Full download Dead in banaras: an ethnography of funeral travelling ravi nandan singh pdf docx
Dead in Banaras: An Ethnography of Funeral Travelling
Ravi Nandan Singh
Visit to download the full and correct content document: https://ebookmass.com/product/dead-in-banaras-an-ethnography-of-funeral-travelling -ravi-nandan-singh/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant download maybe you interests ...
Tahriib – Journeys into the Unknown: An Ethnography of Uncertainty in Migration Anja Simonsen
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022934443
ISBN 978–0–19–286428–4
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192864284.001.0001
Printed in India by Rakmo Press Pvt. Ltd
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
to
the halt house
Rauza
Acknowledgements
The ethnographic and the autobiographical colours involved in the making of this book run deep. I will limit myself to some hues that illuminate aspects of its making.
The anonymous funeral travellers at Harishchandra ghat who came with their respective biers make the ambient milieu of the book. The unspoken pact of not talking, not interviewing began early on and gradually settled into a listening to their presence that deepened over the fieldwork years and emerges in the book, in turn, as ‘sighing’ speech. The funeral workers at the ghat, often too busy to sit down for a talk, helped in making alternative connections between the dead and thought. Let me recount one lesson, I learnt from you. Let me not reveal your name, as you wished. Also, as the adage of the place goes: secrets are more powerful than revelations. Early on in fieldwork, pursuing the several men working with the pyres, I approach you one day, timidly, for an interview—wanting to know more about you, the community, the neighbourhood, and the families living at the ghat. I stutter: I am seeking to study death. You gaze down with anger and retort: why must the truth of death lie with its workers? Go where they come from. Chase them, seek them. True, I thought, why it must? I left, dithered, and after following the dead all around returned to the same place once again. Retrospectively, I see that you made these new ethnographic maps a question of thought before they became actual journeys. Let me recount one more lesson. I am on a different side of the city, closer to Rajghat, observing the cremation work being undertaken by a small group of workers in the Khadak Vinayak neighbourhood. Hardly a few kilometres away from Harishchandra and Manikarnika—the two always aflame, busiest cremation ghats—a lone pyre burnt here with a few funeral travellers in tow. Why? The question became a limerick amongst the small mix of workers and travellers as the solitary pyre burnt. Another day, at the same place, a young apprentice handed me the answer without a prod. Dead bring their own dead. That’s how names and places live and flourish. Our place is forsaken. I acknowledge this illumination that came
my way through the young voice. I also acknowledge the darkness of my failure to include this sombre and solitary cremation place in my ethnographic map.
We return to Harishchandra Ghat. I offer my sincere thanks to Rajaram ji (Postman Baba) for revealing with tact only as much as he thought was protective for an apprentice like me who was innocent about the gateways to transcendence through the dead. Few ghats away, my heartfelt thanks to Mahant Ji (Veer Bhadra Mishra) for taking time out from his busy schedule for what became a rather long interview on a blistering hot day. Many more lessons were learnt as I wandered in and around the city. I am grateful to the Kabir ashram for their generosity in hosting me and offering to teach me more about their Kabir, death (nirgun) and the city. The Ravidas temple at Ghasi Tola patiently engaged with me at a difficult time of loss when of one of their revered saints was assassinated in Austria. The Aghorashram, famously reticent towards researchers, allowed me access into their premises and were exceptionally welcoming. Rajaram Ji, an in-house sevak resident, meticulously described the different places and practises within the Ashram on multiple occasions. I thank Hospital H for identifying with research and respecting my sociological version within the fabric of their busy organizational practises. I remember with gratitude, Anil and his scooter that we used for our gambhir ghumna-phirna. Rakesh and Harmony Book Shop are never out of my mind: those Cohen-Shrimati ji anecdotes, the books, the stories and that gentle smile (even when the shop at the ghat is ready to drown in some wilful monsoon episode). I owe a lot to you and the book shop, Rakesh.
My sincere appreciation to the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript. Your affirmative and nuanced comments have shaped this book in both visible and invisible ways.
Susan Visvanathan has trained me into a sociology that I have only begun to recognize and comprehend. I owe my world to her acumen and sensitivity. An earnest thanks to Bettina Baümer for her magnanimity in offering her residence and her exquisite library (Samvidalaya) during my fieldwork stay in Banaras. Her generous counsel and intellectual directions for my research continue to be an invitation to think with texts. Roma Chatterji and V. Sanil have taken upon themselves, over the last
Acknowledgements xi decade, to tend my work into new directions; without their counsel and engagement this book would have never happened. In the same vein, my gratitude to Deepak Mehta and Sanjay Srivastava. After hearing me speak at the Friday Research Colloquium at the Department of Sociology, University of Delhi, Deepak prompted me to publish in Contributions to Indian Sociology. The writing of the essay threw me into an orbit that has come full circle with this book. There is more to that story. Sanjay sat down hours, meticulously commenting on my draft submission. Saving that track changes file, I have used it as my guardian editor ethos to subsist with the work that followed for this book. Many thanks to Yasmeen Arif for her humour and sensitivity towards thought and for her ways of drawing me into collaboration through conversations, research inputs and workshop discussions. I cherish the exchange. To Sumbul Farah and Saumya Malviya for reading the draft version of the manuscript and sharing our special kaam-ra-derie. To Saumya, an additional thanks for providing his copy of Gangatat.
I thank the departments of sociology at Delhi University, IIT Delhi (Humanities) and Shiv Nadar University for inviting me to present my work at their respective research seminars. The numerous comments and suggestions received have shaped the texture of this book. No amount of acknowledgement can capture the contribution of these interactions and my gratitude for them. I take this opportunity to thank my colleagues at the sociology department in Hindu College for their collegiality and care. A big thanks to Shalini Suryanarayan who facilitated a short, advance earned leave, during her in-chargeship, for me to finish a crucial piece of writing when I had exhausted all my other leaves for the same purpose. RTL (Ratan Tata Library) has been the island, the loci of bookish transformation, between D School and Hindu College for all these years.
The UGC Research fellowship came at an opportune time, providing much relief and enabled fieldwork.
Big thanks: Farhat Parveen Ji at the publications Division, GOI, for handing over her only copy of Aajkal (Kashi Visheshank) for me to photocopy. Zenia Taluja and Shajeem Fazal for coordinating and procuring Kalpana (Kashi Ank) from Hyderabad. Pravisha Mittal for gifting me a copy of Mahajani Saar (indexing how Banaras is notated in the traders’
language of North India). Dr. Arvind Kumar Sambal for directing my attention to Hans Kashi Ank and Hans Aatmakatha Ank. Sincere gratitude to the NK Bose Foundation. Specially for the fact that the access to the foundation’s archive was topped with a homey welcome and delicious food.
Yann Vagneux, with whom my friendship started next to the pyres at Harishchandra ghat during fieldwork, has very kindly allowed me to use one of his images (of pyres with iron platforms) in chapter 5. Thank you Saubhagya Pathy Ji for allowing me to use your Baba’s (Late Dinanath Pathy) painting as the cover image. In the early days of fieldwork, Bettina ji, had sent the postcard image to me from Austria with a note saying that seeing the painting she thought of me. It is fitting, after so many years, some of the ethnographic colours that overtime got impressed into my work find a way to the cover. The five elements laced in the grim orange of fire, the childish doodle of the manly wrestler pose against the death scene and the cosmic ouch of Kali and Shiva: Banaras colours.
To Chandrima Chatterjee at OUP for commissioning the book and her encouraging reassurances. To Moutushi Mukherjee for following it up and seeing it through at OUP. To Nandini Ganguli, for the final rescue act. To Praveena Anbu and team for the production work and their patience with last-minute requirements and delays. To Suneethi Raja for the index work.
To my parents for giving us children all of themselves. A difficult gift to receive and one impossible to return. To Dad and Ma for all their love and support: suitably, the last draft was finalized at the Jaipur house just before the inaugural lockdown season. To Mumma for her ninetieth birthday concern: ‘and, when is the book coming?’ To Sonu-Sher for their good will and supportive presence through the life of this book. NanaNani for handcrafting a world for me that has protected me from my own nightmarish fate into the subject of death. To my sisters, for their, largely undeserved, adulation. To my maternal uncles-aunts for their love and nurturance and for sending me out, in good time, to be independent.
To Geetika: you will recognize our twenty years in this book. All my death work, the diminishing it has caused and soul scratching it has effected have run through you as the holdfast. To Uday, for your days of being joy incarnate and becoming the jocular in-charge in a house
where the parents are mired in death and sudden death (marriage); Gita’s joke: meet Ravi (works on death), meet Geetika (works on sudden death). To Gita and Sushil: Family is to eating what research is to play. To Uday’s question: Can your dead return back as my dead do (respawn) in Minecraft creative mode? One part answer: they do return.
Transliteration, Translation, Kinship
Names and Notations
The author has used the conventions prevalent in Indian English for transliterating words from Bhojpuri, Hindi, and Urdu. Non-English words are presented in simple form without any diacritics and added emphasis of special characters. However, in the spirit of standardization and for reading convenience, all non-English words are italicized. The exceptions here are proper and common names. All translations in the book are author’s own. In places where existent translations have been used, they are duly acknowledged. In chapters 3 and 4 standard kinship notations are used in tandem with positional names, names of endearment, names of relations and proper names of the relatives to create a mixed use. This is done to striate the kinship descriptions with both anonymity and personalization in the narrative. For convenience, at each descriptive juncture, the mixed notations are repeatedly evoked for ready reference.
Preface
As the final draft of the manuscript was being handed over we entered into the covid-19 topsy turvy. Indeed, in the interim two years a different working sentiment of the book, true to covid times, had come into effect: Dead in Banaras and not feeling well in Delhi. As I write this preface, we are perhaps into a reassuring end of a duration that has brought upon waves of death and collateral suffering. The layers of these deaths and social suffering will certainly unfold into our future and we would be forced to think of the covid dead with our unique anthropological affinity to such matters. This book draws out a minor instance of what such an anthropological affinity to the dead might look like. Although, evidently, it speaks from a different ethnographic present— the first two decades of twenty-first century Banaras. The present-day Banaras, at first sight, is a new place. Rightly so, the baton must then pass on to an all new chronicling of the place. Yet, a connecting link, as always, may come into play, between this book’s time and other times of Banaras. Let me give an example of what such a connection might look like. Jonathan Parry (1994) in his classic Death in Banaras laments in the preface to the book that he could not incorporate the coming in of the electric crematorium in his descriptions of the funerary organization in Banaras. Two decades later, into my fieldwork, I found that it is, in part, the efficiency of the open-air, manual cremation that Parry so effectively captures in his book that explains how a promising symbol of industrial modernity, the electric crematorium, falls short from the typecast. In the years between his book and my fieldwork, the electric crematorium sat lonely and was sparingly used against the cheer of the always-on, busy, manual pyres whose flames continue to dot the scene of the ghats in a contrasting relief. In this above sense, I believe, Parry already provides us a portrait of the electric crematorium’s social imaginary in Banaras. The question of the shift from wooden pyres to electric cremation is then not about competing technologies but that of ethics with which the dead are tended to amidst the assemblies of funeral travellers. Having said that, I do not mean in any
way that my ethnography stands in comparison to Parry’s work or can establish and withstand such an enduring connection. In my own assessment, there is a different dimension to this ethnography that may enable us to see and make new connections: a devotion to a genealogy of funerary Banaras involving the ephemeral and the nomadic aspects of the dead and death.
Readers can navigate the book, old school way, cover to cover. Here is a key for the new school reader. Chapter 1 is an introduction to the ethnography, so old and new style readers are both invited. Chapters 2 and 5 are not in any alliance with each other and can be read separately. In contrast, the middle chapters, 3 and 4, are narratively unified and must be read serially. These two middle chapters carry the visceral account of an autobiographical funeral travelling aided by necrological narratives. They are laden with the experience and thoughts of the mournful. Any reader having been in such an unfortunate circumstance will be able to gain a reading momentum with a griever’s ease. An uneasy ease, of course. Other readers may use their discretion before venturing here. Chapter 2, in my view, is the most affirmative chapter of the book. It is about the simple fact that the city— and this is the speakers and users contribution, no doubt—can be almost simultaneously invoked by its many names. I pitch this affirmativeness as a form of city-names ‘playing dead’. By some standards that may not be very affirmative but that is how far I have been able to go. Chapter 5 is an attempt to show how the environmental, religious, medical and the crematorial come together in the making of a funerary Banaras that involves the river Ganga Ji amongst other cultural acts, artifacts and microbial facts. This chapter too carries an affirmative register, that of parvah (care), but the field did not allow me to cast parvah as an imperative and infinite responsibility.
Overall, going into fieldwork, and subsequently going through the endless revisions in the writing of this ethnography, I have been possessed by many ideas and versions that have gradually cut loose. What is the ‘riverrun’ (pravah) of the book then? It is multi-sitedness and an earnest sincerity towards recording the mise-en-scène of the contemporary. I use the word ‘riverrun’ in the sense in which James Joyce (1939) uses it to open his ‘Finnegans wake’— that in fact I had started translating in Hindi as Finnegan ke tiye ki Baithak before realizing that I would need to spend a lifetime to create an Irish-Hindi first— as the onomatopoeic
xix spirit of the book. What I have suitably added in this ethnography to the idea of a changing mise-en-scène of Banaras is its bluey (parvah), mise-enabîme double. Finally, few words about what is it that I am saying in this book and what has inspired me to write such an ethnography. Anthropology and sociology tend to oscillate between thinking of death as a natural social event par excellence and death as an inauthentic event into modernity. Natural social event of the textbook life-cycle ritual act. Inauthentic because into modernity it is never death truly, it is rather a lack of timely intervention, medical aid, care work and community vigilance. Concurrently then death is not death but is an effect of biopolitical letting die, neo-liberal abandonment, collateral damage, extermination and fatal marginalization. There is an unspoken pact of knowledge that living would die rationally and use all means available to extend their longevity.
Now, it is true that life divided by death is not a plain, even and symmetrical return to the social. In fact, the event of death, accentuated in certain specific ways into the contemporary, has an intractable remainder of the thymotic—guilt, remorse, rage, despairing relation to thought— for the surviving community. Yet, drawing from this ethnography one may say that just as the living have a biosocial authenticity, in our times, so do death and the dead. The imagination attached to the infrastructures of hope and saving must not stop us from seeing that people also die within these infrastructures. And, they do not die as pure accidents but rather that is how death finds a way with the living. Do people need help to live rather than die? Will they always be helped into living, even if it is by degrees? Can we build and contribute towards the hope of a reasonably dignified death by socializing medicalization to the last person? Can people be saved? The answer would be a ‘yes, please’ to all of these when we think of these terms at the level of abstract categories such as people, help, dignity and saving. But an emphatic No, to the hope that once these ends are achieved—in imagination, thought or practise—the last person would die beatifically. Death is untimely and the living die in chaotic ways. This is an ethnography of the simple fact: how people die in contemporary Banaras. How is death received, hosted and served by the mourner? The descriptions here move with the affect that death as an ‘event’ cannot be turned into a pure truth of the mourner’s grief. Rather, the book shows that like all other things death and the dead come to settle
into the ordinary. Their truth, as it were, comes in parts and is never an adequate ground for the mourner to articulate that I could grieve with satisfaction. This might explain the mourner’s rage. The rage at not being able to keep one’s dead within a clear and everlasting gaze in a place illuminated by grief.
Summing up, and responding to this conundrum from the end of the living, I would go to the extent of saying that when the times comes, even betrayal of the dead becomes practical— a practical, ordinary ethics that enables living.
The ethnography is autobiographical, based on my father’s death in the ‘field’ and is much inspired by mourning resources of North India. Such resources are plentiful in North India or so a mourner might come to recognize. A small sample of a possible assemblage: Birha, literally meaning lamentations in Bhojpuri, is a folk genre of sing-and-tell rendition of death or deathly events. Shok upanyas, the genre of grief novel in Hindi, for example, Manjushima (1990) by Shiv Prasad Singh on his daughter’s terminal illness and death. Santaap kahani, the sick with sadness story, one of the searing ‘new’ Hindi story forms that rages against the genre of the tragic story, for example, Kshama karo hey vats (Forgive me my dear child) (2010) by Devendra. Milni/bhet, the crying-meeting of grieving and wailing women. And finally the sighing speeches of the funeral travellers at the Harishchandra ghat. In spite of these existent resources, the ethnography did not spring naturally from the fount of the local and the autobiographical. It rather arrived at these resources through the labyrinth of transcontinental philosophy and the ethnographic ‘eye’ rather than the ‘I’ of this apprentice ethnographer.
1 Following the Dead
Corpse as Multiple Social Condition
This is a book about the dead. The dead as tangible, material entities but also as images, ideas, practices and affective social surfaces. In other words, this book is an attempt to make explicit ‘dead’ as multiple social condition. The Hindu dead is its central character. This becomes self-evident as a good part of the book deals with their funerals.1 The ethnography is based on seeing, listening to, and locating the dead across many sites in contemporary Banaras, North India.2 I use seeing, listening, and locating to convey the ways in which a social surface of the living and the dead becomes gradually present to me as an ethnographer—a mixed surface of images, voices, gestures, activities, stillness, the spoken, and the textual. I also use seeing, listening, and locating in the ways in which a heightened capacity for such receptions is granted to a mourner. It was during fieldwork that my father died in the same city and the middle of this book is based on that episode. While the setting is clearly that of the Hindu dead, the book switches between a Hindu world of funerary Banaras and a shared, dense, mixed humanity of the city. The dead as compass guide us to the scenes that are empirically far and near to them. The empiricisms dealt with here include the city, hospital, amputated leg, cremation pyre, the river, polythene, bacteriophage, and other emergent phenomena. Three ideas motorize the discussions of the book. One, borrowing from Gilles Deleuze is the idea of multiplicity as a substantive rather than an adjective.3 Deleuze pitches multiplicity as a substantive emergent relationship rather than a pre-given unity. It is in this Deleuzian sense that I am using dead as multiple social condition and not conditions. Borrowing the same logic, other multiplicities discussed here are those of corpse, city, and names. Two, I focus on dead as multiplicity rather than death as multiplicity, because dead as a relation allows me to locate the continuing inherence and disappearance of death. I also wish to displace the
privileging of death as a pure, transcendent social event by showing how this event gets imbricated with the ordinary.4 Here I am inspired by the work of Veena Das (2006). Das shows how the dead and the living make and remake the ordinary. That reparation from catastrophic violence involves inheriting the dead and their deaths is ineluctable. However, the reception of this inheritance does not involve a method of transcendent passage into the ordinary. Rather, the dead and their deaths become diffused into the social in a way that they create the rough texture of the ordinary. This rough texture contains both self assured normalcy and an untimely, surreal presence of the dead and their deaths. Indeed, seen this way, ordinary can be viewed as a regenerated social but not regenerated from and against death but through, with and in it. My own work, unlike Das, is not tied to any direct site of extreme or chronic violence but is rather invested in showing how dead as social condition comes to inhabit the ordinary. I take from the philosopher Cora Diamond the idea that one way to critically approach the ordinary is to recognize the moral and the ethical in this unlikely realm while simultaneously paying attention to the very world in which this recognition might unfold.5 Although this dimension imbues the overall descriptions of the book, it forms a key discussion in chapter 5 where I make a case to think of environmental pollution through the shifting matrices of crematorial technologies as a moral question. Three, I use my father’s death to personalize the symbols involved in accepting death. Going back and forth between his dying at a city hospital and an extended necrology of his and mine patriline, I hope to add, through this personalization, another perspective, in the shadow of two exceptional ethnographies on Hindu funerals in Banaras: Death in Banaras (1994) by Jonathan Parry and Forest of Bliss (1986) by the filmmaker-ethnographer Robert Gardner.6
With this let me provide short descriptions of the key participants in this ethnography. Here is a brief glossary anticipating the main themes of the book.
The City
The North Indian city, Banaras, is also referred by many other names such as Benares, Varanasi, and Kashi amongst others. I obsessively track
how these names are used through an ethnography of popular, academic, and testimonial literature. I arrive at the conclusion that the place lives in its various names, and operates as a sheltering system for its different residents.
Bio-medicine
Apart from being the funeral capital, Banaras in the ‘local moral world’, to borrow a well-known phrase from Arthur Kleinman (2007), exists as a hospital metropolis of emergency care for the vast and populous North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. One way in which the hospital finds expression here is through a comparative frame of how home and hospital expose the limits and possibilities of care in mutual contrast and continuity.
The Corpse
The site of the contingent, the revenant, and the remnant matter of corpse is approached through the surface of names. We will see an illustration of the well-known anthropological fact of a person becoming a corpse by losing its proper name for another set of contingently used generic names. The acknowledgement of the dead as a loss to the survivors is simultaneous with the loss of the self through the temporary expunging of the proper name from the corpse. Further, we will see how the corpse becomes impersonal, common, and general when it shifts through different names which allude to the divine (shav), ex-living (murda), animal (madh), and the unnameable in a complex flow of funerary dissolution.
The River
The river Ganga, addressed as Ganga Ji, with Ji as an honorific suffix, is experienced by the people at the ghats as a living watery spirit running through Banaras that must accept and contain the remains of the dead in order to metabolize uncertainty and danger as well as offer regenerative blessings to the personal cosmologies of its people. Yet, the river affected
by environmental pollution also exists as a new contingency of dark water with its own uncertainty and danger. Indeed, the moral problem of the river in the contemporary is precisely one of how to ‘see’ and ‘say’ this pollution or to even recognize pollution as diminishing the river’s spirit.
Polythene
Polythene is the ubiquitous modern object that pervades the social life of Banaras as a polymeric fold of life and death. In its Banarasian usage, it finds a parallel with how the river acts as a metaphysical and phenomenal social solution to all concerns of human dangers inherent in the morally imagined world. These dangers are far ranging. They may include worn-out or expired idols, bone-stumps saved during cremation, hospital bio-waste, aborted female foetuses and animal carcasses. Then, there are entities like unfiltered sewage, industrial waste, and polythene that endanger the river and their redressal involves an upturning of the very moral understanding of the river. All these dangers that reach the river are equally reflected in the social fact and form of polythene. So in a way the river and the polythene become two hosts that can contain such dangers. How does one begin to understand such a natural-chemical continuum? The answer may lie in a reiteration of Cora Diamond’s perspective: what is involved in following polythene at the ghats is that as we recognize the moral and the ethical in this mixed realm of the river and the polymer we must simultaneously pay attention to the very world in which this recognition might unfold.
Bacteriophages
Bacteriophages are living parasitical contact zones of viruses dependent on bacteria. They double up as one dynamic continuum of life and death, where the virus predates the bacteria but also replicates itself in that life–death process of the bacteria. Discovered in Ganga’s water as a biological purifying agent in the late nineteenth century, the bacteriophages have returned into the contemporary environmental struggle against bacteria as biological control. In this instance, the parasitical contact zone
becomes triadic when human experimentation actively joins to project a viral–bacterial organic anabiosis.
Funeral Travelling
Finally, the binding thread of the book is the affective register of locating funeral travelling and cremation as an intersection of various emergent encounters. Translating shav-yatra as ‘funeral travelling’ opens up two dimensions in the said English phrase. One is of a personalized, religious grieving that drawing parallels from pilgrimage is tied to ritual practices and symbolic states. Second is of a journey that draws from the domain of travelling. The latter involves reflection and transformation in the face of aesthetics of death and cremation in Banaras. Very often, the second journey thrives on the death of the anonymous rather than that of one’s own. Both these senses prevail in the funeral travelling described in the book; however, given that it is narratively grounded in the anthropological tradition, it tends to privilege the meanings attached to ritual practices and symbolic states.
Let me return to the question of death and dead, this time, through a genealogy of thought on the subject.
Dead as Multiplicity
In foregrounding the idea of ‘corpse as multiple social condition’, I use condition not only to refer to the physical and material state of the corpse but also to show an affective multiplicity that reveals and hides the relation between the dead and the social. This project is then devoted towards a searching of multiple conditions of the social in relation to the dead that are organized in the forms of material, conceptual, and the onomastic (names) in contemporary Banaras.
It is well known that in signposting death, the twentieth century has produced exhaustive oeuvres of knowledge including that of public grieving and collective mourning in response to the unparalleled and crushing violence that it unduly hosted. Amidst this acknowledgment, the book sets on to locate the interstitial spaces of funerary observations,
highlighting grief and mourning that coexist with the heavy rhythms of the ordinary in the everyday social world of Banaras. The low thresholds of life that border on the asthenic are taken into account and made manifest here. Which is why, I say, I listen to the corpse. What is implied in this listening is an affective observation that is different from arriving at representation of death rituals and their corresponding Hindu meanings. In this proposed listening, I have treated corpses, cremation, fire, and river as sights and sounds unto themselves and in relation to each other rather than collapsing them into one uniform, metaphoric funerary complex that is activated only in human voice. This by no means implies that I have cancelled out significations of speech, acts, and gestures. While I acknowledge that owing to the methodological shift, first person accounts of the cremation ghat are both constrained and thin, rather than padding them up I have pared down that field account even further to the social usage of certain names and words alone. This is to convey that even at its barest, at the level of a set of words, pravah (river run) and parvah (funerary care), there is no social usage, without an entanglement of remainders of differing usages. The organization of chapters mirrors this methodological shift. I switch in tenor between the chapters. Some have minimal field narratives, while others are thickly textured. One such thick texture emerges by bringing together the separated domains of the textual and the spoken in Chapter 2. I use the textual and the spoken side by side, for the simple reason that Banaras, a great centre of learning, writing, and literature, allows this complex traffic into conversations. Instead of dissecting how text bears onto the practices, I serve them here in a cooked-together meal. In a similar gesture, I offer my father’s death in the form of an autobiography of a funeral traveller. This also brings us to, the dead centre, of a crucial question: how may we relate the dead to death? A short answer would be: in life. What one means by life here are the different conditions of the social that enable one to recognize the repetition of death as an intrinsic contrast. I am thinking here of Deleuze’s (1988) discussion on ‘fold’ in his book called Foucault.7 Staying with Deleuze’s reading of Foucault and his works enables one to see that death creates a multiplicity of interior–exterior within life and not outside it. We can even say that it is the dead as social condition that bring about folds into these topologies of the interior and the exterior. For sure, these folds can be equally brought about by love, desire, and such. In fact, what
we gain by posing death as a dividual and dispersive event is a continuum that allows us to use the planes of the ordinary with respect to mourning and recovery. Although the accounts in this book switch many forms and rhythms, the ironical relationship between life, death, and the dead holds this perspective together. The irony of the relationship is precisely that while both language and meaning are under tremendous strain in recognizing death and the dead, the life lesson drawn from the field seems to be that we must indeed turn to language in order to affectively recognize the triad of life, death, and the dead. On this note, let me introduce you to the place and time of my fieldwork.
The Banaras of Fieldwork
Banaras, even by the local North Indian standards, is quite unique in putting it all out in the open when it comes to corpses and cremation. There are two cremation ghats in close proximity to each other, always at work, operating with a seemingly simple but excessive sensory semiosis of fire, smoke, sight, and smell amidst other routine river-edge human activities. The places are well known as Manikarnika and Harishchandra ghats. My work is primarily based at the Harishchandra ghat because the said ghat has both, electric ovens—or stoves (chullah), as people call it locally— along with the regular, manual, wooden cremation pyres. The same complex houses a multi-storey hotel, overseeing the electric and manual crematoria, catering largely to young backpacking tourists from around the globe. Abiding with the idea of multi-sitedness, I use Harishchandra ghat as the central station and follow the corpse to different places (Marcus 1995, 2001). One may already notice the ironic brimming of life around the dead. We can see this irony emerge in different transcontinental social spaces that are marked by the double, zigzag presence of tradition and modernity, global and local and their ever-renewed forms. In an extended inspiration from Marcus (2001), I also highlight an irony that tends to emerge out of objects, subjects, and things which continuously recast the idea and meaning of social relations. It is in this latter sense that the dead operate as ironic to life and death on one hand and to language and meaning on the other. That is, even as the dead operate as human signs of ironic meaning, they are simultaneously wound up
in the empiricisms of the contemporary biopolitical linked to the dead as municipal facts as well as continuing markers of ethicized, subjective meanings. The initial fieldwork was carried out between 2005 to 2009. From 2011 unto the present, I have been periodically following different elements of the field, for instance bacteriophages and crematorial technologies, in Delhi and Banaras. I have also included materials from a brief ethnography of crematoria in Denmark (2011) in Chapter 5. More importantly, I have used the interim time to move from my earlier conceptualization of the ethnography conceived within the abstractions of a pure event to that of multiplicity and the ordinary.8 I now present a brief genealogy of how anthropology and philosophy have responded to death in their midst.
A Brief Genealogy of Death and Desire as Thoughts
The usual pairing is that of life and death and the living and the dead. Anthropology, to an extent, has helped shape this equation and most certainly has reproduced and re-enacted it. Once articulated, it became an autonomous binary frame and since then it has been an imperative that anthropology responds to this equation. The responses to this framing, from the ground of anthropology, are varied and this variety may very well be unique to the discipline itself. I will not attempt a chronology here but instead re-create a brief genealogy to underscore some of the ways in which the discipline has responded to this equation. An enduring anthropological engagement has been on the question of organization of society and death of an individual. The lasting image, in my view, is in Emile Durkheim’s (1995) discussion on the subject in his opus—The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. As we move into the book from Durkheim’s rather neatly classified definition of the sacred—as a definite, separated zone distinct from the profane—into the discussion of the negative cult, we encounter the unstable and contagious sacred. The discussion on piacular rites posits this ambiguity of the scared alongside a parallel ambiguity of death as a symbol. This idiom of death is that in which the dead not only radiate out unmoored threats of potentially rupturing the immediate survivors and the extended community from their social anchors but,
significantly, also rupturing the invisible and otherwise barely remembered social structure. Ritualistic communitarian observations reassure a return to normalcy but this dark potentiality hangs onto the social horizon till it latently recedes into the background with the passage of time. In this image, dead and death conjoin against living and life. This image was slightly recomposed by other anthropologists in two altered sketches.
Robert Hertz (1960) detached death from the dead and attached it to one symbolic side of the human body. The left-hand side of the body is seen as a negative, asymmetric, and countervailing force to the right-hand side of life and regeneration. In Hertz, the corpse returns as a social materiality that both unsettles established symbols and also inaugurates symbols of its own—the corpse in itself being such a symbol par excellence.
A yet another enactment of this equation was to harp on the sociological maxim that individuals die society does not. Radcliffe-Brown (1952) writing in the middle of the Second World War may have outlined the most optimistic but bone dry conclusion about the twentieth century in his essay on social structure. This idea was already domesticated in kinship studies to show that the given trope of birth, marriage, and death on a loop may operate as a social-structural cycle in which structural life and the social remain a constant. For all its profound validity, this was and is too simple a disavowal of death as a negligible and empty process in comparison to the obduracy of social structure. One may only look at Rodney Needham’s (1954) mourning essays on the Penan to see how death of children complicates this story in terms of thinking through the relation between the newly dead and the survivors as both a periodic and a protracted question for the community.
A more ingenious statement of this cycle where Hertz and RadcliffeBrown seem to come together was to think in terms of the dead itself participating in its own regeneration into social life through a parallel symbolic enactment by the affected survivors. The fact that from Hertz onwards a mutual presence of death and sexuality could be readily shown in empirical funerary observations gave way to scholars like Maurice Bloch (1982, 1985), Jonathan Parry (1982, 1994), Metcalf and Huntington (1991) affirming and substantiating this link. With the symbolic association of fertility and regeneration firmly on one side, on the other side the link between death and sexuality acquired sideways support in psychoanalysis and cinema, giving rise to a new post-war corpsely mise-en-scène.
