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Beyond death
Updated On: 19 November, 2023 08:12 AM IST | Mumbai | Christalle Fernandes
In her new book, The Final Farewell, writer and researcher Minakshi Dewan talks about the different interpretations of funeral rites and ceremonies in the country. She breaks down the thorough process that led her to examine the deep layers that bind us all
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India has several similarities across the rites and rituals of its funerary customs, which offer relatives a space to mourn and reflect, and a timeframe to process their grief. Pic/Getty Images
Although this topic was a tough one to research, what made it possible was the stories told to me; there were so many stories and anecdotes that came from the death workers and the families. It started as a personal experience I had with death. When I was performing my father’s last rites, I noticed that one of the funeral worker’s eyes were always red, and his voice had a slur. That made me curious about death work and the impact it had on the funeral workers who assisted in the rituals.
When I had gone to Haridwar to update the family records and immerse my father’s ashes in the Ganga, I spoke to the tirath purohit (pandits, locally known as “Pandas”, who maintain the genealogical records of families) and saw the messages left by my grandfather for his father, and so on.
The beliefs about what death really means and the accompanying last rites and rituals are very closely related across religions. For my father, we placed some ganga-jal and tulsi-leaves in his mouth, and read specific verses from the Bhagvad Gita, as a form of pre-cremation rituals. Among Parsis, there is a pre-death ritual, where they put drops of pomegranate juice in the dying person’s mouth. In Islam, specific verses of the Quran are read. It is all to do with the purity of the soul and assisting in a painless passage from this world to the next. The state of mind that a person has during the time of death is the state of mind that the person has after the person dies.
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