ORIENTAL OBSEQUIES
_A Hindoo Burning Ghât_
THE arch-devil death is so unconquerable a foe that the veriest atheist
must easily find it in his heart to forgive the theist who has invented
the consolatory theory of immortality.
If we believe death to be but the imaginary boundary between two lives,
then death ceremonials become very inconsequential. If we believe death
to be the end, the last sad rites assume a terrible significance.
Strangely enough, the most elaborate funeral customs prevail among the
staunchest believers in an after life. But then mankind always has been
inconsistent. Man is born of woman!
In the East I learned something of the _post-mortem_ customs of five
races: the Chinese, the Hindoo, the Parsi, the Burmese, and the
Japanese.
We are apt to think ourselves very advanced—we who are beginning to
believe in cremation. The Hindoos have practised it for thousands of
years.
The funeral pile of a Rajah sometimes costs lakhs of rupees. In Calcutta
I have seen a body burned when three rupees covered the entire expense.
The rich Hindoo may be somewhat exclusive. The Hindoo masses do
everything simply and openly. They bathe out of doors. They pray out of
doors. They cook out of doors. They die out of doors, and their bodies
are burned out of doors.
There are three burning ghâts in Calcutta. The first we visited was the
cheapest and most primitive of the three. It was also the most
interesting; for it was the most eloquent of the Hindoo populace.
It was a longish drive from our hotel to the burning ghât, but the last
half, or more of it, was crowded with interest, for it was along the
bank of the sacred Ganges, and thousands of devout Hindoos were
worshipping.
Only a mile or two inland was Government House, upon the gates of which
crouch two colossal lions—in stone. The British lion is more manageable
in stone than in alien jungle flesh. The British lions of the Calcutta
Government House gates are very impressive, but it is a rare thing to
see them without native crows perched insolently upon their hard heads.
Inside those gates all was a subdued, well-bred hubbub, for Lady
Lansdowne was to hold a drawing-room that night. Anglo-Indian Calcutta
was athrob,—European dressmakers and native dhursies were exceedingly
busy. Here—where we were, on the banks of the Ganges—were myriad human
creatures to whom Government House was but an architectural intrusion.
They were enrapt in the observance of their racial customs; and, to
them, our European customs were less than nothing. It was a little like
a country fair—and greatly unlike. I learned then and there that
specialisation was not a nineteenth century development. The banks of
the Ganges were divided into booths, not by walls, but by occupational
differentiation. We stopped—our underfed horses were glad to stop—we
stopped and watched a, to us, meaningless dance. I thought it more
awkward than suggestive. That may have been because I was ignorant of
its religious meaning. Then we saw a hundred people clustered about a
naked fakir. His unbarbered hair was braided into disgustingly many
plaits. His brown face was painted a ghastly white. He lay naked upon
innumerable spikes (they were dull-edged spikes), and as he bled (in
reality he did not bleed; he balanced himself so beautifully), the
surrounding Hindoos prayed to Kâli, and praised the fakir. We saw
enchanted pigs. We passed inspired fortune-tellers. We stopped to water
our horses at a sacred fountain,—I can’t imagine to what it was sacred,
for I saw our disreputable steeds drink from it, and I saw many
to-the-core afflicted lepers fill their chattees from it. A pile of
common stones based the fountain. The lepers touched them reverently
with their hopeless stumps. It is perhaps well for the human intellect
that “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.”
When the gharri wallah and the sais said we had reached the burning
ghât, we found our inquiring minds intercepted by a crude brick wall. I
have said that the Hindoos burn their dead in the open,—that is true;
but in Calcutta the Hindoo has grown thrifty, and he hedges his burning
ghât with a wall the closed door of which is sternly suggestive of
bukshish.
The sais pounded upon the door with the butt of the whip, kindly loaned
by the gharri wallah. An old Hindoo (he was sucking sugar-cane) opened
the door, after a dignified pause. We gave him a rupee—deferentially,
and passed in. I stumbled upon something, and gave a dainty little
European shriek. The something sat up and rubbed its eyes; it was one of
the burning ghât coolies, and it had been having a sleep. I marked the
holy mud thrice with my Louis Quinze heels, and I stood beside a
smouldering funeral pile. A crack—not unlike the report of a
pistol—drove me back. The heat had broken through the dead man’s skull.
Our brain is our best servant, or our mightiest master, in Europe; in
the land of the Hindoo, it or its casement is the last human part to
protest against the extinguishment of death.
The funeral pile of a poor Hindoo looks very like an ordinary
kitchen-yard wood pile. But if you go up to it—close up to it—you
discover something very like a human form—a glowing charred mass, but
proudly distinguished from every other shape, animate and inanimate. In
the East I tried to look at things reasonably; not from any exaggerated
sympathy with the subjugated native, but because I wished to get from
the East the utmost available information and mental capital.
When I pulled myself together, after shrinking from the first funeral
pile I had ever seen, a phrase flashed to my memory—“Purified as by
fire.”
That is just what the Hindoos do. They purify their dead by fire. The
body is burned until absolutely nothing remains but a handful of
ashes—ashes wholly free from any unclean or poisonous matter.
A second body was brought in. Two coolies carried it upon a rude litter,
woven from coarse grasses, and held together by outlines of bamboo. Two
of the dead man’s brothers followed, chatting pleasantly.
Four stout sticks of wood were driven upright into the ground at the
corners of an imaginary parallelogram, about six feet by two. Between
these four posts were loosely laid sticks of dry, cheap wood. When the
pile was a little more than three feet high, the body was laid upon it.
A dirty piece of crash, of the quality the coolies wear about their
loins, partly wrapt the dead. One of the brothers stepped up and poured
about four ounces of oil over the body. This ensured a quicker
cremation, but was something of a luxury, and not a universal practice.
The oil must have cost about three pies. The other brother paid the
coolies, who shouldered their light empty litter and marched gaily out.
More wood was piled upon the dead. A thin stick was lighted at the other
funeral pile, which was now flaming finely; the second pile was lighted,
and the cremation of the newcomer was begun. The two brothers appeared
very interested in the igniting, and decidedly pleased when it was
accomplished. They squatted down upon the ground, just so far from the
pile that they might feel that their scant, filthy garments were fairly
safe from the sparks, but near enough to watch all the changing phases
of the cremation, and to see easily when it was consummated.
They untied a dirty rag from about a small bundle one had brought with
him. They took out a small earthen bowl; it was clean and shining; and
so was the brass chattee each lifted from his filthily-turbaned head.
The chattees held water; the bowl held curry and rice. They fell to
eating with gusto. And pray why not? They were eating to live. Their
brother was burning to live—to live in Hindoo Paradise. From the Hindoo
point of view his state was far the more blessed; and from all I saw of
coolie life, I am not inclined to think their point of view wrong.
While the dead burned and the living ate, I looked about me, and
thought. I must not claim to have felt much; it was all too strange to
me for feeling to be less than numbed. My first observation was that my
husband and the friend who was with us had withdrawn from my near
vicinity, in the meanest manner. There they stood, on the very edge of
the Ganges, and with their two brave backs squarely turned to the
interesting rite we had come some miles to witness. When I say the
Ganges, I mean of course the Hoogly, which is one of its mouths, and
therefore as sacred to the Hindoos. I thought at first that they were
smoking, because I have noticed that my husband usually is smoking when
he escapes an appreciable distance from my side. They were not smoking;
and our friend afterwards confided to me that they were discussing “the
present condition of European politics,” but discussing it languidly.
Then I saw that the cremation, which had been in full blast upon our
arrival, was completed. There were two distinct kinds of ashes. The
human ashes were carefully gathered into an old chattee. The authorities
do not allow those ashes to be thrown into the river, and I understand
that they never are thrown there in the presence of Europeans. The ashes
of the wood were swept swiftly away. The bits of wood not quite burned,
were frugally collected to be utilised in the next pile.
The two men had finished their curry and rice. They began to play some
native game of chance. They used pebbles for the game itself, and
splinters from the adjacent funeral pile did nicely for counters.
The men—my European men, I mean—came back and said that they would
like to go home. So we went.
Life is so hard for the poorer natives of India that it is not
surprising that they take death so coolly. They have so little to live
for; they live so difficultly, so miserably, so inadequately, that to
them death has ceased to be a devil, and has become, instead, an angel
of deliverance.
The most satisfactory acquaintance I made in Calcutta was with a
physician whose father was a Scotsman and whose mother was a very
high-caste Hindoo woman. Aside from my personal liking for the man, I
found him satisfactory because he could, and did, explain Hindoo customs
to me exhaustively, and also in terms intelligible to my
Europeanly-developed mind. A few nights after we were first at the
burning ghât we asked him how an attempt to introduce Western crematory
arrangements would be received in Bengal. He shook his head. He
personally would welcome the innovation (he, by the way, was a
Christian); he felt sure that some of the better circumstanced, better
informed Hindoos would also welcome it; but the Hindoo masses would
resent it bitterly. The attempt would be foolish, I think. Why force
upon so strongly conservative a people a reform for which they have
absolutely no need? Would it serve any good purpose? I think not. It
would do nothing except widen a breach which we, for many reasons,
should do our utmost to heal.
To me, the system of the Hindoo burning ghâts, of which I saw every
detail, was not nearly so repulsive as the system of the Parsi Towers of
Silence, of which I only saw the outside, and could but too well imagine
the inside. I wish the Parsis would abolish their method of disposal of
the dead in favour of another method, as sanitary, but less revolting.
But the Hindoo custom seems to me entirely commensurate with the Hindoo
needs and the preservation of the general health of India.
I went to the burning ghât once at night. Night is the time of Hindoo
leisure, as indeed it is of most native peoples. The enclosure was
crowded with burning piles.
One night we sailed down the Ganges. The outlines of the attendants of
the dead and of the funeral piles were sharply silhouetted, against the
black background of the dark night, by the flames of the gruesome death
fires; and from that part of the shore sacred to Hindoo worship came the
shrieking and the songs of many thousand half-mad devotees.
In a primitive part of interior India, I once saw a Maharajah’s funeral
pile. It had cost a positive fortune. It was built of expensive spicy
woods and saturated with costly oils. It was richly gilded; and the dead
was wrapped in embroidered silken sheets. For an incredible distance the
air was sweet and pungent and thick with the perfumed smoke.
I remember having thought when a child that the literally sweetest
experience I ever had had was the attending of a High Mass at St.
Peter’s in Rome. But now I must own that the sweetest smell I ever
smelled was the burning of a Maharajah’s funeral pile.