A Flame Beneath The Ground

It would be with a frisson of shock that most Indians receive news of even the existence of such a thing. After all, speak of a Hindu funeral, and the picture that comes to mind is of the pyre, the burning ghats. Don’t these funerary practices—the antyeshti, the lighting of the pyre, the immersing of ashes in a holy river—seem to go right to the heart of what defines a ‘Hindu’, in an emblematic way? One of the things that separate the ‘Hindu’ from the ‘Other’ in popular consciousness? And yet, the more you wade into these dark waters, the more you encounter the outlines of another story, buried in the red loam of the Deccan, and mostly untold in modern times.

Briefly, cremation was not necessarily the norm, and certainly not the exclusive way in which Hindu communities disposed of their dead. Historically, burial seems to have been a fairly widespread practice, and still is among various groups. Prof S. Shettar, former ICHR chairman, in fact offers a maximalist counterpoint to the norm: he says most Hindus do not cremate. As scholars and historians read archaeological and anthropological facts, the picture that emerges is quite plausibly one of a steadily creeping ‘sanskritisation’ (for want of a better word), the spread and adoption over centuries of Brahmin practices that changed the way whole groups of communities began to view themselves. And what is visible now—in extant burial practices—is likely the tip of a whole landmass that’s gone down.

Andy Deemer, the author of the blog, had stumbled on to one part of it. But he was a little bemused: despite the man-bites-dog kind of surprise value it offered, the blogpost itself was around three years old. What had brought on the recent spurt of activity in the comments section? But of course, the funeral of former Tamil Nadu chief minister J. Jayalalitha on December 6 in Chennai. Many Indians, it appears, were intrigued that she was buried and not cremated and struck by the same question that had fascinated Deemer in the first place: don’t all Hindus cremate their dead?

For Deemer, who was then running a startup media company in Bangalore, the Hindu cemetery had been an exciting discovery and he’d put up the pictures on his blog AsiaObscura in 2013 (he’s since moved to the US). “I spoke to several friends while writing that, and after posting it, and heard so many different explanations,” he tells Outlook over e-mail. “One friend told me most Hindus are buried, another told me only some communities buried their dead, but most were surprised to hear there were Hindu cemeteries at all—and insisted I’d found a Muslim or Christian cemetery instead,” he says. Indeed, one recent visitor to his blog left this comment: “Thanks to Jayalalitha, I discovered the practice of burial by Hindus.”

Of course, there are the exceptions that prove the norm. Jayalalitha’s own burial derived more from the rationalist bent of Dravidian politics: most of its past luminaries, from Periyar to MGR, were buried too, in what was more of a symbolic rejection of Brahminical practices. Even within the tradition, there are exceptions: normally young children are buried, so are sanyasis. Spaces like the Topsia burial ground in Calcutta essentially cater to this, a special subcategory within tradition.

But this goes beyond that; it’s a wholly alternate tradition. The full geographical extent of Hindu burial practices in the old days can only be guessed at. As things stand, south India—with its multiple patchwork collisions between Brahminical and other cultures, with its kaleidosco­pic array of adivasis and other groups that sit uneasily within the varna tradition—is perhaps the best place to glimpse its outlines.

A few months before Jayalalitha, the burial with full state honours of Lance Naik Hanumanthappa, who had met with a dramatic death in Siachen, gave notice that his community, the Lingayats, do not cremate—a dead person is buried in sitting posture. The Bangalore District Gazetteer (1990) describes at least two dozen castes or communities that followed the custom of burial. Besides the Lingayats, these included other numerically large communities such as the Vokkaligas (whose many subgroups exhibit some fluidity) and Kurubas which are spread over a large area in the south. Among the Reddi, a section within the Vokkaligas in Karnataka, the Gazetteer notes that some are cremated while others buried.

The Reddys in neighbouring Andhra Pradesh were also among the groups asso­ciated with burial practices—a website offering funerary services lists as many as 40 Hindu cemeteries in and around Hyderabad. Other surviving islands pop up: about two lakh Hindu residents of Rajkanika village in Orissa’s Kendrapara district too bury their dead. And in Kerala, the temple-allied Pisharody community too lower their dead, in a sitting posture, into a pit filled with rock salt—a practice unchanged in the countryside. (Because it required that the family wait for rigor mortis to set in, some of them have started burying in a fully supine position too.)

What exactly marks off the theological division? “Those who do the agni pooja, in marriage and other contexts, they cremate. The rest of the Hindus bury,” says Settar. It’s not an easy generalisation, however, for there can be subtleties even within large caste groups—and often one can see the incursion of cremation. “There are Sudra communities that have accepted Brahminical priesthood, they too cremate. Then there are those with non-Brahminical priests—Jangamas (wandering Shaiva monks) or even community members—among them, the general custom is burial and, occasionally, cremation.”

Some of this complicated narrative goes back to the medieval times, with twists and turns occurring perhaps even in the 14th century. “It depended upon the rulership. For example, the Keladi rulers became Lingayats. When that happened, their subordinates, even their officers, began to follow their customs,” says Settar.

It’s possible to see, in a cross-section of the present, the historical transformation in community practices. Aft­er the Vaishnava wave of Ramanujacharya and the Dasas, many marginalised Dravidian social groups were sanskritised, says Dr K.M. Metry of the Department of Tribal Studies at Kannada University, Hampi. “For instance, cremation is the custom among Gonds in the coastal Uttara Kannada region while it is not so among Gonds in Bidar (north-western Karnataka),” he says. The shift in practice among Gonds on the coast would likely have set in about 200-300 years ago, he reckons. “In wooded regions where you can get firewood easily, one finds many communities that have adopted cremation,” he says.

This schism in adivasi customs—with some observing traditional burial and others having adopted cremation—is a phenomenon that can be observed right from central India (where the Gonds and other groups exhibit this) to the Western Ghats of Kerala. Prehistoric burial sites, found even in the Narmada valley of Gujarat, leave no doubt about what the old norm was. And in Kerala, tribal activist C.K. Janu had launched an agitation in 2005 to claim burial spaces for her people.

Outside the adivasi rubric, the Kodavas of Coorg, who generally don’t see themselves as belonging to the Hindu fold as such and who also don’t have priests officiating at rituals, present a mixed picture too despite a general leaning towards cremation. “Children are never cremated and unmarried youngsters are usually not cremated, they are buried,” says Sowmya Dechamma C.C., assistant professor at Hyderabad University’s Centre for Comparative Literature. However, she can also recount instances of burial during the rainy season when it was not possible to cremate. “What I have observed is that there is no single practice they stick to. It also depends on the dying person’s wish. It’s not dogmatic that one should be buried or cremated,” she says. Many funeral rituals, she notes, too would run contrary to Hindu practices, particularly the invo­lvement of women.

Historically, cremation is seen as a later innovation, as opposed to burial as an early universal custom. The earliest references to Vedic influence, as far as south India is concerned, could date back to around the 3rd century AD. “When Buddhism declined, (the practice of) burial also declined,” says Settar. “But at the same time you can make a distinction between Buddhism and Jainism, although both were heterodox sects. The Jains, by the time they institutionalised, came under the influence of the Vedics,” says Settar, whose study, Inviting Death: Indian attitude towards the ritual death, was published in 1989.

The oldest historical link to burial is, of course, the megalithic culture of the south, some analogies to which can still be observed in the practices of some hill tribes of the Western Ghats. As early as 1909, Edgar Thurston’s Castes and Tribes of Southern India cited an earlier work by Dr C. Macleane about antiquarian remains in the region that included cairns and stone circles indicating burial places. “It has been usual to set these down as earlier than Dravidian. But the hill Coorumbar of the Palmanair plateau, who are only a detached portion of the oldest known Tamulian population, erect dolmens to this day (sic),” the citation goes.

Megalith is a generic term that applies to burial sites intended to safeguard mortal remains for posterity—thousands of such sites have been found in the south. Scholars generally interpret these ancient structures as probably being reserved for those who enjoyed a particular status in society.

“Even in the context of megaliths, we have some evidence of cremation. The dead were cremated, then the excarnation, as we call it, and then the bone material collected and put into these chambers. Such evidence is also there,” says well-known archaeologist Ravi Korisettar. Cremation, he says, is not peculiar to Hindus or any particular community—rather, it is practised by different communities in different cultural contexts.

In the modern urban context, other factors come to influence funerary customs, not least of which is the shrinking availability of land. But the story dates from long before that, only partly visible overground, and waiting to be fully disinterred.