 1913 the British consul in Portland, Oregon, asked for $50 for the cremating of a Sikh; six years later the British consul-general in Chicago made a similar request for a Hindu who had died there in hospital. In the latter instance, the consulate tried to strengthen its appeal for funds by observing that the “proposed action [was] calculated to gratify local Indian sentiment.” Officials at the India Office were unmoved; they saw “insufficient reason” for Indian revenues to be expended in this way.72 Other pleas for assistance reached the India Office, as Indians in places as far apart as Gibraltar, British Honduras (Belize), and Addis Ababa in Ethiopia pressed for their right to hold cremation ceremonies or asked for land to be set aside for the purpose.73 In almost every instance London declined to intervene. As in India itself, this questing after cremation, this search for funerary fire, or simply for the humane and decent disposal of the dead, might serve as a channel for ethnic and religious self-assertion, advancing a growing, or reconstructed, sense of Indian (or Hindu, or Sikh) identity.74 Cremation transformed a tiny

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portion of an alien territory into a ritual approximation of India itself, just as through fire, smoke, and ashes the dead might be imagined as returning in some manner to a distant, perhaps only hazily remembered, India.75 This might be an aspirational, rather than actual, mobilization of the dead, but it was still a way of “dying into India,” as Sudesh Mishra suggestively described it in relation to “the difficult art of dying” among Fijian Indians.76 But aside from objections raised by colonial officials and European residents, this adoption or resurgence of cremation might also create tension within the local Indian community, dividing Hindus and Sikhs from Muslims and Christians or from Indians of Hindu descent for whom it was not thought an obligatory or desirable practice. In Guyana (formerly British Guiana), which during the indentured labor era received more than 230,000 Indian immigrants, cremation was only given legal status in 1956, ten years before independence from British rule.77 Attempts were made, particularly by visiting yogis and swamis from India, to encourage Hindus to resume the practice of cremation that their immigrant ancestors had left off or been forced to abandon under colonial rule. But not every resident Indian welcomed this trend. According to one recent ethnographic study, some recoiled from “the very thought of burning flesh” as “horrifying” and “slightly barbaric.” Others declared it an “un-Hindu practice.” Unless the body was that of a Brahmin, their dead were “not eligible for consumption by fire.”78 T H E D E A D O F WO R L D WA R I

We saw in chapter 3 how it became the norm during the nineteenth century for the bodies of soldiers in Indian cantonments to be burned or buried according to their religious affiliation, but what happened outside India? This question seems seldom to have been considered in military histories of India and the empire, but it is an important case to set alongside the mortuary narrative of diasporic labor. The immediate impression, to judge by the example of the second Anglo-Afghan War of 1878–80, is that soldiers, and the camp followers and noncombatants who accompanied the army, were left to burn or bury their comrades as they saw fit and in such manner as the exigencies of war allowed. The army itself did not, apparently, take responsibility for their burial or even for supplying cremation fuel.79 If a soldier died in a distant location or his body could not be recovered, it was the custom for a pyre to be prepared in his home village with a straw effigy serving as a surrogate corpse. The fire was then lit by the eldest son (or nearest male relative) and the customary rituals observed.80 World War I presented problems of unprecedented magnitude and scale in terms of the sheer number of the Indian war dead and the many theaters of combat in which Indian soldiers fought.81 Little foresight and planning seem to have gone into this question before Indians were sent to fight on the Western Front

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in September 1914 and before casualties began to mount with the first battle of Ypres in October–November that year.82 A situation rapidly developed in which European and Indian officers were forced to take responsibility for the bodies of the Indian dead. Some, without regard to their religion and including noncombatants as well as sepoys, were interred in gardens, fields, and orchards, in hastily dug and often unmarked graves. A few were cremated close to where they fell. For instance, on November 4, 1914, a stretcher-bearer named Jodha, who had died of his wounds, was cremated at a location in northeastern France described only as “close to the dividing hedge in a field to [the] North of the School Lagorgue on Estaires Road.”83 As we have seen with respect to Étretat in 1884, French officialdom was adamantly opposed to cremation, but as mortality soared, both on the battlefield and in hospitals behind Allied lines, a determined effort was made by the British to cremate—and so honor—dead Hindus and Sikhs.84 Some Hindu soldiers were cremated close to the Channel coast at Hardelot hospital, where Rao Pershad, a Brahmin subassistant surgeon serving with the Indian medical corps, was tasked (presumably by virtue of his caste) with performing Hindu funerary rites.85 In Boulogne, Lt.-Col. F. Wall of the Indian Medical Service created a cemetery four hundred yards from the Meerut Indian Army hospital, where Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims were buried, their gravestones marked with the appropriate religious emblems. “The crematorium,” he reported, “took some time to build [suggesting that these were not open-air cremations], and before we had this working the Hindus by their own consent were buried.”86 Between October 1914 and November 1915, 255 Indian soldiers were buried at Boulogne and 31 cremated. But for any cremations to take place at all the British military authorities had first had to overcome—or bypass—French objections. At the clearing hospitals close to the front, reported Walter Lawrence, a former Punjab civil servant who advised the War Office on the morale of Indian troops in France and Britain in 1914–15, “it was quite impossible to arrange for cremation, and all alike have been buried.”87 Lawrence was well aware that Indian soldiers were “outraged at the way dead bodies were left unburied on the battlefield.”88 No less a source of concern was the mixing up of the Hindu and Muslim dead. Lawrence quoted from an intercepted letter sent by an Afridi from the North-West Frontier to a fellow Muslim in India: “I am sorry to say that this is an evil country, because they bury Hindus and Mussulmans in one place.”89 As an old India hand, Lawrence realized the disaffection this might cause. In December 1915 he emphasized the “great importance” attached by Indians of all classes to “the graves of Indians in a foreign country” and believed it “wise policy” to respect those sentiments, even at some financial cost.90 The most widely cited example of British attempts to acknowledge and satisfy Indian sentiment relates to the wounded soldiers sent to England between November 1914 and December 1915 for hospitalization at the Kitchener Military Hospital in Brighton’s Royal Pavilion. The bodies of fifty-three Hindus and Sikhs

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who died there were burned at Patcham Down to the north of the town, while a small number of Muslim dead were taken for burial at the Woking mosque. The treatment afforded to the Indian wounded and dead was represented at the time—and has been since—as demonstrating the cultural sensitivity and soldierly respect shown by the British military toward Indian troops, their “peculiarities and prejudices” and their “caste scruples.”91 We should note, though, that while the bodies of some stretcher-bearers, grooms, and “sweepers” were cremated as they would probably not have been in India, other noncombatants were buried, even in Christian cemeteries, since this was seen as more in keeping with their low-caste status. Buldoo, a Punjabi “sweeper,” denied cremation at Patcham and refused burial at Woking, was eventually interred in St Mary’s churchyard in the New Forest.92 In general, though, the seemingly scrupulous attention paid by the military authorities to the cremation of Hindu and Sikh soldiers (rather than noncombatants) strengthened the idea that cremation was an essential rite for members of these religious communities and reinforced the identification of cremation with male bodies and Kshatriya warrior culture—this, too, at a time when Hindu publicists and reformers in India were strenuously seeking to overturn colonial claims about Hindus’ physical and moral weakness.93 Whether understood as an expression of genuine respect for Indian religious sensibilities or, more pragmatically, as driven by a need to retain the loyalty and uphold the morale of Indian troops at a time of extreme imperial crisis, this concern for caste and the proper observance of funeral rites has been taken to indicate that “a particular value” was placed on the bodies of the Indian dead and recognition of how important “their sacrifice” was to the British in a time of war.94 A leading Rajput prince, the Maharaja of Bikaner, wrote to The Times in April 1917 commending the British military for having “spared no pains or outlay” to ensure that adequate provision was “made for the cremation or burial of soldiers in full accordance with the ritual and customs of their respective communities.”95 There was a clear propaganda message here, as one of the accusations levied against the German army was that, among other “atrocities,” it had grossly mistreated the bodies of Indian soldiers. “India,” the maharaja declared, “cannot but contrast this German barbarity with the care and solicitude shown by the authorities in British India, no less than in the Indian States, to conserve, and protect the religious sentiments and scruples of all classes of the population in respect to the disposal of their dead.”96 In this cremation narrative Patcham Down occupies a place of exceptional symbolic worth. The memorial site, marked by a solemn, solitary chattri (see figure 14), high up on the Sussex downs and unveiled by the Prince of Wales in 1921, has come to be seen as a major monument to India’s war dead and an acknowledgment of the enormous contribution that Indian soldiers made to the British Empire in World War I.97 In September 1932, India’s high commissioner,

Figure 14. The Chattri memorial, Patcham Down, near Brighton, Sussex. Photograph by Giles Penfound, 2008. Image courtesy of the National Army Museum, London.

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Bhupendra Nath Mitra, addressed a rally at the site sponsored by the British Legion. “The chattri,” he told his audience, remembering his Keats, “is to me more than a thing of beauty on your beautiful Downs. It is a symbol of my country, and a monument to my countrymen.”98 But we might pause to reflect further whether Patcham Down truly indicated that “particular value” was placed by the British authorities on the Indian war dead.99 When the Parsi industrialist Ratan Tata visited England in 1927 he and his wife set out by car to locate the monument, expecting to find it situated (as it might be in an Indian city) in or close to Brighton itself. After searching in vain, they were directed to the (today still) lonely, almost inaccessible spot, high on the windswept downs and far from any human habitation. Why, Tata asked with some indignation on returning to London, was it put in “this curious position?”100 The response of the principal assistant secretary at the Imperial War Graves Commission, Arthur Browne, was that “Patcham is out of the way and seen by few. I rather imagine it was chosen as the place of cremation for that very reason.”101 A “safe” distance from Brighton, the site was intentionally far removed from the public eye and any possible source of complaint about the burning in England of the Sikh and Hindu dead. From the outset there were doubts about the legality of the cremations under the 1902 Cremation Act, which (the Home Office pointed out) prohibited the open-air burning of corpses, and concerns were expressed about creating an undesirable precedent. Indeed, more than a century on, the “fire-burials” at Patcham Down remain almost the last and only occasion on which any open-air cremations have been held in Britain.102 Significantly, the initiative for the cremations came not from the War Office but from an Indian medical officer, Lieutenant Das Gupta, who was stationed in Brighton, and in response to the “desire of representative members of the Indian community.”103 The idea was only then taken up by the town’s mayor and supported by private donations. At first expressly designated a “burning ghat,” the cremation site was soon described more neutrally as the site of a “funeral pyre,” though clearly not one but a series of cremations were held there in 1915–16.104 These out-of-the-way soldier cremations were not, then, publicly celebrated events in the sense that many high-profile cremations had become in India itself by this date. But they could be meaningful, moving, and memorable nonetheless. In October 1915 The Times published an article by an unnamed correspondent who described the “strange rites” held at the “burning-ghat” at Patcham Down. The “spectacle” (that word again) was, he wrote, “one to stir the most jaded sense of wonder.” He recalled “the sound of the queer, whining chant of the mourners, . . . the acrid fumes of the burning pyre, . . . and the brown, bare-footed figures squatting in prayer or busy about the complicated details of the long ritual.”105 The cremation was that of a Brahmin, an Arya Samajist, and appears to have been organized not by the authorities but by other noncombatants at

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Brighton’s military hospital. Following a by then not uncommon practice, a photograph was taken of the dead man’s face to be sent to relatives in India. The body was placed in a hearse while mourners clambered into waiting ambulances. They were driven through the village of Patcham, “intensely English with its church and duck-pond,” and onto a steep track until it became impassable for the motor vehicles; the final approach had to be made on foot. “In time,” the correspondent continued, “the procession began to climb the hill, the mourners chanting as they went: Ram Ram satya hai: Om ka nam satya hai—Vedic verses telling of the eternal and single truth of the Name.”106 The gate to the “ghat” was unlocked and the body carried into a small enclosure, where three concrete slabs had been laid for the burnings. One of these was carefully swept and sprinkled with water, and blocks of wood were heaped up in preparation. The body, “under its bright pall” and dressed with chrysanthemums, was placed on the pyre and the face again exposed: “Honey and ghee, and minute portions of the eight metals, and other ritual things were passed between the pale lips.” The mourners sat around in a semicircle, and “squatting on their haunches, with their hands folded and their eyes downcast, chanted their singsong chants, now shrill, now soft, now a murmur and then a shout.” After further “long and complicated” rituals, wood and straw were added, and the pyre was ignited. Crystals of camphor were lit and poured into the midst of the blaze. “And while it burned the mourners kept tossing upon it little pinches of ghee mixed with grains and fruits, scent, saffron, and spices.” When the fire had died down, ashes and bone fragments from the pyre were taken back to the hospital in Brighton to be put in a little wooden coffin bearing the dead man’s name. In time, the correspondent concluded, “the coffer will be sent to his family in India, and from the Sussex Downs his ashes will return home, to be sprinkled on the breast of some Indian stream.”107 Like Charam Singh’s cremation on a beach near Melbourne twenty years earlier, the “unburnt ‘pul’ [phul]” were “taken down to the shore and flung into the sea.”108 WA R G R AV E S

Still more complex were the issues surrounding the disposal and memorialization of Indians who died in other theaters of war. Apart from fighting in France and Belgium in 1914–15, the Indian Army was involved in two other major campaigns: in Mesopotamia (Iraq) and at Gallipoli. In Mesopotamia Indian troops and noncombatants were caught up in the fighting that led to the protracted siege of Kutal-Amara by Turkish forces from December 1915 to April 1916. Some 1,746 Indians died in the siege, including 278 noncombatants, more than a third from disease. The official report on the campaign refers only briefly to Indians being interred in an old cemetery adjoining the brickfields at Kut, but a photograph in London’s

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Imperial War Museum shows noncombatants trying to burn the body of one of their deceased comrades on what appears to be a wholly inadequate pyre.109 Even before the war was over the question was raised of whether the hastily buried (or partly burned) remains of Hindu and Sikh soldiers in France, Belgium, the eastern Mediterranean, and the Middle East should be exhumed in order to be properly cremated with due attention to ritual requirements and with permanent memorials.110 In July 1918 a subcommittee of the Imperial War Graves Commission in London pledged to respect the “rites and ceremonies” of the Indian war dead of various communities.111 This ambition proved difficult to implement in practice. At Salonika in northern Greece, for example, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, “and possibly Animists” had all been buried together, their remains impossible to separate and distinguish.112 Careless record keeping during the war meant that the names of the dead were often unreliably recorded, causing doubt as to whether a given soldier had been Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh.113 Laborious though the task was, the commission sought to exercise “great care” in matters of religious identity, if only for fear of the political repercussions of not doing so. As Arthur Browne, the commission’s secretary, put it in 1925: “There is much religious fanaticism in India and although it is unlikely that the memorials will ever be seen by relatives, there are many Indians on the lookout for any excuse to make trouble, and I am particularly anxious to avoid any mistakes which could be used as a weapon to attack the British or Indian Governments.”114 With so many Indian soldiers and noncombatants “missing” after the Mesopotamia campaign—one estimate put the figure at between twenty and forty thousand—the commission abandoned the idea of naming all the dead on its monuments. Unlike in France, it restricted itself in the Middle East to naming Indian officers while only numbering the lower ranks and noncombatants.115 After the war an attempt was made to exhume and repatriate the remains of Indians killed in Iraq and Egypt but not cremated at the time due to a shortage of wood. This was done partly in the expectation that surviving comrades might take the ashes back to India to be immersed in the Ganges. Wooden boxes were to be provided for this purpose, but nothing further seems to have happened. At Gallipoli, where Indians of different religions died fighting the Ottoman army, the bodies of 147 soldiers were exhumed in 1920. As it was impossible to establish the religious affiliations of the dead men, after consulting serving Indian officers, the remains were “reburied at sea” off the Dardanelles. “In this way,” it was reported, “the religious feeling of all classes would be satisfied.”116 The difficulties confronting the Imperial War Graves Commission in seeking to memorialize the Indian dead were as much semantic as corporeal. Could Hindus and Sikhs who had been, or should have been, cremated be referred to as having been “buried” and in a place called a “cemetery”? Or was implying that Muslim and Hindu bodies lay interred side by side an affront to both

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communities? Did the ashes of the cremated “repose” like buried bones? Could cremated Indians be described, like European casualties on the Western Front, as “the fallen”? Should some alternative, less culturally specific, terminology be used instead? In practice, “burial” was loosely construed to include the remains of the cremated dead, but to the discerning Indian, or old India hand, this appeared misleading and possibly offensive. The commission decided that where possible Muslims should be referred to as having been “buried” while Hindus were “honoured.”117 Aware, as Browne put it, that “there is no grosser insult to a Muhammadan than to suggest that his body has been burnt,” a more nuanced phrase had to be found for memorials to the Indian dead in military cemeteries at Baghdad and Basra. One solution was to dedicate the site to soldiers “whose bodies were committed here to earth or fire.”118 The labors of the Imperial War Graves Commission attest to the enormous difficulties involved in the disposal of the Indian war dead within an imperial context in which Hindu-Muslim divisions loomed increasingly large and through a commemorative vocabulary that remained fixated on the idea of burial as the cherished norm and cremation as an aberrant alternative. When it came to World War II a changed set of political concerns and cultural sensitivities prevailed. In the war’s aftermath the government of the by now independent India did not want to remember its soldier dead with rows of tombs and crosses or with cathedrals of commemoration like those erected in France and Belgium after the first war. Several sites of conflict lay outside the boundaries of post-Partition India, like the battlefields of Imphal and Kohima in East Pakistan (today Bangladesh), and so were unlikely to be visited by many Indians. Instead the government wanted memorials erected near cantonments in India itself, in places where they would be conspicuously visible and could instruct and inspire a new generation of a new nation’s soldiers.119 In consultation with the Imperial War Graves Commission, the Indian high commission in London devised a fresh formula by which to memorialize the dead. They were neither “fallen” nor “buried.” Rather, employing an idiom that sounded both Hindu and patriotic, the memorials were set up to honor the officers and men “who died in battle and whose mortal remains were committed to fire.”120 C O N C LU SIO N

The global career of Indian cremation from the 1830s onward reinforces a pattern evident from previous chapters. It underscores the generally hostile reception given to Indian cremation by the West even (perhaps especially) at a time when cremation in its more overtly modern, technically proficient, quasi-industrial form was gradually gaining ground. For many in the West and in many territories under colonial rule, cremation after the Indian fashion, on an open-air, wood

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pyre, was anathema. It was loathed, ridiculed, condemned by association with sati, and not uncommonly, prohibited. The grounds for this opposition were often stated to be sanitary—cremation was a danger to the health of the living—even though it gained qualified approval on precisely the same grounds in India itself. But opposition also reflected deep-seated negative views of Indians themselves, especially as low-class, low-caste, migrant laborers, and the continuing perception of India as in essence primitive, backward, and barbaric. And yet that is not the whole story. Against that recurrent hostility needs to be set a story of the colonial accommodation and the imperial facilitation of an only half-approved “native” practice. Just as in India the colonial regime and its sanitary and municipal agencies recognized cremation after the Indian fashion as being too widely esteemed and socially entrenched ever to be supplanted, and (more pragmatically) as a basis for cooperation with Indian elites and a means of managing the pauper dead, so abroad and in the diaspora there were political reasons to respect Hindu and Sikh cremation or to use it as an occasion to strengthen ties of empire and loyalty. Military authorities, public health agencies, and colonial administrations overseas, as in India, were obliged to take some responsibility, however minimal it might at first appear, for the disposal of the Indian dead—for soldiers, paupers, indentured workers. But the global and diasporic narrative of Indian cremation also reinforced Hindu and Sikh attachment to the idea of the funeral pyre as much as to its actual practice—as a mark of national or religious identity, as a means of renewing or re-creating ties (however remote and imaginary) to India itself. The dead might themselves prove mobile, with bodies, ashes, and funerary urns crisscrossing the globe. But no less powerful was the mobility of the ideal of cremation for Indians, wherever they might live and die, as the right, proper, noble, and sacred end of their earthly existence.

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The Rebirth of Cremation

In the long travails of Indian cremation it would be difficult to select a single moment or decisive event that forever changed the course of its history or marked a critical transition from an older, more traditional, form of cremation to one that was ineluctably modern. However, the decades of the 1870s and 1880s, a time when the cremation movement was slowly gaining traction in the West, can be seen with hindsight as being pregnant with impending change. Two episodes, close in time but significantly different in agency and effect, help capture the distinctive trajectory of Indian cremation, the change in Western attitudes to the dead, and the shifting parallels and cross-cultural exchanges between cremation East and West. Taken together these events hint at the role of technological innovation in underpinning the rebirth of cremation in India but still more the changing social, religious, and political environment within which Indian cremation now functioned. In 1875 the Prince of Wales, heir to the British throne, visited India. In the course of his cold-weather tour, the prince did the things visiting royalty were accustomed to do. He rode elephants and shot tigers; consorted with princes; presided over banquets, durbars, and balls; and was regally entertained by his government hosts.1 But on November 17, while visiting Bombay, he made a significant departure from the usual itinerary: he went to visit the dead. Accompanied by Frank Souter, the city’s police commissioner, and Raghunath Narayan Khote, one of Bombay’s leading municipal councilors, the prince was first taken to see the Parsi towers of silence on Malabar Hill—or rather, since Europeans were denied access, he was shown the outside of the towers and, with the aid of a model, had their functioning explained to him. According to the Times of India, “The Prince 123

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took great interest in the model, and spent some time examining it.”2 He then moved on to visit the Hindu temple at Walkeshwar and the cremation ground at Sonapur.3 There he saw the place where dead infants and the victims of smallpox and measles were buried and the burning-ground where two bodies were in the process of being cremated. He questioned Khote, his guide and interpreter, about the site, and then the “whole party left not only satisfied with the cleanliness and tidiness of the place, but evidently with the superiority of the Hindu mode of the disposal of the dead.”4 The prince’s excursion to a Hindu cremation ground and the Parsi towers of silence may not have had a profound impact on Western attitudes, but it was widely publicized and stimulated a flurry of detailed (and not entirely skeptical) discussion about Indian funerary customs in the local press and illustrated newspapers in London.5 It was as if the prince had given the royal seal of approval to modern Hindu cremation. In October 1883, eight years after the prince’s visit to Sonapur, Swami Dayananda Sarasvati, the charismatic founder of the Arya Samaj, was cremated. When the swami died at Ajmer, two sanyasis came to collect his body, intending to bury it. Traditionally, the bodies of Hindu holy men were not cremated, but buried or released into a sacred river, on the grounds that, already being pure, their remains did not require further purification by fire.6 Dayananda was thus one of the first of India’s new cadre of Hindu religious leaders to depart from the convention of interment, which, in an age of Hindu revitalization and growing competition with rival faiths, now seemed too close to Christian and Muslim practice or an insufficient means of honoring an exemplary and inspirational individual. Fire, to quote Gaston Bachelard again, “magnifies human destiny,” and nowhere was this need for fire more keenly felt—or more resolutely pursued—than in celebrating the modern Hindu dead.7 A special life called for a special death. Dayananda was cremated on an immense sandalwood pyre, accompanied by the chanting of Vedic hymns, and before a huge congregation of followers and disciples.8 Cremation in this grand manner gave the resurgent Hinduism with which he was so closely associated a new and unapologetic public presence and fashioned from the braided narratives of Vedic revivalism and Orientalist scholarship a newly authoritative vision of the Aryan past. Cremation articulated Dayananda’s attachment to what he understood as the pure, original religion of the Hindus, stripped of later accretions and impurities, a religion in which fire and the cherished firerite (homa) occupied a commanding role and vital symbolic function. His followers said that before his death Dayananda had stipulated that he wanted to be cremated and according to the ritual prescriptions laid out in his guide, the Satya Prakash (Light of truth), first published in 1875.9 In the words of one newspaper report, the swami’s cremation was carried out “in precisely the same manner as laid down in Vedic ritual, directions for which had been given by Dayanand himself in his will.”10 This cremation and its attendant rites and publicity set a

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powerful precedent for his followers and for modern Hindus more generally and, through the expanding Samajist network overseas, provided a model for death rites in the diaspora.11 Hindu cremation forged its own redemption. In defiance of all the crude Western stereotypes of Indian backwardness and barbarity, but in a guarded interaction with colonial sanitary concerns and funerary conventions, “traditional” cremation refashioned itself as a modern rite and a very public act of commemoration. Many recent historians have written of the way in which Hinduism was reconstituted and redefined from the late nineteenth century onward, in opposition to its colonial and domestic “others” and through the assertive consolidation of its previously broad and disparate socioreligious constituency.12 Cremation, though largely absent from this discussion, was undoubtedly one of the instruments through which that modern, homogenizing identity was constructed. While borrowing from the West and drawing selectively (as we have already seen) on some of its technological innovations, cremation—in the open air, on a funeral pyre—helped to nuance and define Hindu India’s difference from the West. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it had acquired a social authority and a political momentum among Hindus that the British, even had they chosen to do so, would have found difficult to contain and impossible to curtail. A series of high-profile cremations—of intellectuals, religious leaders, and revered nationalists—consolidated the growing public stature and political appeal of cremation as an essential and obligatory Hindu rite. Such highly visible events as Dayananda’s cremation honored personal charisma and dynamic leadership, but they also celebrated the cause—the religion, the nation, the communal identity, the sectarian creed—with which that individual was so powerfully identified. At the same time, while moving forward into a new age of public awareness and commemoration, such funerary events also transported cremation back to the original Vedic notion of sacrifice, as if the body of the illustrious modern dead were itself a sacrifice, to be consumed and consummated by fire, thereby seeking and gaining assurance for the well-being of the nation, the people, and the followers of the faith. Whether consciously intended or not, the cremation pyre re-created, in a new religious and patriotic idiom, the ideals of sati, the act of self-sacrifice enacted, out of grief, respect, and honor, on the funeral fire of the lamented dead. But as in so much of this cremation story, India and Europe intersected. Alongside the rebirth of cremation within the evolving cultural norms of Hindu India, there was, as the Prince of Wales’s visit to Sonapur might suggest, a discernible shift in European attitudes to Indian cremation. Among some Westerners there was a move away from the voyeuristic horror of earlier decades and the sanitary discourse of the mid- to late nineteenth century toward a more open appreciation of Hindu religion and the part cremation played within a religious culture that had not succumbed to the relentless materialism and soulless barbarity of the modern West.

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Earlier chapters showed how many British travelers and residents felt—and voiced—a deep repugnance for Hindu cremation practices, an antipathy echoed in the debates over cremation in Britain itself in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Even among supporters of cremation in the West, India often served as a model of how cremation should not be practiced. That said, this negative representation of Indian cremation, and, through it, of India itself, was not entirely inflexible and unqualified, whether among distant commentators in the West or among the increasing number of Western visitors to India in the late nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. The reasons for this more empathetic engagement are complex. One factor was that, as cremation became a more familiar method of disposing of the dead in the West, the means by which it was performed in India, in cremation’s homeland, in the open air and on a flower-strewn pyre, began to be more acceptable, and, to some, appealing. While many Western cremationists extolled the superior virtues of mechanized cremation, others saw in the “traditional” Indian technique a method that was far more dignified, spiritual, and respectful of the dead. Bound up with this was a new mood of what Richard Fox termed “affirmative Orientalism.”13 Just as some Westerners took guidance and inspiration from India for their vegetarianism, others (possibly the same individuals) saw in India a preferred way of disposing of the dead. In this lay moral choice and ethical predisposition rather than the self-interested pragmatism of a colonial regime and its reluctant acceptance of an immutable “other,” or simply an appetite for something that was exotic, new, and unconventional.14 Allied to Western occultism, this New Age vision saw India, not as a place of unremitting hardship and unspeakable horror, but as possessing a spiritual energy and aesthetic vitality far nobler and more appealing than the dull, grubby, profit-hungry, materially obsessed civilization of the modern West. Even in an age of strident imperialism and belligerent racism, India had its earnest enthusiasts and cultish devotees. There were more immediate reasons, too, for the increasingly appreciative reception afforded to Indian cremation by the late Victorians and Edwardians. As argued previously, cremation had a particular appeal to Western sanitarians and their followers, who believed that “scientific cremation” was (as they saw it) the means best suited for the hygienic disposal of the dead in India. The cremation movement could be expected to command a greater degree of support there than in Europe. But that was not all. On a more personal level, whether from sanitary conviction or from individual sentiment, some European residents in India sought cremation for themselves. A small number opted for cremation in the modern crematorium opened in Calcutta; a few, more strikingly, chose to be cremated in (or something closely resembling) the Hindu manner. Religion,

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especially the eastward-looking cult of Theosophy, helped motivate this; but so too did the apparently widespread fear of being buried alive.15 For others again there was a desire for the ashes of the dead to be sent “home” and so, like Indians dying abroad, become reunited with the people and places to which the body ultimately “belonged.” Even as the West’s own attitude to the disposal of the dead was changing, so was India’s place in the world. Technological and social innovations—steamships and railroads, Cook’s tours and global travel, illustrated newspapers and portable cameras—were all making India by the 1880s and 1890s far more geographically and visually accessible to the outsider than ever before. As the Prince of Wales had shown in 1875, a winter tour of India was now entirely practicable. The Taj Mahal and the mausolea of the Mughal dead constituted one obvious set of attractions, but Western necro-tourism, as the prince had also demonstrated, might now encompass the Hindu burning ghats of Bombay and Benares and the Parsi towers of silence. It was, though, a bitter and unseemly paradox that at the very time when, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, millions of Indians were dying of starvation and disease, death was itself a “spectacle” and the place and manner of the disposal of the dead an object of the inquisitive, or jaded, tourist gaze.16 Among the colonial elite, the visit of the Prince of Wales to Sonapur in 1875 established something of a precedent. In May 1888, toward the end of his term of office, the viceroy, Lord Dufferin, undertook “from the sanitary and olfactory point of view, . . . a terrible morning walk” through the slums of Calcutta. Perhaps inspired (or chastened) by his wife’s work in establishing a fund for medical aid to the women of India, “the impulse suddenly seized him to make a resolute exploration of the more crowded and insanitary quarters of his capital.”17 In the course of his “slumming,” after visiting filthy cowsheds and crowded bustees (slums) and picking his way through the “unspeakable abominations of Burra Bazaar,” Lord Dufferin rejoined his carriage and was taken to the burning ghat at Nimtala. “The body of a young woman, who had died that morning of cholera, was being cremated. His Excellency stayed a short time at the burning ghat, asking several questions, and showing much interest in the ceremony.”18 The viceroy’s brief, if instructive, stay allowed the local correspondent of the Daily Telegraph to expound at some length on this “remarkable and suggestive place.” “It is soon seen,” he observed, “that there is no need of elaborate crematoria, furnaces, or the like, for this quick and beautiful form of obsequies. The purifying flames rise and crackle; the fume drifts out of the arches over the river; the attendants sit in the corners of the building, smoking hookahs or softly chatting; very soon you only remark a smoldering pile of grey ashes which sinks into a surprisingly little layer.”19 The writer concluded that “neither Lord Dufferin, nor anyone who has watched the process of cremation in India, can ever again doubt that in celerity, simplicity, economy, and the abolition of all mournful associations, it [the

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Hindu mode of cremation] recommends itself to crowded populations and sanitary reformers.”20 Whatever the viceroy himself may have thought of his visit, this sympathetic account of cremation was far removed from the hellish visions of hostile missionary tracts. The unnamed correspondent was not alone in his appreciative sentiments. Some while earlier, in 1865, the death occurred of Jagannath Shankarshet. One of Bombay’s premier businessmen, Shankarshet was a deeply religious Hindu and one of the individuals who, as we saw in chapter 3, helped to defend, but also to modify, cremation practice in the city. A few years before his death he had befriended George Birdwood, a rather eccentric medical officer better known as the author of the Industrial Arts of India and as an erudite, if pedantic, Orientalist scholar. Birdwood had mixed feelings about Shankarshet, describing him as an “idolater” and a “bigoted Hindu,” but recognizing him nonetheless as a devout man and an influential figure in Bombay’s “native” community.21 When Shankarshet died, Birdwood, rather against his own inclinations, attended the cremation. Recalling the episode fifteen years later, he wrote in a kind of reverie that a very great burning was made for him. I thought it would give me a cruel shock. But it was attended with none of the horrors, the awful reverberatory furnace, and the repulsive, smoking, factory-like chimney, and all the soulless mechanism of cremation in Europe. Except that milk was used instead of wine, the ritual was essentially that described by Homer in the burial of Patroclus; and so far from being pained, when it was over, and I looked up into the clear and brilliant blue heavens above, I was soothed by the reflection that no taint of earthly corruption would ever be associated with the memory of my friend, for all that had been mortal of him was now part of the sunshine around and about me.22

Even if Homer and the pyre of Patroclus stood foremost in his classicist’s mind, Birdwood was evidently moved by what he witnessed. Here was cremation fire not as a kind of primitive violence visited upon the body of the dead, or even the modern “horrors” of the “awful reverberatory furnace,” but as something purifying, contemplative, ethereal. Apart from mollifying his harsh presumptions about Hindu “idolatry,” friendship with Shankarshet and the experience of the Brahmin’s cremation encouraged Birdwood to believe in the possibility of “frank intercourse between our Native fellow subjects in India and ourselves.”23 Cremation might be a bridge between cultures. Whether from religious inclination, romantic sentiment, or growing cultural and political empathy with India and Indians, Western writers were beginning to extol the virtues of Hindu cremation, if only (like Birdwood and the Daily Telegraph correspondent) in order to heighten the contrast with both conventional earth-burial and “industrial” cremation in the West. The point can be taken a step further by returning once more to Benares, which, as we saw in chapter 2,

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had served in missionary tracts and travel narratives as the epitome of repulsion and horror at the sights of the Hindu burning ghat. Certainly, even in the 1880s and 1890s some Western observers continued to express their repugnance and dismay. For instance, in his account of a tour of Ceylon and India in the winter of 1892, the writer Edward Carpenter—normally considered a progressive figure and renowned as a critic of modern Western civilization—gave an extremely negative view of cremation at Benares, declaring that on its burning ghats “every sense” was “violated and sickened.”24 Similarly, when Colonel Henry S. Olcott, cofounder of the Theosophy Society, first visited the city in 1879, he was shocked by what he saw. “It is,” he wrote of Manikarnika Ghat, “a brutally realistic scene, with no poetry or refinement about it, and if cremation had been introduced at [sic] the West in that rough guise there would not have been more than one body incinerated, I am sure.”25 But then his attitude changed. A few years later, having witnessed a Buddhist cremation in Ceylon, Olcott became an enthusiast for openair cremation and the “all-purifying fire.”26 When he died at the Theosophical Society’s headquarters at Adyar on the outskirts of Madras in 1907, his body was cremated on a sandalwood pyre. One urn of his ashes was taken to the Ganges, a second emptied into the sea at Adyar.27 Reflecting the Theosophists’ belief in reincarnation, the memorial inscription at the site of his cremation reads: “On this spot his body was given back to the elements by fire. . . . May he soon return.” Then there was Arnold. A former headmaster of the Government Sanskrit College in Poona, Edwin Arnold rose to international fame as the acclaimed author of The Light of Asia. First published in 1879, this verse narrative recounting the life of the Buddha made Buddhism (of which so little was known at the time in the West) accessible and meaningful to Western readers. In 1885–86 Arnold returned to the country where he had previously worked and published an account of his travels. Entitled India Revisited, this personal account might suitably stand for the wider Western reappraisal of Hinduism in general and of Hindu cremation in particular. Among other places in “this beautiful land” and amid scenes that recalled the life of “the divine sage” centuries earlier, Arnold stopped at Benares.28 His account is a poetic celebration of the city as a vibrant spectacle of Indian life and an encapsulation of India’s deeply spiritual essence. “Imagine,” he wrote, “what an artistic effect results from such a fringe of life and of colour between the steep multi-coloured background of the steps and temples and the shining waters of the stream!” In the noisy, kaleidoscopic bustle, priests and pilgrims, bathers, invalids, and animals all jostled for attention. His gaze then turned to the place of cremation, where, at the foot of the ghat, “the people who sell the ‘death-wood’” (the Doms) were seen “raking for white bones in the heaps of hot ashes, and piling up fuel and cow dung for their next batch of funeral-pyres.” Beside them lay “three still figures covered in white and red cloths [white for men, red for women], from which protrude only the fixed cold feet, washed by the

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outer edge of the tide.”29 But this was not the prelude to some mournful exegesis. Rather, Arnold continues: “These are the dead of today, happy—thrice happy—to have passed to the Gate of Swarga, close to Gunga’s good waves. Their friends sit near, well satisfied even amid their natural regrets; and, very soon, three blue curls of smoke wafted among the temple-roofs from three crackling fires, . . . will tell where those quiet votaries have finished their pilgrimage once and for all. Wonderful is the fervor of belief among these gentle metaphysical Hindu people!”30 Aptly, when he died eighteen years later, Arnold was cremated at Woking.31 But it was not only men, or even those with obvious empathy for India, who wrote with feeling of Hindu cremation. The much-traveled Ethel Alec-Tweedie visited India in 1920 in the course of an extensive Asian tour. Deeply antagonistic to Indian nationalism, she warmly praised what she saw as General Reginald Dyer’s gallant defense of an embattled empire—others called it a massacre—at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar in April 1919.32 She seemed most comfortable when staying with maharajas and shooting crocodiles. But Alec-Tweedie was also an ardent cremationist, serving for several years on the council of the Cremation Society of England. Cremation pyres on the banks of Ganges moved her to a very different response from the bloodbath at Amritsar. “The Hindus show their intense wisdom by returning their dead to ash,” she wrote. It was “all very primitive, very sanitary, very wise, aye, and . . . romantic too: ashes cast on to that quickly-flowing stream to pass along half of India and finally find their way into the broad ocean.” Could anything, she asked, “be more beautiful than this idea?” It only surprised her that others had not followed India’s example. “The white ash is symbolic of purity. . . . Ethically, cremation is beautiful. Sanitarily, earth burial is detestable and from such ancient peoples as the Hindus or the Romans one can learn much in the way of the disposal of one’s dead.”33 T H E N EW C R E M AT IO N I S T S

Cremation might, of course, be enthused over rather than practiced. Many Europeans in India, or former residents, wrote about cremation as one of the fascinating sights of India, or, like Birdwood, as a moving experience insofar as it pertained to the passing of an Indian friend or colleague. But there were some, if only a small minority, of Europeans for whom cremation was, for whatever reason, a sought-after end. And sometimes it was precisely cremation in the Indian manner, not the impersonal and mechanized form popularized in the West, that they desired. In other words, as well as having its secular and sanitary advocates in India as in the West, Hindu cremation appealed to the eccentric, the dissident, the Indophile, the occultist, or those like Alec-Tweedie for whom the thought of burial, and so perhaps burial alive, was appalling. It appealed precisely because it was neither Western nor colonial, or because it represented the inversion of

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those stereotypes of Indians’ moral and physical weakness by which the West had hitherto maintained its hegemony over India.34 For many of these new cremationists, the act of cremation did not stand alone but was integral to their wider appreciation of, and absorption into, Hindu civilization. Indeed, one might go further and argue that the recognition of Hinduism as a world religion, comparable with Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, and the homogenization of Hindu beliefs and practices that might imply, required that Hindus have their own distinctive manner of disposing of, and commemorating, the dead. Perhaps the most striking illustration of this new thinking about Hinduism and cremation was Sister Nivedita. Born in Ireland in 1867, the daughter of a congregational minister, Margaret Noble moved to Wimbledon in Surrey, where she set up a school for girls. Able and determined by nature, her “fire” was the quality for which she was most admired.35 In London in 1895 she met the Hindu evangelist Swami Vivekananda, the man often credited, following his dramatic appearance at the World Congress of Religions at Chicago in 1893, with helping to establish modern Hinduism on a global stage. She was so impressed by his noble demeanor and message of renunciation that in 1898 she followed him to Calcutta. Noble’s first impressions of India and Indians were entirely positive—so unlike, she later recalled, “the terrible pictures of the Hindu routine which . . . had embittered my English childhood!”36 In Calcutta she founded a girls’ school, and she lived in a house in Bagh Bazaar for the rest of her life, making only occasional trips back to Britain. She joined the Ramakrishna Mission, founded by Vivekananda as an organization dedicated to giving service (seva) to the community and spreading awareness of the spiritual inheritance of Hindu India, which she saw as an antidote to the “nihilism and materialism of modern Western culture.”37 Renamed Sister Nivedita, she traveled widely in India, often at Vivekananda’s side. She recorded her experiences and impressions in numerous books and articles, including The Web of Indian Life (1904), a work whose idealization of Hindu India and antimissionary tone created a furor in Britain.38 She lectured passionately on religion, education, and women, and helped inspire a new school of art, which looked to Hindu myths and legends rather than to the Western pictorial tradition for its muse. As a “philosopher of romantic nationalism and aggressive Indianism,” there was also an intensely practical side to Nivedita’s commitment to India, as shown by her involvement in anti-plague work in Calcutta in 1897 and famine relief in eastern Bengal in 1906, activities that made her still more critical of colonial rule and British ignorance.39 When Vivekananda died in 1902 he was by his own wish cremated—another significant departure from the convention that holy men were either buried or released into a sacred stream.40 Contrary to the high-caste Hindu custom by which women were excluded from such ceremonies, Nivedita attended his cremation at Belur Math. She was profoundly moved by the experience, to the extent that his

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death and fire-burial became a nucleus for her meditation and devotion.41 In 1905, perhaps remembering “Swamiji,” she wrote with intense feeling about Hindu cremation and the Hindu manner of honoring the dead. Lighting the funeral pyre was, she wrote, “the last act of personal service to be rendered by children to their dead father.” Literally and figuratively, it was the final act of service by the devotee to her master.42 In one of her later works, Footfalls of Indian History, she described a visit to Benares, “the pilgrim centre of a continent,” and to Manikarnika Ghat. “Who,” she asked, “would not love to die on those beautiful ghats, with the breath of the night or the morning on his brow, the sound of temple-bells and chanting in his ears, and the promise of Shiva and memories of the past in his heart?” She even revered the sati stones set at the rear of the ghat, imagining them as “memorials of triumphant wifehood in the hour of its bereavement.”43 Conceivably, after Vivekananda’s death, Nivedita felt herself to be a living sati, awaiting death and the funeral pyre to free her from her mourning and loss.44 When Nivedita died from dysentery in Darjeeling in 1911 she was cremated, her body accompanied to the pyre by “some of the most distinguished sons of Bengal.”45 It was as if by being cremated in the Hindu manner she was “coming home,” not to Britain, for which she felt no abiding attachment, but to the India of her adoption, distancing her, even in death, from the oppressive Raj and materialistic West, and affirming instead the depth of her spiritual, emotional, and intellectual attachment to Hindu India. The plaque erected on the site of her cremation reads: “Here repose the ashes of Sister Nivedita (Margaret E. Noble) of the Ramakrishna Mission who gave her all for India.” The life and death of Nivedita was not the only demonstration of how cremation might serve to express or affirm the spiritual affinity of Westerners with India and the East. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who cofounded the Theosophical Society in 1875 with Henry Olcott, was cremated at Woking in 1891 in a ceremony attended by both Hindus and Theosophists; some of her ashes were sent to the Ganges for immersion.46 Occultism and an attachment to what were understood to be Hindu and Buddhist beliefs had close connections with the cremation movement in the West. This is one reason for doubting Thomas Laqueur’s claim that “there was no new attitude—not towards death or the dead, in any case—that favored cremation, no sudden turn to Hinduism or Buddhism, which believed in cremation on religious grounds.”47 Cremation in itself may not have engendered a new faith, but for many new cremationists it was at the heart of their rejection of Western Christianity and the fascination with Eastern faiths and the idea of rebirth. In abandoning his own Christian background, Olcott developed (as noted previously) a personal enthusiasm for cremation as an ancient rite, one for which Hindu India and Buddhist Ceylon provided compelling models. Theosophy’s engagement with cremation dates back to the early years of the movement in the United States. In 1874 Olcott joined the New York Cremation Society, one

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of several organizations that had sprung up in the United States to advocate the burning of human remains. Two years later, following the death of the German émigré Baron de Palm, Olcott presided over what the baron had called cremation “in an Eastern fashion.” The burning, dubbed by critics “a pagan funeral,” took place in December 1876 in Washington, Pennsylvania; it was reputedly the first American cremation.48 Only subsequently did Olcott and Blavatsky visit South Asia and witness Hindu and Buddhist cremation for themselves. Thereafter, cremation became the norm among Theosophists in India as elsewhere. As Alex Owen has observed, occult sects like Theosophy made a particularly powerful appeal to women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, offering them a “spiritualized vision of social change” and “ideals of regeneration and self-fulfillment that were deeply attractive to feminists of the period.” Such unorthodox, unconventional movements represented a new kind of religiosity and an intensity of feeling and self-expression that helped liberate women from the conventional constraints—physical as well as moral—of Victorian domesticity and patriarchal dominance.49 As with Nivedita, in the questing years of fin de siècle India proved deeply attractive to many educated Western women, bored by home life, disillusioned with family ties and obligations, and denied fulfilling public roles and professional opportunities. India, by contrast, could be a place of both opportunity and enchantment. It was a country where, still more than in Britain or the United States, they could exercise a newfound independence and explore the dynamic and creative power (in Hindu terms, shakti) of their hitherto suppressed female energy. In 1893 the Theosophists were joined by Annie Besant, already renowned as a socialist, feminist, and doughty trade unionist; she subsequently moved to India and became president of the society following Olcott’s death in 1907. Under her charismatic leadership Theosophy spread rapidly on the subcontinent, among high-caste Indians, Parsis, and Europeans, and it soon numbered well over a hundred branches.50 Besant brought Theosophy closer to Brahmanical Hinduism; she also espoused the cause of Indian nationalism. During World War I her anticolonial writing and impassioned oratory brought her into association with the Hindu nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak; like him, she organized a Home Rule League to demand Indian autonomy. In 1917 she was elected president of the Indian National Congress, the first woman and last European so honored. Then, between 1918 and 1922, her brand of more moderate nationalism was eclipsed by the rise of Gandhi and his radical noncooperation and civil disobedience campaigns.51 Like Nivedita, Besant was an “Indian by persuasion,” and cremation, in its Hindu and Buddhist form rather than its modern, Western incarnation, was part and parcel of both women’s heady mix of religion, gender, and identity politics.52 Some white women Theosophists in India were cremated on their deaths in the

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Hindu manner, attended by Brahmin priests and accompanied by the chanting of verses from the Bhagavad Gita.53 When Besant died in 1933 her body, swathed in white silk (rather than the country calico), was displayed at the Theosophical Society headquarters at Adyar as hundreds of mourners filed past. At a funeral ceremony attended by both Indians and Europeans, speeches were given, photographs taken, and her body placed on a cremation pyre. Later a “garden of remembrance” (a decidedly English touch) was laid out to memorialize her burning.54 Like Blavatsky and Olcott before her, Besant requested that her ashes be immersed in the Ganges. Margaret Noble and Annie Besant had personal and theological reasons for wanting to be cremated. For them cremation in the Hindu style was a significant cultural and political statement, a distancing alike from Christian orthodoxy and colonial autocracy. It is less obvious, however, why a number of other European men and women chose a similar means of disposal for their mortal remains, especially when they appear not to have been committed followers of either Hinduism or Theosophy. For instance, in 1890 a European superintendent of government telegraphs at Bhavnagar in Gujarat died of “heat apoplexy.” Shortly before his death he had expressed “a strong desire” to be cremated. The cremation was held in the grounds of the local hospital and in the presence of friends. The (presumably Christian) funeral service was read before his body was placed on a wood pyre, covered over “in the native style,” and burned.55 In 1912, J. A. Hubbard, a European planter in Coorg in south India, similarly asked for his body to be cremated.56 Two years later, George Marshall, aged seventy, whose daughter had married an infantry officer stationed in India, died while visiting her in Bangalore. His body was cremated in the Anglican cemetery under the direction of an officer of the Indian Medical Service, Captain Chambers, and his ashes interred there.57 In 1925, the body of Mr. C. N. Gregory, an elderly European resident in the Himalayan hill station of Mussoorie, was burned in the Hindu cremation ground and according to Hindu rites.58 A year later, and still more remarkably, an officer of the elite Indian Civil Service, Mr. Douglas, the collector of Ghazipur in the United Provinces, died of cholera. At his request, he was cremated at Allahabad on the banks of the Ganges, the pyre lit by a fellow civil servant. About four thousand people attended the cremation, including many of the deceased’s Indian colleagues.59 It is hard not to see in such cremations a deliberate gesture of identification with Hindu India, perhaps even of reconciliation, at a time when anticolonial attitudes were in many respects hardening and the gulf between East and West appeared ever widening. While occultists, ideologues, and dissenters like Blavatsky, Nivedita, and Besant led the way in adopting Hindu cremation, the trend toward cremation in the Western manner among Europeans familiar with India was also becoming a more general phenomenon. From the 1890s onward many Britons with India

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connections, particularly from the upper echelons of the civil service, the army, and the medical service, were cremated at Woking and later at Golders Green and other British crematoria, their burning generally accompanied by a Christian burial service. The cremation at Woking in 1896 of the former Bombay surgeongeneral William Moore was noted in chapter 5. Among former governors and senior civil servants cremated at Golders Green by 1914 were Lepel Griffith, Denzil Ibbertson, and Richard Strachey.60 The cremation of such prominent imperial officials and bureaucrats hardly supports Laqueur’s claim that in the 1920s cremation was “still a radical gesture.”61 In May 1929 Flora Annie Steel, long resident in India and best known for her mutiny novel On the Face of the Waters, was cremated at Arno’s Vale cemetery, close to where Rammohan Roy was buried.62 By the 1930s obituary notices in The Times frequently named individuals with former or current India connections, soldiers, civil servants, bankers, businessmen, and engineers, whose bodies were cremated in Britain. These were not Hindu cremations, but it is tempting to think that the experience of India in part informed their or their family’s decision to choose cremation over burial. E U R O P E A N C R E M AT IO N I N I N D IA

The cremation of Europeans in India might be a matter of personal choice or religious conviction; it was also integral to a wider movement. This was notably the case among medical officers, whose sanitary arguments in favor of cremation went beyond merely recommending it for the disposal of Indian bodies. Here professional opinion and individual sentiment conjoined. If it was advisable on health grounds to burn bodies in India rather than to bury them, then that desideratum might apply to Europeans as well, whether in India or elsewhere. British doctors in India gave strenuous support to the cremation movement in Britain and the campaign for its legal recognition. They and other white residents made donations to the Cremation Society in London when it was formed in 1875; among the members of its provisional council was the Reverend James Long, a missionary widely known for his radical stance on social and economic issues in Bengal.63 When a memorial in favor of legalizing cremation in Britain was sent to the Home Secretary in London in 1880, its signatories included twenty-four from India; of these six belonged to the Army Medical Department and nine to the Indian Medical Service, along with several nonservice medical personnel and a few nonmedical officials. An Indian doctor, A. C. Banerji, also signed.64 Dr. Shirley Deakin, a junior civil surgeon at Allahabad and the principal organizer of the signatories in India, encouraged the sending of postcards to the Home Secretary to further buttress the cremation cause. The expertise of medical men in India would, he wrote, “naturally carry weight since, residing in a country where cremation is resorted to by most Hindus, they are better able to judge of the advantages of this method of

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disposal of the dead, and to weigh the objections urged against it[,] than medical men at home are.”65 Deakin wrote as a European exile as much as a concerned physician. Five years earlier, with the cremation movement in Britain still in its infancy, he had recommended cremation for European residents in India “as being more consonant [than burial] with the reverence cherished for our dead.” British officials and their families were constantly on the move in India, he explained, or left India altogether, leaving behind at “some distant station,” the neglected graves of their loved ones. With the lapse of time “the tombs tumble to pieces and the inscriptions become illegible,” unless some obliging friend or willing agent was on hand to maintain them. “How much better would it be to have the remains of our dead reduced to two or three pounds of ashes?” In that convenient and portable form “they could be carried about and be safe from desecration and from desertion in a far-off foreign land.”66 Deakin voiced a wider sentiment, shared by other Europeans in Asia (such as the Dutch in Java), that cremation allowed the remains of those who died abroad to be reunited with their families in Europe, repatriated to the places in which they had been born or grown up.67 Necro-mobility thus transcended the racial divide. The ashes of the European dead, like those of Indians dying abroad, could be carried “home” to where they ultimately belonged and so could receive the respect they deserved.68 Cremation might assuage the anguish of exile. Taking the logic of cremation still further, Europeans in Calcutta pressed for their own crematorium. Around 1900 a sensation was caused when the deceased wife of a Polish doctor in the city was taken, for want of anywhere more suitable, for cremation at the Hindu burning ghat at Nimtala. Many Europeans were shocked, feeling that it was “hardly appropriate for the obsequies of a Christian lady to be conducted in the midst of Brahminical ceremonies.”69 The Cremation Society of Bengal was formed, modeled on the Cremation Society in England; it consisted almost entirely of white residents and had a preponderance of medical men on its management committee. The society petitioned Calcutta corporation for permission to build a crematorium, primarily but not exclusively for European use. A small crematorium was constructed, the first in India to be “built on modern principles.”70 It had a coal-gas furnace imported from Paris at a cost of Rs. 30,0845, plus Rs. 10,843 paid for the plot of land on Lower Circular Road. According to J. Neild Cook, the city health officer, the crematorium “would be a credit to any modern city.”71 His predecessor, Dr. Frederick Pearse, one of the original proponents of the scheme, told members of the society, “Of all processes that of cremation is the quickest and safest for reducing the body to its ultimate stage of dissolution.” He conceded that cremation had been “out of fashion for several centuries” among the nations of Europe, but the “advance of modern science . . . allows us to resume the ancient habit of cremation under

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much more favourable circumstances”—he made no reference to contemporary Hindu practice—“and to achieve it with a promptitude, an inoffensiveness and a decorum hitherto unattainable.”72 Opened in 1906, the red-brick building with its tall chimney was equipped with a shelter for mourners, a gatekeeper’s lodge, and a columbarium to house funeral urns.73 But the crematorium proved no rival to the renowned Christian cemetery on Park Street or to the many other burial sites scattered about the city. Even though the charges were said to be modest, at Rs. 30 for each cremation (compared to £5 in Britain at the time, nearly twice the amount), very few operations were actually performed at the site in its early years. In 1907 only eleven cremations were held there out of more than twenty thousand in Calcutta as a whole, rising only marginally to thirteen in 1921. As late as 1938 only twenty-eight bodies were burned there.74 The reasons for this low take-up are clear. High-caste Hindus preferred open-air cremation, though a “Hindu lady” was among the first to be cremated there in 1906.75 Most British residents in India retired to their home country and died there, while the largely Roman Catholic Eurasian and Indian Christian communities were staunchly opposed on religious grounds to burning the dead.76 The scant use made of the Calcutta crematorium, and the feeling among the Indians that it was essentially intended for the white population, did nothing at the time to encourage the construction of similar crematoria elsewhere in India. P R I N C E LY C R E M AT IO N S

Writing about twentieth-century Australia, Pat Jalland remarked that cremation “discouraged ceremony, with its tight schedules, industrial hardware and functional buildings, which seemed to suit a society increasingly inclined to keep death at a distance.”77 India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a world away from this austere and regimented mortuary regime; it had more in common with what Jalland describes as the “elaborate Victorian funeral display” from which modern “industrial” cremation was itself a reaction.78 By the second half of the nineteenth century cremation in India (in the Hindu fashion) had taken on a new normalized status. The absorption of cremation into the municipal politics and the administrative routines of Calcutta and Bombay discussed previously was only one part of this transformation. In tension with, and often in defiance of, attempts to make urban cremation less visible and so less offensive to sanitary norms and disgruntled city dwellers, cremation began to command new levels of public prominence and social visibility, aided by press coverage and photography, but also through a growing sense of how public space—the street still more than the burning ghat—could be used to make a statement about the dead as well as the living. These changes impacted the death rites afforded to a range

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of public figures, who were (almost invariably) male, Hindu, and high caste: religious reformers, politicians, philanthropists, educationalists, businessmen, and princes. These, in Thomas Laqueur’s phrase, were the “special dead,” men whose exemplary lives and lamented passing called for exceptional commemoration and lasting memorialization.79 Despite the ritual pollution associated with death and the physical corpse, cremation emerged as part of a modern celebrity—and celebratory—culture. The enhanced and very public profile given to what were formerly private expressions of grief and ritually circumscribed cremation practices created fertile ground for overtly political maneuvers. The final sections of this chapter seek to establish the broad characteristics of this new public cremation; the next chapter turns to the political consequences arising from it. We might begin, as so often in this modern cremation story, with India’s princes. Unburdened by sati, and with their political authority eroded by British paramountcy, the celebration of the death of princes remained one of the ways in which India’s Hindu and Sikh rulers could give public form to their now waning grandeur.80 As was seen in the previous chapter with respect to Indian cremations in London, this innocuous, if ostentatious, expression of a prince’s opulent selfimportance was abetted by the British, who had reasons of their own to want to uphold the outward semblance of princely power without conceding their own control. The convention whereby male relatives carried the body of the deceased barefoot to the cremation ground (one of the rationales for retaining inner-city burning ghats) was not for princes. On the morning of December 28, 1894, the Maharaja of Mysore, Chama Rajendra Wadiar, died in Calcutta at the age of thirty-one. The viceroy and senior Mysore officials were promptly informed, and arrangements were made for his cremation. The maharani, who had accompanied her husband to Calcutta, wanted his body taken to Benares for burning, but a special train could not be organized in time. After consultation with the city’s commissioner of police, it was arranged that the maharaja should be cremated in Calcutta instead but at Kalighat instead of Nimtala Ghat. “While the household priests of the Maharajah took charge of the body and performed various formalities necessary preparatory to its removal from the house”—in fact, the villa of the Maharaja of Vizianagram at Beliaghata—“a gang of servants constructed a magnificent bier”—covered in costly Kashmiri shawls—“on which to convey the body to the cremation ground.”81 At 3:00 in the afternoon of December 29 the procession left Beliaghata, its route, along the Lower Circular Road, cleared of traffic by a troop of mounted police. The maharaja’s servants and officials walked behind the bier, barefooted and bareheaded, followed, at first on foot and then by carriage, by the viceroy’s ADC and the government of India’s foreign secretary. Onlookers lined the route, “the great attraction to the rabble being the rupees which were being thrown among the crowd at short intervals.”82 Tossing coins to the masses was a tradition

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once followed by Mughal emperors and viceroys on their ceremonial entry to a city; it also echoed, however unintentionally, the manner in which a sati, as a final gesture of renunciation and farewell, scattered money and jewels to the assembled throng before mounting her husband’s pyre. Since the maharaja had been an honorary colonel of the British Army, his body was escorted by a detachment of Bengal Cavalry, and on the orders of the viceroy, an eighty-one-gun salute was fired from the ramparts of Fort William as the procession wound its way to Kalighat. “As became a Prince of his position,” so ran a newspaper report, “it was necessary that function [the cremation] should be performed out of the ordinary,” one mark of which was a pyre heaped high with sandalwood.83 Later a public memorial was to be erected at the site to commemorate the late maharaja.84 The Maharaja of Mysore had been a ruling prince, held in high esteem, as his cremation so publicly demonstrated, by the colonial regime. He was commended for being a progressive figure who helped found industries and build his state’s modern infrastructure. Strikingly different in all these respects was Malhar Rao, the ex-Gaekwad of Baroda, who died in Madras in July 1882. Having acceded to the throne of this small but strategically important state in Gujarat in 1870 following the suspicious death of his brother, Malhar Rao alienated his imperial overlords by his intemperate conduct, violent mistreatment of his subjects, and an apparent attempt to poison the political agent, Colonel Robert Phayre. Although the Gaekwad’s involvement in the poison plot could not be proved conclusively, he was deposed in 1875 and banished to Madras.85 When he died there seven years later, his widow was determined that Malhar Rao’s death should be celebrated with as much princely éclat as if he had never been dethroned. His body was laid on a palanquin, decorated in the green and gold livery of Baroda state, and adorned with flowers. Combining regal, religious, and martial emblems, the funeral procession was led by an elephant with a silver howdah (costing Rs. 1,000) and wearing a silver necklace, a horse bearing (as befitted a Maratha prince) a warrior’s sword and shield, two bulls pulling a decorated cart, and nine cows with their calves. As the cortege passed through Madras to the cremation site, Rs. 700 rupees in small coins were thrown to the crowds lining the streets. With the cost of the animals, the jewels and ornaments, the sandalwood pyre, the feeding of the poor, and fees for the Brahmin priests, it was estimated that Rs. 25,000 to 30,000 was lavished on Malhar Rao’s eleven-day death ceremonies, some of it paid for by the Baroda court.86 Far from being cremated in quiet obscurity, such regal extravagance was the last-ditch attempt by the ex-Gaekwad’s family to assert his right to rule the state of which he believed he had been unjustly deprived. Not all the princely cremations exuded such an air of self-important extravagance. One of the most arresting of the many images of nineteenth-century cremation in India was a photograph taken by Lala Deen Dayal of the cremation of another Maratha prince, the Maharaja of Indore, Tukoji Rao Holkar, in June

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Figure 15. Burning Pile of the Late Maharajah Tookaji Rao Holkar. Engraving from a photograph by Lala Deen Dayal, published in The Graphic, July 24, 1886. © Dinodia Photos/Alamy Stock Photo.

1886. At the time Dayal was employed in the secretariat in Indore, his career as a photographer still in its early stages.87 But his image was of sufficient interest to be reproduced as an engraving in London’s Graphic illustrated weekly less than a month after it was taken (see figure 15). The paper gave a brief description of the cremation, provided by Dayal himself. As the body was taken to the cremation site, he wrote, “Every point of vantage was speedily filled by the large crowd, many of whom were visibly moved with grief.” The ruler’s elder son lit the pyre “amidst the deafening noise of drums, rifles, and cannons, the latter firing fifty-one rounds to indicate his age.”88 But this is not the point at which Dayal’s photograph was taken; instead, it captures a later, more relaxed moment. Seen from an elevated vantage point, the remains of the body are barely visible in the smoke of the dying fire. A few hundred Indians stand around, some in the foreground in uniform, perhaps from the maharaja’s band, but most are in white, civilian dress. There are hardly any women visible, and not a sati in sight. Some onlookers squat on the ground around the pyre and along the riverbank; others look down from a bridge. Some spectators have turned away from the fire to gaze up at the camera, no grief apparent on their faces. No one presses close to the pyre (as in the turbulent scenes of Gandhi’s cremation); no force is needed to keep the crowd at a safe distance. The body, obscured by smoke, is nearly consumed; “at

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the time the picture was taken,” Dayal’s commentary concludes, “little remained of the whole.”89 In this image cremation holds none of its old “horrors.” It is calm, reflective, dignified. It is about ending and letting go. C R E M AT IO N A N D T H E N EW I N D IA N P U B L IC

Enough of princes. Along with the Prince of Wales’s excursion to Sonapur in 1875, this chapter began with the cremation in 1883 of the Arya Samajist Dayananda Sarasvati, an event that gave new public prominence and religious authority to Hindu cremation rites. Yet Dayananda’s was only the first of several high-profile cremations among India’s religious leaders, social reformers, and statesmen that helped fix and affirm the importance of this fire rite in the public life and political imaginary of modern India. Such public cremations helped establish what Laqueur terms “the aura of the dead” and the presentation of the corpse as an icon, as “a way of making something present and tangible that is not present and cannot be grasped.” The corpse, he adds, becomes “something radically different from itself. . . . It works a magic we seem to need to believe in.”90 This observation has a particular salience for India between about 1880 and the outbreak of World War I, when both religious and political movements assigned a new significance to what Harjot Oberoi describes with respect to Sikh reform movements as “the semiotic potential of the body,” in which “the body was made a principal focus of symbolic concern and a central means of projecting ideological preoccupations.”91 Partha Chatterjee has pointed to a similar trend. He notes how the death in 1894 of the famed novelist and patriot Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay occasioned an intense debate among Bengal’s bhadralok intelligentsia. Some proponents argued, in the Western manner, for the holding of memorial meetings and public expressions of grief to commemorate a nation’s great writers, statesmen, soldiers, and scientists; others dissented, protesting that this was turning death into a public entertainment and was not consistent with Hindu belief that grief was private, sacred, and best observed in seclusion.92 Public was a much-used term in nineteenth-century India, especially from the 1850s onward. In the realms of the state there were departments of public works, a director of public instruction, a burgeoning literature on public health, and even institutions of “public safety” (the municipal police and fire brigade). But in this usage public largely meant what the government believed was necessary or beneficial for its colonial subjects or essential for its own survival. By contrast, in the later decades of the century there emerged a very different definition of “public,” one that reflected the concerns and aspirations of Indians and, more especially, the Indian middle classes or those who spoke from the middle ranks of society on behalf of the Indian masses. Historians, following Jürgen Habermas, have designated this “the colonial public sphere,” while stressing the greater

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constraints colonialism imposed on the institutions and expressions of India’s emergent middle classes than on their autonomous counterparts in Europe.93 In this demotic reconceptualization of “the public,” the ever-present specter of death and hence the seemly disposal of the dead were crucial ingredients. At one extreme, this new sense of “the public” informed debates about municipal responsibility and the proper (or most economical) means of cremating or burying pauper corpses. At the other extreme, new ideas of “the public” helped fashion the far more ostentatious and reverential death ceremonies of those who enjoyed national renown. In either case, public responsibility for the dead or the public need to celebrate the dead won out over the secluded expression of private grief. One consequence of this (with which the middle classes might be less content) was that colonial attempts to confine cremation within the walls of well-regulated cremation grounds (in the interest of “public health” and “public safety”) might be breached by outpourings of mass grief and popular fervor. Enacted in the name of religion and nation, here was a form of public expression the British found it difficult to constrain or deny. Cremation exploited a newfound “symbolic concern” for the body—the body, above all, of the “special dead”—and carried it to a new level of public meaning and intensity. In January 1884, a few months after Dayananda’s cremation in Ajmer, the Brahmo Samajist leader Keshab Chandra Sen died in Calcutta and was cremated. Although, as noted in chapter 5, the Brahmos’ founder, Rammohun Roy, had been buried in Bristol when he died there in 1833 and his remains subsequently transferred to Arno’s Vale cemetery, later Brahmos, like the Arya Samajists, followed the rite of cremation rather than burial. As Tapan Raychaudhuri has put it, Sen “turned the rationalist Brahmo movement into a vehicle for intense devotionalism,” and his cremation duly reflected the extent to which that devotionalism might now find a focus in the body of the deceased guru or sage.94 Dressed in a white silk dhoti, Sen was placed on a sandalwood bedstead at his home, Lily Cottage, and decked with jasmine, marigolds, and roses. Before the body was moved a photographer from the European firm of Bourne and Shepherd was called in to take pictures of the deceased, images that could then become objects “of touching regard to hundreds of the Brahmo leader’s disciples, friends, and admirers.”95 By the second half of the nineteenth century photographing the dead had become an established practice in Europe and North America, especially among middle-class families; in India it was still a novelty.96 Sen’s body was then borne through the streets of Calcutta, “followed by thousands and thousands of natives of all castes and creeds, and by a very numerous gathering of leading European gentlemen.” In the words of the Englishman newspaper, “No better proof could be found of the respect and esteem in which the late Brahmo leader was held than in the thousands who followed his remains to witness the cremation ceremony.”97 At Nimtala Ghat his body was laid on a sandalwood pyre, and the funeral service was

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conducted according to Brahmo rites. His ashes were later collected and taken back to his private chapel at Lily Cottage. If Sen’s funeral had an air of novelty about it—the funeral photographs, the procession through crowded streets, the extensive newspaper coverage—it was not for long unique.98 In August 1886, two years after Sen’s death, photographs were taken of the body of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa at Cossipore outside Calcutta, a mystic who, still more than Sen, had become the inspiration for an intensely devotional religious cult.99 In the pre-cremation images Ramakrishna is shown lying on a flower-strewn bier, his face clearly visible to the camera. He is surrounded by disciples, including Narendranath Datta, later known as Swami Vivekananda, many of whom look toward the camera rather than down at Ramakrishna’s body. The photographs were taken by a Bengali photographic studio at the behest of Dr. Mahendralal Sarkar, Ramakrishna’s physician and a formative figure in Indian science and medicine in late nineteenth-century Calcutta.100 Perhaps the photographs were intended (like Sen’s) to memorialize the sage and provide a tangible reminder of his earthly existence and spiritual power, or to document and authenticate the community of his followers, the men who might one day be worthy to follow in his footsteps.101 By the 1890s photography was no stranger to India’s dead, nor to cremation. Indeed, photography expressed, or facilitated, three different ways of seeing and representing the dead. One was as a form of darshan by which the reverential image of funerary repose (the bared head and upper body calmly nestled among flowers) was preserved for the living to meditate on, venerate, and so experience the moral authority and spiritual aura of the deceased guru, saint, or martyr.102 This idea of the photograph as a means of experiencing or transmitting darshan contrasted sharply with a second type of image, more characteristic of the tourist’s gaze than the devotee’s worship, of cremation as a kind of spectacle in which the blazing pyre and all the bustle surrounding it formed the primary field of view rather than the face and upper body of the deceased. Cremation as photographic spectacle suggested, even while it could not directly convey, the intensity of noise, smell, and heat, the fervor and confusion of the event, as at Manikarnika Ghat in Benares, rather than the calm that followed (as, exceptionally, in Dayal’s Indore photograph) or the darshan image of the cherished dead. And third, there was the photographic image of the mundane dead—the unadorned and barely clad corpse, face bared, feet protruding—loaded without much apparent respect or ceremony, as during Bombay’s plague epidemic, onto an awaiting municipal pyre. In July 1891, Calcutta witnessed another very public commemoration of a celebrated life: the cremation of Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar. An esteemed educationalist and social reformer, Vidyasagar, far from being an orthodox Hindu, was a rationalist, humanist, and agnostic, and yet there seems to have been no doubt among his relatives and followers that he should be cremated after the Hindu

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fashion.103 At 4:00 a.m. on the morning of July 30 his body was taken in procession from his home through the streets of Calcutta to Nimtala Ghat. Despite the early hour, hundreds of people turned out to witness the passing of his corpse and to touch the bier. Arriving at the ghat an hour later, Vidyasagar’s brothers wanted to light the funeral fire at once, but his grandsons insisted that a photograph should first be taken to remember the great man. Sarat Chandra Sen, a local photographer, was sent for, and arrived just as the sun was rising. By this time thousands of mourners had gathered at the ghat. The body was again washed and photographs taken. It was 6.30 a.m. before the pyre was lit. The fire burned for five hours before being extinguished with Ganges water. The ashes were gathered up and taken back to the family home.104 C O N C LU SIO N

These high-profile cremations in the 1880s and 1890s, along with the examples of Indian princes given earlier, suggest some of the ways in which Indian cremation, or the public engagement with cremation, were beginning to change. Apart perhaps from emulating grand funerals in Britain, like that of the Duke of Wellington in 1852 (when more than a million people lined London’s streets), these celebratory events in India bear the imprint of technological innovation, notably the photographing of the dead, which in the case of Vidyasagar delayed the lighting of the funeral pyre for over an hour. Newspapers and illustrated magazines in India and Britain gave extensive coverage to these events, both as a means of recording the passing of princes and other public figures and as a way of eulogizing the lives and achievements of great men. Rarely at this date were women so commemorated. That those achievements were often represented as patriotic and/or self-sacrificing added to the sense of their cremations’ symbolic worth and inspirational importance to India’s religious life and the modern nation. These funerary spectacles were of striking spatial and social significance. They were exceptional episodes in urban life, participatory events in which Indians (as if in anticipation of later demonstrations and street protests) temporarily took over the city from the colonial power and the municipal authorities in order to revere the dead (or, more mundanely, to gawp at the passing cortege and scrabble for scattered rupees), just as the cremation ground, that place of pollution and dread, became transformed into a privileged site for funeral photographs and orations, for statues, plaques, and shrines to memorialize the dead. While the cremation ground remained the ultimate center of attention, the procession to the burning ghat was of growing importance as a means of displaying wealth and power—the opulence of princes, the self-sacrifice and patriotism of reformers and leaders—just as the funeral pyre itself required costly mounds of sandalwood and lavish quantities of ghee to do justice to the holiness or the illustriousness

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of the deceased. Anything less would savor of disrespect. But cremation, even in India, remained a cross-cultural conversation. While disposing of the dead in the Western “industrial” manner largely remained a white prerogative, confined to Calcutta, cremation in the established but evolving Indian form provided an effective medium through which dissident Westerners like Nivedita and Besant could express their commitment to India and attachment to the Hindu faith. They might not have been born Hindus, but they could die like Hindus.

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Cremation and the Nation

Cremation in British India was always to a degree political. Its condemnation by European travelers and Christian missionaries informed a wider denigration of Hindus and Hinduism and the projection of Europe as a morally as well as materially superior civilization. The toleration, even endorsement, of cremation by the colonial authorities, its incorporation into the routine management of cities, jails, hospitals, and the army, was a necessary gesture of political accommodation, designed to appease the Indian population and avoid unwanted confrontation. Even when cremation was given a scientific and sanitary rationale and commended as preferable to burial, the implication was that the handling of Indian bodies required particular care and tact if the needs of colonial biopolitics were to be met. That corporeal caution might, it is true, from time to time be overlooked or deliberately overturned—in the confusion of battle, in the upsurge of plague mortality, in the calculated desecration of the bodies of rebels and “fanatics”— but in more normal times cremation commanded from the colonial authorities a far more compliant and respectful response. At the opposite end of the political spectrum, the manner in which cremation in the Hindu fashion was taken up and lauded by Western dissenters like Nivedita and Besant underscored their actively anticolonial agenda. Grand funeral processions and cremation spectacles recalled the power, however diminished, of India’s warrior princes. Hindus (and others) who leapt to the defense of cremation reminded the colonial regime that this was a practice whose observation was of more than religious significance. Bodies were political; none more so than those of the dead. However, for reasons already indicated, toward the close of the nineteenth and in the early years of the twentieth centuries Hindu cremation began to take on a 146

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still more overtly political form and to function as a vehicle for Indian, more especially Hindu, nationalism. This enlargement in the scale, visibility, and significance of cremation created a new dynamic in colonial biopolitics. In its new and more emphatically political manifestation, cremation became emblematic of a proud and defiant nationhood, further developing in the years after Indian independence in 1947 into a powerful expression of India’s national identity and its legitimate place in the world. But in becoming political and militant, cremation also nurtured or articulated a violence directed not only against the British (and that other colonial power, the Portuguese) but also against India’s Muslim population. T H E P O L I T IC A L C O R P SE

One can see signs of increased state sensitivity around Hindu cremation in the early years of the plague epidemic, itself a political as well as epidemiological watershed in the history of modern India. When in April 1898 Damodar Hari Chapekar was hung in Poona’s Yeravda Jail for the murder (along with his two brothers) of the city’s deeply unpopular plague commissioner, W. C. Rand, his body was passed over to his relatives. This had long been established administrative practice, but Chapekar’s corpse was released on the express condition that it would be cremated straightaway without any public demonstration, and to make sure of this a police guard accompanied the body to the burning ghat.1 For the British the Rand assassination and the accompanying unrest in Poona had been a traumatic moment, exposing with sudden starkness the vulnerability and unpopularity of the regime. But what the British had particularly begun to fear, at a time of heightened national feeling, was that the bodies of prisoners who had been convicted and, as in this case, executed for their political acts would become the focus for patriotic demonstrations and open defiance of colonial authority. What was feared in 1898 was realized a few years later when the ill-judged decision by Lord Curzon, as viceroy, in 1905 to partition Bengal (into a predominantly Muslim east Bengal and largely Hindu west Bengal) provoked widespread agitation and the first intense expressions of popular nationalism across India.2 Apart from demonstrations and boycotts targeting the British and their economic and administrative hold over India, revolutionary groups of mostly high-caste Hindus emerged, whose objective was to defeat the colonial power through bomb plots and assassinations. When revolutionary terrorists were arrested, imprisoned, and executed, the British authorities were faced with the politically awkward decision of how to dispose of the bodies. It was a dilemma they never quite resolved. The landmark case was that of a young Bengali revolutionary, Kanai Lal Datta. Accused of killing Narendra Nath Gossain, an approver in the earlier Alipore bomb case, Kanai Lal was executed in Calcutta’s Alipore Jail on November 8, 1908, and his body was handed over to relatives. What followed spun rapidly out of the

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control of the colonial authorities. According to press reports, Kanai Lal’s body was taken to the cremation ghat in a procession of a thousand people, mostly students, walking barefoot behind the flower-strewn bier. Exceptionally, but highly significantly in view of their normal absence from such rites, a “very large number” of women attended the ceremony at the ghat. There a funeral oration was given by Kanai Lal’s uncle, followed by the singing of nationalist songs, the blowing of conches, and shouts of “Kanai Lal ki jai” (“victory to Kanai Lal”).3 On the initiative of a patriotic lawyer, the cost of the sandalwood for Kanai Lal’s pyre was met by public subscription; further sums were to be raised for a marble monument to the dead hero.4 According to the government account of events, however, the district magistrate, Mr. Bompas, had insisted on the corpse being taken to the nearest cremation ground (Kalighat, a mile from Alipore Jail), not the more distant Nimtala Ghat, which would have allowed more time for crowds to gather. Citing municipal regulations, Bompas required that Kanai Lal’s face be covered during the procession, in the hope of dampening down the emotional excitement caused by the passing corpse, but he was unable to prevent a lengthy delay at the burning ghat that lasted from 9:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. “The delay in setting light to the pyre was clearly intentional,” officials reported, “the object being to enable as many persons as possible to view the corpse.” In their version of events, the police denied that a funeral oration had been given but admitted that photographs were taken of the body, and that Sarojini Ghosh, sister of the revolutionary Aurobindo Ghosh, laid a copy of the Bhagavad Gita and some flowers beside the body: “No other woman of respectable family was present.”5 It was concluded that in future the police might be able to curb demonstrations en route to the cremation ground, but that once the body arrived there they could do little “to prevent delay in setting fire to it or to prevent people coming in to view it.”6 The English press in Calcutta was deeply incensed at the “extraordinary laxity or stupidity” of the authorities in handing over the body of the “cowardly assassin” in the first place and so allowing him to be treated as a “hero and demigod.”7 A later police report acknowledged that the affair of Kanai Lal’s cremation “had a most pernicious effect on the minds of the youths of Bengal,” with one would-be revolutionary even making a false confession to a murder plot “because it was the dream of his life to have a funeral like Kanai Lal Dutt’s.”8 To the patriotic public, Kanai Lal was a national martyr, an inspiration for the revolutionary movement, and his heroic self-sacrifice was celebrated in numerous tracts and illustrated works.9 In a pamphlet written by Moti Lal Ray, produced nearly fifteen years after the cremation and promptly proscribed by the colonial authorities, the author recalled the sight of Kanai Lal’s body laid out on the funeral pyre: “As soon as the blanket was carefully removed, what did we see—language is wanting to describe the lovely beauty of the ascetic Kanai—his long hair fell in a mass on his broad forehead, the half-closed eyes were still drowsy as though from a taste of nectar,

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the living lines of resolution were manifest in the firmly closed lips, the hands reaching to the knees were closed in fists. It was wonderful! Nowhere on Kanai’s limbs did we find any ugly wrinkle showing the pain of death.”10 Western critics had often in the past claimed that Hindu cremations seemed to lack any display of emotion or even apparent concern for the body of the departed. No longer. The saintly, ascetic qualities ascribed to Kanai Lal as his body awaited cremation; the emotional fervor of the crowded cremation ghat; the speeches, hymns, and conch blowing; and the rush for relics of his body—overturned or inverted earlier notions, Hindu and European, of the horrors of the burning ground and the polluting corpse. The scene at Kanai Lal’s cremation echoed and carried to a new political intensity the idioms of sanctity and reverence seen earlier at the cremations of religious leaders and social reformers like Keshab Chandra Sen, Vidyasagar, and Vivekananda. These were “didactic deaths,” instructive to the public of the spiritual greatness and moral stature of the deceased swami and social and religion reformer or the self-sacrificing nobility of the youthful, fearless patriot.11 Political deaths and cremations like Kanai Lal’s were didactic, too, in that they schooled a wider public in the arts of anticolonial protest and inducted new social elements—women as well as men, masses as well as elites—into displays of public outrage and grief. Colonial attempts to sanitize cremation, to render it regulated and confined, collapsed when confronted with such massive demonstrations of public feeling. This potent mingling of the political and the religious, the funereal and the celebratory, so evident in the case of Kanai Lal Datta in 1908, deeply alarmed the British and left them perplexed about how in future they could prevent such impassioned events. The authorities tried to correct their error. The Bengal jail manual was hastily revised to state that the body of any prisoner who died or was executed in jail was to be made over to friends and relatives if claimed by them, “unless there should be any special reasons to the contrary.” This prohibition might apply due to death from an infectious disease, but more especially if there were “grounds for supposing that the convict’s funeral will be made the occasion for a demonstration.” A burial or cremation within the prison, attended by relatives, might be allowed, though only “in a perfectly private manner without any procession, pomp, public demonstration or any kind of display.”12 More immediately, under the headline “Warned by Experience,” the Times of India’s Calcutta correspondent reported on November 17, 1908, that the body of Satyendra Nath Bose—who was due to be executed a few days later for his participation in a revolutionary conspiracy—was not to be allowed out of the jail, but would be burned in the jail compound with only a few relatives present. It had already been rumored that Satyendra Nath’s funeral was to be accompanied by an even greater display of public enthusiasm than Kanai Lal’s and a samadhi erected to commemorate the “dignity of a martyr.”13 Bose was executed in Alipore Jail at 6:00 a.m. on November 20, 1908, with

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two hundred armed police on hand to deter any demonstrations. A large crowd, mainly of women, waited at the cremation ghat all day in the vain hope of seeing his ashes thrown into the Hooghly. When it was learned that an effigy of the executed revolutionary was to be taken in procession to the river for immersion instead, the local magistrate imposed a ban under Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure to prevent it. This proved only partly successful. Reviving an old practice in which, in the absence of a body, straw surrogates were cremated, effigies of Satyendra Nath were burned, “with all the rites and customs attending the cremation of a Hindu.” Students roamed the streets chanting “seditious songs to the effect that they would not be deterred from doing their duty to their country, if a thousand gibbets were erected for their execution.”14 In the months and years that followed Kanai Lal Datta’s execution, the British authorities made repeated attempts either to prevent the use of the Hindu cremation ground as a platform for the celebration of the life and death of revolutionary martyrs or, conversely, to stage their own ceremonies for loyal Indians killed in their service. In January 1914, when a police inspector, N. N. Ghosh, was assassinated for his part in investigating “terrorist crimes,” a grand cremation was held for him at Nimtala Ghat, attended by leading British and Indian officials, including the city’s police commissioner, Frederick Halliday. The assembled crowd “evinced great sympathy” for the dead inspector, shouting that the assassin “should be burnt alive.”15 Again, when a deputy superintendent of police was shot dead at Mymensingh the following October, his body was accompanied to the cremation ground by an escort of armed police with fixed bayonets. As a mark of respect at the burning ghat, in the presence of the district magistrate and senior officers, the police fired three volleys over the body.16 But for the British the difficulty still remained of how to dispose of the bodies of executed revolutionaries or those who died in prison. In the late 1920s there was a revival of revolutionary terrorism, with renewed bomb plots. Preeminent among them was the Lahore conspiracy case. One of the accused was a young Bengali, Jatindra Nath Das.17 When he died in Lahore Jail on September 13, 1929, after a hunger strike lasting sixty-three days, the authorities were undecided how best to dispose of his body. They concluded, however, that they had no choice but to release the body, and it was sent by train to Calcutta, the place of his birth. On arrival overnight at Howrah station the body was met by the mayor of Calcutta, Subhas Chandra Bose, who used the occasion to orchestrate a mass demonstration of anticolonial anger and grief. The body was taken in the back of a truck (as was now becoming common practice with the “special dead”) to Howrah town hall, where patriotic speeches were made. Then, starting at 8:00 a.m., the corpse was carried through the city, with an estimated 200,000 to half a million people lining the streets. The eight miles to the burning ghat took several hours for the cortege to complete, and it was 3:00 p.m. before the body was finally laid on the

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funeral pyre. The return of Jatindra Nath was marked by demonstrations not only in Calcutta but in towns and cities across India.18 The police were notably absent from the streets of Calcutta on that day, but this was not the way in which the British wished to see India’s revolutionaries commemorated. Veering almost to the opposite extreme, in March 1931 prison officers secretly removed the bodies of three executed revolutionaries, Bhagat Singh, Raj Guru, and Sukh Deo, from Lahore Central Jail at 8:30 p.m., without informing their relatives. They were taken by truck sixty-five miles to the banks of the Sutlej and burned; the ashes were thrown into the river at 5:00 a.m. the following morning. The British claimed that the cremations had been correctly performed and appropriate Hindu and Sikh rites followed, but this was widely disputed. It was even suggested (though without any evidence to support such a provocative claim) that the bodies had been dismembered by the police before burning.19 It was, however, clear that officials in Punjab had taken such drastic measures in order to preempt a recurrence of the scenes that had accompanied the cremations of Jatindra Nath Das and Kanai Lal Datta in Calcutta. But they could not prevent the three revolutionaries, Bhagat Singh in particular, from being memorialized—as they still are—as heroic martyrs and icons of Indian resistance to British rule.20 T H E P O L I T IC A L FA S C I NAT IO N S O F F I R E

Fire, it has often been pointed out, is a uniquely transformative element. It has a “fundamental ability to change material worlds and affect our experience of materiality.” As well as great physical destructiveness, it also has the capacity to be a socially generative and culturally creative force.21 Metaphorically and materially, cremation and the fire—sacred, sacrificial, purifying, defiant—with which it was identified became by the early twentieth century a vehicle for the expression of a new mood of nationalist determination and militancy. When Bal Gangadhar Tilak died on August 1, 1920, Bombay’s governor, George Lloyd, a staunch imperialist, made the surprising decision to allow the body to be cremated not at an existing burning-ground but on Chowpatty beach on Back Bay, a place of public resort and recreation close to the city’s center. The move appears to have been intended as a gesture of conciliation: Tilak, once seen by the British as an extremist firebrand and twice imprisoned for his political views, had recently assumed a more moderate stance.22 Following the creation of a new constitutional settlement, with the Government of India Act of 1919, the British were anxious to secure the cooperation of moderate nationalists, and allowing the public commemoration of Tilak’s death was thus seen as a way of trying to win Indian support by acknowledging his political stature and patriotic commitment.23 Although the government insisted that the site should not be marked by a memorial or monument of any kind, this injunction—perhaps predictably—was

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almost immediately ignored. “Remembrance,” to borrow a phrase from Jay Winter’s discussion of the “memory sites” of World War I, became “part of the landscape.”24 A small shrine to Tilak soon appeared on the spot, at first in the form of a sand sculpture of the god Shiva; each year on the anniversary of his death speeches were given, schoolchildren laid offerings, and his photograph was garlanded with flowers. Next, a Tilak Memorial Committee called for a statue to be erected on the site. In 1926 the Bombay government reluctantly agreed, and a memorial, paid for by public subscription, was unveiled in 1933. Meanwhile, to the government’s dismay and mounting annoyance, Tilak’s samadhi became a favored venue for political demonstrations and a starting point for nationalist rallies and processions. The spot acquired a political magnetism, a locational magic, all its own, with recurrent demands that the deaths of other nationalist leaders should be similarly honored on the sands. The authorities refused.25 Cremation and commemoration at Chowpatty symbolized Tilak’s elevation into the pantheon of national heroes and helped create a new urban geography for the memorialization of the “special dead.” It was not an isolated episode. When the Bengali nationalist Chittaranjan Das died at Darjeeling in June 1925, his body was taken by rail to Calcutta, where it was met by such vast crowds that the city effectively came to a standstill. Leaving Sealdah station, the funeral procession stopped at the corporation building where Das had been the first mayor; at the office of the newspaper Forward, which he had founded; and then at his home on Russa Road. After nearly eight hours the procession reached Keortala cremation ground, where the crowd surged forward for a last sight of the body before it was consigned to the flames.26 No less striking was the way in which Das was memorialized within the cremation ground, including the construction of a shelter for mourners using the burning ghat. A memorial to Das was unveiled at the site in 1935, becoming, like the Tilak samadhi in Bombay, a place for delivering patriotic speeches and holding political demonstrations as well as celebrating his life and career.27 As these parallel developments in Bombay and Calcutta showed, by the 1920s and 1930s cremation had become one of what Lisa Trivedi has described as the “technologies of nationhood”—the material and ideological means by which Indian nationalists (or nationalist Hindus) communicated their message of patriotism, service, duty, and defiance to a wider public.28 Following Tilak, with varying degrees of public celebration and memorialization, other politicians and public figures in the interwar years were similarly honored.29 And yet from a nationalist perspective, Tilak’s cremation was a particularly captivating event. Coming at a time of mounting anticolonial fervor following the Amritsar massacre of April 1919 and the launching of Gandhi’s noncooperation and civil disobedience movement, Tilak’s funeral pyre symbolized a new mood of defiance. It was as if the leader’s body had been a kind of corporeal offering, a fire sacrifice, made to inspire and embolden patriots throughout India. Fire was both funerary fact and patriotic

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metaphor. As one writer later remarked, on the day of his cremation Tilak “joined the five elements and from that sacred and inspiring funeral flame spread in India through Mahatma Gandhi the life-sustaining fire of non-cooperation.” Tilak passed on to Gandhi “all the power of his penance, and the heat of his fire, all his urges for freedom and all his life-work when he left his body.”30 As Jonathan Parry and others have noted, for Hindus the end of life was theoretically marked not by the biological moment of death but by the ritual breaking of the skull (kapal kriya) and the final release of “vital breath” (pran) during cremation.31 Cremation was, as Parry puts it, a “creative act of sacrifice.”32 The funeral pyre became a place not for the routine disposal of the already dead but for a living sacrifice to the fire god Agni. Understood in this way, the cremation of Tilak was not the burning of an inert and lifeless corpse but an act of self-sacrifice, not unlike (in theory) a sati mounting the funeral pyre of her deceased husband. And, like sati, the funeral flames served to glorify that sacrifice, only now not in honor of a dead husband but of the revered and godlike Mother India.33 Away from the pyre, too, fire had its historical moment, its time of exceptional utility and meaning in the national cause. Fire became a symbol of sacrifice and commitment, but also a marker of mass participation in ways that the nationalist elite might struggle to contain and indeed find alarming or dangerous. From the early 1920s to the early 1930s forest fires (whose significance was discussed in chapter 4) became exceptionally numerous and widespread; many were deliberately lit to express anger or defiance at restrictive forest regulations, but also in support of the civil disobedience campaigns. In 1921, at the height of Gandhi’s noncooperation movement, 317 separate forest fires were reported from Kumaon in the far north of India. In a further upsurge of nationalist agitation in 1931 more than fifty-two thousand acres in the same region were “wantonly” set on fire.34 Forest fires gave literal meaning to the idea that India was “ablaze” with nationalist fervor. So, too, did Gandhi’s own anticolonial maneuvers. In 1919–20 he proposed a series of measures to advance the cause of noncooperation and hasten swaraj (selfrule). One of these was a boycott of foreign cloth, intended to strike at the heart of Britain’s commercial hold over India. As well as refusing to buy or wear foreign cloth and clothes made from it, Gandhi, who a decade earlier in South Africa had presided over a “great bonfire” of registration certificates in protest against the racially discriminatory “Black Act,” called on Indians to publicly burn garments made from foreign cloth.35 Bombay saw several such patriotic bonfires, attended by crowds of excited onlookers.36 One witness recalled that the burning of a huge pile of clothes at Elphinstone Mill in June 1921 was greeted with shouts of joy and that a “glow of freedom lighted up thousands of faces.”37 At a demonstration held at Gauhati (Guwahati) in Assam in August that year “a sort of frenzy seized the whole crowd, and from all sides foreign clothing rained in heaps upon the burning pile.” So many clothes were thrown on “the sacrificial fire” that it was still smoldering the

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following morning.38 On his 1921 India tour Gandhi oversaw the burning of “tall hillock-like heaps of foreign cloths,” the flames visible from passing trains.39 There was something provocative, even incipiently violent, about such fierce and defiant foreign-cloth fires that is perhaps hard to reconcile with Gandhi’s nonviolent credo. In responding to criticism from, among others, the poet Rabindranath Tagore, Gandhi retorted (using the idioms of the colonial sanitarian) that he saw in “those foreign clothes the germs of the plague of slavery.” How could such emblems and vectors of a nation’s servitude possibly be used or passed on to others? “To burn them is the only remedy.”40 Sanitary idioms apart, Gandhi’s feeling for the purifying and sanctifying property of fire was one of those deep-seated cultural attachments that declared his Hindu, as well as Indian nationalist, identity. After 1921 the mahatma’s attention shifted to making hand-spun, handwoven cotton cloth (khadi) as the vernacular alternative to imported textiles, but even in the early 1930s the burning of foreign cloth remained on Gandhi’s personal agenda and as one of the Congress Party’s “nationalist rituals.”41 If fire helped symbolize and fuel patriotic fervor, it might also be its nemesis. On April 10, 1919, three days before the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh, a mob in the city of Amritsar attacked three banks and assaulted European employees. Two of the staff at the National Bank were beaten unconscious; furniture was heaped over their bodies, which were then doused in kerosene and, in a grim parody of a cremation pyre, set on fire.42 In November 1921 an anti-British riot erupted in Bombay and lasted several days, in the course of which a police station was set on fire “and given over to the flames.” Trams and automobiles were attacked, a liquor shop burned, and fire engines obstructed in their work. In the words of Krishnadas, a loyal Gandhian, “the spirit of intolerance had gone on increasing unchecked and had culminated in this huge conflagration at Bombay.”43 But Gandhi refused at this point to yield to the demands of more cautious nationalists that he abandon his campaign. Then, on February 5, 1922, at a time when the civil disobedience movement had reached a critical juncture, twenty-three policemen in the town of Chauri Chaura in the United Provinces were killed when, trying to escape their pursuers, they took refuge in a thana (police station). “The violent mob set fire to the building”—using kerosene looted from the bazaar—“reducing men and all to ashes.”44 This violent denouement finally persuaded Gandhi to suspend civil disobedience. If, up until that time, fire had given form and inspiration to the nationalist campaign, it now, if only temporarily, hastened its dissolution. C R E M AT IO N , C A S T E , A N D C OM M U N I T Y

Historically Hindu cremation was a high-caste rite, one of the rights and privileges of the “twice-born” Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas. Among the lower castes—the Sudras and untouchables (Dalits)—it was not the usual means of

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disposing of the dead, being too expensive, prohibited by the higher castes, or simply not part of their traditions. As we saw in chapter 2, with respect to early colonial ethnography, this hierarchical distinction still largely prevailed in mid- to late nineteenth-century India. But it was beginning to be eroded as some lowercaste Hindus became more affluent or as they sought to be recognized as Brahmins or (more often) Kshatriyas and so, among other marks of higher status, to enjoy the right to cremation. In the cities the municipalization of mortality and the normalization of cremation in jails and other colonial institutions further enlarged the remit of cremation, however perfunctorily performed, among Hindus of all castes. This enlargement of the cremation community was exemplified by the Bengal famine of 1943–44. Large numbers of the starving poor flooded into Calcutta from the stricken countryside (as they had into Bombay in 1876–77), only to die in the streets.45 Their bodies were gathered up by the hundreds and thousands by municipal workers, or removed from hospitals and police morgues, loaded onto trucks, and regardless of caste (and possibly of religion), taken to the city’s burning grounds and crematoria. Religious rites and social customs barely figured in this mass disposal of the dead. It was seen by the hard-pressed authorities as simply an essential measure of public health and safety.46 Conceivably, prompt action to remove the dead made the stark horror of this man-made famine less visible to the public, though contemporary photographs by William Vandivert, Margaret Bourke-White, and others reveal the shocking scale and apparently routine process of collecting and transporting the wasted, near-naked corpses (in figure 16, in a truck belonging incongruously to the Air Raid Precaution service). Seldom has the term disposal when applied to the dead borne such a weight of negative connotations. Quite how many of the “pauper and unclaimed dead” were removed and cremated in this way is unclear, whether in Calcutta itself or in the other towns and cities where similar scenes were grimly enacted. The authorities grew wary of issuing any statistics that would demonstrate the extent of the catastrophe. But as mortality in Calcutta rose by November 1943 to over two thousand a week, there were reports of city cremation ghats (which even before the war had struggled to burn five hundred corpses a week) becoming “congested” with bodies.47 Albeit from very different causes, communal violence on the streets of Calcutta in January and August 1946 added further to this horrific tally and to the “overwhelming material predicament” the continuing tide of corpses represented.48 But these mass disasters and the wholesale burning of the dead they occasioned only partly explain the way in which the social reach of cremation was being extended to engage and encompass a wider Hindu constituency. Two other factors merit consideration: one the attempts by reform organizations led by the Arya Samaj to cremate all the Hindu dead and the other the desire of the lower castes themselves, especially the “scheduled castes” or Dalits, to share in a rite

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Figure 16. Loading corpses into a truck for cremation during the Bengal Famine, 1943. Photograph by William Vandivert. LIFE Picture Collection © gettyimages.

hitherto the prerogative of high-caste communities. As part of its attempt to erase caste distinctions, to “re-convert” those who had become Muslims or Christians, and to build a more integrated and assertive Hindu community, the Arya Samaj and similar organizations, in India and abroad, attached particular emphasis to claiming the bodies of the dead for cremation. This applied even, one might say especially, when those deaths had been of a “bad” or violent nature.49 The victims of rail accidents, and later of air disasters, were claimed for Hindu cremation, even when an individual’s identity might be uncertain, to ensure that their bodies, retrieved from crash sites, hospitals, or morgues, received the proper funeral rites and were not buried or otherwise disposed of.50 In July 1937 the Punjab-Howrah express was derailed in Bihar and more than a hundred passengers killed. The dead were taken to Patna, where they were photographed and then buried or

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cremated according to their assumed religious identity.51 Such a strategy might duly honor the Hindu dead, but it could also engender a sense of competition with other communities (who might claim the same bodies as their own) or even lead to unfortunate mistakes over the religious identity assigned to a particular individual.52 If the bodies of the dead “belonged” to one community or another, then cremation (or burial) was the ultimate sign of that proprietary right. In this sense, the growing militancy of Hindu nationalism was directed (as historians have shown) at increased domination not only over women’s bodies but also over the bodies of the dead.53 At times of national solidarity, when intercommunal harmony was a priority, as in early April 1919 in Amritsar, Hindus and Muslims might join together to assist each other in burying or burning the dead: Hindus digging graves, Muslims bringing fuel for the pyre.54 But by the 1920s such shared gestures were increasingly rare, as clashes erupted in which cremation was the cause, sometimes the consequence, of angry confrontations. Thus, in May 1926 at the railroad town of Kharagpur in Bengal opposing parties clashed when Muslims objected to a Hindu cremation procession, accompanied by loud music, passing a mosque. Rioting lasted for several days, leaving at least twenty dead and thirty injured, most of them Muslims.55 Three years later, in November 1929, a similar collision occurred in Bombay. In order to reach the cremation ghat at Sonapur, Hindu funeral parties had to pass close to the Muslim burial ground; negotiating this uneasy proximity was a perennial source of friction. On this occasion several Hindus were attacked and injured by Muslims as they carried a woman’s body to the burning-ground.56 Further quarrels, provoked by the playing of music in Hindu funeral processions, followed in the 1930s and early 1940s.57 Even when riots arose for other reasons, the procession carrying the Hindu dead to the cremation ground was a common occasion for conflict, whether with Muslims or with armed police and soldiers brought in to patrol the route, escort the bier, and deter further violence.58 At a time of escalating communal tension in Punjab, Sikh funeral processions resulted in similar clashes with Muslim onlookers and congregations, as at Amritsar in June 1937.59 Until World War I, and even thereafter, it had been the custom for the bodies of untouchables (officially renamed the “depressed classes” and called by Gandhi Harijans or “children of god”) either to be buried or, if they were cremated, to be burned in a corner of their own caste’s burial ground.60 Except as suppliers of fuel and stokers of pyres, untouchables were precluded from attending the cremation of high-caste Hindus. One of the most contentious issues municipal councils across India faced was how to balance the competing claims of different communities to new or existing burial and cremation sites and how far to respect the objections of one community to the proposed opening of another community’s cemetery or cremation ground close to their own. Mixing up the dead, that fear of

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polluting the dead as well as fear of the polluting dead, of mingling the bones and ashes of their dead with those of other faiths or lower in the Hindu hierarchy, was much in evidence in the interwar years. Members of the depressed classes, or the organizations and individuals who spoke on their behalf, began to demand that untouchables were entitled to cremation rather than burial and, more radically still, not cremation at some distant location but at, or close to, the burning ghats of the higher castes.61 In 1926, for instance, a meeting of Sind’s Hindu Provincial Congress at Sukkur passed a resolution for the amelioration of the conditions of the depressed classes. This listed a series of demands, which included free access for members of the community to wells, schools, and temples, but also on equal terms to the cremation grounds of caste Hindus.62 In 1934 Arya Samajists in Bombay endorsed a proposal that the city’s existing burning ghats be opened for use by untouchables or, failing that, for new grounds to be established for all Hindus including the depressed classes.63 A meeting of the All-India Scheduled Castes Federation at Madras in 1944 likewise insisted that untouchables be given full access to casteHindu cremation grounds.64 But change was slow in coming and was not without opposition. In 1938, after a decade of intensive agitation by and on behalf of the untouchables, the standing committee of Bombay’s municipal corporation approved a grant of Rs. 69,000 for a Harijan cremation ground to be opened in the vicinity of Sonapur on Queen’s Road (since the caste-Hindu burning-ground was private property, its trustees could not be forced to open it for Dalits to use).65 By the early 1940s, as the first wave of enthusiasm for Gandhi’s Harijan campaign waned, some campaigners felt that the removal of “Harijan disabilities” was not progressing quickly enough or that such gestures as opening caste-Hindu cremation grounds to untouchables did little to redress their underlying social, economic, and political grievances.66 Only after independence was a comprehensive anti-untouchability bill drawn up (eventually brought into law as the Untouchability Offences Act of 1955) to outlaw discrimination against members of the depressed classes in, among other places, burial grounds and cremation sites.67 There was, however, an alternative and less confrontational route by which ex-untouchables might secure their right to cremation. At Nagpur on October 14, 1956, before an estimated 400,000 followers, India’s law minister Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar formally renounced Hinduism and declared his conversion to Buddhism.68 By changing religion Ambedkar hoped to inspire fellow untouchables to escape the oppression and exploitation of caste Hindus. His migration to Buddhism also had the effect of normalizing cremation among sections of the depressed classes’ population (including members of his own Mahar caste). When Ambedkar died in December that year, his body was cremated according to Buddhist rites, presided over by Buddhist priests but to the incongruous accompaniment of a volley of blanks from the police and a bugler sounding the Last Post over

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the sandalwood pyre. The cremation was not, however, held at Chowpatty beach as Ambedkar’s Dalit followers had requested; Bombay’s chief minister, Y. B. Chavan, blocked that proposal. Nevertheless, Ambedkar’s remains were later interred at Chowpatty, close to where Tilak had been cremated in 1920.69 The proximity of these two memorial sites seemed to signal (however deceptively) how through cremation the high castes and the low had at last been reconciled and brought, in death, to a belated equality. F R OM R AJ T O R AJ G HAT

War came to India in 1939, its impact increasingly felt as the Japanese stormed through Burma and threatened to invade India itself. In Bombay in March 1942 the burning of overnight cremation fires was banned by the police commissioner for fear the flames, “visible at a great distance from the shore,” would help enemy ships and bombers find their target.70 Otherwise cremation passed relatively unscathed during World War II, despite acute shortages of wood and kerosene and the phenomenal demands on burning ghats made by the mass mortality of the Bengal famine and subsequently by the deaths from communal killings.71 Photographs from Calcutta in the mid-1940s suggest that some bodies were burned where they had fallen, in the city’s streets and lanes. Cremation, which nineteenth-century sanitarians had sought to reform and confine, now, in the mid-twentieth century, was becoming unbounded, redefined and reconfigured in an age of nationalist politics, sectarian violence, and mass participation. Once private and secluded, cremation for the “special dead” had become public theater. Perhaps no episode showed cremation’s unbounding more clearly than the funeral of Rabindranath Tagore in August 1941. Before the poet died in “solemn beauty” at Jorasanko in Calcutta, he had asked to be cremated at Shantiniketan in rural Bengal, at the site of the university he had founded, “under the open sky among the boys of my ashram.”72 Instead, conforming to what had already become an urban tradition in Calcutta, Tagore’s body was paraded through the crowded streets of the city, with garlands and flowers showered onto his bier from the pavements and rooftops. Stopping in College Street for speeches and floral tributes from the vice-chancellor and leading academics of Calcutta University, the procession took two hours to cover the five miles to Nimtala Ghat. En route there were scenes of “mass frenzy” as the crowd tried to touch Tagore’s body, pulling at his limbs and plucking hair from his head and beard. As one shocked Bengali later commented: “Instead of serenely paying obeisance to a person of such stature as Tagore, what the people did was unmitigated barbarism.”73 Such was the commotion and pressure of the crowd at Nimtala Ghat that the entrance gate and part of the perimeter wall collapsed; corpses already there, awaiting cremation, were roughly pushed aside. People fainted in the crush. Eventually, at

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dusk, as the pyre was lit a “hush fell in the vast crowd, while many broke under the stress of emotion.” 74 In what one observer called their “funerary ecstasy,” some of the crowd surged forward, and even before the ashes were cold, seized bones and other relics. Little remained of the great poet and national icon to be taken back in reverence to Shantiniketan.75 In Bombay five years later, in May 1946, the body of the nationalist leader and prominent lawyer Bhulabhai Desai was carried on an open bier, mounted on a truck adorned with flowers and the national flag, through the streets from Congress Party headquarters to the Sonapur cremation ground, watched by an estimated 100,000 people. Shops and offices throughout the city closed as a mark of respect. It was only with difficulty that the police could persuade the crowd not to take the body to Chowpatty beach to be burned next to the Tilak samadhi and to continue to Sonapur. At the cremation site there were unruly scenes as the crowd tried to force its way into the walled enclosure. Several people were crushed or swooned in the stampede. Eventually, Desai’s body was brought to the burning place, with garlands and flowers raining down from those unable to get close to the pyre. The assembled dignitaries were unable to make their funeral speeches because of the “din” caused by the incessant shouting of nationalist slogans. As had become common practice, the event was given extensive press coverage, including photographs of the funeral procession.76 The long evolution of Hindu cremation since the 1870s, as well as these more recent deaths, street processions, and scenes of tumult and emotion at the burningground, set precedents for Gandhi’s cremation following his assassination in Delhi on January 30, 1948. While death by hanging (like Kanai Lal Datta and Jatindra Nath Das) or by an assassin’s bullet (like Mohandas Gandhi and, after him, Indira Gandhi) might once have been regarded as “bad death” and so precluded cremation, in the new era of Hindu cremation the funeral pyre had come to be seen as a supremely fitting way of honoring and vindicating the nation’s martyred dead.77 In death, as in life, Mohandas Gandhi was an object of exceptional veneration and darshan.78 Although the government of India’s first impulse was to have the mahatma embalmed so that his body would remain, Lenin-like, as a didactic inspiration for future generations, consultation with his son, Devadas Gandhi, and secretary, Pyarelal Nayar, revealed that Gandhi’s own wish had been to be cremated; the mahatma, it was said, “was strongly opposed to any special worship of his remains.”79 The spectacle of a nationalist cremation had occurred many times in Calcutta and Bombay over the previous decades; now, fittingly, it came to Delhi, capital of the new India. On January 31, the day after the assassination, crowds estimated at over a million gathered along the five-mile route of the funeral procession from Birla House, where Gandhi had been killed, clambering onto lampposts, trees, and statues to gain a better view and have a final darshan of the passing corpse.

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With close relatives and followers walking behind the flower-strewn cortege, Gandhi’s body, draped in the national flag, was transported on a military vehicle pulled by servicemen to Raj Ghat, the open space on the banks of the Yamuna where Hindu cremations had long been held. While some observers found the use of a military vehicle to carry the body at odds with Gandhi’s dedication to nonviolence, it was no more than a variation on the kinds of mechanical means of transport now commonly used for important funeral processions. And if India’s armed forces were also much in evidence, whether to provide crowd control or by their diverse regional origins and religious identities to give a display of unity at a time of national crisis, this was not unlike the employment of police and troops in many other state funerals over the preceding fifty years.80 Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy and first governor-general of India, his wife Edwina, and their entourage sat cross-legged and awkward before the pyre, hoping by their action to instill calm in the seething mass of spectators. India’s prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, his daughter Indira, the home minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, and other cabinet members gathered around the pyre, barely sheltered from the crush. Brahmin priests performed Vedic rites before a pyre piled high with sandalwood. As the fire was lit at 4.45 p.m. by Gandhi’s son, Ramdas, “a million-throated cry of anguish rose from the mammoth crowd.” Despite the troops, wielding lathis and mounted on horseback, struggling to contain them, some in the crowd surged close to the blazing pyre (see figure 2 in chapter 1). When “sobbing women rushed forward to obtain a last darshan of the Mahatma,” the thoughts of some at the scene turned to sati.81 Photographs and newsreels brought to that seemingly ancient scene a modern visibility and connectivity: the sandalwood, the mounting fervor of the crowd, the mourners’ grief-stricken faces, the blazing pyre, the charred wood and the fire-consumed body, and, later, perhaps most poignantly of all, the solemn gathering of Gandhi’s ashes (see figure 17). As well as the Indian photographers present, the event was covered by Margaret Bourke-White and Henri Cartier-Bresson, who between them took dozens of pictures of the scene, some of which rapidly appeared in illustrated newspapers and magazines around the world.82 Never before had a Hindu cremation garnered such global attention.83 Gandhi’s funeral captured the complex semiotics of modern Indian cremation: the public honoring of the dead; the involvement of the masses; the presence of women as well as men; the theater and fascination of the blazing pyre; the mixing of religion and politics; the ancient rites and modern media; the fire as sacrifice, grief, remembrance, and regeneration. After the funeral, Gandhi’s ashes were placed in several urns and distributed across India to be seen, in a further act of darshan and dispersal, as the train carrying them halted at railroad stations or as they were exhibited in towns and cities, the Buddha-like relics serving at a time of crisis to rally the people and shore up the fragile project of national unity.84 On

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Figure 17. Gathering the ashes from Gandhi’s cremation. Photograph by Henri CartierBresson © Magnum Photos.

February 13, watched by millions, some of the ashes were ceremonially immersed at the Sangam, the sacred spot below Allahabad where the waters of the Yamuna and Ganges mingle, and from where symbolically Gandhi’s remains might be carried across India and eventually to the sea.85 In a further demonstration of necromobility, other portions of his ashes were sent abroad, to Burma, Tibet, Ceylon, and Malaya. The urn sent by air to Singapore (a place Gandhi had never visited while alive) was displayed in the city’s Victoria Memorial hall for several days before, on March 28, in an event watched by thousands of ethnic Indians, the ashes were scattered in the sea off Clifford Pier.86 Death and the diaspora were once more united. From the start it had been intended that a memorial, described as a samadhi, should be erected on the site of Gandhi’s cremation. Various schemes were proposed, including a twelve-acre deer park.87 But while Buddhist and Hindu precedents were freely invoked, the innovative nature of what was proposed aroused controversy. There was much debate in the Lok Sabha (the lower house of the Indian parliament) and in the press about whether the monument should be called a samadhi (as Nehru maintained), a stupa, or some other name. According to one critic, “The word ‘samadhi’ is used for a memorial erected on the burial site of a Hindu saint. Gandhi did not die a saint nor was his body buried and hence his

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memorial at Raj Ghat cannot be called a samadhi.” The correct term, in his view, was a chattri, of the kind that could be seen at Nasik, Benares, and elsewhere.88 What actually emerged, more than sixteen years after Gandhi’s death, was an engraved black marble plinth, more like a sacrificial altar than the regal umbrella of a Rajput chattri. Raj Ghat thereafter became a place of national memorial, a Hindu Arlington, an open-air St Paul’s, where, after Gandhi, other prime ministers—Nehru, his successor Lal Bahadur Shastri, and his daughter Indira Gandhi—were also cremated and memorialized. Many other prime ministers, deputy prime ministers, and presidents have now been commemorated there or close by, the memorial stones and gardens of remembrance reflecting the eclectic tastes and social diversity of India’s national leadership. For Indians, as for visiting tourists and dignitaries, Raj Ghat has become a shrine of national remembrance. T H E NAT IO N A N D T H E WO R L D

Cremation was not just a domestic matter, internal to the career of the Indian nation. It was also integral to the way in which India—Hindu India—presented itself to the world. Chapter 5 showed how, as Indians moved abroad to work, travel, or settle, cremation, or the desire for cremation, journeyed with them. This diaspora of the dead continued into the nationalist era and the early decades of Indian independence, its progression marked by the repatriation of the ashes of prominent politicians, princes, and businessmen, but also by local struggles for recognition of the right of Hindus, Sikhs, and others to be cremated abroad and in an approved and respectful manner. In 1926, under the headline “Questions of Cremation: Indians’ Fight with Red Tape,” the Times of India reported how Indian students in Berlin had sought to have cremated the body of one of their number, Tryambak Pathak, who had been found frozen to death in the Silesian mountains. German officials initially objected to the cremation on the grounds that Pathak had not left any written instructions about the disposal of his body, as the law required.89 Three years later, in 1929, a member of the legislative assembly in Delhi denounced the ban on Hindu cremation in the Belgian Congo and asked what the government of India was going to do to address this “outrage on the religious rites and ceremonies of Hindus.”90 Concern for the proper disposal and memorialization of Indians who died abroad intensified after independence, especially when such individuals were seen as representing the Indian nation. Colonel Unni Nayar, acting as a United Nations observer, was killed during the Korean War in August 1950 when his jeep hit a landmine; his body was cremated locally following Hindu rites. His death was mourned by Nehru and Patel as a national as well as personal disaster, and photographs of the cremation appeared in the national press.91 The accidental deaths of two Sikh soldiers serving with United Nations forces in Gaza in January

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1960 were similarly honored, with a military salute and photographs of the cremation pyre appearing in the daily papers.92 In the age of Nehruvian nonalignment, cremation was emblematic of India abroad—the India of peacekeeping missions, energetic international diplomacy, and patriotic service and personal self-sacrifice commemorated through funerary fire. Elevating cremation to an emblem of national pride and self-identity had further corollaries. As conflict with Portugal erupted over Goa in 1955 and continued to escalate until the Indian army invaded in December 1961, the death of Indian martyrs resurrected and re-created many of the corporeal idioms of the earlier struggle against British colonial rule. The repatriated bodies of Indian satyagrahis or volunteers killed by the Portuguese were paraded through Indian streets and given a highly emotional and patriotic cremation.93 When the Portuguese authorities were accused of mistreating bodies or denying them their rightful cremation, tension ratcheted up still further. To deprive Indians of the right to cremate their dead had come to be seen as an affront to Indian nationhood. As the dispute with China intensified in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Chinese were accused of insulting India by refusing to return the bodies of Indian policemen and soldiers killed in border skirmishes for cremation or of disposing of them in ways (such as burial) that were provocatively disrespectful.94 Following one such incident in October 1959, nine members of the Indian border police (India’s “nine brave sons”) killed by the Chinese in Ladakh were, on their return, given a “befitting cremation with full military honours,” the Last Post sounding out over the long row of funeral pyres.95 Four years later, after India’s humbling defeat in the Himalayan war of 1962, the Chinese repeatedly refused Indian requests to be allowed to collect and cremate “in accordance with the religious rites” the bodies of Indian military personnel who had died fighting in Ladakh, which now lay on the Chinese side of the “line of control.” The most the Chinese would agree to was for the Chinese Red Cross to cremate the bodies on India’s behalf.96 The Indian ministry of external affairs responded on October 5, 1963, in an official memorandum accusing the Chinese of “utter callousness . . . in willfully preventing the last rites from being performed.”97 Seldom had the semiotics of the Indian body and the politics of cremation occupied so prominent a place in the nation’s public life and external affairs. In the wake of partition, these international tensions were further reflected in India’s relations with its Muslim neighbors and in the representation of India and Indians in national politics and popular imagination across the Islamic world. Hindus and Sikhs working, and in some cases long resident, in Middle Eastern countries were faced with a ban on cremation in any form, as in Kuwait in 1987, on the grounds that the state religion, Islam, “did not permit this practice.”98 Such blanket hostility might be experienced at a personal level, too. Early in his career, before he became a celebrated novelist, Amitav Ghosh encountered this firsthand

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during his anthropological fieldwork in Egypt in the 1980s. His village informants knew of Indians as people who worshipped cows and burned their dead—both practices that they regarded as haram, deeply abhorrent and proscribed by Islamic law. Cremation was, in their view, horrific and barbaric: “Are people fish that you should fry them on a fire?” one woman demanded.99 Some of Ghosh’s other contacts thought that burning the dead was a foolish attempt to try to cheat the day of judgment. He was told to go back to India and “put an end to this burning business.” In a rhetoric that echoed nineteenth-century European repugnance, cremation in the eyes of these Egyptian Muslims made India a nation of “savages.”100 At the end of October 1984, India’s prime minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguard in retaliation for the army’s assault on the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Her cremation, held three days later, on November 2, 1984, was delayed (contrary to custom) until dignitaries from around the world had had time to arrive in Delhi. Screened live on India’s state-run television channel, Doordarshan, on the BBC in Britain, and in the United States and elsewhere, the cremation reached an unprecedentedly wide national and international audience. Exceptionally, too, in a funerary idiom dominated by men, it was the body of a woman that for once commanded attention.101 With the pyre lit by her son and successor as prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, the cremation symbolized both the continuity of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and the precariousness of the Indian nation-state at a time of profound crisis, a moment analogous to Mohandas Gandhi’s assassination and funeral in 1948. But rather than the backdrop of Partition and Hindu-Muslim killings, Indira Gandhi’s cremation occurred at a time of fierce division between Hindus and Sikhs, both cremating communities, with the Sikhs accused of plotting or being complicit in her murder and of seeking to wreck national unity by wanting a separate Sikh state of Khalistan.102 An estimated three thousand Sikhs were killed in the orgy of violence that followed the assassination, a pogrom recalling the worst days of the partition riots almost forty years earlier. As the smoke of arson spread across the city, Sikhs were hacked to death on the streets of Delhi, only miles from where that other burning, the cremation of Indira Gandhi, was about to happen.103 If Mohandas Gandhi’s cremation had seemed like an appeal for communal peace and domestic harmony, Indira Gandhi’s appeared to reflect more darkly the violence of the moment. There is a sense of both menace and uncertainty in Raghu Rai’s unsettling photograph (see figure 18) of huge flames and billowing black smoke issuing from the pyre; a group of tense mourners and wary bodyguards stand close by, looking anxiously not at the burning corpse but, as if in fear and danger, away from the fire. Internationally, the event was met with as much bewilderment as mournfulness, as commentators on BBC television struggled to explain the meaning of the rites, especially the ritual breaking of the skull.104 Some viewers were shocked by what they saw on their screens. Hemchand Gossai, a

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Figure 18. The cremation of Indira Gandhi, November 1984. Photograph by Raghu Rai © Magnum Photos.

Guyanese of Indian descent, watched on television in the United Kingdom, where he was a doctoral student. “The western world,” he wrote, “for the most part is unaccustomed to this kind of spectacle and there seems to be a continuing urgency to ensure that the brutality of death and the realities of burial and cremation are kept as pristine as possible.” There was a frankness, an unmediated directness, about Indira Gandhi’s televised burning that created—or re-created—doubt and repugnance. There was something, Gossai recalled twenty years later, “that makes the act of cremation in this manner so brutal and final.”105

Epilogue Rethinking the Hindu Pyre

Cremation was both ancient rite and modern ritual. As an old and prestigious rite, its origins in India can be traced back to early Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist times. In the early modern age it gained fresh impetus and authority from its association with Sikhism and the political ascendancy of the Rajputs and Marathas. But in the nineteenth century, in the era of British colonial rule, cremation in the Indian manner faced its greatest challenges: from Christian missionaries and other Westerners who viewed it as ungodly and barbaric, and from sanitarians who, while arguing that cremation might be technically preferable to other means of disposing of the dead, saw its Indian practice as unscientific and unhygienic. Yet in fact neither challenge was sufficient to overturn the established form of Indian cremation or ever make its abolition a likely proposition. For a pragmatic British administration, wholesale interference with a rite revered by millions of its subjects was impractical and impolitic. On the contrary, cremation was a practice followed by the priestly, martial, and mercantile elites on whose active support or tacit acquiescence British supremacy ultimately relied. But while open-air, pyre cremation remained in essence inviolate, it was still subjected to intense scrutiny and a protracted debate that lasted from the 1850s (well before the cremation movement developed in the West) to the close of the colonial era in the midtwentieth century. In the process, Indian cremation adapted, changed, and found practical means of accommodation, especially within the modern metropolitan cities of Bombay and Calcutta. It also became a more political act and a more public performance. Enlarged at home, transported abroad, cremation became emblematic of a new Hindu assertiveness and a recast Indian identity.

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There has been extensive discussion in recent years of what Thomas Laqueur terms “the work of the dead”—the social memorialization and political mobilization of the dead in the service of the living. Remarkably little of this scholarship has hitherto been concerned with South Asia, and yet cremation deserves a far more conspicuous and considered place in the social, political, and environmental history of that region than it has hitherto commanded, just as South Asia itself deserves far greater prominence in the global study of death rites and mortuary practices. Indian cremation was always more than an Indian issue. Through imperial networks of exchange and debate, through the South Asian diaspora and the memorialization of the Indian war dead, India and its distinctive mode of cremation have had a not insignificant impact on Western funerary thought and commemorative action. Positively or negatively, too, Indian cremation has had a profound impact on the Western experience, representation, and understanding of India itself. Cremation never ceased to be an intimate, personal act, and for many Indians at home and abroad, an emotional necessity, a ritual obligation, a reaffirmation of their faith. But in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries cremation also added to the armory of colonial biopower. A colonizing of the dead, a governmentality of the graveyard and the burning ghat, cremation constituted one of the many sites through which, in the name of sanitary science and urban order, the colonial regime asserted (or sought to assert) its authority over the living and the dead. Not least among those affected were the pauper dead, who formed so large a portion of those sent to urban cremation sites from hospitals and jails or as the casualties of famines and epidemics. The increasing presence of the subaltern poor should remind us that cremation, in origin an upper-caste rite, also impacted the life, work, social status, and death of the lower classes. The corporeal politics of funerary surveillance and control was never exclusively colonial, for aside from instances of overt resistance, cremation in its modern guise relied on the willingness and participation of Indians for its adaptation and reform. In cremation the necro-politics of the colonial era moved, seemingly effortlessly, into the biopolitics of the Indian nation-state. Much has happened since Indira Gandhi’s cremation in 1984, still more since Mahatma Gandhi’s in 1948, to demonstrate the continuing appeal of funerary fire and its hold over the Hindu imagination. Cremation on an open-air, wood pyre in the conventional Hindu manner has remained as powerful a political statement and affirmation of religious identity as it was in the late colonial era. In December 1950, two years after Gandhi’s death, Vallabhbhai Patel, the Mahatma’s lieutenant, India’s home minister, and an increasingly conservative, pro-Hindu force in Indian politics, was cremated in Bombay in a state funeral presided over by India’s president, Rajendra Prasad. There had been some suggestion that Patel, too, should have been cremated next to Tilak at Chowpatty. Instead a “tidal wave

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of grief-stricken humanity,” estimated at one million, watched or followed his bier on its way to Sonapur. Only five hundred people were admitted to the cremation ground, but dozens more climbed the fifteen-foot-high perimeter walls or clambered up nearby trees to gain a view.1 Jawaharlal Nehru’s death and cremation followed in 1964. As India’s first prime minister, Nehru has been described as a man with a “passionate secular vision of a new India” and as a “secular modernist” who “shunned the self-proclaimed champions of the ‘Hindu community’ as reactionaries.”2 And yet when he died his body underwent a decidedly Hindu cremation, on the banks of the Yamuna amid the priestly chanting of Vedic hymns, the pouring of ghee, and the lighting of a sandalwood pyre. His ashes were taken back to his hometown, Allahabad, for immersion at the Sangam.3 One might interpret this as a late-life lapse from Nehru’s earlier secularism or a demonstration that cremation had become more of a political ceremony than a religious rite. Burning the dead might not, in itself, be incompatible with secularism, merely a recognition that cremation after the Hindu manner had become the normal form of state funeral afforded to India’s political leaders, unless they categorically belonged to a community other than that of Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, or Jains. The rise of the Hindu Right and the dominance of Indian politics and government by the Bharatiya Janata Party since the 1990s have elevated cremation still further in Indian politics and iconography as a cherished rite that is viewed as fundamental to the Hindu religion and so, by extension, essential to the Hindu nation.4 Seen in this way, cremation serves to express and exemplify the nation while also proclaiming a critical distinction not just from Pakistan, the Islamic state and rival power next door, but still more divisively, from India’s own internal “others,” the Muslims, Christians, and tribal communities for whom interment remains the norm. All reference to the historical travails by which modern Hindu cremation has come into being, its long history of contestation, containment, accommodation, and acceptance at home and abroad, are thereby ignored or dismissed as irrelevant, unpatriotic, and insulting. Faith trumps history. And yet for all its apparent ascendency, cremation has remained a matter of deep controversy in India and across the South Asian diaspora. As a political as well as religious rite, its dominance has periodically been challenged. Late in the evening of December 5, 2016, the death was announced of J. Jayalalitha, the longserving chief minister of the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Becoming leader of the All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) on the death of its founder, M. G. Ramachandran, in 1987, Jayalalitha, a former star of the Tamil cinema, had served six terms as chief minister since first taking office in 1991. Her body, laid in state at Rajaji Hall in Chennai, was seen by an estimated two million people who flocked there to pay their last respects. It was widely assumed that, after the custom of high-caste Hindus, as a Brahmin of the Iyengar caste Jayalalitha would be cremated. Instead, her body was buried at the north end

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of Marina Beach, close to where her mentor, Ramachandran, had been interred thirty years earlier. The decision by the AIADMK leadership to have Jayalalitha buried rather than cremated sparked intense debate about funeral rites and atheism in modern India.5 The active rejection of cremation has had a long history in Tamil Nadu, dating back to the controversial figure of E. V. Ramaswami Naicker. Naicker founded the atheistic Self-Respect Movement in 1925 and from 1944 led the Dravida Kazhagam (Dravidian Association), precursor to the AIADMK. His radical social reform agenda included women’s rights, the abolition of private property, the removal of untouchability, and the eradication of caste. He sought to instill in non-Brahmins, the great majority of Tamils, a sense of pride and self-respect rather than being in thrall to the tiny Brahmin elite.6 His irreligious anti-Brahminism was a frontal assault on the political and social power of the Brahmins, but also on the rites and customs that had long sustained Brahmin authority and privilege. Naicker called for the rejection of the “meaningless” ceremonies presided over by Brahmins; the reform of marriage (including encouraging widow remarriage and cross-caste marriages); and the abandonment of cremation, as an essentially Brahminical rite, in favor of burial or other, overtly secular, means of disposing of the dead. When Naicker died in 1973, aged ninety-four, his body was buried, his grave a shrine to his atheistic beliefs.7 That forty-three years later the body of Jayalalitha, a prominent politician from one of the most prestigious of all south Indian Brahmin castes, should also be buried rather than cremated was thus a highly significant political gesture and a powerful reference back to one of the founding figures of modern Tamil politics. The status of cremation has also been challenged abroad. In 2010 Davendra Kumar Ghai, a Uganda-born Hindu long resident in Britain, won the right in the Court of Appeal to have his body cremated after death. He argued that cremation in the open air “on a traditional funeral pyre” was an obligatory religious rite among Hindus and Sikhs and that performing this “sacrament of fire” did not contravene the 1902 Cremation Act, which first legalized cremation in the United Kingdom. Hitherto the act had been interpreted to mean that the burning of human remains anywhere except in an enclosed crematorium was illegal, a position the British government has been keen to uphold. Four years earlier, in 2006, Ghai had called for a judicial review of the prevailing interpretation of UK cremation law after Newcastle-upon-Tyne city council had first granted, then refused, him permission to conduct an open-air cremation in accordance with Hindu and Sikh rites.8 Ghai had long campaigned for open-air funerals for members of the Asian community rather than the procedure, not uncommon among British Hindus and Sikhs, of having the bodies of their dead relatives flown to India for burning. Believing that UK law did not prohibit it, in July 2006 Ghai organized a funeral-pyre cremation for Rajpal Mehat, a Sikh who had drowned

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in a London canal. The 2010 Court of Appeal judgment created the possibility for the long-standing ban on open-air cremations in Britain to be lifted and for outdoor burning of the dead to be recognized by law, albeit subject to regulations and conditions yet to be determined by the government. In the words of the Master of the Rolls, Lord Neuberger, delivering the review panel’s judgment: “It seems to us that Mr. Ghai’s religious and personal beliefs as to how his remains should be cremated once he dies can be accommodated within current cremation legislation.”9 For Ghai and his supporters the judgment was a victory for religious freedom; for opponents of open-air cremation the idea of burning bodies anywhere outside the enclosed confines of an approved crematorium was profoundly offensive.10 The issue remains unresolved. Ghai believes he and fellow Hindus have been denied “the solace of fire,” but with concern growing over atmospheric pollution the likelihood of open-air, wood-pyre cremations being officially approved in Britain seems remote.11 Paradoxically, perhaps, cremation in the “traditional,” open-air manner to which Ghai alludes is being challenged in India itself—not by foreign courts or regional politics, but by changes affecting the country at large. Population growth, the rapid expansion of India’s multi-million-population cities, and the demands of an industrial economy have all put unprecedented pressures on the environment in which wood-pyre cremations, open to the sky, once flourished. Wood for cremation has become increasing scarce and costly, sandalwood a rarity.12 In cities, with an estimated 600 kg (1,323 lbs.) of wood needed to burn a body, the cost today can easily be Rs. 15,000 or more. Each death means another tree felled. A recent survey suggests that in present-day India around fifty to sixty million trees are cut down every year to provide wood for cremation.13 It was once argued in support of cremation in the West that this was a more “environmentally friendly” practice (as we would now put it) than burial: little land was taken up for cremation by comparison with the ever-expanding cemeteries, and the smoke from the burning corpse dissipated harmlessly into the ether rather than remaining to pollute the earth. Or, as conventional Hindu thought maintained, the remains of the dead body returned to the elements from which it had been born. As India’s governor-general, C. Rajagopalachari, a Tamil Brahmin, observed in his funeral oration at the pyre side of the poet-politician Sarojini Naidu in March 1949: “All that was spirit in her went away early this morning. What is left behind is common earth, air and water. We have joined together to give back to mother earth and mother air all that belonged to them.”14 But today, viewed materially rather than metaphysically, and in a far more environmentally conscious age, this “giving back” of the human body to the elements of earth and sky seems less desirable. If an estimated seven million Hindus die in India each year and many of those are “traditionally” cremated on an openair, wood pyre, then the costs to the environment in terms of felled trees, the

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release of greenhouses gases, the spread of atmospheric pollution, and the contamination of rivers are immense and add in no small measure to India’s unfolding environmental catastrophe. As this book has tried to show, modern technology and modern cremation share many connections, and concern about the economic and environmental costs of funerals, whether involving earth- or fire-burial, has long been an incentive for change—in India as in the West. Although enclosed Western-style crematoria, fueled by gas or electricity, were largely rejected in India before World War I, there was, at least in the cities, an inevitable logic to their eventual adoption. In 1928 a plan for a gas- or coke-fueled crematorium for Bombay was put forward by the city’s municipal commissioner. At the time it garnered little support, both on the grounds of cost (a lakh of rupees) and the expectation that (as in Calcutta) only Europeans and very few Hindus would use it. When a public meeting was held to protest against the proposal, the scheme was quickly shelved.15 It was not until 1953, a quarter of a century later, that Bombay (and India) acquired its first electric crematorium, now at the cost of five lakhs. Located at Chandanwadi in central Bombay, it was said to “ensure cheap, hygienic and quick cremation of bodies.” Able to burn thirty bodies a day, it would cost only Rs. 12 to 15 per cremation compared to Rs. 35 to 40 for a wood pyre.16 If historically low-caste Hindus could adopt the cremation rite of the Brahmins, Rajputs, and Banias as a demonstration of their aspirational upward mobility in terms of social and ritual status, then cremation was implicitly an argument against the supposed fixity of the caste hierarchy. In reality, that change did not occur without some resistance on the part of the higher castes or by individuals and communities, high and low, who continued to regard burial as their ancestral rite or for whom it was an appropriate personal act or political choice. But making cremation cheaper through the opening of modern crematoria, by scaling down or removing the need for costly wood and priestly ministrations, allowed it—in theory at least—to become accessible to all Hindus, regardless of wealth and caste. In cremation, as in any other social performance, there will always be pronounced differences of wealth, status, and public acclaim. But perhaps the two ends of the spectrum of modern Indian cremation that this book has described—the prestigious high-caste rite and the perfunctory disposal of the poor—have moved some way toward a common ground. In the decades since the 1950s electric crematoria, and more recently those using compressed natural gas, have opened in cities across India. These include Varanasi, where a concern to “clean up” the heavily polluted Ganges has been a significant driver since the 1980s in attempts to move cremation away from the “traditional” riverbank pyres on Manikarnika and Harishchandra ghats.17 This innovation has often been opposed, principally on religious grounds, but both cost factors and environmental considerations argue for the crematoria’s increasingly popular

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use.18 To some degree rituals, including the circumambulation of the corpse and the cracking of the skull, have had to be abandoned, curtailed, or reduced to symbolic gestures, in order to accommodate the shift from the open-air pyre to a largely enclosed electric crematorium.19 The same considerations of cost and environment have also impelled experiments to create new and simpler crematoria using “green technologies” and an “eco-friendly pyre” that does not involve the consumption of such large quantities of wood or other fuel.20 Among many Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and others, the intense desire for the “solace” of funerary fire remains undiminished, but for others, perhaps of a younger generation, a wooden pyre, open to the sky, accompanied by ancient rituals, is now “an antiquated practice.”21 Cremation after the established Indian manner has certainly not disappeared, but it has continued to be, as it has been for the last two centuries, a site of innovation and adaptation, of contestation but equally of change.

A Note on We i ghts a n d Cu rren cy

A maund was a measurement of weight used in connection with timber, food grains, and other commodities in India and was equivalent to 82.28 pounds or 37.3 kilograms. Definitions of a candy varied widely. As used in the Bombay dockyards, it was the equivalent of 12 cubic feet of timber. The value of Indian rupees (Rs.) fluctuated over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The rupee was initially worth around 2 shillings sterling, or Rs. 8 to Rs. 10 to £1 (or US$ 0.5), but by the end of the nineteenth century this had fallen to 1 shilling and 4 pence. Between 1922 and 1939 the exchange rate fluctuated from Rs. 2.7 to 3.8 to the US dollar.

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Abbre viat ion s

ABP ARMCB BHOR BT CSE CWGC IF ILN IMG IOR NAI RMAC RMTEB TCSE ToI

Amrita Bazar Patrika Administration Report of the Municipal Commissioner Bombay Bombay Health Officer’s Report Bombay Times Cremation Society of England Commonwealth War Graves Commission (formerly Imperial War Graves Commission) Indian Forester Illustrated London News Indian Medical Gazette India Office Records, British Library, London National Archives of India, New Delhi Report on the Municipal Administration of Calcutta Report on Municipal Taxation and Expenditure in the Bombay Presidency Transactions of the Cremation Society of England Times of India

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Glos s ary

brattis

Cakes of cow dung, sometimes mixed with rice husks and other waste, used as domestic fuel but also on cremation pyres.

chattri

The umbrella-like canopy or dome that surmounts a Hindu, especially Rajput, memorial to the dead; a term applied more generally to Hindu funerary monuments.

Dalit

The modern name given to the “oppressed,” formerly referred to as “untouchables” and the “depressed classes.”

darshan

The blessing conferred by seeing a great or holy person, living or dead.

dokhma

The Parsi “tower of silence,” for the exposure of the dead.

Doms

An “untouchable” caste of Hindus, attendants at Hindu cremation grounds.

ghat

A step, particularly leading down to water, as by a river or reservoir, but also a place of cremation. At Benares, these two meanings are combined, as the burning ghat is located on the steps leading down to the River Ganges.

masaan

A Hindu place of cremation.

phul

The calcinated remains (“flowers”) of teeth and bones left after human cremation.

samadhi

A tomb or monument erected over a place of burial or cremation.

sati

The immolation of the “devoted” widow who, as an act of “self-sacrifice,” immolates herself on the funeral pyre of her dead husband. Sati conventionally refers to the widow, but by extension, especially in colonial usage, sati or “suttee” described the act of immolation itself.

tamasha

A “spectacle,” entertainment, or show.

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180 varna

Glossary The fourfold division of Hindu society into Brahmins, as priests; Kshatriyas, as warriors and rulers; Vaishyas, as merchants and traders; and Sudras, as agriculturalists and artisans. The first three are also designated the “twice-born.”

Note s

P R E FAC E

1. Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan C. M. Ross (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 16. 2. Maxine Berg, “Sea Otters and Iron: A Global Microhistory of Value and Exchange at Nootka Sound, 1774–1792,” Past and Present Supplements 14 (2019): 59. 3. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (London: Penguin, 2012), 491. C HA P T E R 1 . BU R N I N G I S SU E S

1. “Cremation in Australia,” ToI, April 20, 1895, 6 (reprinted from an unnamed newspaper). 2. “Cremation in Australia,” 6. 3. “Cremation in Australia,” 6. In June 1934 the body of Armat Singh was burned in the Western Australian bush near Canning River, a site used for earlier Sikh cremations. Following this “unusual and reverent ceremony,” his ashes were deposited in the river. According to the local press, it was “only a myth” (but what a myth!) that such ashes were sent to the Ganges for immersion. The Mirror (Perth), June 30, 1934, 8. 4. “Cremation in Australia,” 6. 5. “Cremation in Australia,” 6. 6. Cremation was legalized in South Australia in 1891, and the first crematorium opened in Adelaide in 1901. In Victoria the Cremation Society was formed in 1892, but the first official cremation was not performed until 1905. 7. Cremation societies were formed in Denmark in 1881 and in Sweden/Norway in 1882; the first crematorium opened in Stockholm in 1887. TCSE 2 (1885): 65.

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Notes

8. Simon Cooke, “Death, Body and Soul: The Cremation Debate in New South Wales, 1863–1925,” Australian Historical Studies 24 (1991): 323–39. 9. Pat Jalland, Changing Ways of Death in Twentieth-Century Australia: War, Medicine and the Funeral Business (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2006), chap. 15. 10. “The First Cremation at Adelaide, Australia,” Undertakers’ Journal, undated cutting in CRE H16, CSE. 11. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, Freedom at Midnight (Delhi: Vikas, 1976), 446–50. 12. Jacob Copeman and Deepa S. Reddy, “The Didactic Death: Publicity, Instruction, and Body Donation,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (2012): 59–83. 13. Garrey Michael Dennie, “Flames of Race, Ashes of Death: Re-Inventing Cremation in Johannesburg, 1910–1945,” Journal of Southern African Studies 29 (2003): 182. 14. A different account of the origins of the Johannesburg crematorium was given by the town engineer, Burt Andrews, whose concern about cremation began around 1901 when an Indian (clearly not Gandhi) asked for permission to burn his dead brother’s body. When this was refused, Andrews proposed the construction of a crematorium for use by all religious communities. G. S. Burt Andrews, “Cremation,” Municipal Magazine (Johannesburg), January 1921, 35, in CRE H15, CSE. 15. The evidence is circumstantial, but see the report on the Gujarat Social Reform Conference, which Gandhi attended in August 1920. ToI, September 2, 1920, 10; and “Cremation Rites,” ToI, May 3, 1948, 6. 16. Edward J. Bermingham, The Disposal of the Dead: A Plea for Cremation (New York: Edward J. Bermingham, 1881), 52. 17. E. Bendann, Death Customs: An Analytical Study of Burial Rites (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1930), chap. 3. 18. For India as “a museum” of the dead, see William Crooke, Things Indian: Being Discursive Notes on Various Subjects Connected with India (London: John Murray, 1906), 126–30. 19. For a description of the Parsi towers, see ILN, February 27, 1897, 284. 20. William Eassie, Cremation of the Dead: Its History and Bearings upon Public Health (London: Smith, Elder, 1875), 35. 21. The term fire-burial was widely used in the late nineteenth century to associate modern cremation practices in Germany with the death rites of the ancient Teutonic tribes. Karl Blind, Fire-Burial among Our Germanic Forefathers: A Record of the Poetry and History of Teutonic Cremation (London: Longmans, Green, 1875). 22. Pittu Laungani, “Death and Bereavement in India and England: A Comparative Analysis,” Mortality 1 (1996): 191–212. 23. Shirley Firth, Dying, Death and Bereavement in a British Hindu Community (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 1997), 4, 71. 24. On attempts to establish open-air cremation in Britain, see the epilogue. I borrow the term necropolitics from Achilles Meintjes, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15 (2003): 11–40, but my use of it is very different. 25. For a similar complaint from a cultural geographer, see L. Kong, “Cemeteries and Columbaria, Memorials and Mausoleums: Narrative and Interpretation in the Study of Deathscapes in Geography,” Australian Geographical Studies 37 (1999): 1–10.

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26. See Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), chaps. 4 and 5. Another leading authority, C. A. Bayly, in The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), ignores the dead entirely. For an interesting discussion of necro-mobility, see Lakhbir K. Jassal, “Necromobilities: The Multi-Sited Geographies of Death and Disposal in a Mobile World,” Mobilities 10 (2015): 486–509. 27. A. G. Hopkins, “Globalization: An Agenda for Historians,” in Globalization in World History, ed. A. G. Hopkins (London: Pimlico, 2002), 1–10; and Martin Thomas and Andrew Thompson, “Empire and Globalisation: From ‘High Imperialism’ to Decolonisation,” International History Review 36 (2014): 142–70. 28. Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). 29. Laqueur, Work of the Dead, 17. 30. Laqueur, Work of the Dead, 9, 31. 31. Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 28. 32. Laqueur, Work of the Dead, 110–11. 33. Laqueur, “Burning the Dead,” in Work of the Dead, pt. 4. 34. Laqueur, Work of the Dead, 265–71. 35. For example, Shalini Randeria, “Carrion and Corpses: Conflict in Categorizing Untouchability in Gujarat,” European Journal of Sociology 30 (1989): 171–91. 36. Burton Benedict, Indians in a Plural Society: A Report on Mauritius (London: HMSO, 1961), 118–19; Morton Klass, East Indians in Trinidad: A Study in Cultural Persistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 129–30; and Adrian C. Mayer, Peasants in the Pacific: A Study of Fiji Indian Society (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), 81. 37. Firth, Dying, Death and Bereavement. 38. Jonathan P. Parry, Death in Banaras (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 2. 39. Parry, Death in Banaras, 145. 40. Parry, Death in Banaras, xix. 41. For details of the early cremation movement, see Laqueur, Work of the Dead, pt. 4. 42. Florence G. Fidler, Cremation (London: Williams and Norgate, 1930), 23–25. 43. Henry Thompson, “The Treatment of the Body after Death,” Contemporary Review 23 (1873): 319–28; and Henry Thompson, Modern Cremation: Its History and Practice to the Present Day, 3rd ed. (London: Smith, Elder, 1899). 44. Peter C. Jupp, From Dust to Ashes: Cremation and the British Way of Death (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 93, 113. 45. British Medical Journal, February 8, 1908; reprinted as Cremation (London: British Medical Association, 1908), 1–2. 46. TCSE 66 (1935): 25. 47. Brian Parsons, “The Funeral and the Funeral Industry in the United Kingdom,” in Handbook of Death and Dying, ed. Clifton D. Bryant, 2 vols. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003), 1:612–13. 48. On eastern Europe, see Martina Hupková, “The Link between the Popularity of Cremation in the Czech Republic and Religious Faith,” Prace Geograficzne 137 (2014):

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69–90; for the progress of cremation generally, see Douglas J. Davies and Lewis H. Mates, eds., Encyclopedia of Cremation (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005). 49. TCSE 16 (1903): 33. 50. Dwayne A. Banks, “On the Economics of Death in the United States,” in Handbook of Death and Dying, ed. Clifton D. Bryant (2 vols., Thousand Oaks, Sage, 2003), 2: 608. 51. ToI, April 28, 1883, 5. 52. Andrew Bernstein, “Fire and Earth: The Forging of Modern Cremation in Meiji Japan,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 27 (2000): 297–334. 53. Isabella M. Bird, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, 4th ed., 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1881), 2:309. 54. Hugo Erichsen, in Park and Cemetery, October 1925, cutting in CRE H15, CSE. Similarly, Fidler, Cremation, 45. 55. RMAC, 1907–8, 60. 56. Maria Koskinen, “Burning the Body: The Debate on Cremation in Britain, 1874– 1902,” (PhD thesis, University of Tampere, Finland, 2000), 12, 91, 183. 57. Laqueur, Work of the Dead, 493. 58. C. A. Bayly, “From Ritual to Ceremony: Death Ritual and Society in Hindu North India since 1600,” in Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death, ed. Joachim Whaley (London: Europa Publications, 1981), 155. 59. C. A. Bayly, “From Ritual to Ceremony: Death Ritual and Society in Hindu North India since 1600,” in Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the. Making of Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 133. 60. The term recast references scholarly discussion about what constituted “tradition” in colonial India; see Lata Mani, “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,” in Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989), 88–126. 61. Kama Maclean, Pilgrimage and Power: The Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, 1765–1954 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 13. A similar argument about the importance of the colonial context and the queen’s proclamation is made in John Zavos, The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 35–36. 62. Maclean, Pilgrimage and Power, 13. 63. I follow Foucault in defining biopolitics as “the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, a general strategy of power.” Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 16. For an instructive discussion of colonial biopower and governmentality, see Stephen Legg and Deana Heath, eds, South Asian Governmentalities: Michel Foucault and the Question of Postcolonial Orderings (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 64. For the making of a modern Hindu identity, see Zavos, Emergence of Hindu Nationalism; and William Gould, Religion and Conflict in Modern South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 65. For the continuing question of cremation (or incineration) as the complete annihilation of the dead, see Filotheos-Fotios Maroudas, “The Holocaust, the Human Corpse and the Pursuit of Utter Oblivion,” Conatus 4 (2019): 105–23.

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66. For “belonging through burial,” see Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 25–31. 67. Geoffrey Gorer, Death, Grief, and Mourning in Contemporary Britain (London: Cresset Press, 1965), 45. 68. For an account of the rituals, see Parry, Death in Banaras, chap. 6. 69. In erecting monuments at the site of cremation, Rajputs and other Hindus were said to be “merely following the fashion of the Muhammadans, whose imposing and costly tombs formed so important a feature in the architectural works of the Muslim conquerors of India.” John Campbell Oman, Cults, Customs and Superstitions of India (Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs, 1908), 113. See also Crooke, Things Indian, 487: “[I]n this he [the Hindu] has gradually adopted the model designed by the Musalmans [Muslims].” But Hindu chattris also incorporated and reworked elements of pre-Muslim Rajput architecture and replicated in stone the gilded parasols held as an emblem of kingship over Hindu rulers. On the interactive, mutually constitutive relationship between “Hindu” and “Muslim” architecture in medieval India, see Finbarr Barry Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), chap. 5. 70. Correspondence in files SDC 86 and WG 909, CWGC. 71. Neuve Chapelle: India’s Memorial in France, 1914–1918 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1928), 3. 72. In 1928 construction of the Sukkur barrage across the River Indus (now in Pakistan) was halted while negotiations were held for the removal of a Hindu cremation ground to a new site. ToI, November 8, 1928, 12; ToI, February 5, 1929, 23. 73. Sudesh Mishra, “Diaspora and the Difficult Art of Dying,” in Subaltern Studies X, ed. Gautam Bhadra, Gyan Prakash, and Susie Tharu (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 6 (emphasis added). 74. ToI, March 2, 1936, 13. 75. For Benares as a place of amusement and exuberance as well as “morbid moroseness,” see Parry, Death in Banaras, 21. 76. On Manikarnika Ghat, see Parry, Death in Banaras, 13–14. 77. For the pot-breaking ritual, see Parry, Death in Banaras, 177; and Firth, Dying, Death and Bereavement, 78–79. 78. In the 1970s three-quarters of all cremations in Benares were performed at Manikarnika Ghat. Parry, Death in Banaras, 24. 79. E. B. Havell, Benares: The Sacred City (London: Blackie, 1905), 94. 80. Walter Crane, India Impressions: With some Notes of Ceylon during a Winter Tour, 1906–7 (London: Methuen, 1908), 206, 208. 81. Clipping in CRE H9, CSE. See also Sidney Low, A Vision of India, 2nd ed. (London: Smith, Elder, 1907), 267. 82. Mary Frances Billington, Woman in India (New Delhi: Amarko Book Agency, 1973), 255. 83. Between 1875 and 1900 the ILN carried pictorial reports on Indian cremation grounds on at least three occasions: ILN, October 16, 1875, 1; ILN, October 25, 1879, 390; and ILN, May 21, 1898, 751.

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84. This included lantern slides; for example, “The Burning Ghat, Benares,” in H. J. Mackinder, India: Eight Lectures Prepared for the Visual Instruction Committee of the Colonial Office (London: George Philip and Son, 1910), opposite p. 55. On the uses of colonial photography (including images of Hindu cremation at Benares and Calcutta), see James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), chap. 6. 85. Piers Brendon, Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism (London: Secker and Warburg, 1991), 146–48. 86. ToI, November 18, 1875, 2. See chapter 6 for this episode. 87. Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore, Winter India (New York: Century, 1903), chap. 11; ToI, April 17, 1926, 6; and ToI, April 23, 1926, 8. 88. ToI, July 31, 1901, 2. 89. Gorer, Death, Grief, and Mourning, 169–75. 90. “A Souvenir of the Plague in Bombay,” ToI, June 21, 1897, 3. 91. Some of these photographs appear in Peter Rühe, Gandhi (London: Phaidon Press, 2001), 290–304. 92. Cf. Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan C. M. Ross (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964). 93. For example, J. R. Ackerley, Hindoo Holiday: An Indian Journal (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 50; and photographic collections of American servicemen Frank Bond, Glenn S. Hensley, and Robert Keagle in the University of Chicago’s Digital South Asia Library. 94. ToI, July 13, 1958, 6; and Ralf Oppenhejm, A Barbarian in India (London: Phoenix House, 1955), chap. 5. For an example of a postwar novel in which Hindu cremation is featured, see Joseph G. Hitrec, Son of the Moon (London: Michael Joseph, 1949), 158–63. 95. Allen Ginsberg, Indian Journals, March 1962–May 1963 (San Francisco: Dave Haselwood Books, 1970), 56–57, 61–68, 122–28. C HA P T E R 2 . C O L O N IA L N E C R O - P O L I T IC S

1. Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). 2. Lepel Griffin, Famous Monuments of Central India (London: Autotype Company, 1886), vi. 3. Alexander Cunningham, The Bhilsa Topes; Or, Buddhist Monuments of Central India (London: Smith, Elder, 1854), 287–92. 4. ToI, February 3, 1916, 9; and ToI, November 13, 1931, 10. This politically inspired veneration of the cremated relics of the Buddha and his disciples continued after Indian independence. Douglas F. Ober, “From Buddha Bones to Bo Trees: Nehruvian India, Buddhism, and the Poetics of Power, 1947–1956,” Modern Asian Studies 53 (2019): 1312–50. 5. For the sanitary argument, see Laqueur, Work of the Dead, 88, citing the eleventhcentury Muslim writer Alberuni. 6. For a contemporary analysis, see B. N. Datta, “Vedic Funeral Customs and Indus Valley Culture,” Man in India 16 (1936): 223–307. Commenting on the recent excavation of Indus Valley sites, the Illustrated London News observed: “Today in England one may be

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either buried or cremated, and so it was, apparently, in India some 5000 years ago.” ILN, March 6, 1926, 399. 7. Burjor Avari, India: The Ancient Past: A History of the Indian Sub-Continent from c. 7000 BC to AD 1200 (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2007), 66. 8. Romila Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 (London: Allen Lane, 2002), 130; and Frits Staal, Agni: The Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altar, 2 vols. (Berkeley, CA: Asian Humanities Press, 1983), 1:74–81. 9. The Rig Veda, trans. Wendy Doniger (London: Penguin, 1981), 49; and A. L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India, 3rd ed. (New Delhi: Rupa, 2003), 177. 10. Francis Seymour Haden, Cremation—An Incentive to Crime: A Plea for Legislation. 2nd ed. (London: Edward Stanford, 1892), 7. 11. Thapar, Early India, 165, 230. 12. William Eassie, Cremation of the Dead: Its History and Bearings upon Public Health (London: Smith, Elder, 1875), 4; Hugo Erichsen, The Cremation of the Dead: From an Aesthetic, Sanitary, Religious, Historical, Medico-Legal and Economical Standpoint (Detroit: D. O. Haynes, 1887), 7; and Aubrey Richardson, The Law of Cremation: An Outline of the Law Relating to Cremation Ancient and Modern (London: Reeves and Turner, 1893), 1–2, 11. 13. Edgar Thurston and K. Rangachari, Castes and Tribes of Southern India, 7 vols. (Madras: Government Press, 1909), 4:236–491. On Bavasa, see Sunil Khilnani, Incarnations: A History of India in 50 Lives (London: Penguin, 2017), 71–78. 14. Kushwant Singh, A History of the Sikhs, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 1:37. 15. Khilnani, Incarnations, 87. 16. Followers of Kabir followed the Muslim (or low-caste Hindu) tradition of burying their dead. C. A. Bayly, “From Ritual to Ceremony: Death Ritual and Society in Hindu North India since 1600,” in Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death, ed. Joachim Whaley (London: Europa Publications, 1981), 168. 17. Singh, History of the Sikhs, 1:54, 67, 74, 177. 18. “Everything was done to prevent it, but in vain. . . . [It was] a most horrible sight.” W. G. Osborne, The Court and Camp of Runjeet Sing (London: Henry Colburn, 1840), 224. For Ranjit Singh’s cenotaph, see John Campbell Oman, Cults, Customs and Superstitions of India (Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs, 1908), chap. 5. 19. Tony Ballantyne, Between Colonialism and Diaspora: Sikh Cultural Formations in an Imperial World (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007), 60; and Harjot Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), 338–42. 20. Henry Thompson, Modern Cremation: Its History and Practice to the Present Date, 3rd ed. (London: Smith, Elder, 1899); and Laqueur, Work of the Dead, pt. 4. 21. Stewart Gordon, The Marathas, 1600–1818 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 87–90; and Richard M. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, 1000–1765 (London: Allen Lane, 2019), 318. 22. C. R. Saii, “Shivaji’s Tomb,” ToI, December 14, 1895, 5; see also the “Memorial Chhatri of Shivaji of Raygad,” in English Records on Shivaji (1659–1682), 2 vols. (Poona: Shiva Charitra Karyalaya, 1931), 2, opposite p. 310.

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23. R. V. Russell and Hira Lal, The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India, 4 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1916), 4:35–37. 24. On the restoration of the Raigad memorial and Tilak’s launch of an annual festival in honor of Shivaji, see Stanley A. Wolpert, Tilak and Gokhale: Revolution and Reform in the Making of Modern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 79–82. For Tilak’s cremation, see chapter 7. 25. James Douglas, A Book of Bombay, 2 vols. (Bombay: Bombay Gazette Steam Press, 1883), 1:87. 26. Douglas, Book of Bombay, 1:87. 27. Douglas, Book of Bombay, 1: 88. 28. On Roy’s role in the abolition of sati, see Tanika Sarkar, Rebels, Wives, Saints: Designing Selves and Nations in Colonial Times (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2009), chap. 1. 29. I use sati both in the colonial sense of the immolation of widows by burning, often written as suttee, and in the Hindu sense of a “devoted” woman who performs this act. 30. House of Commons, Parliamentary Papers, 1830, vol. 27, no. 178, 131. For a discussion of early sources, see Andrea Major, “‘Pious Flames’: European Encounters with Sati before 1805,” South Asia 27 (2004): 153–81. Of the extensive recent literature on sati, see especially John Stratton Hawley, ed., Sati, the Blessing and the Curse: The Burning of Wives in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and Catherine Weinberger-Thomas, Ashes of Immortality: Widow-Burning in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 31. House of Commons, Parliamentary Papers, 1826–27, vol. 20, no. 354, 147. 32. R. Hartley Kennedy, The Sutti, As Witnessed at Baroda, November 29th, 1825 (London: J. King, 1855), 23. 33. Kennedy, Sutti, 24–28, 49–50. 34. Kennedy, Sutti, 52–53. 35. Henry Jeffreys Bushby, Widow-Burning: A Narrative (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1855), 6. 36. Bushby, Widow-Burning, 21–38; and Edward Thompson, Suttee: A Historical and Philosophical Enquiry into the Hindu Rite of Widow-Burning (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1928), 22. 37. Cuttings from Times [London], April 3, 1877, and April 9, 1877, in CRE H5, CSE. 38. George Jacob, Western India before and during the Mutinies (London: Henry S. King, 1871), 138–41. 39. Amrita Bazar Patrika (ABP), July 9, 1899, 4, reproducing an article from Tribune (Lahore). On the persistence of enthusiasm for sati in Punjab, see also Oman, Cults, Customs and Superstitions, 108–18. 40. For example, Thomas Duer Broughton, Letters from a Mahratta Camp during the Year 1809 (Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi, 1977), 108, 154. 41. There were some more objective depictions of Hindu cremation; see Pierre Sonnerat, Voyages aux Indes orientales et à la Chine, 2 vols. (Paris: Froulé, Nyon, et Barrois, 1782), 1:85–98, plates 14, 15. 42. “Hindoo Funeral,” Oriental Annual (1835): 219.

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43. E. H. Nolan, The Illustrated History of the British Empire in India and the East, 2 vols. (London: James S. Virtue, 1859), 2:37–38, 489–90. Similarly, see [Julia] Corner, The History of China and India: Pictorial and Descriptive (London: Dean, 1847), 252–53. 44. Arthur Parker, A Hand-Book of Benares (Benares: E. J. Lazarus, 1895), 44–45. 45. ToI, March 30, 1882, 4. 46. Between 1817 and 1827, an estimated 4,323 satis were performed, mostly in Bengal. Bayly, “From Ritual to Ceremony,” 173. 47. House of Commons, Parliamentary Papers, 1830, vol. 178, 131. 48. See the dismissive response of the NWP government to suggestions made by its sanitary commissioner, Charles Planck, in Report of the Sanitary Commissioner of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, 1879, 56–58. 49. House of Commons, Parliamentary Papers, 1830, vol. 550, 43. 50. Mrs. Fenwick Miller, “Cremation of the Dead,” The Woman’s Signal, April 21, 1898, 243. 51. Cf. Piers Vitebsky, Dialogues with the Dead: The Discussion of Mortality among the Sora of Eastern India (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 52. Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner for Bengal, 1864–65, 80. 53. See the contrasting descriptions of picturesque scenes and the “shocking” sight of corpses in J. Johnson, The Oriental Voyager: Or Descriptive Sketches and Cursory Remarks on a Voyage to India and China (London: James Asperne, 1807), 115–16; and [R. G. Wallace], “An Officer in His Majesty’s Service,” Fifteen Years in India: Or, Sketches of a Soldier’s Life (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1822), 28–29. 54. Norman Chevers, “The Sanitary Position and Obligations of the Inhabitants of Calcutta,” Indian Annals of Medical Science 9 (1864): 63. 55. [William Buyers], Recollections of Northern India: With Observations on the Origin, Customs and Moral Sentiments of the Hindoos (London: James Blackwood, 1852), 133. 56. Buyers, Recollections of Northern India, 133–34. 57. Buyers, Recollections of Northern India, 135. 58. Baptist missionaries called this “ghat murder.” Bayly, “From Ritual to Ceremony,” 172. 59. Wallace, Fifteen Years, 29. 60. Maria Graham, Journal of a Residence in India (Edinburgh: Constable, 1812), 148. Similar sentiments can be found elsewhere; see, for example, [Harriette Ashmore], “The Wife of an Officer in the 16th Foot,” Narrative of a Three Months’ March in India, and a Residence in the Doab (London: R. Hastings, 1841), 88–90; and George W. Johnson, The Stranger in India: Or, Three Years in Calcutta, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1843), 1:100. 61. [E. S. Mazuchelli], “A Lady Pioneer,” The Indian Alps and How We Crossed Them, Being a Narrative of Two Years’ Residence in the Eastern Himalaya and Two Months’ Tour into the Interior (London: Longmans, Green, 1876), 10–12. 62. David Arnold, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800–1856 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), chap. 2. For contemporary attitudes in Britain, see Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), esp. chap. 3. 63. Wallace, Fifteen Years, 30.

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64. Joshua Russell, Journal of a Tour in Ceylon and India (London: Houlston and Stoneman, 1852), 137. 65. Graham, Journal of a Residence, 141; and Emma Roberts, Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan with Sketches of Anglo-Indian Society, 3 vols. (London: W. H. Allen, 1835), 2, chap. 2. 66. James Ranald Martin, Notes on the Medical Topography of Calcutta (Calcutta: G. H. Huttmann, 1837), 52. 67. Reginald Heber, Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, and Carey, 1829), 1:81. 68. On the emergence of Benares as a center for Hindu funerary rites, see Bayly, “From Ritual to Ceremony,” 162–63. 69. M. A. Sherring, The Sacred City of the Hindus: An Account of Benares in Ancient and Modern Times (London: Trübner, 1868), 17. Sherring makes no reference here to cremation and the burning ghats. 70. Heber, Narrative of a Journey, 1:256, 265. 71. Hobart Caunter, The Oriental Annual: Or, Scenes in India (London: Edward Bull, 1834), 125–81. [Ashmore], Narrative of a Three Months’ March, 182–91, complained about the “horrid” sight of beggars on her visit in 1834 but made no mention of cremation. 72. Roberts, Scenes and Characteristics, 1, chap. 9. The idea of Benares as a “city of light” is an ancient one; see Diana L. Eck, Banaras: City of Light (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983). As Eck also notes, Benares was called Mahasmasana, that is, the great cremation ground (Banaras, 32). 73. Robert Elliott, Views in India, China, and on the Shores of the Red Sea, 2 vols. (London: H. Fisher and R. Fisher, 1835), 1:5–6. Visiting Benares in 1847, Mrs. Mackenzie noted “the ghat on which dead bodies are burnt,” but this did not diminish her appreciation of the “pictorial effect of the scene.” Mrs. Colin Mackenzie, Life in the Mission, the Camp, and the Zenana: Or, Six Years in India, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1854), 1:89. 74. On the picturesque in India, see Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 120–40. 75. James Prinsep, Benares Illustrated, in a Series of Drawings (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1831), plate 9. 76. Samuel Bourne, Photographic Journeys in the Himalayas (Bath: Pagoda Tree Press, 2009), 6. 77. [Anonymous], “Cremation in India,” The Young Folk’s Budget, April 19, 1879, 253. 78. Anonymous, “Cremation in India,” 253. 79. Anonymous, “Cremation in India,” 253. 80. Anonymous, “Cremation in India,” 253. In the Bible Tophet was a place of burning where pagan worshippers sacrificed children to the gods Moloch and Baal. 81. David Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 124–26, 147, 173. 82. For the alleged eating of a half-cremated corpse by an itinerant sadhu, see “A Ghoul,” ToI, December 1, 1884, 3. On the esoteric practices of the cremation ground, see Philip Rawson, The Art of Tantra (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 112–13; and Parry, Death in Banaras, chap. 8.

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83. Conversely, the place of repulsion and death might also be a site of intense religious experience. George L. Hart and Hank Heifetz, trans. and eds., The Four Hundred Songs of War and Wisdom: An Anthology of Poems from Classical Tamil, “The Purananuru” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 202–6. 84. See Walter Hutchinson ed., Customs of the World: A Popular Account of the Manners, Rites and Ceremonies of Men and Women in All Countries, 2 vols. (London: Hutchinson, 1900), 1:434–56. 85. For example, John Briggs, “Report on the Aboriginal Tribes of India,” in Report of the Twentieth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Held at Edinburgh, July and August 1850 (London: John Murray, 1851), 171. 86. M. A. Sherring, Hindu Tribes and Castes as Represented in Benares, 3 vols. (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink), 1872–81. 87. For the colonial understanding of caste and the Hindu hierarchy, see Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 88. Sherring, Hindu Tribes and Castes, 1:401. 89. Parry, Death in Banaras, 4, 75. 90. Sherring, Hindu Tribes and Castes, 1:401. 91. Sherring, Hindu Tribes and Castes, 3:235. One of the consequences of the practice of cremation “was to perpetuate ranking within the caste system [from the Brahmins down to the Doms] through proximity to the pollution of death.” Bayly, “From Ritual to Ceremony,” 159. Intriguingly, Bayly also remarks: “Even amongst the high caste . . . [funerary] practice differs markedly from district to district: less than four hundred miles from Benares there were Brahmins who buried their dead as late as the nineteenth century” (157), but sadly he gives no source. 92. On Sherring, Risley, and the “ethnographic state,” see Dirks, Castes of Mind, 46–51. 93. Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency XX: Sholapur (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1884), 72–73, 84, 90. 94. Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency XX: Sholapur, 93, 119, 120, 122, 124, 143, 147, 156. 95. Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency XX: Sholapur, 170–82. 96. A later volume of the gazetteers also gave extended notices of the death rites of different Hindu communities. Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency IX, pt. I, Gujarat Population: Hindus (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1901), 47–343. Thurston and Rangachari, Castes and Tribes similarly identified cremation with the high castes. 97. Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency XVIII, pt. I, Poona (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1885), 147–50, 442, 444. 98. Deaths in Bombay during 1848, 1849, 1850 (Bombay: Education Society’s Press, 1851), 25–26. 99. Deaths in Bombay during 1865 (Bombay: Education Society’s Press, 1867), iii. In 1864 the figure for cremations had been 45.54 percent; Deaths in Bombay during 1865, iii. 100. Deaths in Bombay during 1848, 1849, 1850, 111–12. The extremely high levels of infant mortality in nineteenth-century Bombay might provide one explanation for the large number of Hindu burials.

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101. J. Forsyth, The Highlands of Central India: Notes on Their Forests and Wild Tribes, Natural History, and Sports (London: Chapman and Hall, 1871). For further discussion of the assimilation through cremation of tribals into “Aryan” society, see E. T. Dalton, “The ‘Kols’ of Chota Nagpur,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 25 (1866): 153–98. 102. Forsyth, Highlands of Central India, 147. See also F. B. Bradley-Birt, Chota Nagpore: A Little-Known Province of the Empire (London: Smith, Elder, 1903), 47–49, 60–61. 103. Daniel J. R. Grey, “Creating the ‘Problem Hindu’: Sati, Thuggee and Female Infanticide in India, 1800–1860,” Gender and History 25 (2013): 498–510. C HA P T E R 3 . T H E C I T Y A N D I T S D E A D

1. As in Pierre Loti, India, trans. George A. F. Inman (5th ed. London: T. Werner Laurie, 1928), 245–54. 2. In the 1911 census Calcutta and Bombay each had populations of around a million and Benares 200,000. 3. Jonathan P. Parry, Death in Banaras (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 18, 41–43. 4. H. R. Nevill, Benares: A Gazetteer (Allahabad: Superintendent, Government Press, United Provinces, 1909), 262–64; and Parry, Death in Banaras, 45. 5. Edwin Greaves, Kashi: The City Illustrious or Benares (Allahabad: Indian Press, 1909), 48; and Parry, Death in Banaras, 44–45. 6. ToI, January 13, 1937, p. 11. 7. Sandria B. Freitag, ed., Culture and Power in Banaras: Community, Performance, and Environment, 1800–1980 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 8. Paul Rodaway, Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense and Place (London: Routledge, 1994). 9. Diana L. Eck, Banaras: City of Light (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 4, 32. 10. [Margaret] Sinclair Stevenson, The Rites of the Twice-Born (London: Oxford University Press, 1920), 148–49; and Shalini Randeria, “Carrion and Corpses: Conflict in Categorizing Untouchability in Gujarat,” European Journal of Sociology 30 (1989): 171–91. 11. Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 277. 12. On Europe, see Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, trans. Aubier Montaigne (Leamington Spa, UK: Berg, 1986). 13. Francis Ford, Neilgherry Letters (Bombay: Telegraph and Courier Press, 1851), 4. 14. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (London: Penguin, 2012), 491. 15. BT, June 20, 1857, 1167. 16. BT, June 20, 1857, 1167. 17. ToI, April 24, 1871, 2; and Vaughan Nash, The Great Famine and Its Causes (London: Longmans, Green, 1900), 4–5. 18. ToI, April 19, 1887, 4. 19. P. J. Marshall, “The White Town of Calcutta under the Rule of the East India Company,” Modern Asian Studies 34 (2000): 307–31. 20. This was not just a big-city issue. In 1926 a maulvi in a village in Chittagong brought a criminal case against a Hindu cremation ground close to his house, complaining that the

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bad smell had given him diarrhea and that his prayers were repeatedly interrupted by cries of “Haribolo,” invoking Hari (Krishna). ToI, September 18, 1926, 16. 21. F. J. Mouat to secretary, Bengal, July 18, 1859, Bengal Judicial (Jails), no. 5, August 11, 1859, IOR. 22. F. H. Robson, jailor, to magistrate, Hooghly, September 27, 1858; H. C. Halkett, sessions judge, Hooghly, to B. C. Mullick et al., June 30, 1859; and Mouat to sec., Bengal, August 1, 1859, nos. 5-6, IOR. 23. Edmund A. Parkes, A Manual of Practical Hygiene (London: John Churchill, 1864), 457. 24. Parkes, Manual of Practical Hygiene, 457–58. 25. Edmund A. Parkes, A Manual of Practical Hygiene, 4th ed. (London: J. and A. Churchill, 1873), 442. 26. Edmund A. Parkes, A Manual of Practical Hygiene, 5th ed. (London: J. and A. Churchill, 1878), 474. 27. Henry Thompson, “Cremation: A Reply to Critics and an Exposition of the Process,” Contemporary Review 23 (1874): 559–60; and Edward J. Bermingham, The Disposal of the Dead: A Plea for Cremation (New York: Edward J. Bermingham, 1881), 22, 26, 31. 28. Thompson, “Cremation.” 29. Deaths in Bombay during 1848, 1849, 1850 (Bombay: Education Society’s Press, 1851), 25–26. 30. Correspondence Relating to a Proposed Enactment for the Regulation of Places Used for the Disposal of Corpses in the Town and Island of Bombay (Bombay: Education Society’s Press, 1855), 20–24. 31. Correspondence Relating to a Proposed Enactment, 9–11. 32. Correspondence Relating to the Prohibition of Burials in the Back Bay (Bombay: Education Society’s Press, 1855). 33. The impact of the commission extended well beyond military hygiene. David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 67–74; and Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine, 1859–1914 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 34. BHOR 1866, 1. 35. BHOR 1866, 6. The complaint about Muslim graveyards in Calcutta becoming “nurses of cholera, fever, and dysentery” entered metropolitan accounts of the “dangers” of burial. William Eassie, Cremation of the Dead: Its History and Bearings upon Public Health (London: Smith, Elder, 1875), 66. 36. BHOR 1866, 6. Hewlett’s trenchant views were repeated the following year: ARMCB 1867, 5. Europeans in general were said to regard the Parsis’ exposure of the dead as “even more repugnant” than Hindu cremation. James Grant, Cassell’s Illustrated History of India, 2 vols. (London: Cassell, 1891), 2:470. 37. RMAC 1909–10, xxi. 38. BHOR 1866, 6. 39. ARMCB 1872, 15. 40. In smaller towns, where the task of recording deaths was assigned to minor officials whose main responsibility was to collect octroi payments, this method proved very unreliable. RMTEB 1880–81, 19; and RMTEB 1883–84, 11.

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41. S. M. Edwardes, The Bombay City Police: A Historical Sketch, 1672–1916 (London: Oxford University Press, 1923), 59; ToI, October 21, 1880, 2; ToI, August 31, 1899, 5; and ToI, May 14, 1914, 5. 42. ToI, October 21, 1880, 2. 43. C. E. Buckland, Bengal under the Lieutenant-Governors, 2 vols. (Calcutta: S. K. Lahiri, 1901), 1:280–81. 44. Thomas Martin, Specification of a “Cinerator” for the Use of Brahmins and Other Hindoo Castes Who Perform Their Funeral Rites by Burning (Bombay: Cheeson and Woodhall, 1864), 1–2. 45. Times, April 14, 1864, 5. Hewlett proposed a similar “crematory” for Bombay. BHOR 1866, 6. 46. Grant, Cassell’s Illustrated History, 2:469; and Eassie, Cremation of the Dead, 97–98; Campbell, April 30, 1884, Hansard, House of Commons, 3rd sess., 287, 1884, col. 989. 47. “The Evolution of the Nimtala Burning Ghat,” http://thegangeswalk.com/nimtala -burning-ghat. 48. “Destruction versus Decomposition,” IMG 22 (1887): 175. For an earlier statement, see “The Disposal of the Dead,” IMG 10 (1875): 104–6. 49. “Infectious Diseases and Cremation among Europeans,” IMG 29 (1894): 60. 50. For the cholera connection, see Times, April 13, 1864, 5; and ToI, November 21, 1874, 2. 51. Patrick Hehir, Hygiene and Diseases of India: A Popular Handbook, 3rd ed. (Madras: Higginbothams, 1913), 407–8. 52. J. A. Jones, A Manual of Hygiene, Sanitation and Sanitary Engineering with Special Reference to Indian Conditions (Madras: Superintendent, Government Press, 1896), 100. 53. Hehir, Hygiene and Diseases of India, 411. 54. A. J. H. Russell, ed., McNally’s Sanitary Handbook for India, 6th ed. (Madras: Superintendent, Government Press, 1923), 247. 55. Russell, ed., McNally’s Sanitary Handbook for India, 247–48. 56. Henry Grace, The Code of Military Standing Regulations of the Bengal Establishment (Calcutta: Cooper and Upjohn, 1791), 296–97; and Henry Grace, The Continuation or Supplement of the Code of Bengal Military Regulations (Calcutta: Hircarrah Press, 1799), 48. 57. The army, prisons, and hospitals were institutional sites where colonial medical practice and sanitary surveillance were particularly intensive in nineteenth-century India. Arnold, Colonizing the Body, chap. 2. 58. Report of the Sanitary Commissioner for Bombay, 1868, xli–xlii. 59. F/4/634, no. 17213, IOR. 60. For the burying of two executed Hindu convicts at Bellary in the Madras Presidency in 1830, see Madras Judicial, October 8, 1830, nos. 3411–12, IOR. 61. India Home (Judicial), July 1, 1864, nos. 1–7, NAI. 62. Bombay Judicial, nos. 1340–42, April 29, 1836, IOR. 63. Report of Dr. J. B. Walker, superintendent, Agra Central Jail, February 1, 1854, NWP Criminal (Judicial), no. 104, May 9, 1854, IOR. 64. L/PJ/7/476, IOR. 65. ToI, January 15, 1859, 37.

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66. George Alexander Hodge, The Bengal Jail Manual (Calcutta: City Press, 1867), app. 1, 15–16; and A Manual for the Guidance of Officers of the Prison Department in the Panjab and its Dependencies (Lahore: Central Jail Press, 1874), 61. 67. C. Renny, Medical Report on the Mahamurree in Gurhwal, in 1849–50 (Agra: Secundra Orphan Press, 1851), 49–50; and Madras Famine Code (Madras: n.p., ca. 1897), 29, 73. In Bombay Presidency the municipalities or village councils were responsible for disposal of the pauper dead. Bombay Judicial, no. 144, January 7, 1916, IOR. 68. Nash, Great Famine, 43, 57, 180. 69. Robert Young, “On the Inhabitants of Lower Bengal,” in Report of the Twenty-First Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (London: John Murray, 1852), 96. 70. General Report on Public Instruction in the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency, 1850–51, 81; and General Report on Public Instruction in the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency, 1861–62, 216. 71. Bodies for anatomical purposes were obtained either from the police hospital in Calcutta or “from the Ghaut where the Hindoos of this city burn their dead.” J. W. Dalrymple, Calcutta, to chief sec., Madras, September 30, 1852, Madras Public, no. 18, August 30, 1853, IOR. 72. Buckland, Bengal under the Lieutenant-Governors, 1:296. 73. RMAC 1925–26, 1: 54. 74. RMAC 1926–27, 1:39; RMAC 1929–30, 1:46; and RMAC 1931–32, 1:47. 75. RMAC 1936–37, 1:48; and RMAC 1938–39, 1:37. 76. Birendra Nath Ghosh, A Treatise on Hygiene and Public Health, 7th ed. (Calcutta: Scientific Publishing, 1930), 339. 77. ToI, February 21, 1882, 4. 78. Correspondence Relating to the Prohibition of Burials, 13. 79. Correspondence Relating to the Prohibition of Burials, 14. 80. Correspondence Relating to the Prohibition of Burials, 13. 81. Correspondence Relating to the Prohibition of Burials, 25. 82. Correspondence Relating to the Prohibition of Burials, 26. 83. Correspondence Relating to the Prohibition of Burials, 16. 84. Buckland, Bengal under the Lieutenant-Governors, 1:296. 85. Proceedings of an Ordinary Meeting of the Municipal Corporation of Calcutta, Held at the Town Hall on Monday, 7th March 1864 (Calcutta: Hindoo Patriot Press, 1864), 4–6. 86. Proceedings of an Ordinary Meeting of the Municipal Corporation of Calcutta, 9. 87. Proceedings of an Ordinary Meeting of the Municipal Corporation of Calcutta, 10. 88. Proceedings of an Ordinary Meeting of the Municipal Corporation of Calcutta, 11. 89. Times, April 14, 1864, 5. 90. ToI, February 17, 1882, 3. 91. ToI, October 27, 1884, 7. 92. ToI, October 27, 1884, 7. 93. “The Bombay Plague Epidemic of 1896–97: Work of the Bombay Plague Committee,” photographic album held at the Wellcome Library, London, folios 15–16. 94. ToI, January 13, 1899, 5; see also ToI, January 19, 1899, 6.

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95. James Ricalton, India through the Stereoscope: A Journey through Hindustan (New York: Underwood and Underwood, 1907), 34–35. 96. ToI, August 6, 1874, 3. 97. ToI, July 28, 1884, 5. On Bombay’s elites, see Christine Dobbin, Urban Leadership in Western India: Politics and Communities in Bombay City, 1840–1885 (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), chap. 1. 98. Report of the Municipal Commissioner on the Plague in Bombay for the Year Ending 31st May 1900 (Bombay: Times of India Press, 1901), 125. 99. RMAC 1904–05, xix. 100. RMAC 1910–11, 115. 101. RMAC 1919–20, 1:112. 102. ToI, July 3, 1882, 2. 103. ToI, May 28, 1887, 3. 104. ToI, March 23, 1883, 3. 105. ToI, March 23, 1883, 3. For earlier discussion, see ToI, February 3, 1883, 6. 106. ToI, March 23, 1883, 3. 107. ToI, May 12, 1883, 3; and ToI, June 18, 1883, 3. 108. ToI, June 23, 1883, 6. 109. A Parsi Cremation Society was formed in 1922 and Rs. 400,000 collected for land on which to build a crematorium, but, after fierce protests from orthodox Parsis, the scheme was dropped. ToI, June 23, 1923, 7. 110. ToI, May 14, 1886, 3. Twenty years later a dispute arose over the proposed siting of a playhouse close to Sonapur cremation ground. “L. B.” observed that “to erect a theatre which is a place of mirth and merriment by the side of a place where mourners come with hearts heavy and drooping is an idea which is as grotesque as it is ridiculous.” ToI, June 3, 1907, 6. Conversely, it was argued that if the theater were built its users would “be subjected to a serious nuisance from . . . a noisome stench and discordant and high-pitched music”: ToI, June 4, 1907, 5. Plans for the “errant theatre” were later scrapped. 111. ToI, June 21, 1887, 5. 112. ToI, August 20, 1887, 5. 113. Letters to the editor, ToI, August 19, 1887, 3; ToI, September 2, 1887, 4; ToI, September 14, 1887, 3; ToI, September 17, 1887, 6; ToI, September 26, 1887, 6; and ToI, September 29, 1887, 5. 114. ToI, May 9, 1888, 3. 115. In Calcutta plague coincided with heated discussion of reform of the municipal corporation and its sanitary powers. ABP, May 1, 1898, 4; and ABP, August 28, 1898, 3. On the conflicts surrounding the epidemic, see Arnold, Colonizing the Body, chap. 5; and Myron Echenberg, Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague, 1894–1901 (New York: New York University Press, 2007), chap. 2. 116. ToI, January 25, 1897, 5. 117. Edwardes, Bombay City Police, 49. 118. George W. Clutterbuck, In India: The Land of Famine and Plague (London: The Ideal Publishing Union, 1897), 34, 36.

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119. F. M. Coleman, Typical Pictures of Indian Natives, 6th ed. (Bombay: Times of India, 1899), 29. 120. ToI, February 2, 1897, 5; editorial, ToI, January 18, 1897, 4. For the author of this “plan of action,” see Beatrix Gatacre, General Gatacre: The Story of the Life and Services of Sir William Forbes Gatacre, 1843–1906 (London: John Murray, 1910), 164. 121. See figure 8 and another still more explicit image of a naked body being loaded onto a pyre at Sonapur, also available at Wellcome Collections Online. The Visual Plague Database at the University of Cambridge contains a large number of plague photographs, especially for Bombay. 122. As in Calcutta. ABP, May 15, 1898, 4. 123. M. E. Couchman, Account of Plague Administration in the Bombay Presidency from September 1896 till May 1897 (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1897), 138. 124. Bombay General (Plague), no. 1295, September 10, 1898, IOR. 125. As in Poona; see [W. C. Rand], Supplement to the Account of Plague Administration in the Bombay Presidency from September 1896 till May 1897 (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1897), 6, 9. 126. ToI, February 13, 1897, 3; and ToI, April 13, 1897, 5. For the “unusual and pathetic sight of even women taking the dead to the pyre,” see ToI, January 19, 1899, 6. 127. Hehir, Hygiene and Diseases, 408. 128. ARMCB 1867, app. B, 54; and ARMCB 1880, 320. 129. ARMCB 1901, app. B, 244. Unfortunately, mortuary statistics were not given in Bombay after 1903. 130. On Sanskritization, see M. N. Srinivas, Social Change in Modern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), chap. 1; and C. J. Fuller, The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Society in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 25–27. Not infrequently this quest for upward mobility implied emulation of Kshatriya warrior status rather than Brahmin priesthood. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 114–17. 131. In 1920 the Mahar Parishad called on Mahars to cremate rather than bury their dead. Jayashree Gokhale, From Concessions to Confrontation: The Politics of an Indian Untouchable Community (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1993), 69. Among the Nadars, formerly a caste of toddy-tappers and petty traders, “Where once burial had been the custom . . . , the community increasingly chose cremation as symbolic of higher status” in keeping with their aspiration to be regarded as Kshatriyas. Robert L. Hardgrave, The Nadars of Tamilnad: The Political Culture of a Community in Change (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1969), 107–8. 132. RMAC 1910–11, xxxiv, 114. 133. RMAC 1918–19, 1:26. In 1910 many more bodies were sent to the city for cremation from outside (2,023) than for burial (377), suggesting that this movement mainly involved high-caste Hindus. RMAC 1910–11, 114. 134. Data from Statistical Abstract Relating to British India from 1904–05 to 1913–14 (London: HMSO, 1916), 625–30, 858.

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1. Stephen J. Pyne, “Nataraja: India’s Cycle of Fire,” Environmental History Review 18 (1994): 1. 2. On “fire-worship,” see William Crooke, Things Indian: Being Discursive Notes on Various Subjects Connected with India (London: John Murray, 1906), 217–21. 3. As, for instance, in Frits Staal, Agni: The Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altar, 2 vols. (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1983). On Hindu religious practice in general, see C. J. Fuller, The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Society in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 4. These issues are further discussed in David Arnold, “Fire, Forest, City: A Social Ecology of Fire in British India” Environment and History (in press). 5. Tim Flohr Sørensen and Mikkel Bille, “Flames of Transformation: The Role of Fire in Cremation Practices,” World Archaeology 40 (2008): 253. 6. Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan C. M. Ross (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 16. 7. Staal, Agni, 1:77; and Pyne, “Nataraja,” 4–6. 8. Kathleen D. Morrison, “Conceiving Ecology and Stopping the Clock: Narratives of Balance, Loss, and Degradation,” in Shifting Ground: People, Animals, and Mobility in India’s Environmental History, ed. Mahesh K. Rangarajan and K. Sivaramakrishnan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), 39–64. 9. Kad Handi [pseud.], “Permanent Fire-Lines,” IF 9 (1883): 143. 10. On swidden, see Jacques Pouchepadass, “British Attitudes towards Shifting Cultivation in Colonial South India: A Case Study of South Canara District, 1800–1920,” in Nature, Culture, Imperialism: Essays on the Environmental History of South Asia, ed. David Arnold and Ramachandra Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 123–51; and Archana Prasad, “The Political Ecology of Swidden Cultivation: The Survival Strategies of the Baigas in the Central Provinces, India, 1860–1890,” in India’s Environmental History, ed. Mahesh Rangarajan and K. Sivaramakrishnan, 2 vols. (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2012), 2:246–77. 11. Hugh Cleghorn et al., “Report of the Committee Appointed by the British Association to Consider the Probable Effects in an Oeconomical and Physical Point of View of the Destruction of Tropical Forests,” in Report of the Twenty-First Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (London: John Murray, 1852), 98. 12. Resolution no. 40, January 6, 1858, in L/E/3/830, no. 30, June 4, 1859, IOR. 13. On India’s exceptional vulnerability to forest fires, see W. R. Fisher, Dr. Schlich’s Manual of Forestry, vol. 4, Forest Protection, 2nd ed. (London: Bradbury, Agnew, 1907), 638–68. 14. D. Brandis and A. Smythies eds. Report of the Proceedings of the Forest Conference Held at Simla, October 1875 (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1876), 4, 12. 15. B. Ribbentrop, Forestry in British India (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1900), 148–49.

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16. J. Forsyth, The Highlands of Central India: Notes on Their Forests and Wild Tribes, Natural History, and Sports (London: Chapman and Hall, 1871), 96, 98–99. 17. “A Note from Coorg about Forest Fires,” IF 9 (1883): 134–35; and Gregory Allen Barton, Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 87. 18. Selections from the Proceedings of the Godavari District Association, 1912 and 1913 (Cocanada: Godavari District Association, 1914), 93. 19. E. A. S. [pseud.], “Fire-Protection in the Tropics,” IF 39 (1913): 24–26; C. E. C. Fischer, “The Need for Fire-Protection in the Tropics,” IF, 225–32; C. E. C. Fischer, “Damage to Teak by Fire,” IF, 434–35; H. C. Walker, “Fire-Protection in the Tropics,” IF, 532–40; and H. M. Glover, “Departmental Firing in Chir Forests in the Rawalpindi Division, Punjab,” IF, 568–71. In Bengal foresters attempted to “banish fire from the landscape,” only to be forced to recognize its value in regenerating sal forests. K. Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), chap. 7. 20. J. S. Gamble, A Manual of Indian Timbers (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1881). 21. Forsyth, Highlands of Central India, 208; and F. B. Bradley-Birt, Chota Nagpore: A Little-Known Province of the Empire (London: Smith, Elder, 1903), 276–77. 22. Richard Temple, Oriental Experience: A Selection of Essays and Addresses Delivered on Various Occasions (London: John Murray, 1883), 261–62. 23. “Progress Report of Forest Administration in Jodhpur for 1890–91,” IF 18 (1892): 65–66. 24. Hugh Cleghorn, The Forests and Gardens of South India (London: W.H. Allen, 1861), 152. 25. N. A. Dalzell, Observations on the Influence of Forests, and on the General Principles of Management as Applicable to Bombay (Bombay: Bombay Education Society’s Press, 1863), 24. 26. E. S. Wood, “Roads and Fire Conservancy,” in Brandis and Smythies, Report of the Proceedings of the Forest Conference, 14. 27. Arnold Wright, ed., Southern India: Its History, People, Commerce, and Industrial Resources (London: Foreign and Colonial Compiling and Publishing Company, 1915), 721. 28. Campbell Walker, “Plantations and Firewood Reserves in the Madras Presidency,” in Brandis and Smythies, Report of the Proceedings of the Forest Conference, 94–101; Cleghorn, Forests and Gardens, 145-162. 29. In UP in 1888-89 canal plantations covered thirty thousand acres and contained 1.85 million trees: “Report on the Canal Plantations,” IF 18 (1892): 69–70. 30. “Administration Report on the Railways in India,” IF 18 (1892): 229–30; and “Administration Report on the Railways in India for 1891–92,” IF, 435. 31. On wood consumption, see Pallavi V. Das, “Railway Fuel and Its Impact on the Forests in Colonial India: The Case of the Punjab, 1860–1884,” Modern Asian Studies 47 (2013): 1283–1309; Clive Dewey, Steamboats on the Indus: The Limits of Western Technological Superiority in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), 59–64; and

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for sugar boiling, Report of the Bombay Forest Commission, 4 vols. (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1887), 1:62. 32. G. P. Millett, “Thana Forests and Their Working Plans,” IF 18 (1892): 89–95. In 1884–85 Thana district exported almost twenty thousand tons of timber and fifty thousand tons of firewood by sea to Bombay and Gujarat and a further three thousand tons of timber and twenty-six thousand tons of firewood to Bombay and Poona by rail. Report of the Bombay Forest Commission, 1:14. 33. ARMCB 1882, 370. 34. RMTEB 1898–99, 250. 35. Mathew Gandy, “Landscapes of Disaster: Water, Modernity, and Urban Fragmentation in Mumbai,” Environment and Planning A 40 (2008): 108–30; and Nikhil Anand, Hydraulic City: Water and Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 36. R. S. Pearson, Commercial Guide to the Forest Economic Products of India (Calcutta: Superintendent, Government Printing, India, 1912), 56. 37. Richard Temple, Men and Events of My Time in India (London: John Murray, 1882), 419. 38. R. S. Pearson, “Note on Sundri Timber,” Forest Bulletin, no. 29 (1915): 5–6. 39. “Review of Forest Administration,” 27. 40. Pearson, Commercial Guide, 7. 41. For the value of “thinking through things,” see Elizabeth A. Lambourn, Abraham’s Luggage: A Social Life of Things in the Indian Ocean World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 42. For the ritual, social, and political significance of cloth in modern India, see C. A. Bayly, Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), chap. 6; Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), chap. 5; and Lisa N. Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi’s Nation: Homespun and Modern India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). 43. James Ricalton, India through the Stereoscope: A Journey through Hindustan (New York: Underwood and Underwood, 1907), 34. 44. RMAC 1901–02, app. K, 89–95. 45. Ricalton, India through the Stereoscope, 188. 46. Jonathan P. Parry, Death in Banaras (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 4, 96. 47. Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 133–37. 48. In Mauritius, for example, the preference was for mango wood. Burton Benedict, Indians in a Plural Society: A Report on Mauritius (London: HMSO, 1961), 119. 49. Thus, Sikhs were said never to use kikar (Acacia arabica) for cremation. R. W. Falcon, Handbook on Sikhs for the Use of Regimental Officers (Allahabad: Pioneer Press, 1896), 53. 50. Birendra Nath Ghosh, A Treatise on Hygiene and Public Health, 7th ed. (Calcutta: Scientific Publishing, 1930), 339.

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51. Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, IX, pt. I, Gujarat Population: Hindus (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1901), 48; and Punjab District Gazetteer: Jullundur District (Lahore: Civil and Military Gazette Press, 1908), 141. 52. [Margaret] Sinclair Stevenson, The Rites of the Twice-Born (London: Oxford University Press, 1920), 149. 53. Amli is tamarind, Tamarindus indica. For its many uses, see Gamble, Manual of Indian Timbers, 139, 142. 54. ToI, September 6, 1884, 3. 55. Alfred Chatterton, “The Production of Sandalwood Oil in India,” in Industrial Handbook, 1919, [edited by] Indian Munitions Board (Calcutta: Superintendent, Government Printing, India, 1919), 410. With its “precious . . . sweet odour” and as an “emblem of immortality,” sandalwood also had associations with sati. James Bruce, Scenes and Sights in the East (London: Smith, Elder, 1856), 52. On sandalwood, see James McHugh, Sandalwood and Carrion: Smell in Indian Religion and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), chap. 8. 56. “The Production of Sandalwood,” IF 25 (1899): 84; and George Watt, Dictionary of the Economic Products of India, 6 vols. (London: W. H. Allen, 1885–93), 6, pt. 2, 461–67. 57. M. Rama Rao, “Notes on Sandal,” IF 30 (1904): 359. 58. Report on the Madras Agricultural Exhibition, 1883 (Madras: Government Press, 1883), 201. 59. Ghosh, Treatise on Hygiene, 339, gives a figure of five maunds. Modern estimates tend to be substantially higher, up to 600 kg or 1,323 lbs. 60. Parry, Death in Banaras, 96. 61. ToI, January 11, 1884, 4. 62. Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase, 2 vols. (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1958), 2:779. 63. ToI, March 8, 1961, 1. 64. ARMCB 1897–98, 64; RMAC 1917–18, 1:86. 65. ToI, June 19, 1953, 10. 66. R. M. Betham, Marathas and Dekhani Musalmans (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1908), 61. 67. W. R. Robertson, Report on the Agricultural Conditions and Prospects of the Neilgherry and Coimbatore Districts (Madras: Higginbotham, 1881), 152. 68. Accounts Relating to the Sea-Borne Trade and Navigation of British India, March 1890, 20–21. 69. ToI, August 25, 1894, 4; and Accounts Relating to the Sea-Borne Trade and Navigation of British India, 1913, 27. 70. ARMCB 1882, 369. 71. In 1881–82 kerosene was used for street lighting in twenty-seven of the fifty-eight municipalities in Bombay Presidency. Some still used coconut oil; others had no municipal lighting at all. RMTEB 1881–82, 29. 72. RMAC 1901–02, 54; and RMAC 1910–11, xviii. 73. Robert Wallace, India in 1887 (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1888), 221. 74. ToI, July 17, 1897, 4.

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75. Madras, Revenue (Special), no. 158, August 9, 1918, IOR. 76. RMAC 1906–07, 69. 77. Sidney Low, A Vision of India, 2nd ed. (London: Smith, Elder, 1907), 80, and photograph opposite p. 84; ToI, February 2, 1897, 5. 78. ToI, October 27, 1884, 7; and ToI, March 17, 1885, 5. 79. RMAC 1911–12, 95. 80. ToI, May 9, 1875, p. 3; and ToI, June 10, 1876, 3. 81. ABP, April 10, 1898, 4. 82. ToI, January 25, 1892, 3; and Bombay Chronicle, January 22, 1927, 4. 83. Report and Statistical Tables of the Calcutta Fire Brigade, 1916, xi. 84. RMAC 1906–07, app. J, 92; and Report and Statistical Tables of the Calcutta Fire Brigade, 1919, app. 12, xii. 85. Ania Loomba, “Dead Women Tell No Tales: Issues of Female Subjectivity, Subaltern Agency and Tradition in Colonial and Post-colonial Writing on Widow Immolation in India,” History Workshop Journal 36 (1993): 209. 86. Tanika Sarkar, Rebels, Wives, Saints: Designing Selves and Nations in Colonial Times (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2009), 12–13. 87. In 2001 more than 150,000 women, principally in the fifteen- to thirty-four-yearold range, were killed by fire. Prachi Sanghavi, Kavi Bhalla, and Veena Das, “Fire-Related Deaths in India in 2001: A Retrospective Analysis of Data,” Lancet, April 11, 2009, 1282–88; and Devanik Saha, “Indian Women Most Prone to Death by Fire,” IndiaSpend, January 28, 2017. On “dowry murder,” see Mala Sen, Death by Fire: Sati, Dowry Death and Female Infanticide in Modern India (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001); and Veena Talwar Oldenburg, Dowry Murder: The Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 88. ToI, March 3, 1913, 10. For the case of the widow of a railroad clerk in Bhavnagar, see ToI, March 19, 1918, 9; and for a young Kathiawar widow, ToI, April 25, 1931, 14. 89. ToI, July 7, 1913, 6. 90. ToI, May 28, 1929, 10. There were, however, cases in which widows aspired to commit sati in a more conventional manner. In Hooghly district in November 1915, for example, a widow tried three times to throw herself onto her husband’s pyre. Each time she was extricated by relatives, but she was so severely burned that she died soon afterward and was cremated with her husband. ToI, November 18, 1915, 8. 91. Stevenson, Rites of the Twice-Born, 207–8. Thompson declined to discuss these “irregular suttees,” doubting that they were common and preferring to see them as “on the borderline between suttee and ordinary brutal murder.” Edward Thompson, Suttee: A Historical and Philosophical Enquiry into the Hindu Rite of Widow-Burning (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1928), 126. 92. For example, ToI, February 2, 1918, 5; ToI, May 10, 1919, 11; and ToI, August 31, 1936, 10. 93. Notably, the sati of Sampati, a young Brahmin widow, at Barh near Patna in 1927. ToI, June 6, 1928, 7. The event was attended by “a mob of fanatics numbering thousands,” who added fuel to the fire and prevented the police from intervening. The case was taken on appeal to the Privy Council in London, where it was noted: “To a policeman the suicide

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of a suttee was an illegal act, but to a Hindu it was meritorious, elevating the widow above her fellow creatures and ‘shedding great lustre upon her family.’” In this and similar cases it was claimed that the fire had miraculously lit itself, so no individual could be implicated in—and sentenced for—the sati’s death. ToI, February 28, 1929, 4. The Barh case seems to have inspired other attempts at sati; see, for example, ToI, August 19, 1930, 8. In September 1932 police in Agra district opened fire, killing three people and wounding six others, in an attempt to disperse a “riotous mob of several thousands,” assembled to witness the sati of a young Brahmin widow. ToI, September 5, 1932, 12. 94. The revival or re-idealization of sati dated back to debates in the 1890s over the Age of Consent Bill. Indira Chowdhury, The Frail Hero and the Virile History: Gender and Politics in Colonial Bengal (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 70–74. For the “masculinist ideologies of the [Hindu] nation,” see Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 9. 95. The use of cremation to destroy the bodies of those responsible for heinous crimes is hardly confined to India. See the case of the notorious “Moors murderer” Ian Brady in Britain: Guardian (London), November 4, 2017, 15. 96. Laqueur, Work of the Dead, 4, 7. 97. Andrew Ward, Our Bones Are Scattered: The Cawnpore Massacres and the Indian Mutiny of 1857 (London: John Murray, 1996), 451–52. 98. Ward, Our Bones Are Scattered, 422, 454. Other rebel corpses were thrown down wells or dumped in ditches. Christopher Hibbert, The Great Mutiny: India, 1857 (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1980), 132, 150, 322, 331. After Jhansi was captured and five thousand rebels were slaughtered, their bodies were heaped up in the streets, covered with whatever wood could be found, and set on fire; the town “looked like one vast burning ground.” Hibbert, Great Mutiny, 382. 99. Stephen F. Dale, The Mappilas of Malabar, 1498–1922: Islamic Society on the South Asian Frontier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980);and K. N. Panikkar, Against Lord and State: Religion and Peasant Uprising in Malabar, 1836–1921 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989). 100. H. V. Conolly, district magistrate, Malabar, to sec., Madras, Judicial, July 28, 1849, Correspondence on the Moplah Outrages, 1:2; and Conolly to sec., Judicial, Madras, October 12, 1849, Correspondence on the Moplah Outrages, 1:29. 101. Panikkar, Against Lord and State, 70. 102. C. Collett, joint magistrate, Malabar, to chief sec., Madras, September 27, 1855, Correspondence on the Moplah Outrages, 2:101–2. On the attitudes and motives behind this action, see Elizabeth Kolsky, “The Colonial Rule of Law and the Legal Regime of Exception: Frontier ‘Fanaticism’ and State Violence in British India,” American Historical Review 120 (2015): 1237–39. 103. Collett, to sec., Judicial, Madras, October 8, 1855, Correspondence on the Moplah Outrages, 2:127–28. 104. Collett to district magistrate, Malabar, December 15, 1855, Correspondence on the Moplah Outrages, 2:192. 105. Extract, Public Letters, Madras, July 26, 1858, L/PJ/3/1346: 82, IOR.

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106. M. Venkatarangaiya, ed., The Freedom Movement in Andhra Pradesh, 4 vols. (Hyderabad: Andhra Pradesh State Committee, 1965–74), 3:92. 107. ToI, August 29, 1955, 5. 108. Bhangya Bhukya, The Roots of the Periphery: A History of the Gonds of Deccan India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017), 163. 109. Jim Corbett, Man-Eaters of Kumaon (London: Oxford University Press, 1944), xvi. 110. James W. Best, Forest Life in India (London: John Murray, 1935), 253. 111. D. D. Cunningham, Some Indian Friends and Acquaintance: A Study of the Ways of Birds and Other Animals Frequenting Indian Streets and Gardens (London: John Murray, 1903), 227, 236, 240. 112. See, for instance, the sketch of “New Sonapore Depot for Dead Cattle &c.” in BHOR 1866, opposite p. 6. 113. “The Cremation of Refuse,” British Medical Journal, November 9, 1889, 1051; ToI, November 16, 1904, 6, for the “cremation” of sewage in Indian cantonments. 114. For example, Edward J. Bermingham, The Disposal of the Dead: A Plea for Cremation (New York: Edward J. Bermingham, 1881), chap. 6. See also David Arnold, “Burning Issues: Cremation and Incineration in Modern India,” NTM: Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin 24 (2016): 406–13. 115. See discussion “Cremation on the Battlefield” at the International Sanitary Conference, Breslau, ToI, October 26, 1874, 4. 116. India Military, B, April 1879, L/MIL/5/678, IOR. 117. James Mills, Cinerators and Sanitation (Madras: Vest, 1883), 8. 118. Mills, Cinerators and Sanitation , 14–15. 119. David Arnold, Toxic Histories: Poison and Pollution in Modern India (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University, 2016), 178–82. 120. Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 196–203. 121. Laqueur, Work of the Dead, 499. 122. “Destruction versus Decomposition,” IMG 22 (1887): 175. 123. Patrick Hehir, Hygiene and Diseases of India: A Popular Handbook, 3rd ed. (Madras: Higginbothams, 1913), 407–12; and A. J. H. Russell, ed., McNally’s Sanitary Handbook for India, 6th ed. (Madras: Superintendent, Government Press, 1923), 247–50. 124. ABP, April 21, 1898, 5; ABP, April 28, 1898, 6; and ABP, May 12, 1898, 5. Such was the authority of fire that even in Portuguese Goa, where Hindu cremation had long been suppressed, corpses were burned to prevent the spread of plague. ToI, February 11, 1897, 5. 125. ARMCB 1896–97, 663–78; and M. E. Couchman, Account of Plague Administration in the Bombay Presidency from September 1896 till May 1897 (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1897), 51, 69. 126. “Incineration,” IMG 24 (1889): 275. 127. “The Incineration of Refuse in Calcutta and Other Towns in India,” IMG 29 (1894): 381. 128. For experiments in Calcutta and Bombay, see ARMCB 1893–94, 466–67; ARMCB 1894–95, 523; and Administration Report of the Corporation of Madras Health Department, 1913, 16–17.

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129. C. C. James, Drainage Problems of the East, 2 vols. (Bombay: Times of India, 1906); and George B. Williams, Sewage Disposal in India and the East (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1924). On the American experience, see Melosi, Sanitary City, 196–203, 275–78, 347–49. C HA P T E R 5 . T H E G L O BA L D E A D

1. Homer, The Iliad, trans. E.V. Rieu (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1950), 415; and J. Harvey Simpson, Cremation in Manchester and Elsewhere, 2nd ed. (Manchester, UK: James Collins and Kingston, 1902), 11–12. 2. Karl Blind, Fire-Burial among Our Germanic Forefathers: A Record of the Poetry and History of Teutonic Cremation (London: Longmans, Green, 1875). 3. See, for instance, the description of a cremation at Bangkok in Thailand in 1867, in Le Comte de Beauvoir, Voyage autour du monde (Paris: E. Plon, 1878), 498; the author, observing that in the East bodies were baked (brûle) and not interred, exclaims, “Oh! non, je ne veux pas mourir ici!” (Oh no! I don’t want to die here!). For cremation in Bali, see Frank Hedges Butler, Round the World (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1924), 204–15. 4. F. Martin, Les Cimetières et la Crémation: Étude Historique et Critique (Paris: J.-B. Baillière et Fils, 1881), 144–53. 5. “Ex Oriente Lux,” ToI, May 15, 1874, 2. 6. Aubrey Richardson, The Law of Cremation: An Outline of the Law Relating to Cremation Ancient and Modern (London: Reeves and Turner, 1893), 11. 7. Joachim Whaley, ed., Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death (London: Europa Publications, 1981). 8. There are passing references to this India connection in Lisa Kazmier, “Leading the World: The Role of Britain and the First World War in Promoting the ‘Modern Cremation’ Movement,” Journal of Social History 42 (2009): 559–64. 9. This can be seen from the numerous British newspaper clippings for the period in CRE H15, CSE, and from TCSE for these years in which India barely figures. 10. William Eassie, Cremation of the Dead: Its History and Bearings upon Public Health (London: Smith, Elder, 1875), 1, 92–96. 11. Eassie, Cremation of the Dead, 35. 12. Eassie, Cremation of the Dead, 66, 96–97. 13. TCSE 2 (1885): 67. 14. Hugo Erichsen, The Cremation of the Dead: From an Aesthetic, Sanitary, Religious, Historical, Medico-Legal and Economical Standpoint (Detroit: D. O. Haynes, 1887), 7, 25. For the American cremation movement and its Eastern interests, see Stephen Prothero, Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 19, 39, 81. 15. ToI, June 17, 1890, 4. 16. W. Robinson, Cremation and Urn-Burial, or the Cemeteries of the Future (London: Cassell, 1889), 186–88. 17. ToI, May 15, 1885, 6. 18. ToI, August 26, 1891, 4. 19. TCSE 12 (1899): 25.

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20. Hansard, House of Commons, 3rd series, vol. 287, April 30, 1884, cols. 988–89. 21. Hansard, House of Commons, 3rd series, vol. 287, April 30, 1884, col. 989. 22. ToI, May 20, 1884, 7. The 1902 Cremation Act sought to overcome this concern over “foul play” by requiring a detailed certificate of the cause of death before cremation was permitted and a postmortem should any doubts remained. 23. Times, April 13, 1864, 5. 24. ILN, October 25, 1879, 390. 25. For instance, “The Burning of the Dead in India,” The Mirror, July 11, 1874, cutting in CRE H1, CSE. 26. Broadsheet located in CRE H2, CSE. 27. Copy in CRE H6, CSE. 28. Mary Carpenter, ed., The Last Days in England of the Rajah Rammohun Roy (London: Trübner, 1866), 154–57. 29. Sivanath Sastri, History of the Brahmo Samaj, 2nd ed. (Calcutta: Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, 1974), 116, 261; and David Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (Calcutta: Gupta Brothers, 1959), 273–80. 30. Blair B. Kling, Partner in Empire: Dwarkanath Tagore and the Age of Enterprise in East India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 237. 31. “Burial Rites of Lascars,” Daily Telegraph, January 8, 1876, cutting in CRE H4, CSE. On lascars in Britain, see Rozina Visram, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain, 1700–1947 (London: Pluto Press, 1986), chap. 3. 32. ToI, February 1, 1875, 3. 33. Edward W. West, ed., Diary of the Late Rajah of Kolhapoor during His Visit to Europe in 1870 (London: Smith, Elder, 1872), 85. 34. The death rites of Kolhapur Marathas were almost identical to Brahmins’. Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency XXIV: Kolhapur (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1886), 80. 35. “Municipality of Florence: Statement of the Funeral Procession and Cremation of the Corpse of His Highness the Late Maharajah of Kolhapore,” R/2/987/541, IOR; also in West, Diary of the Late Rajah, app. 4. 36. For many in the West cremation was in essence “urn-burial,” and considerable attention was given among early cremationists to the design of funeral urns and their storage in columbaria; for example, Robinson, Cremation and Urn-Burial. 37. Eassie, Cremation of the Dead, 90. 38. Luigi Maccone, Storia Documentata della Cremazione i Popoli Antichi ed i Moderni con Speciale Riferimento alla Igiene (Bergamo: Instituto Italiano d’Arti Grafiche, 1932), 56, and plate opposite p. 90. Martina Hupková, “The Link between the Popularity of Cremation in the Czech Republic and Religious Faith,” Prace Geograficzne 137 (2014): 74, implies that the legalization of cremation in Italy in 1874 was a consequence of the maharaja’s cremation. 39. ToI, January 17, 1871, 2; and “Cremation,” Iron, January 3, 1874, cutting in CRE H1, CSE. For Shelley’s botched cremation, see Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 539–40. 40. Henry Bacon, Etretat, Hamlet of the Setting Sun: A Norman Village and Its Surroundings (Paris: Brentano, 1895), chap. 18.

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41. Guy de Maupassant, “A Cremation,” www.online-literature.com. 42. ToI, September 23, 1884, 6; and Le Monde Illustré, September 13, 1884, cover image. 43. Thompson to Eassie, March 2, 1877, CRE H5, CSE. 44. On Woking crematorium, see Laqueur, Work of the Dead, 517. 45. Henry Thompson, Modern Cremation: Its History and Practice to the Present Date, 3rd ed. (London: Smith, Elder, 1899), 24. 46. ToI, March 4, 1887, 6. 47. From the 1890s the Arya Samaj spread rapidly among Indian communities overseas. Kenneth W. Jones, Socio-Religious Movement in British India (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 193. 48. ToI, September 7, 1908, 6. When the raja of the south Indian state of Pudukottai died in Paris in May 1928, his widow wanted the body taken to India for cremation. Instead it was embalmed at the American Hospital in Paris and sent to London for cremation. ToI, May 30, 1928, 9. 49. ToI, September 3, 1913, 7; and ToI, September 5, 1913, 7. 50. ToI, September 23, 1911, 9. 51. TCSE 25 (1911): 8. 52. Hindu cremations overseas were not confined to the British Empire or to princes. In 1933 a wealthy Hindu merchant named Pessoomal Bhoiraj was cremated on a wood pyre on the beach near Algiers in French North Africa; see the story, with its fantastical Arabian Nights cover illustration, in L’Illustré du Petit Journal, January 1, 1933, Getty Images 144848613. For an earlier Hindu cremation in Tunis, see Le Petit Parisien, May 17, 1908, Getty Images 144846599. 53. Morton Klass, East Indians in Trinidad: A Study in Cultural Persistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961); and K. Hazareesingh, History of Indians in Mauritius (London: Macmillan, 1975), 59. 54. Patrick Eisenlohr, Little India: Diaspora, Time, and Ethnolinguistic Belonging in Hindu Mauritius (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 5–9. 55. David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 156–57. 56. The standard work remains Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–1920 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), but like most authors on the subject, he makes no reference to Indians’ cremation or burial. 57. Marina Carter, Servants, Sirdars and Settlers: Indians in Mauritius, 1834–1874 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995). 58. K. L. Gillion, Fiji’s Indian Migrants: A History to the End of Indenture in 1920 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1962), 123–24. 59. I take the phrase “ritually hostile environment” from Elizabeth A. Lambourn, Abraham’s Luggage: A Social Life of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 246. 60. Report of the Royal Commissioners Appointed to Enquire into the Treatment of Immigrants in Mauritius (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1875), 476–77. Cremation was recognized under the island’s 1925 Public Health Act, but under strict conditions and only with a special permit from the permanent secretary or appropriate sanitary authority.

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61. Report of the Indian Immigrants Commission, 1885–7 (Pietermaritzburg: P. Davis, 1887), 44–45. 62. Report of the Indian Immigrants Commission, 192–93. 63. Klass, East Indians in Trinidad, 130. The Trinidad and Tobago law permitting cremation dates from 1953. 64. A photograph in the Natal Witness, April 22, 1922, 1, cutting in CRE H14, CSE, shows Indians gathered at a “so-called crematorium” (an open-air funeral pyre), two miles outside Pietermaritzburg, with the caption: “A demand is springing up for the erection of a proper crematorium for all races.” 65. Thillayvel Naidoo, The Arya Samaj Movement in South Africa (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1992); and Hazareesingh, History of Indians in Mauritius, 89. In Fiji a branch of the Arya Samaj was established in 1902, but even in the 1950s cremations were rare because of the expense of wood, ghee, and employing a priest. Adrian C. Mayer, Peasants in the Pacific: A Study of Fiji Indian Society (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), 9, 81. Klass, East Indians in Trinidad, 142, 146, notes the role of the Sanatan Dharma Mahasabha, the Arya Samaj, and visiting “swamis” from India in Trinidad by the 1950s. 66. Garrey Michael Dennie, “Flames of Race, Ashes of Death: Re-Inventing Cremation in Johannesburg, 1910–1945,” Journal of Southern Africa Studies 29 (2003): 177–92. 67. J. D. Tyson, Report on the Conditions of Indians in Jamaica, British Guiana and Trinidad, 1938–39 (Simla: Manager, Government of India Press, 1939), 28. 68. West India Royal Commission, 1938–39: Recommendations (London: HMSO, 1940), 30. See also C. Kondapi, Indians Overseas, 1838–1949 (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1951), 382–83. 69. In A House for Mr. Biswas, V. S. Naipaul’s novel of Indian life in Trinidad, when Mohun Biswas’s father dies in the early twentieth century, he is buried (despite being a Brahmin), as cremation was forbidden. When Biswas himself dies forty years later, shortly after World War II, he is cremated. His cremation, “one of the few permitted by the Health Department, was conducted on the banks of a muddy stream and attracted spectators of various races.” V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1969), 32, 590. 70. See, for example, Laws of Trinidad and Tobago: Cremation Act, Act 16 of 1953. In British Honduras an ordinance of 1913 made cremation lawful, but only with the governor’s approval. Unapproved cremation risked a fine of $250 and/or a prison sentence of hard labor. L/PJ/6/1240, no. 1730, IOR. 71. L/PJ/6/743, no. 83, IOR. 72. L/PJ/6/1241, no. 1830, IOR, L/PJ/6/1591, no. 2916, IOR. 73. In Gibraltar, on the eve of World War I, the community of fifty or so British Indian subjects was able to perform cremations (three in the four years up to 1913) only by using a site owned by the military authorities, who declined to relinquish it. Indians sought a site of their own and equal rights with the Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish populations. M. Thawrdas and M. Kimatrai to colonial secretary, Gibraltar, June 16, 1913, L/PJ/6/1249, no. 2339, IOR. For Sikh burials and cremations in British Honduras in 1913, L/PJ/6/1240, no. 1730, IOR. For Coptic Christian opposition to cremation in Addis Ababa in 1927, L/PS/11/281, IOR.

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74. In Australia the rediscovery of Sikh cremation sites has been an important means of affirming the Sikhs’ place in Australian history. “WA Sikh Cremation Site: Adenia Reserve,” www.australiansikhheritage.com/wasikhcremationsite/. 75. This also applied to Ceylon. In 1879 the body of Sir Muthu Coomaraswamy, a Tamil member of the island’s legislative council, was cremated in Colombo. Though he was born in Ceylon, at the insistence of his aged mother his ashes were sent for immersion in the Ganges at Benares. ToI, May 15, 1879, 3; ToI, December 9, 1879, 2. 76. Sudesh Mishra, “Diaspora and the Difficult Art of Dying,” in Subaltern Studies X, ed. Gautam Bhadra, Gyan Prakash, and Susie Tharu (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 6. Likewise, in Mauritius in the 1950s bone fragments and the ashes of the cremated were taken out to sea in a boat and cast overboard. In this way, the remains of the deceased were said to “mingle with the waters of the Ganges which also flows into the sea.” Burton Benedict, Indians in a Plural Society: A Report on Mauritius (London: HMSO, 1961), 119. 77. Recruiters, hoping to attract Indians to British Guiana, stressed that cremation was not prohibited in the colony, suggesting that concerns had already been raised about its legality. ToI, February 5, 1924, 8. 78. Johannes Gerrit de Kruijf, “Guyana Junction: Globalisation, Localisation, and the Production of East Indianness” (PhD diss., University of Utrecht, 2006). See also Hemchand Gossai, River Crossings: Memories of a Journey (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2006), 337, 344. 79. H. B. Hanna, The Second Afghan War, 1878–79–80: Its Causes, Its Conduct and Its Consequences, 3 vols. (Westminster: Archibald Constable, 1899–1910), 1:313–14; and 3:331. A cutting from the Penny Illustrated Paper, January 1880, in CRE H6, CSE, shows a sketch of “Our Indian Troops Burning Their Dead Comrades” at Ghazni during the war. A similar image appeared in ILN, February 8, 1879, 136. 80. A. H. Bingley, Sikhs (Simla: Government Central Printing Office, 1899), 79. However formulaic, the account of burial practices in this and other army handbooks in the 1890s and 1900s suggests a need for European officers to be informed about soldiers’ funerary practices even if they did not take actual responsibility for their observance. 81. Close to a million Indians fought in the war, suffering more than 120,000 casualties. DeWitt C. Ellinwood, “The Indian Soldier, the Indian Army, and Change, 1914–1918,” in India and World War I, ed. DeWitt C. Ellinwood and S. D. Pradhan (New Delhi: Manohar, 1978), 183–84. 82. 140,000 Indians were sent to the Western Front between September 1914 and November 1915, 50,000 of them noncombatants; 8,557 were killed and 50,000 wounded. Gordon Corrigan, Sepoys in the Trenches: The Indian Corps on the Western Front, 1914–1915 (Staplehurst, UK: Spellmount, 1999), ix. 83. List of Indian officers, NCOs, and men who died in 112 Indian Ambulance Force in France or Belgium, L/MIL/7/19548, IOR. 84. For French opposition, see Walter Lawrence to Lord Kitchener, December 27, 1915, Lawrence Papers, IOR. 85. W. G. Macpherson, History of the Great War: Medical Services General History, vol. 2, The Medical Services on the Western Front and during the Operations in France and Belgium in 1914 and 1915 (London: HMSO, 1923), 130–31.

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86. F. Wall, to Assistant Director, Medical Services, XV Division, July 15, 1916, L/MIL/7/19548, IOR. See also Neuve Chapelle: India’s Memorial in France, 1914–1918 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1928), app. 3. 87. “Nominal Roll of Men Cremated in Meerut Stationary Hospital at Boulogne, France,” and Walter Lawrence to “Storr,” December 16, 1915, L/MIL/7/19548, IOR. French objections to cremation persisted after the war. M. Adams to IWGC, April 22, 1922, WG 909/7, CWGC. On the proposed cremation of the war dead of all Allied nations “in the simple manner of Indians,” and the rejection of this idea, see David Crane, Empires of the Dead: How One Man’s Vision Led to the Creation of WWI’s War Graves (London: William Collins, 2013), 66–67. 88. Visram, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes, 118. See the reports of the Indian mail censor in Mss Eur F 143/83 and F 143/84, IOR. 89. Lawrence to Kitchener, December 27, 1915, Lawrence Papers, IOR. 90. L/MIL/7/19548, IOR. The theme runs throughout Lawrence’s correspondence with Kitchener, from December 1914 to December 1915. Lawrence Papers, F. 143/65, IOR. For his career, see Walter Lawrence, The India We Served (London: Cassell, 1928). 91. By August 1916, 14,514 Indian soldiers had been treated in British hospitals. ToI, August 24, 1916, 4. 92. ToI, July 12, 1915, 15; and Lawrence, The India We Served, 269–73. For the cremation as well as burial of “sweepers” and grooms, see list from Indian Expeditionary Force D, December 15, 1914, L/MIL/7/19548, IOR. 93. On anxieties over Hindu masculinity and the “othering” of Muslims, see Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (New York: Palgrave, 2002), esp. chap. 6. 94. Samuel Hyson and Alan Lester, “‘British India on Trial’: Brighton Military Hospitals and the Politics of Empire in World War I,” Journal of Historical Geography 3 (2012): 21. 95. Times, April 21, 1917, cited in Hyson and Lester, “British India on Trial,” 23. 96. ToI, May 25, 1917, 8. 97. The chattri was designed by a young Indian architect, E. C. Henriques, then resident in England. On the monument and its unveiling, see ToI, February 24, 1921, 12; and ToI, November 15, 1921, 11. As a writer for the Daily Telegraph, January 19, 1921, observed, “it reproduces the sarcophagus peculiar to most of the burial grounds of Hindus in India,” and created an effect of “solemn grandeur . . . enhanced by the wild scenery of the rolling Sussex downland.” Cutting in WG 1606/15, CWGC. 98. Cutting from Sussex Daily News, September 19, 1932, in L/MIL/7/19548, IOR. 99. Other Indian sepoys and noncombatants were cremated at Netley Hospital on Southampton Water (at least eighteen) and at Brockenhurst in the New Forest (probably twenty-eight) between November 1914 and October 1915. L/MIL/7/19548, IOR. 100. William Bull to Fabian Ware, September 2, 1927, WG 1606/15, CWGC. The question is still pertinent. In May 2019, when my wife and I visited Patcham Down on a cold, bleak, blustery day, another couple trudged up the hill behind us and sat nearby. Seeing my interest in the place, the man asked with some bewilderment: “Why did they put it here?” Today there is a signpost on the nearest road that simply reads “To the Chattri.” In 1921 the site was so remote that the cars carrying the Prince of Wales and his party had to struggle across “sodden down land turf” in order to reach it. ToI, February 24, 1921, 12.

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101. Office note by Arthur Browne, October 23, 1928, WG 1606/15, CWGC. 102. Douglas J. Davies and Lewis H. Mates, eds., Encyclopedia of Cremation (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005). 103. Hugo Talbot, town clerk, Brighton, to general sec., Ministry of Munitions, July 9, 1919, L/MIL/7/19548, IOR. On the work of IWGC, renamed the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in 1960, see Philip Longworth, The Unending Vigil: A History of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, 1917–1967 (London: Constable, 1967). 104. G. L. Pepys, India Office, to Oscar Öveden, Uppsala, August 19, 1932; and India Office memo to John Otter, September 28, 1920, L/MIL/7/19548, IOR. 105. Times, October 16, 1915, 11. 106. Times, October 16, 1915, 11. 107. Times, October 16, 1915, 11. 108. Lawrence to Kitchener, February 15, 1915, Lawrence Papers, IOR. 109. P. Hehir, “Account of the Medical Arrangements &c during the Siege of Kut-alAmara,” in Mesopotamia Commission: Report of the Commission Appointed to Enquire into the Operations of War in Mesopotamia (London: HMSO, 1917), app. 3, 171, 178; and photograph HU 104981, Imperial War Museum, London. 110. For instance, in relation to the remains of four Sikh soldiers found in “graves” in France in early 1922. Office note, February 2, 1922, WG 909/7, CWGC. In some cases the IWGC went to extraordinary forensic efforts to identify Sikh, Hindu, and Gurkha soldiers from fragments of clothing, regimental insignia, and religious emblems (such as Sikhs’ steel bangles), and even by skull measurements; Sikhs were said to have particularly “fine distinguishing marks.” Major Blacker’s report, n.d. [ca. 1921], WG 909/7, CWGC. 111. Third meeting, IWMG, July 24, 1918, WG 113, CWGC. A decision to exhume and cremate buried Hindu soldiers had been made earlier. Minutes of the Indian Graves Committee, March 20, 1918, SDC 86, CWGC. 112. Arthur Browne to director of works, October 2, 1929, WG 219/16, pt. 1, CWGC. 113. Browne to director of works, November 13, 1925; and Browne to joint director of records, IWGC, April 12, 1926, CWGC. 114. Browne to director of works, November 13, 1925, WG 219/16, CWGC. 115. Browne, interview with General Alexander Cobbe, India Office, March 7, 1924, WG 219/16, pt. 1, CWGC. 116. C. L. Miskin to Captain Ridger, February 25, 1924; and Miskin to director of records, IWGC, March 12, 1925, WG 909/5, CWGC. 117. H. F. Chettle, director of records, IWGC, to Rudyard Kipling, December 17, 1931, and loose papers, WG 909/5, CWMG. 118. Browne to director of works, November 13, 1925, WG 219/16, CWGC. 119. A. S. Laing, chief records officer, IWGC, March 6, 1951, A/172, pt. 1, CWGC. 120. Director of works, memo, May 17, 1956, A/172, pt. 1, CWGC. C HA P T E R 6 . T H E R E B I RT H O F C R E M AT IO N

1. William Howard Russell, The Prince of Wales’ Tour: A Diary in India (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1877).

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2. ToI, November 18, 1875, 2. There is no mention of this visit in Russell’s account of the prince’s tour. 3. It is possible that the visit to Sonapur was Souter’s idea, since he appeared sympathetic to cremation. He once told municipal councilors in Bombay, “I am an orthodox Christian, and I should not object to my remains being burned.” His remark, targeting the objections of hard-line Hindus, drew laughter. ToI, May 28, 1887, 3. In fact, when he died suddenly in 1888, Souter was buried, not cremated. It is more likely that Khote persuaded the prince to see Sonapur. See Sorabji Jehangir, Representative Men of India (London: W. H. Allen, 1889), 165–66. 4. ToI, November 18, 1875, 2. 5. ILN, November 13, 1875, special supplement; and The Ladies’ Treasury, February 1, 1876, 80–84. 6. J. T. F. Jordens, Dayananda Sarasvati: His Life and Ideas (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 242. 7. Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan C. M. Ross (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 16. 8. ToI, January 11, 1884, 6. 9. Jordens, Dayananda Sarasvati, 152. For Dayananda and the fire ritual, see Kenneth W. Jones, Arya Dharm: Hindu Consciousness in 19th-Century Punjab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), chap. 2; and John Campbell Oman, Cults, Customs and Superstitions of India (Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs, 1908), chap. 7. 10. ToI, November 8, 1883, 6. 11. The murder and cremation in March 1897 of Pandit Lekh Ram, one of Dayananda’s most stridently anti-Muslim disciples, added to the growing sense of the burning of the dead as a demonstration of Hindu militancy and a gesture of communal defiance. Jones, Arya Dharm, 194. 12. William Gould, Religion and Conflict in Modern South Asia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (New York: Palgrave, 2002); and John Zavos, The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000). 13. Richard G. Fox, “East of Said,” in Edward Said: A Critical Reader, ed. Michael Sprinker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 151–52. 14. Nico Slate, Gandhi’s Search for the Perfect Diet: Eating with the World in Mind (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019), 53. 15. “One shudders to think of earth burial. . . . In cremation it is otherwise.” [Ethel] Alec-Tweedie, Mainly East (London: Hutchinson, 1923), 119; cf. George K. Behlmer, “Grave Doubts: Victorian Medicine, Moral Panic, and the Signs of Death,” Journal of British Studies 42 (2003): 205–35. 16. For the mortality of the period, see Ira Klein, “Death in India, 1871–1921,” Journal of Asian Studies 32 (1973): 639–59. 17. ToI, May 23, 1888, 5, reproducing an article from the Daily Telegraph. 18. ToI, May 23, 1888, 5. 19. ToI, May 23, 1888, 5.

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20. ToI, May 23, 1888, 5. 21. George C. M. Birdwood, Introduction to Jehangir, Representative Men of India, xi. This account also appears in a slightly different form in George C. M. Birdwood, Sva (London: Philip Lee Warner, 1915), 17–23. 22. Birdwood, “Introduction,” xi. 23. Birdwood, “Introduction,” x. 24. Edward Carpenter, From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta: Sketches in Ceylon and India (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1892), 263–64. 25. Henry Steel Olcott, Old Diary Leaves: The Only Authentic History of the Theosophical Society, 2nd series (London: Theosophical Society, 1900), 276. 26. Henry Steel Olcott, Old Diary Leaves: The Only Authentic History of the Theosophical Society, 3rd series (London: Theosophical Society, 1904), 342–49. 27. Stephen Prothero, The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 171–72. 28. Edwin Arnold, India Revisited (London: Trübner, 1886), 233, 324. 29. Arnold, India Revisited, 217. 30. Arnold, India Revisited, 217–18. Benares also figured in the Indian travel writing of the period, but references to the cremation ghats, if they appeared at all, were muted or subsumed within more general observations and reflections; see, for example, Bholanauth Chunder, The Travels of a Hindoo to Various Parts of Bengal and Upper India, 2 vols. (London: N. Trübner, 1869), 1:236–56; and Romesh Chunder Dutt, Rambles in India during Twenty-Four Years, 1871 to 1895 (Calcutta: S. K. Lahiri, 1895), chap. 1. 31. TCSE 17 (1904), 20. 32. Alec-Tweedie, Mainly East, 105–6. On the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, see Kim A. Wagner, Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019). 33. Alec-Tweedie, Mainly East, 118–19. 34. For this inversion of Orientalist stereotypes, see Fox, “East of Said,” 152. 35. Barbara Foxe, Long Journey Home: A Biography of Margaret Noble (Nivedita) (London: Rider, 1975), 11. 36. Foxe, Long Journey Home, 37. 37. Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and “the Mystic East” (London: Routledge, 1999), 93. On the Ramakrishna Mission see Gwilym Beckerlegge, Swami Vivekananda’s Legacy of Service: A Study of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006). 38. Foxe, Long Journey Home, 191. 39. Foxe, Long Journey Home, 173. 40. The body of Vivekananda’s preceptor Ramakrishna was also cremated at Belur in 1886. For the more conventional burial of a swami at Benares in 1899, see ABP, July 16, 1899, 5, 7. 41. Nivedita to J. MacLeod, September 14, 1902, in Letters of Sister Nivedita, ed. Sankari Prasad Basu (Calcutta: Nababharat, 1960), 1:503–6; and Foxe, Long Journey Home, 145–46. 42. Nivedita, “Some Hindu Rites for the Honoured Dead,” in The Complete Works of Sister Nivedita, 4 vols. (Calcutta: Ramakrishna Sarada Mission, 1967), 2:280.

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43. Nivedita, “A Study of Benares,” in The Complete Works of Sister Nivedita, 4:185, 187. 44. On the “living sati,” see Catherine Weinberger-Thomas, Ashes of Immortality: Widow-Burning in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 28–34. 45. Sister Nivedita: A Sketch of Her Life and Her Services to India (Madras: G. A. Natesan, [ca. 1912]), 41. 46. ToI, May 13, 1891, 5. 47. Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 493. 48. Prothero, White Buddhist. 49. Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 87. 50. Kenneth W. Jones, Socio-Religious Movement in British India (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 172. 51. For Besant, see Jones, Socio-Religious Movement in British India, 174–76; and Joanne Stafford Mortimer, “Annie Besant and India, 1913–1917,” Journal of Contemporary History 18 (1983): 61–78. 52. For “Indians by persuasion,” see Fox, “East of Said,” 153. 53. See ToI, July 29, 1912, 11, for the cremation of a female Theosophist, Dr. Louise Appel. 54. Times, September 22, 1933, 11; and ToI, September 25, 1935, 4. A photograph of Besant’s cremation can be found in Getty Images SSPL 102731090. 55. ToI, June 24, 1890, 5. 56. ToI, March 19, 1912, 7. 57. ToI, January 20, 1914, 7. 58. ToI, June 4, 1925, 7. 59. ToI, August 27, 1926, 10. There are also instances of European involvement in Hindu cremations by the 1920s. [Margaret] Sinclair Stevenson, The Rites of the Twice-Born (London: Oxford University Press, 1920), 150, records how the Thakur of Gondal in Kathiawar took the highly unusual step of requesting his friend and tutor, Dr. Argyll Robertson, to attend his cremation and light the pyre. 60. TCSE 21 (1908): 18. For Strachey’s cremation in February 1908, see Mss Eur. F 127/409, IOR. 61. Laqueur, Work of the Dead, 25. 62. ToI, May 10, 1929, 4. Cremations had begun at Arno’s Vale about twenty years earlier. 63. Cremation Society notice, n.d. (ca. 1875), in CRE H4, CSE. 64. “Memorial to Home Secretary in Favour of Cremation,” undated clipping from British Medical Journal, in CRE H7, CSE. 65. ToI, September 9, 1880, 2. 66. ToI, September 9, 1880, 2. 67. For the Dutch in Batavia, see ToI, August 25, 1874, 3. 68. By the 1900s a trade existed in the global movement of the dead; see the advertisement for Davies, Turner & Co. of Lime Street, London, offering to transport dead bodies and cremated ashes “to and from all parts of the World,” in Cremation in Great Britain (London: Cremation Society of England, 1909), 89.

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69. RMAC 1905–06, 54. 70. TCSE 19 (1906), 15. 71. RMAC 1905–06, xix, 54. 72. ToI, June 29, 1905, 5. 73. RMAC 1906–07, 61. For the crematorium and its working, see ToI, May 17, 1906, 3. 74. RMAC 1907–08, xxv, 60; RMAC 1921–22, 98; and RMAC 1938–39, 2:37. 75. ToI, December 10, 1906, 8. 76. ToI, December 2, 1907, 8; and ToI, June 5, 1913, 8. 77. Pat Jalland, Changing Ways of Death in Twentieth-Century Australia: War, Medicine and the Funeral Business (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2006), 328. 78. Jalland, Changing Ways of Death. 79. Laqueur, Work of the Dead, 197, 212. 80. Barbara N. Ramusack, The Indian Princes and Their States (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 81. ToI, January 2, 1895, 6. 82. ToI, January 2, 1895, 6. 83. ToI, January 2, 1895, 6. 84. ABP, October 9, 1898, 6. 85. Ian Copland, The British Raj and the Indian Princes: Paramountcy in Western India, 1857–1930 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1982), 141–53. 86. ToI, July 31, 1882, 3; and ToI, August 9, 1882, 3. 87. On Dayal, see Gary D. Sampson, “Lala Deen Dayal: Between Two Worlds,” in India Through the Lens: Photography, 1840–1911, ed. Vidya Dehejia (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2000), 259–71; and Judith Mara Gutman, Through India Eyes: 19th and Early 20th Century Photography from India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). 88. Graphic, July 24, 1886, cutting in CRE H9, CSE. 89. Graphic, July 24, 1886. 90. Laqueur, Work of the Dead, 53, 83. 91. Harjot Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), 344. 92. Partha Chatterjee, “Two Poets and Death: On Civil and Political Society in the Non-Christian World,” in Questions of Modernity, ed. Timothy Mitchell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 35–36. 93. Sandria B. Freitag, “‘The Public’ and Its Meanings in Colonial South Asia,” South Asia 14 (1991): 1–13; and John Zavos, The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 12–14. 94. Tapan Raychaudhuri, Perceptions, Emotions, Sensibilities: Essays on India’s Colonial and Post-Colonial Experience (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 62. 95. ToI, January 14, 1884, 6, citing The Englishman (Calcutta) for January 10, 1884. 96. Jay Ruby, Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), chap. 2; and Beth Ann Guynn, “Post-mortem Photography,” in Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, ed. John Hannavy (New York: Routledge, 2008), 1164–67. For the continuing use of photographs to memorialize the family dead in India, see Pooja Sagar, “Images of Deaths and Marriages: Syrian Christian Family Albums and

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Oral Histories in Kerala,” in Photography in India: From Archives to Contemporary Practice, ed. Aileen Blaney and Chinar Shah (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 63–74. 97. ToI, January 14, 1884, 6. 98. Not all the death rites and cremations covered by newspapers in the late nineteenth century were in any sense “modern,” but those that remained “traditional” and “orthodox” were often remarked on for precisely that reason. See the death and cremation of Kristo Das Pal, editor of the Hindoo Patriot, ToI, July 25, 1884, 5; and ToI, July 28, 1884, 5. 99. Raychaudhuri, Perceptions, Emotions, Sensibilities, 62. 100. For the “photo-iconography” of Ramakrishna, see Gwilym Beckerlegge, The Ramakrishna Mission: The Making of a Modern Hindu Movement (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), chap. 6. 101. For a further significant example of postmortem photography, see the image of Tilak reproduced in Christopher Pinney, “The Body and the Bomb: Technologies of Modernity in Colonial India,” in Picturing the Nation: Iconographies of Modern India, ed. Richard H. Davis (Hyderabad: Orient Longmans, 2007), facing p. 52. 102. On darshan, see Diana L. Eck, Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India (Chambersburg, PA: Anima Publications, 1981), though nowhere does Eck consider darshan in relation to the dead. By the 1920s the public viewing of the dead had become a wellestablished practice, as in the case of the assassinated Arya Samajist Swami Shraddhananda in Delhi in 1926: ToI, December 25, 1926, 14. 103. On Vidyasagar, see David Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (Calcutta: Gupta Brothers, 1959), 54–56. 104. Subal Chandra Mitra, Isvar Chandra Vidyasagar: Story of His Life and Work, 2nd ed. (Calcutta: New Bengal Press, 1907), 268–69. C HA P T E R 7 . C R E M AT IO N A N D T H E NAT IO N

1. ABP, April 24, 1898, 7. 2. Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973); and Peter Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal: The Rise of Revolutionary Terrorism in India, 1900–1910 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993). 3. ToI, November 11, 1908, 7. An approver is someone who in a criminal case is freed from prosecution and possible conviction in return for testifying against the other accused. 4. ToI, November 13, 1908, 7. 5. F. W. Duke, chief sec., Bengal, to sec., India Home, November 14, 1908, Home (Jails), no. 24, November 1908, NAI. According to the Times, November 12, 1908, following the cremation there was a “general rush” to gather portions of the ashes and “fragments and bones were preserved for dispatch as relics to other towns.” In L/PJ/6/903, 1908, no. 4252, IOR. According to one report the ashes were sold in Calcutta for Rs. 5 an ounce, the supply being “made to suit the demand.” F. C. Daly, “Note on the Growth of the Revolutionary Movement in Bengal,” in First Rebels: Strictly Confidential Note on the Growth of the Revolutionary Movement in Bengal, ed. Sankar Ghosh (Calcutta: RiddhiIndia, 1981), 39. 6. Duke to sec., India Home, November 14, 1908, NAI.

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7. ToI, November 13, 1908, 7. See also Times, November 11, 1908, in L/PJ/6/903, 1908, no. 4252, IOR. 8. Daly, “Note on the Growth,” 40. 9. Durba Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919–1947 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 71–72. 10. Cited in Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists, 85. 11. I borrow here from Jacob Copeman and Deepa S. Reddy, “The Didactic Death: Publicity, Instruction and Body Donations,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (2012): 59–83, but my use of the phrase “didactic death” differs substantially from theirs. 12. Notes to India Home (Jails), nos. 19–28, November 1908, NAI. 13. ToI, November 18, 1908, 7. 14. ToI, November 23, 1908, 7. In 1847, thirty-one straw effigies had been burned at Kasi Mitter’s Ghat in Calcutta, representing men who had drowned and their bodies lost while on a pilgrimage. BT, March 31, 1847, 256. 15. ToI, January 22, 1914, 7. 16. ToI, October 11, 1915, 10. For the cremation of a loyalist at Nasik in June 1910, see ToI, June 11, 1932, 12. 17. Taylor C. Sherman, “State Practice, Nationalist Politics and the Hunger Strikes of the Lahore Conspiracy Case Prisoners, 1929–39,” Cultural and Social History 5 (2008): 503–4. 18. ToI, September 17, 1929, 1; and Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists, 123–25. 19. On this episode, see ToI, March 26, 1931, 7; Corinne Friend, ed., Yashpal Looks Back: Selections from an Autobiography (New Delhi: Vikas, 1981), 218–19; and, more generally, Kama Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India; Violence, Image, Voice and Text (London: Hurst, 2015); and Chris Moffat, India’s Revolutionary Inheritance: Politics and the Promise of Bhagat Singh (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 20. The postindependence government of India followed a similar policy. When Gandhi’s assassins, Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte, were executed in November 1949, the home ministry refused to allow photographs to be taken before they were hanged and subsequently refused to release their bodies for cremation: ToI, November 15, 1949, 1. 21. Tim Flohr Sørensen and Mikkel Bille, “Flames of Transformation: The Role of Fire in Cremation Practices,” World Archaeology 40 (2008): 253. 22. For Tilak’s career, see Stanley A. Wolpert, Tilak and Gokhale: Revolution and Reform in the Making of Modern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962). 23. ToI, October 29, 1920, 5. 24. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1. 25. ToI, August 2, 1923, 4; ToI, June 5, 1926, p. 16; ToI, August 20, 1926, 10; ToI, June 11, 1927, 13; ToI, January 27, 1930, 11. In 1933 the government refused to allow the cremation of another prominent nationalist, Vithalbhai Patel, on Chowpatty sands, basing its decision on “experience gain[ed] subsequent to the cremation of Mr. Tilak’s remains.” ToI, November 4, 1933, 14. 26. ToI, June 19, 1925, 9; Calcutta Municipal Gazette, June 20, 1925, 207, 211, 219; and Paul R. Greenough, “The Death of an Uncrowned King: C. R. Das and Political Crisis in

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Twentieth-Century Bengal,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 28 (1986): 414–41. Such funerary processions were not unique to Calcutta and Bombay; see the account of the funeral of Lala Lajpat Rai in Lahore in November 1926, at which women and students joined a crowd estimated at 75,000 to 100,000. ToI, November 19, 1928, 11. 27. ToI, June 16, 1927, 9; ToI, June 17, 1927, p. 10; ToI, June 24, 1930, 11; and ToI, June 2, 1933, 3. Calcutta municipality paid Rs. 15,000 toward the cost of the memorial and its upkeep. ToI, June 19, 1935, 4. 28. Lisa N. Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi’s Nation: Homespun and Modern India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), chap. 2. 29. For instance, the Congress leaders Motilal Nehru in 1931 and J. M. Sen Gupta in 1933. ToI, February 7, 1931, 10; and ToI, July 25, 1933, 7. 30. Haribahn Upadhyaya, “That Infallible Weapon—Non-Cooperation,” in 1921 Movement: Reminiscences, by [Government of India] (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1971), 211. 31. Jonathan P. Parry, Death in Banaras (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 180–81. Catherine Weinberger-Thomas, Ashes of Immortality: Widow-Burning in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 239 n42, adds: “Cremation might thus be viewed as a sacrifice in the fullest sense of the term: the offering of a live victim.” 32. Jonathan Parry, “The End of the Body,” in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, ed. Michel Feher (New York: Zone, 1989), 503, 506. 33. On India as a Hindu goddess, see Sumathi Ramaswami, The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 34. F. C. Ford Robertson, Our Forests (Allahabad: Printing and Stationery, United Provinces, 1936), 30–31. On “forest satyagrahas,” see Ramachandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 51–55, 107–9; and David Baker, “‘A Serious Time’: Forest Satyagraha in Madhya Pradesh, 1930,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 21 (1984): 71–90. 35. Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi before India (London: Allen Lane, 2013), 298–302; and Judith M. Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 56. 36. Shankerlal Banker, “In Retrospect,” in 1921 Movement, 43. 37. Indulal Yajnik, “Ushering in New Era,” in 1921 Movement, 218–27. 38. Krishnadas, Seven Months with Mahatma Gandhi: Being an Inside View of the NonCo-Operation Movement (1921–22), 2 vols. (Madras: S. Ganesan, 1928), 1:66. 39. Krishnadas, Seven Months with Mahatma Gandhi, 1:85, 88, 318. 40. Quoted in Upadhyaya, “That Infallible Weapon,” 213; see Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, ed., The Mahatma and the Poet: Letters and Debates between Gandhi and Tagore, 1915–1941 (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1997), 83–84, 90. 41. Brown, Gandhi, 225; and Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi’s Nation, 112. 42. Kim A. Wagner, Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 108. 43. Krishnadas, Seven Months with Mahatma Gandhi, 1:410. 44. Tara Chand, “The Story of the First Unarmed Revolt,” in 1921 Movement, 31; and Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922–1992 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 24, 54.

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45. The famine and its causes have been much debated; for example, Paul R. Greenough, Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal: The Bengal Famine of 1943–44 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); and Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 46. ToI, August 27, 1943, 4; and Janam Mukherjee, Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire (London: Hurst, 2015), 132–33. As Mukherjee notes (132, 286), two volunteer organizations, the Hindu Satkar Samiti and the Muslim Anjuman Mofidul Islam, tried to separate out the bodies of the Hindu and Muslim dead, perhaps using distinguishing marks such as circumcision; to what effect is unclear. 47. ToI, November 3, 1943, 4. 48. Mukherjee, Hungry Bengal, 239–46. 49. For instance, in Hyderabad an Arya Samajist, Gaya Pershad, collected the bodies of the dead for cremation or burial, especially those who had perished in floods or epidemics. Karen Isaksen Leonard, Social History of an Indian Caste: The Kayasths of Hyderabad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 209. 50. But equally, cremations among servicemen who died in accidents might serve to reinforce communal and occupational identities, as in the case of two Sikhs killed in a plane crash near Karachi in September 1933 and given a funeral that combined military honors with Sikh rites: ToI, September 6, 1933, 10. 51. ToI, July 19, 1937, 9. 52. In Bombay in September 1934, a Muslim woman’s body was cremated by accident. Her corpse had lain overnight in a morgue and in the morning Hindu relatives of another of the deceased were given the wrong body and failed to check its identity. ToI, September 7, 1934, 4. 53. Cf. Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (New York: Palgrave, 2002). 54. Wagner, Amritsar 1919, 127, 177. 55. ToI, May 20, 1926, 12. 56. ToI, November 12, 1929, 12. 57. For instance, at Hyderabad. ToI, March 16, 1933, 3. 58. As in Multan and Lahore. ToI, April 30, 1935, 12; and ToI, October 25, 1935, 9. 59. ToI, June 19, 1937, 13. 60. On the Harijan movement, see Oliver Mendelsohn and Marika Vicziany, The Untouchables: Subordination, Poverty and the State in Modern India (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 106–11. 61. See the resolution moved by Dr. P. G. Solanki, a depressed classes leader, in the Bombay corporation, in ToI, February 2, 1934, 13. For the significance of this inclusion of low castes, untouchables, and tribals within a redefined Hindu community, thereby providing an answer to the question “Who is a Hindu?,” see John Zavos, The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. 212. 62. ToI, May 3, 1927, 10. 63. ToI, February 13, 1934, 3. 64. ToI, September 26, 1944, 4.

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65. ToI, August 28, 1937, 5; and ToI, December 29, 1938, 21. In Bombay finding suitable space for a scheduled caste cremation ground created conflict with Sunni Muslims who wanted the same site for an extension to their burial ground: ToI, June 23, 1942, 6. 66. ToI, January 28, 1942, 6. 67. ToI, December 31, 1953, 1. Dalit exclusion from caste-Hindu cremation sites continued. ToI, January 11, 1954, 6; and ToI, December 6, 1957, 1. Significantly, however, Parry, Death in Banaras, 66–67, found no discrimination against the Dalit dead in Benares in the 1980s. 68. Eleanor Zelliot, Ambedkar’s World: The Making of Babasaheb and the Dalit Movement (New Delhi: Navayana Publishing, 2013), chap. 4. 69. ToI, December 7, 1956, 1; and ToI, December 8, 1956, 1. 70. ToI, March 28, 1942, 11. Restrictions were also briefly applied in Poona. ToI, June 22, 1942, 6. 71. Shortages of wood and the railway wagons to transport it persisted after independence. ToI, June 19, 1955, 10. 72. Rajarshi Chunder, “A City in Mourning: 7 August 1941,” in Calcutta: The Stormy Decades, ed. Tanika Sarkar and Sekhar Bandyopadhyay (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2015), 47. 73. Chunder, “A City in Mourning: 7 August 1941,” 56, quoting Bijoya Ray. 74. Chunder, “A City in Mourning: 7 August 1941,” 50–52. 75. Alex Aronson, Brief Chronicles of the Time: Personal Recollections of My Stay in Bengal (1937–1946) (Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1990), 88. 76. ToI, May 7, 1946, 6. 77. On “bad deaths” and their worrying consequences for the living, see C. J. Fuller, The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Society in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 227. 78. On Gandhi darshan, see Brown, Gandhi, 99, 112, 167–68, 382. 79. ToI, January 30, 1948, 1; Alan Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1958), 276; and Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase, 2 vols. (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1958), 2:747–85. 80. ToI, February 1, 1948, 1. The funeral arrangements were made by a British officer, Major-General Roy Bucher, under the direction of the Indian defense ministry. Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 15. 81. ToI, February 1, 1948, 1; and Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, Freedom at Midnight (Delhi: Vikas, 1976), 449. 82. Claude Cookman, “Margaret Bourke-White and Henri Cartier-Bresson: Gandhi’s Funeral,” History of Photography 22 (1998): 199–209; Margaret Bourke-White, Halfway to Freedom (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949), 233; Henri Cartier-Bresson, In India (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987); and ILN, February 7, 1948, 143. 83. On the global reaction, see Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten, 280–81. 84. Cartier-Bresson, In India, images 41, 42. 85. Collins and Lapierre Freedom at Midnight, 450–51. 86. Fischer, Gandhi, 16–17; and “Seventy Years Ago, Mahatma Gandhi’s Ashes Brought to Singapore,” Mothership, https://mothership.sg/2018/01/.

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87. ToI, January 13, 1949, 5. 88. ToI, April 3, 1964, 11; and ToI, April 14, 1964, 8. 89. ToI, April 5, 1926, 9. 90. ToI, September 19, 1929, 12. 91. ToI, August 14, 1950, 11; ToI, August 21, 1950, 3. 92. ToI, January 19, 1960, 7. 93. ToI, August 19, 1955, 7. 94. ToI, October 28, 1959, 1. On this conflict, see Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (London: Macmillan, 2007), 330–37. 95. ToI, November 16, 1959, 1. 96. ToI, September 10, 1963, 3. 97. ToI, October 8, 1963, 1. 98. ToI, March 14, 1989, 10. While a ban on open-air Hindu cremation has generally remained, there has been some easing of these restrictions in recent years, with modern crematoria permitted in the Gulf states and Pakistan. See, for instance, the report on the opening of a crematorium at Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates in July 2013, funded by the Government of India and Indian businessmen. According to this report, the first crematorium in Dubai opened sixty-five years earlier. Ramola Talwar Badam, “Sharjah Crematorium for Hindus and Sikhs,” The National, July 17, 2013, www.thenational.ae/uae /sharjah-crematorium-for-hindus-and-sikhs-to-open-after-ramadan-1.286963. A crematorium also opened in Lahore in Pakistan in 2005. 99. Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land (London: Granta, 1992), 169. 100. Ghosh, In an Antique Land , 125, 169, 235. 101. Among the few women to be given a state funeral in the first decades after independence was Sarojini Naidu, at the time of her death governor of Uttar Pradesh. She was cremated at Lucknow in March 1949. ToI, March 3, 1949, 1. 102. This tension is captured in the Washington Post report. see William Claiborne, “Indira Gandhi Cremated in Hindu Ritual,” Washington Post, November 4, 1984, www .washingtonpost .com /archive /politics /1984 /11 /04 /Indir.. .al /124ca3f5 -3121 -4289 -9c7d -51a953ab7b39/?utm_term=.4d3cb7c43165. 103. Guha, India after Gandhi, 569–72. 104. This is my personal recollection of the commentary given by presenter Sue Lawley and Bob Bradnock, then of SOAS. 105. Hemchand Gossai, River Crossings: Memories of a Journey (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2006), 344, 347. EPILOGUE

1. ToI, December 16, 1950, 1. 2. Judith M. Brown, Nehru (London: Longman, 1999), 182; and William Gould, Religion and Conflict in Modern South Asia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1. 3. ToI, May 29, 1964, 1; ToI, May 30, 1964, 8. 4. On the rise of the Hindu Right, see Stuart Corbridge, John Harriss, and Craig Jeffrey, India Today: Economy, Politics and Society (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013), chap. 9.

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5. “The Politics of Atheism,” Tribune, December 22, 2016, www.tribuneindia.com /article/news_print.aspx?story_id=340059&catid=35&mid=70. 6. For Ramaswami Naicker, see Sunil Khilnani, Incarnations: A History of India in 50 Lives (London: Penguin, 2017), 266–75. 7. Christopher John Baker, The Politics of South India, 1920–1937 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 83, 192–93; and V. S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now (London: Heinemann, 1990), 216–21. 8. Riazat Butt, “Hindu Seeks Court Ruling Over Open-Air Cremations,” Guardian, September 5, 2008. 9. Nick Britten, “Hindu Wins Right to Traditional Cremation,” Telegraph, February 10, 2010, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/7205737/Hindu-wins-right-to-traditional -cremation.html; and Hasan Suroor, “Devout Hindu Wins Funeral Pyre Case,” Hindu, February 15, 2010, www.thehindu.com/opinion.columns/Hasan_Suroor/Devout-Hindu -wins-funeral-pyre-case/article16814616.ece. 10. Alistair Hunter, “Deathscapes in Diaspora: Contesting Space and Negotiating Home in Contexts of Post-Migration Diversity,” Social and Cultural Geography 17 (2016): 247–61. 11. For Ghai’s view, see https://anglo-asian.org. 12. Ezra D. Rashkow, “‘Perfumed the Axe That Laid It Low’: The Endangerment of Sandalwood in Southern India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 51 (2014): 41–70. 13. Gargi Gupta, “Saying Goodbye, the Green Way,” www.dnaindia.com/india/report -saying-goodbye-the-green-way-226604. 14. ToI, March 3, 1949, 1. 15. ToI, April 13, 1928, 10; ToI, May 18, 1928, 10; ToI, August 13, 1928, 5; and ToI, December 18, 1928, 4. 16. ToI, April 3, 1953, 8. The equipment for the cremation furnace was supplied from Denmark by Larsen & Toubro Ltd., the firm later responsible for building the Delhi metro. ToI, July 10, 1954, A viii. At first the crematorium was used principally for the pauper dead. ToI, August 14, 1954, 3. 17. On the pollution of the Ganges and the Ganges Acton Plan, see Kelly D. Alley, On the Banks of the Ganga: When Wastewater Meets a Sacred River (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). 18. On reactions to the electric crematorium at Harishchandra Ghat, see Jonathan P. Parry, Death in Banaras (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xix, 93, 97, 275. 19. Vishwambhar Nath Prajapati and Saradindu Bhaduri, “Human Values in Disposing the Dead: An Inquiry into Cremation Technology,” Journal of Human Values 25 (2019): 58–61. 20. Gupta, “Saying Goodbye”; Aditi Malhotra, “Indian Court: Find Alternatives to Wood-Fired Cremations,” Wall Street Journal, February 4, 2016, http://on.wsj.com /1Pzibam; Archana Kaushik, “Can You Afford to Die? Estimates of Expenditure on Rituals and Impact on Ecology,” Economic and Political Weekly 53, January 20, 2018. 21. Butt, “Hindu Seeks Court Ruling.”

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Inde x

Adelaide, 5 “affirmative Orientalism,” 126 Agni, 11, 28, 77, 153 Agra Central Jail, 60 Alec-Tweedie, Ethel, 130 Alipore Jail, 60, 147, 148, 149 Allahabad, 15, 134, 135, 162, 169 All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, 169–70 Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji, 158–59 American Civil War, 94 Amritsar, 130, 152, 154, 157, 165 Andamans, 60–61, 81 Anglo-Afghan War, Second, 94, 112 animals: association with human corpses and cremation, 36–37, 92–93, 102; incineration of, 54, 94 Archaeological Survey of India, 27 Arnold, Edwin, 129–30 Arno’s Vale cemetery, 103, 135, 142 Aryans, 28, 45, 46, 98–99, 100, 124 Arya Samaj, 14, 15, 76, 84, 106, 110, 116, 124, 142, 155–56, 158, 219n49 ashes and bones, disposal of, xiii, xiv, 4, 5, 18, 28, 30, 51, 58, 91–92, 104, 117, 118, 127, 132, 136, 144, 150, 151, 161–62, 209n75, 216n5 Attenborough, Richard, 5 Augier, Gerald, 32 Australia, xii, xiv, 3–5, 12, 16, 107, 137, 181n6

Bachelard, Gaston, xii, 76, 124 Back Bay, 32, 51, 55, 63, 93, 151 Bacon, Henry, 106 “bad deaths,” 156, 160 Baker, Herbert, 18 Banias, 32, 60, 73 Baroda, 33; Gaekwad of, 105, 106, 139 Basava, 29 Bayly, Christopher, 15 Beato, Felice, 39 Benares (Varanasi), 42; cremation at, xv, 8, 11, 19, 20–24, 35, 38–41, 42, 45, 49–51, 81, 84, 127, 128–30, 132, 138, 163, 190n73, 213n30; crematorium, 11, 172–73. See also Harishchandra ghat; Manikarnika ghat Bengal, partition of, 147 Bentinck, Lord, 33, 34 Berg, Maxine, xii Bernier, François, 102 Besant, Annie, 133–34, 145, 146 Bhagavad Gita, 134, 148 Bharatiya Janata Party, 169 Bhukya, Bhangya, 92 Bikaner, Maharaja of, 114 Billington, Mary, 22 biopolitics, biopower, 16, 50–51, 146, 147, 168, 184n63 Bird, Isabella, 13 birds and fish. See animals

243

244

Index

Birdwood, George, 128, 130 Blanc, H. J., 68, 69 Blavatsky, Helena, 132, 133, 134 bodies: desecration of, 9, 16, 61–62, 90–92, 146; identification of, 61, 118, 156, 211n110, 219nn46,52 Bombay (Mumbai), 80, 81, 87, 95, 96; burial in, 55, cremation in 11, 32, 44, 49, 50–53, 55, 62, 65–72, 83–85 100, 127, 159; crematorium, 69–70, 172; mortality in, 44, 72–74, 191n100; plague in, 70–72. See also Sonapur Bompas, Mr., 148 Bose, Satyendra Nath, 149–50 Bose, Subhas Chandra, 15 Boulogne, 113 Bourke-White, Margaret, 24, 155, 161 Bourne, Samuel, 39–40, 82 Bourne and Shepherd, 142 Brahmins, 28, 31, 32, 42, 44, 60, 73, 74, 103, 106, 116, 128, 154–55, 169–70, 191n91 Brahmo Samaj, 103, 107, 142 Brandis, Dietrich, 78 Brighton 113, 116 Brighton military hospital, 113, 117 Britain, 5, 9, 12, 13, 16, 56, 57, 99, 106–7, 126, 135, 170–71 British Empire, 5, 13–14, 107–8, 114 British Honduras (Belize), 111 British Medical Association, 101 Browne, Arthur, 116, 118, 119 Brunetti, Ludovico, 94 Buddha, 18, 27, 161, 186n4 Buddhists, 8, 14, 27, 73, 129, 158, 159, 162, 167 burial, fear of, 130 burial and burial grounds, 17–18, 28, 38, 46, 56, 137; Christian, xi, 8, 44, 55, 59, 92, 100; Jewish, 8; low-caste Hindu, 8, 43–44, 62, 67, 68, 72–73, 92, 108; Muslim, xi, 8, 17, 29, 44, 55, 59, 60–61, 69, 70, 92, 100, 109, 113, 114, 118–19 Burma, 27, 81, 86, 98, 162 Buyers, William, 36–37 Calcutta (Kolkata), 81, 82, 86, 95, 131, 150–52; cremation in 11, 13, 49, 50–53, 56, 60, 64, 74–75, 92, 100, 101, 137, 138, 155, 159; crematorium, 57–58, 62, 74, 101, 126, 136–37, 172; deaths in, 74, 88–89 Calicut (Kozhikode), 91 Campbell, George, 101 Canada, 12 cantonments, 59–60, 119

Caribbean, xii, 10, 110–11, 132 Carpenter, Edward, 129 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 24, 161 casuarina, 77, 80 Catholics, 12, 137 Caunter, Hobart, 39 Cawnpore (Kanpur), 22, 87, 90 Ceylon, 27, 108, 129, 132, 162 Chandan, 106 Chapekar, Damodar Hari, 147 charcoal, 79, 80, 96 Charles, F. L., 69 Chatjay, Kanderao, 105 Chatterjee, Partha, 141 Chattopadhyay, Bankimchandra, 141 chattris, 18, 31, 103, 104, 114, 116, 163, 185n69 Chauri Chaura, 154 China, 17, 27, 84, 164 cholera, 15, 57, 59, 100, 102 Chowpatty beach, 19, 151, 152, 159, 168, 217n25 Christians, xi, 4, 8, 26, 28, 30, 32, 35, 38–39, 41, 46, 52, 53, 112, 156, 169 cloth, 81–82, 153–54 colonial ethnography, 10, 42–45, 99, 155 Congo, 163 Conolly, H. V., 91 Cooch Behar, Maharaja of, 107 Cook, J. Neild, 136 Cook’s tours, 22, 127 Corbett, Jim, 92 cow-dung cakes (brattis), 8, 33, 43, 85–86, 94, 96 Crane, Walter, 21 cremation: costs of, 68, 137, 172; environmental impact of, xiii, 85, 86, 93, 96, 171–72; fuel for, 56, 61, 67, 70, 80–86, 96, 171–73; “industrial,” xi, xv, 9, 10, 14, 62, 75, 119, 128, 137, 145; municipalization of, 8, 55–57, 65–70, 73; open-air, xi, 4, 6–7, 9, 13, 14, 62, 71, 75, 82, 105, 111, 116, 119, 125, 126, 129, 167, 168, 170–71, 173; politicization of, 17, 32, 107, 118, 138, 146–53; property rights and, 53; sanitary, 8, 14, 54–59, 94–96, 109; as a form of sacrifice, 11, 13, 34, 125, 148–49, 152–53; scientific, 7, 16, 58, 126, 146; and warrior elites, 16, 30 Cremation Act (1902), 99, 116, 170, 206n22 cremation ghats, xiv, xv, 11, 18–19, 39–43, 50, 62–63, 85. See also Harishchandra ghat; Manikarnika ghat; Nimtala ghat; Sonapur Cremation Society of Bengal, 136 Cremation Society of England, 12, 99, 106, 107, 130, 135

Index Crewe, Lord, 107 Cross, R. A., 101 Cunningham, Alexander, 27 Curzon, Lord, 147 Dalits. See untouchables Daniell, Thomas and William, 39 darshan, 143, 160, 161, 216n102 Das, Chittaranjan, 152 Das, Jatindra Nath, 150–51, 160 Das Gupta, Lt., 116 Datta, Kanai Lal, 147–49, 151, 160 Dayal, Lala Deen, 24, 39, 139–41, 143 Deakin, Shirley, 135–36 Delhi, 5, 19, 160, 165. See also Raj Ghat Desai, Bhulabhai, 160 diaspora, xii, xiv, 8, 9, 10, 11, 19, 107–12, 125 district gazetteers, 43–44 Diu, 32 Doms, 41, 42–43, 67, 70–71, 82, 129 Douglas, James, 32 Dufferin, Lord, 127 Dyer, Reginald, 130 Eassie, William, 12, 54, 99–100, 106 East India Company, 14, 26, 32, 50 Egypt, 118, 165 Elphinstone, Lord, 63 Erichsen, Hugo, 100 Ethiopia, 111 Étretat, 105–6, 113 eucalyptus, 80, 82 Europeans, cremation of in India, 62, 126, 132, 133–37 famine: Bengal (1943), 24, 155, 159; Bombay (1876–78), 68, 155 Fayrer, Joseph, 100–101 Fiji, 19, 111, 112 fire: in forests, 77–79, 153; political uses of, 152–54; in rituals and religion, 8, 76, 124 firewood, 61, 67, 78–82, 200n32 Firth, Shirley, 9, 10 Florence, 104–5 foreign cloth, burning of, 153–54 forestry, 77–79, 81 Forsyth, James, 44–45, 78 Fox, Richard, 126 France, 10, 113, 117, 118, 119 Franco-Prussian War, 94 French hostility to cremation, 105, 113, 205n3

245

Frith, Francis, 39 funeral processions, 52–53, 142–44, 146, 148–51, 152, 157, 159–61, 218n26 funeral pyres, xi, 4, 5, 7, 13, 18, 24, 33, 34, 45, 65, 82, 87, 104–6, 112, 117–18, 124, 129, 132, 140, 160–61, 164 funerary urns, xiv, 104, 120, 129, 137, 161–62, 206n36 Gallipoli, 118 Gandhi, Indira, xii, xv, 19, 161, 163, 165–66, 168 Gandhi, Mohandas (Mahatma), 14, 81; cremation of, xii, xv, 5–7, 17, 24, 84, 140, 160–63, 165, 168; political leadership of, 133, 152–54, 157–58; in South Africa, 13, 152–54, 157–58, 182n14 Gandhi, Rajiv, 165 Ganges, 15, 28, 36–37, 40, 172; cremation on banks of, 50, 74, 98, 130, 134; disposal of ashes and bodies in, xiv, 4, 8, 11, 19, 20–21, 30, 33, 36, 118, 129, 132, 134, 162, 169, 181n3. See also Benares (Varanasi) Gardner, Robert, 24 Gatacre, William, 70 Gaza, 163 geography, sacred, xiv, 19, 51; sensory, sensuous, xiv, 51–53, 84 Germany, 6, 11–12, 31, 57, 114, 163, 182n21 Ghai, Davendra Kumar, 170–71 ghee, 4, 33, 81, 84, 104, 144 Ghose, Ramgopal, 64 Ghosh, Amitav, 164–65 Ghosh, Sarojini, 148 Gibraltar, 111, 208n73 Ginsberg, Allen, 24 Goa, 17, 80, 164, 204n124 Godavari, 19, 104 Golders Green, 107, 135 Gonds, 92 Gorer, Geoffrey, 18 Gossai, Hemchand, 165–66 Gotha, 12, 106 Graham, Maria, 37 Greeks, 28, 31, 42, 98 Grimm, Jacob, 100 Guyana (British Guiana), 112 Habermas, Jürgen, 141 Halalkhors, 44 Hardwar, 19 Harijans, 157–58

246

Index

Harishchandra ghat, 11, 21, 172 Havell, E. B., 21 Hazareesingh, K., 107 Heber, Reginald, 38 Hehir, Patrick, 72, 75 Henniker, Elizabeth Inger, 4 Hewlett, T. G., 55, 56 Hindu cremation, xi, xiv, xv, 3, 5, 8, 16, 28–29, 30; defense of, 15, 62–64, 68–70; as highcaste practice, xiii, 8, 29, 44, 45, 154–55, 172; low castes and, 30, 43–44, 56, 67–68; Muslim responses to, 53, 90–91, 164–65, 192n20, 221n98; reform of, xii, 62–63, 65–67; Western attitudes to, 35, 37, 52, 65–66, 68, 70–71, 93, 98–99, 100, 102, 130–35. See also cremation Hinduism, xiii, 14, 27, 38, 50, 76, 125, 131; Western views of, xv, 23, 34, 40–41, 128 Hindu-Muslim conflict, 17, 147, 157, 220n65 Hindu nationalism, xi, 16–17, 43, 90, 124, 147, 152, 157 Hindu philanthropy, 58, 63, 66, 69 Hindus, burial of, 62, 169–70 Hodges, William, 39 Hooghly, River, 58, 64, 74, 95, 150; disposal of corpses in 37, 57, 62, 63–64, 101, 102 Hooghly (town), 53 hospitals, 61–62 House of Commons, 101 Iliad, 98 Imperial War Graves Commission, 116, 118–19 incinerators, 56, 94–96 indentured labor, 13, 108–9 Indian Forest Service, 78 Indian Medical Service, 113, 134, 135 Indian National Congress, 133, 154 India Office, 111 Indore, Maharaja of, 139 Indus Valley civilization, 28, 186n6 influenza, 74, 92 Italy, 11, 12, 19, 30, 57, 94, 103–4 Jains, 8, 30, 73, 167 Jalland, Pat, 137 Jang Bahadur, 34 Japan, 27; cremation in, 12–13, 98 Jayalalitha, J., 169–70 Jews, 30, 55 Johannesburg, 6–7, 110, 182n14 Johnstone, T. B., 44

Kabir, 29 Kalighat, 138, 139, 148 Kallenbach, Herman, 6 Kashi Mitra ghat, 62, 74 Kayasthas, 74 Kennedy, R. H., 33 Kensal Green cemetery, 103 kerosene, 4, 8, 86–88, 89–90, 95–97, 106, 154, 201n71 Khote, Raghunath Narayan, 66, 68, 69, 123–24 Klass, Morton, 107 Kolhapur, Maharaja of, 104–5 Korean War, 163 Krishnadas, 154 Kshatriyas, 29, 31, 32, 114, 154–55, 197n130 Kumbh Mela, 15–16 Kunbis, 31, 43 Kut-al-Amara, 117 Kuwait, 164 Lahore, 30 Lahore Central Jail, 150, 151 Laqueur, Thomas, 9–10, 11, 14, 26, 82, 90, 94, 132, 138, 141, 168 lascars, 103 Lawrence, Walter, 113 Leith, A. H., 44, 54–55, 63 Lingayats, 29, 30, 43, 44, 73 Lloyd, George, 151 London Missionary Society, 35, 38 Long, James, 135 Loomba, Ania, 88 Lucknow, 22 Lutyens, Edwin, 18 Maclean, Kama, 15 Madras, 79, 80, 96, 129, 139 Mahabharata, 28, 77 Mahars, 44, 74, 86, 158, 197n131 Mandlik, Vishvanath Narayan, 66, 68 Mangs, 44 Manikarnika Ghat, 20, 21, 24, 39, 40, 49, 50, 82, 129, 132, 143, 172 Mappilas (“Moplahs”), 90–91 Marathas, 16, 31–32, 34, 43, 86, 104, 139 Martin, J. R., 38 Martin, Thomas, 57 Masaan, 24 Maupassant, Guy de, 106 Mauritius, 13, 107, 108–9, 110, 111, 207n60, 209n76

Index Mazuchelli, Elizabeth, 37 medical colleges, 61–62 Mehta, Pherozeshah, 68, 69 Melbourne, 3–5 Melville, Herman, xv, 52 memorialization, xii, 9–11, 14, 17–19, 27, 38, 90–91, 102, 117, 119, 138, 143–44, 151–52, 163, 168 Mesopotamia (Iraq), 117–18 Mills, James, 94 Mishra, Sudesh, 19, 112 missionaries, xii, 14, 26, 35–38, 43, 45, 62, 100, 128, 146, 167 Mitra, Bhupendra Nath, 116 Mitter, Degamber, 64 Moby-Dick, xv, 52 modern cremation movement, xi, 8, 11–13, 30, 54, 62, 75, 130 Moore, William, 101, 135 Mouat, F. J., 53 Mountbatten, Lord, 161 Mughals, 30, 31, 127, 139 Muslims, xi, 8, 17, 18, 29, 53, 80, 90–91, 112, 114, 118–19, 147, 156, 157, 164–65, 169 mutiny and rebellion (1857–58), 15, 22, 52, 61, 64, 90, 203n98 Mysore, 84; Maharaja of, 138–39 Nadars, 74, 197n131 Naidu, Sarojini, 171 Nanak, Guru, 29 Narayan, Shivshanker, 24 Narmada, 33 Nasik, 19, 104, 163 Natal, 108, 109–10 Nathgoobhoy, Munguldar, 66 necro-botany, 82 necro-geography, xiv, 10 necro-mobility, xiii, 14, 136 necro-politics, xiv, 9, 168 necro-tourism, 22–23, 127 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 19, 161, 162, 169 Nehru, Kamala, 19 Neill, James, 90 Neuve Chapelle, 18 New Zealand, 12 Nilgiris, 52, 80 Nimtala ghat, 57–58, 63, 64, 67, 74, 82, 88, 93, 102, 127, 136, 138, 142, 144, 148, 150, 159 Nivedita, Sister (Margaret Noble), 131–34, 145, 146

247

Nolan, E. H., 34 North America, xiv, 8, 111 Oberoi, Harjot, 141 Olcott, Henry S., 129, 132, 133 Ootacamund, 80 Oppenhejm, Ralf, 24 Owen, Alex, 133 Pakistan, 169, 221n98 Pant, Govind Ballabh, 84 Parkes, Edmund A., 53–54, 68, 100 Park Street cemetery, 10, 137 Parry, Jonathan, 11, 42, 82, 84, 153 Parsis, 8, 53, 69, 76, 80, 84, 92, 116, 133, 193n36 Patcham Down, 114–17, 210n100 Patel, Vallabhbhai, 161, 168 Patroclus, 98, 128 paupers, 56, 61, 62, 67–69, 75, 95, 111, 120, 142, 155, 168 Pearse, Frederick, 136 Pershad, Rao, 113 photography, xv, 5, 22, 24, 39, 58, 65, 70, 82, 117, 134, 135, 139–40, 142–44, 148, 152, 155, 159, 160, 161, 164 phul, 18, 27, 104, 117 plague, 24, 66, 70–72, 74, 80, 85, 94, 95, 143, 147 poisoning, 56–57, 89, 101–2, 110 Poona (Pune), 32, 44, 57, 88, 147 Portuguese, 17, 32, 147, 164 Prasad, Rajendra, 168 Prinsep, James, 39 prisoners, 53, 60–61, 147–50 public, public sphere, 17, 65, 137, 141–42 Pyne, Stephen, 76 Queen’s Road, 68–70, 82. See also Sonapur Queen Victoria’s proclamation (1858), 15, 32, 64 Rai, Raghu, 165 Rajagopalachari, C., 171 Raj Ghat, 19, 161, 163 Rajputization, 18 Rajputs, 16, 18, 19, 31, 32, 34, 42, 114, 185n69 Ramachandran, M. G., 169–70 Ramakrishna Mission, 131, 132 Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, 143 Ramaswami Naicker, E. V., 170 Ramayana, 28 Rampa rebellion, 92 Rand, W. C., 147

248

Index

Rao, Malhar, 139 Ray, Moti Lal, 148 Raychaudhuri, Tapan, 142 revolutionary terrorists, 147–51 Ribbentrop, Berthold, 78 Ricalton, James, 66 Richardson, Aubrey, 99 Risley, H. H., 43 Roberts, Emma, 39 Romans, 28, 31, 42, 98, 130 Roy, Rammohun, 33, 103, 135, 142 Royal Commission on the Sanitary State of the Army in India, 55 Salonika, 118 samadhi, 19, 31, 149, 152, 160, 162 Sanchi, 27 sandalwood, 4, 8, 30, 33, 77, 79, 80, 84, 104, 106, 124, 129, 139, 144, 148, 161, 167, 171, 201n55 Sanskritization, 73 Sarasvati, Dayananda, 15, 84, 124, 125, 142 Sarkar, Mahendralal, 143 Sarkar, Tanika, 88 Sarnath, 27 Sastri, Natesa, 65 sati, 33–35, 39, 45, 102, 106, 120, 132, 138, 202n90, 202n93; abolition of, xii, 13, 16, 26, 30, 33; compared to modern cremation, 125, 139, 153, 161–62; revival of, 88–90, 97 sati stones 18, 35, 132 Scandinavia, 11 Self-Respect Movement, 170 Sen, Keshab Chandra, 103, 142–43, 149 Shanghai, 111 Shankarshet, Jagannath, 63, 65, 100, 128 Shastri, Lal Bahadur, 163 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 105 Sherring, M. A., 38, 42–43 Shivaji Bhonsle, 31, 32, 104 Sikhs, Sikhism, 29–30, 141, 167; in Australia, 3–5, 181n3; cremation of, xi, xiv, 3–5, 14, 16, 30, 61, 103, 107, 108, 110, 111, 113, 114, 118, 138, 151, 157, 163, 165, 170 Simla, 80 Singapore, 162 Singh, Bhagat, 151 Singh, Bishin, 5 Singh, Charam, 3–4, 13, 19, 30, 117 Singh, Man, 92 Singh, Mett, 3, 4 Singh, Rampal, 106

Singh, Randir, 103 Singh, Ranjit, 30, 34 soldiers, 59–60, 94, 112–19, 209n80 Sonapur, 23, 24, 51, 53, 55, 56, 65, 68–70, 82–84, 87, 124, 125, 141, 157, 158, 169, 196n110 Sonnerat, Pierre, 34 Souter, Frank, 68, 69, 123, 212n3 South Africa, xiv, 6, 12, 16, 111, 208n65 spectacle, xii, 5, 22, 24, 34, 50, 79, 88, 89, 116, 127, 129, 143, 144 Steel, Flora Annie, 135 Stevenson, Margaret Sinclair, 83, 89 Strachey, John, 57 Strachey, Richard, 135 Sudras, 29 Sundarbans, 81, 82 sundri, 81, 82, 84 swidden, 77–78 Switzerland, 11, 12, 19 Tagore, Devendranath, 103 Tagore, Dwarkanath, 103 Tagore, Rabindranath, 154, 159–60 Tagore, Ramnath, 64 Taj Mahal, 18, 23, 127 Tata, Ratan, 116 television, xii, 24, 165–66 Temple, Richard, 79 Thacker & Co., 23 Thailand (Siam), 27, 98, 99 Theosophists, 127, 129, 132, 133, 134 Thompson, Henry, 12, 54, 106 Tilak, Bal Gangadhar, 19, 31, 133, 151–52, 153, 159, 168 Tonnerre, Dr., 57 Topsia, 62 towers of silence (dokhma), 8, 23, 44, 55, 62, 68, 69, 92, 93, 123, 124, 127 tribals, 45, 46, 92, 108 Trinidad, 107, 110, 208n69 Trivedi, Lisa, 152 Udaipur, Maharana of, 33 United States, 6, 11, 12, 86, 100, 132–33 untouchables, xi, 17, 30, 67, 154; cremation and, 29, 67, 73, 108, 155–59 Vaidyas, 74 Vaishyas, 29, 154 Vandivert, William, 155 Vasudev, Narayan, 66, 100

Index Vedic hymns and rites, 28, 31, 117, 124, 161, 169 Verdery, Katherine, 10 Vidyasagar, Iswar Chandra, 143, 149 visuality, visualization, xii, xv, 22, 25. See also photography; television Vivekananda, Swami, 131, 132, 149 Wagner, Richard, 98 Wales, Prince of, 23, 114, 123–24, 125, 141 Wall, F., 113 water, disposal of corpses in, 36, 61, 75, 92, 100. See also Ganges; Hooghly, River Western Front, xiv, 18, 112–13, 119

249

Winter, Jay, 152 Wolpert, Stanley, 5 Woking crematorium, 12, 62, 101, 102, 106, 107, 130, 132, 135 Woking mosque, 114 women: attendance at Hindu cremations, 131, 148, 150, 161; cremation of, 106, 107, 132–34 137, 165, 171; death from burns, 87–90, 97. See also sati World War I, 112–14, 133, 141, 152, 157 World War II, 119, 159 Yama, 41, 51 Yamuna, 15, 19, 60, 161, 162, 169

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