This book Death in Banaras is an example of the interpretive approach in anthropology. Parry is concerned with finding out the meaning of rituals and how the ‘business of death’ is organised in Banaras , city of cosmogony. Among the social phenomena, death is one that has not been studied to the extent it should be, and from that perspective, it is a significant contribution.
As a place to die, to dispose of the physical remains of the deceased and to perform the rites which ensure that the departed attains a ‘good state’ after death, the north Indian city of Banaras attracts pilgrims and mourners from all over the Hindu world. This book is primarily about the priests (and other kinds of ‘sacred specialists’) who serve them: about the way in which they organise their business, and about their representations of death and understanding of the rituals over which they preside.
Death and the City: Through Divine Eyes
This deals with Banaras’s association with death and its transcendence. This is looked from a religious perspective that Lord Vishnu created the cosmos tie by performing aesthetic austerities at what is now the city’s main cremation ground. Kashi is known as the ‘Great Cremation Ground’ because it is there that the five great elements which compose the world arrive as corpses. The gulf which divides the city from profane space is again underlined by the maxim that it stands apart from the three loks, the fourteen bhuvans and the nine khands. Kashi constitutes a tenth khand. But if Kashi is the cosmos it is also symbolically identified with the human body. The five ghats which are visited in the course of the panchtirath pilgrimage are sometimes explicitly equated with the five elements of which the body is composed.
Since cremation is a sacrifice, regenerating the cosmos, and since funeral pyres burn without interruption throughout the day and night at Manikarnika ghat, creation is here continually replayed. As a result it is always the satya yug in Kashi, the beginning of time when the world was new. That it is because of the city’s sacredness that people come there to die and be cremated is an obvious truism. What is less obvious perhaps is that the ideology itself implies that Kashi is sacred precisely because they come for this purpose, for it is death and cremation that keep the city at the navel of the universe yet outside space and time. It is no accident, then, that the scene of cosmogony is also the site of unceasing cremation or that the especially important corpses should be burnt on that very spot where Vishnu sat for 50,000 years alight with the fire of the austerities by which he created the world.
A Profane Perspective
With its reputation for orthodox Brahmanical Hinduism and its ancient tradition of Sanskritic learning, it is the Brahmans who set the dominant religious tone of the city. Despite its relatively small population, Banaras now supports three universities, each of which prides itself on strength in Sanskrit studies and/or Hindu philosophy, as well as a host of pathshalas (traditional schools) devoted to transmitting under the tutelage of a Brahman guru a knowledge of the sacred scriptures and an ability to recite the vedic mantras.
At the level of popular religion there is at least a degree of ‘syncretism’. Many lower castes Hindus go as supplicants to the shrine of the Muslim martyr, Bahadur Shahid, for the solution of problems caused by the malevolent ghosts of those who have died a bad death, many lower castes Muslims visit the samadhi (tomb) of a Hindu Aghori ascetic for the cure of barrenness. The pilgrims however have continued to arrive in ever increasing numbers though it is likely that a smaller proportion of them than formerly belong to the highest and the most affluent sections of the society, and that the ‘index linked’ value of the average priestly donation has declined. But this is almost certainly made up for by volume and turn over. More and more pilgrims come by rail and bus on ‘package tours’ of a number of sacred centres and fewer and fewer of them stay in Banaras for more than a couple of days. Perhaps a majority are there only for a few hours. Many are the first members of their family or village to have visited the city and do not therefore have a hereditary panda. Increasing number of corpses are also brought to the city for their last sacrifice and more people of rank aspire to cremate them on the footsteps of Vishnu.
Some of those outsiders who have cremated their corpses in Banaras stay on to perform the mortuary rituals of the first twelve days and some who have cremated elsewhere come to the city to perform these rites.At certain seasons large numbers of villagers from the surrounding countryside, accompanied by their exorcists, visit the sacred tank of Pishach Mochan to lay the spirits of the malevolent dead
to rest. During pitri paksh (the fortnight of the ancestors) tens of thousands of pilgrims stop at Kashi to offer rice balls to their ancestors at pishach mochan or on the ghats before completing their pilgrimage to Gaya, where they perform rites for their final liberation. In one way or another then death in Banaras is an extremely big business.
Death as a Living: Shares and Chicanery
This chapter describes the division of mortuary labour between various groups of occupational specialists who earn a living in and around the burning ghats, a division of labour which is closely constrained by the ideology of caste. One type of caste specialist is, for example, required to handle the physical remains of the deceased another to deal with his marginal and malevolent ghost before its incorporation as an ancestor while a third type of specialist presides over rituals addressed to the essentially benevolent ancestor.
At death the soul becomes a disembodied ghost (or prêt), a hungry and malevolent state dangerous to the survivors. On the 12th day after death a rite is performed which enables the deceased to rejoin his ancestors and become an ancestor himself.
The Mahabrahman (funeral-priest) presides over the rituals addressed to the ghost during the first eleven days after death, and accepts on behalf of the ghosts the gifts intended to it. A further set of gifts is made in the name of the newly incorporated ancestor on the 12th day and these are accepted by the deceased’s hereditary household priest (kul purohit) in the case of outsiders who have stayed in Banaras to perform the mortuary rituals. The Brahman specialist stands in for the soul he serves (the impure funeral-priest for the ghost, the relatively pure pilgrimage-priest for the ancestor).
Mahabrahman means the ‘great brahman’. The caste is alternatively known as Mahapatra, ‘great vessels’. An actor is a patra, a vessel for the qualities of the character he plays. In the drama of death the funeral-priest is the vessel for the rancorous greed of the ghost. Worshipped as the deceased he is dressed in dead man’s clothes, is made to wear his spectacles or clutch his walking stick and is fed his favourite foods. If the deceased were a woman, a female Mahabrahman is worshipped and presented with woman’s clothing, cosmetics and jewellery.
At a rite which marks the end of the period of the most intense pollution, the chief mourner, and then the other male mourners, are tonsured by the Barber. But before even the chief mourner, the Mahabrahman should be shaved – as the prêt itself- were the one most deeply polluted by the death.
Though unequivocally Brahman, Mahabrahmans are prêt Brahmans – ghost brahmans- who are in many contexts treated much like Untouchables and are described as acchut (not to be touched). No fastidious person or clean caste will dine with them. In theory, they should live outside the village and to the south of it (that is in the direction of death). Writing of the Banaras rural hinterland in the
1940s, Opler and Singh report they may not even enter the village to beg. With regard to such matters as the consumption of meat and alcohol and the incidence of widow remarriage and breaches of caste endogamy they could not be described as paragons of Brahmanical orthodoxy, but nor could many of the other Brahman communities who earn a living on ghats. The Mahabrahman’s relative degradation
is rather a consequence of the fact that they participate in the death pollution which afflicts their patrons. Since they have many jajmans they are (as it were) in a permanent state of impurity. Not only impure, the Mahabrahman is also highly inauspicious. Although physical contact with a sweeper woman would be unambiguously polluting, it is auspicious to see her face as one is embarking on a new enterprise. By contrast it is at any time inauspicious to set eyes on a Mahabrahman and if you chance to see one first thing in the morning then
somebody in your house may die. You should not even utter his name in the morning. Nor may a Mahabrahman come to your door. ‘Nobody’ as the proverb has it, should have the misfortune that a Mahabrahman cross his threshold. He is somebody to be kept at bay, somebody to whom- in the custom of certain localities- to throw stones as he departs at the end of the mortuary rituals least he be tempted to return. Salt should not be put in the food he is served, for salt sets up relationship with the eater and no relationship should be acknowledged with the ghost (prêt).
The Mahabrahman is regarded with a mixture of fear and contempt. He is regarded with ‘a gaze of hate’ (hay drishti), is known as the ‘bitter one’ (katu), is said to have no ‘lustre’ (kanti) on his face, and the stereotype contrasts his fabulous wealth with the squalor of his demeanour and life-style. He is treated with less respect and consideration than the meanest untouchable. One Mahabrahman friend resentfully recalls his teachers’ taunts that he should leave school to hang up water-pot dwellings for the ghosts; another tells of a Khatri woman throwing
away all the chillies drying on her roof when he went to retrieve the kite which had landed on it.
Mahabrahman weddings and other life-cycle rituals are presided over by a ‘pure’ Brahman. One Mahabrahman sells pan (the betel-nut which many Banarasis chew addictively) in a quarter of the city where many people must be aware of his caste; while another runs a tea-shop on the main road which passes through his suburban village.
The rites of the first eleven days after death are conducted on the ghats (or on the bank of some sacred tank). The Mahabrahman who officiates at these rites will only come to the house of his jajman (patron) if he is summoned on the day of the cremation to preside over the offering of five rice-balls made between the door of the house and the funeral pyre. On the following day he directs the hanging of the water-pot which serves as the home for the prêt in the branches of sacred pepal (Ficus religiosa) tree; and he subsequently accompanies the jajman there on daily expeditions to offer ware and a lighted lamp. He also conducts the offering of one rice-ball each day, each of which creates a different part of a new body for the deceased. This body is completed on the tenth day. On The eleventh day it is fed and the prêt is now ready to become an ancestor. The Mahabrahman’s duties are at an end. He is worshipped, fed, given gifts and departs having mashed the water-pot dwelling of the pret.
If cremation is carried out in panchak – (a block of five consecutive lunar mansions (nakshattras) during which it is particularly inauspicious to burn a body) – the Mahabrahman presides over the rite of ‘pacifying the panchak’ (panchak shanty). In cases of ‘untimely death’ he superintends on the eleventh day the additional rite of Narayani bali which has the object of preventing the embittered soul from remaining in prêt form (yoni); and he also performs putla vidhan– at which an elaborate effigy of deceased is constructed and then cremated for those whose corpses were either lost or immersed in the Ganges. ‘Bad deaths’ generally represents good income for the funeral priest.
The inventory constitutes the maximum elaboration of the Mahabrahman’s duties. In most cases there is no question of panchak shanty, Narayani bali and putla vidhan. Of the standard repertoire, the Mahabrahman would only expect to perform the full complement for an important jajman from whom he expects a munificent offering. For the majority his services are considerably attenuated, and often amount to no more than attending the rituals of the tenth and eleventh days, scrambling them through with much surreptitious editing when the financial pickings look slim, and accepting the gifts with more or less bad grace.
The Mahabrahman’s presence is, however, essential. He confers salvation, and allows the soul to ‘swim across’ to the other world. For the successful conclusion of the rites he must be satisfied with the gifts offered. ‘His belly must be full’, though on such occasions he is seemingly insatiable. Without his blessing the deceased will remain in the limbo of pret- hood to plague his family with misfortune and further bereavement; with it their descent line can prosper and increase. His curse is greatly feared, a fact which the Mahabrahman often exploits with veiled threats designed to encourage a tight-fisted jajman to loosen his purse-strings.Aseparate caste– the Mahabappas – is funeral priests to the funeralpriests. Mahabappa settlements are small and scattered, and each serves the Mahabrahman communities of a considerable area. No matter on which ghat they are cremated (or immersed), the Mahabrahman who has pari (his ‘turn’ in the rota) on the day on which the corpse is brought to the ghat has the exclusive right to accept all gifts which will subsequently be made in the name of the ghost, the most valuable of which are generally offered at the rituals of the tenth or eleventh day.
In practice, the city Mahabrahmans are only likely to hear about, those who cremate in Banaras, or whose ashes are brought for immersion. The residue represents the least promising donors. In the past, four settlements of village funeral-priests were appointed by the city Mahabrahmans to watch over their rights, and inform them of any death in the vicinity. Today it is these local representatives who appropriate a large proportion of the offerings made by village jajman of the poorer sort. Jajman from outside the radius of pachchh do not fall within the scope of the Banaras funeral-priests unless they stay in the city to perform the tenth and eleventh day rituals, in which event they are claimed by the pari-holder. But even when this is not the case, he may still derive some income from them by presiding over the offerings made at the ghat on the day of cremation. In total, the pari owner may acquire ten or twelve jajman who will offer him sajja dan ten or eleven days later; and earn up to Rs. 150 from offerings made at the pyre.
The mechanics of the system are such that occasionally a pari-holder miscalculates, or more likely forgets to show up on the ghat on the day of his pari (though he will usually have realised his error by the time of crucial ten or eleventh day rituals). In such an eventuality, Bihari Maharaj – the richest and most powerful pari-holder whose servants remain on Manikarnika ghat 24 hours a day – takes charge of all jajman; and when the rightful owner eventually turns up reimburses him with a proportion of the takings. In the course of the year there are one or two paris which remain regularly unclaimed, and for all intents and purposes Bihari has made these his own. Within the Mahabrahman community pari rights are very unevenly distributed. Bihari Maharaj has rights to some seventy-five days a year, while his half-brother and another man between them account for a further fifty-five days. In other words, a third of the year is owned by just three individuals.
In both pachchh and pari the right-holder needs the help of several semipermanent karinda-servants in order to attend to all his jajman, and to muster a suitably imposing backing at the time of negotiating the offerings. About twenty Mahabrahmans work more or less regularly as karindas, most of them for several different employers. On the day of pari one of them will remain throughout the twenty fours at Harishchandra ghat, and two or three at Manikanika, where they collect information about prospective jajman and preside over offerings at the pyre. The income from pachchh and pari is quite unpredictable. The profession, people say, is dependent of the sky (akash-vritti). Several turns running may yield only the most impoverished jajman. But there is always the chance that once in a while the pari-holder may enjoy the windfall of a Maharaja, or a Marwari business.
Other variants of pari
The untouchable Dom funeral-attendants labour at the pyres under a similarly infamous reputation for rapacity. The cremation ground Doms – who distinguish themselves as Gotakhor (driver) Doms – insists that they are an entirely separate sub-caste from the Sweeper Doms of Banaras and other north Indian cities, and from the Basket-maker Doms of the rural areas. They numbered around 670, and mainly reside in two neighbourhoods in the vicinity of the two burning ghats.
The family barber has already cropped up in association with the funeral-priests. He acts as a general factotum throughout the period of mourning; and would normally accompany the funeral procession to the cremation ground where he tonsures the chief mourner, sometimes all sons of the deceased, and sometimes the corpse itself. An experienced Barber will have come to the ghat before, may
find himself directing many of the proceedings, and is usually expected to negotiate with the wood-seller (who pays him commission of 1 anna in the rupee) and with the shops which sell shrouds and other mortuary goods. Around 700 small crafts are licensed to work the river front. Most are owned and manned by Mallahs, a caste of fishermen and boatmen. Each boat may take passengers only from its own ghat, though the right to fish anywhere on the river is unrestricted.
An important source of subsidiary earnings on several ghats is the right to dredge in the river mud for coins thrown into the Ganges by the pious pilgrims as gupt dan – a ‘secret’ and particularly meritorious gift.
The way in which passengers are allocated between the various right-holders of a single ghat is variable. Dashashvamedh is the most popular bathing ghat in the city. The boatmen all sit together on a wooden platform at the bottom of the long flight of stone steps that leads down to the river. As any potential passenger reaches the top of the steps one of the boatmen will stake a claim by calling out
‘the one with the spectacles’, the ‘bell-bottom pant wallah’, ‘the red monkey Englishman’. Whoever claimed the passenger takes him.
At Manikarnika ghat there are six established shops which specialise in the sale of what are collectively called ‘the goods of the skull-bearing’ (kapal kriya saman). These consist of shrouds, various offerings to the pyre, and the big water-pot (gagra) which the chief mourner throws over his left shoulder at the end of cremation to ‘cool’ the pyre. These shops also sell stone slabs for weighting down corpses immersed in river. Forty or fifty years ago a single individual had a monopoly on this business- which he reportedly enforced by smashing pots brought by the mourners from elsewhere.
By contrast with the kapal kriya trade, the wood businessman at Manikarnika is today a relatively ‘free’ market. Up until about 1910, however, a single shop owned and managed by a powerful Rajput family- had a complete monopoly over all wood sold on the ghat. This shop still exists and remains the exclusive supplier of wood to the Doms when they negotiate an ‘all-in’ price which includes the cost of materials. The reason is that the arcaded structure where the Doms sit to negotiate their ‘tax’, where they eat and store bamboo from the biers, is under this Rajput family’s control, and the Doms use it only on their sufferance. The same shop is also the sole supplier of the five mounds of wood which the Municipal Council allows for the cremation of indigent corpses.
Pandagiri – the profession of pilgrimage-priest
As we have seen, many mourners bring the ashes of a deceased kinspersons to Banaras to immerse in the Ganges, while the vast majority of pilgrims perform offerings to their ancestors during the course of their visit. It is in principle the pilgrimage-priest – the panda or tirath-purohit – who arranges, and may even preside, over these rituals. In the case of those outsiders who remain in, or come to the city to perform the post-cremation mortuary rites, it is he who stands in for, embodies and receives gifts in the name of the newly incorporated ancestor at the rituals of the twelfth day.
The panda puts the pilgrims up in his own house or in one of the numerous pilgrims’ hostels, arranges their visits to the shops, temples and other sacred sites and for the rituals they perform, and accepts the gifts associated with them. He is, he says, ‘a contractor of religion’ (dharma ka thekedar)- a phrase which nicely captures his role as a general purpose ‘fixer’for both this-and other-worldly comforts of his clients.
The Last Sacrifice: The Expression of Grief
At death it is men who give birth. In nearly all communities, women are regarded as too faint hearted to accompany the corpse to the burning ghat and it is exclusively men who assist cremation. Even in the absence of the son a man serves as dagiya (the one who gives fire) and performs the subsequent rites. What then is the role of women? The short answer is, to grieve. The corpse are meticulously washed by women, wrap it in a white shroud and lay out on the bed with thirty seven other brightly coloured shrouds draped over it. When it is moved to one side for its bath, and when it is lifted onto the bed, the women burst out into a chorus of wails and have to be cajoled by men to relinquish it. More garlands and balloons are added to the bier, a golden sari is tied to a long bamboo pole, a red sari to another. These are to serve as standards which would lead to the funeral procession. Abir is rubbed on the face of the corpse. It is time to move but the women who surround the bed become reluctant to make away for the pall bearers. As they shoulder it the women cry out in anguish, the two bands play different tunes, the young boys also dance frenziedly, and most of the men raised a triumphant cry of Har, Har, Mahadev (a greeting appropriate to Lord Shiva). The women are allowed to accompany the procession only a short way.
The Good and Bad Death
A good death occurs at the right time and at the right place-ideally in Banaras on the banks of Ganges with the lower limbs in the water. Failing Banaras or some other place of piligrimage one should die at home on purified ground and in open air, and not on a bed or under a roof. Even in Banaras there are good and the bad times to go. Death in uttarayan-the six months of the year that begin with the winter solstice (maker sanskranti)-is propitious for this is the day time of the gods. During dakshinayan (the other six months) they spend much of their time asleep and do not therefore take much notice of human affairs. But the ancestors are now wide awake so dakshinayan is auspicious for the performance of the shraddh rituals addressed to them and this is during this period that pitri paksh– the fortnight of the ancestors- is celebrated. A bad death is one, then, in which the deceased has revealed no intention of sacrificing his body (e.g. the victim of violence or accident), or of renouncing its desires (e.g. suicide). Alternatively it is that of a person whose body does not constitute a fit sacrificial object.
Ghosts into Ancestors
In Banaras the post cremation mortuary rites describe the way to convert the marginal prêt-ghost into an ancestral-pitr, and to facilitate the arduous journey of the deceased to the adobe of the ancestors (pitr lok) where he arrives on the anniversary of his death. Rites addressed to the ghost are presided over by the Mahabrahman Funeral-priest, those addressed to the ancestors by the deceased’s hereditary household – or pilgrimage – priest. In Banaras both sets of rituals are collectively known as shraddh. Etymologically shraddh is closely related to shraddha or faith, shraddh being popularly defined as that which is offered to the ancestors with faith. The offerings are of two kinds. The first is pind dan the gift of pinds- balls of rice, barley flour or khoa (a thick paste made by boiling milk). The second kind of offering is mediated by the Brahmins who are fed and offered gifts.
Panna Ojha
Those who die a good death are cremated. Panna Ojha is a man of commanding presence in his mid sixties. Despite his ochre renouncer’s robe, Panna is a householder. By caste a potter, he lives in a village some five or six miles from the centre of the city. Most of his patients see him on the verandah of his house, on one side of which is a raised platform which contains a shrine of the goddesses Durga and Sitala, and a square sacrificial fire pit into the ash of which several ascetics’ tongs and tridents are stuck. During his consultations Panna sits
imposingly on the platform with his patients- generally in family groups- at his feet below him. His sessions begin with an elaborate act of worship for his tutelary deities and a lengthy reading from various sacred texts.
Conclusion
The book provides an account of the association of the city of Banaras with death rituals. It also gives a brief sketch of what is known about its history as a pilgrimage centre, and as a place to die and to dispose of the physical remains of the death.
Generally, in the study of death, the focus has been on rituals. By contrast, Parry’s work is a thick description of what is called the ‘business of death’. In addition to a symbolic analysis of rituals- their meaning and purpose- the work provides a detailed understanding of the ‘ritual technicians’ so to say, who are associated with the performance of death rituals. From the study of the microcosm- the Manikarnika ghat- Parry moves on to the understanding of Banaras as the ‘city of cosmogony