The Final Farewell

Book Review

“Death ends life, not a relationship,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals.

The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too.

Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own.

I read the book finally, having shelved it for months. It left me rather amused. India has such a lot of diversity even in the rituals associated with death! Will the present government, with its inveterate obsession with oneness [as in One Nation, One Election; one penal code; one religion; one language…] now raise a new jingle ‘One Nation, One Death’?

Some of these traditions are quite interesting. I wrote about one of them a few days back in this same space: Vultures and Religion. Vultures play a vital role in the final rites of the Parsis. Used to play, rather, because vultures have become nearly extinct in India because of human beings. The Parsis are forced to change their age-old custom about ‘the final farewell’.

Though Islam evolved out of Judaism and Christianity, its Paradise is far more fun than that of the predecessors. Life in the Islamic Paradise is sheer pleasure. “The ‘Gardens of Delight’ are arranged hierarchically in Paradise,” the book teaches me. “Among the inhabitants of heaven, there are different levels of holiness, and only the most deserving can advance to the higher gardens. However, the highest level is reserved for great saints and martyrs who ascend directly without trial or judgement on the Day of Resurrection” [emphasis added].

You can imagine my grin when I’m reading such stuff.

Hinduism has the most variety of rituals when it comes to death, I understand from this book. You have to get one kind of a priest for the last rites at home, another for those in the cremation ground, and yet another for the post-cremation rites. There is a hierarchy among these priests too. Then there is hierarchy among the dead too. The high caste corpses are treated with more dignity than the low caste ones, for instance. Widows and transgenders don’t deserve much dignity even in death!

They – widows and transgenders – never get anything called dignity in life, of course. Widows are considered to be the killers of their husbands, according to the country’s glorious and ancient traditions. They are treated as such after the death of their husbands. There was a time when widows were expected to jump into the funeral pyres of their husbands and burn themselves to death. Probably, the men who made that rule thought that they would continue to get their women’s services in the next world too.

Quite many of the widows in Hindu homes find themselves unwanted and are forced to leave. Some of them end up in places like Vrindavan, Lord Krishna’s birthplace, where there are many institutions such as ashrams and “private enterprises” that are happy to take them for various reasons many of which are not quite noble.

If Vrindavan is the City of Widows, Varanasi is the City of Death. Chapter 12 is titled ‘Varanasi: a Site of Death Tourism.’ Over 200 bodies are cremated daily in this city of death. If widows gravitate towards Vrindavan, unwanted old men find themselves in Varanasi sooner or later. A lot of tourists visit Varanasi too: to see death’s fiery dances. Death tourism!

If cremation fires don’t fascinate you, there are the Aghori seers with their fearsome appearances and unconventional practices. They don’t wear much clothes, and smear their bodies with ashes taken from the cremation grounds. There may be a human skull or bones dangling on their chest. They drink alcohol liberally and some of them eat meat too. Theirs is quite a rare species of holiness.

Will the present dispensation in the country put an end to all this diversity in death as they are striving hard to do with diversity in life? The author concludes saying that “history suggests that death rituals are the last to change.” They are not only about religious sentiments but also about people’s personal emotions. After all, “Death ends life, not a relationship.” 

An Aghori

PS. If there’s any undertone of sarcasm in this review, that belongs entirely to me and not to the book. The book is a serious study of the last rituals in India.