Dead in Banaras An Ethnography of Funeral Travelling 0192864289 9780192864284 Compress

Dead in Banaras
Dead in Banaras
Ethnography of Funeral Travelling
R AV I NA N DA N SI N G H
1
3
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to the halt house
Rauza
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Transliteration, Translation, Kinship Names and Notations xv
Preface xvii
1. Following the Dead: Corpse as Multiple Social Condition 1

The City 2
Bio-medicine 3
The Corpse 3
The River 3
Polythene 4
Bacteriophages 4
Funeral Travelling 5
Dead as Multiplicity 5
The Banaras of Fieldwork 7
A Brief Genealogy of Death and Desire as Thoughts 8
Postcard Bookmark 11
Sighing Speech 12
Domghouse 14
Anecdote 16
Circumstances 16
2. The City Multiple: Place-Names Play Dead 23
Visiting the Place-Name 24
Take the Train 24
Take the Bus 25
Take the Plane 26
More Than a/One Name 27
Irony Lives in Place-Names 29
A Talkative Landscape 31
History 32
Tradition 34
Legend 39
The Time of Before and the Time of Now 42
Temple and University 43
Playing Dead 51
viii Contents
3. Good, Bad Death: Family Necrology and Hospital Sojourn 53
Unfolding Itinerary of Funeral Travelling 55
Father as a Relative 61
Father as a Dying Relative 71
4. Crying and Listening: Forms of Mourning and Community 81
Father as a Dead Relative 82
Dead Father as a Relative 88
Father’s Dead Relatives 97
Father’s Father 97
Father’s Mother 98
Father’s Youngest Daughter 101
5. Conversation of Pyres: Seen and Unseen Passages of
Crematorial Aesthetics and Ethics 105
Eco-Aesthetics 106
Seasonal Variations of Hindu Civilization 106
The Language of Environmental Pollution 110
Complexion of Pyre and the Complexion of the River 114
Polythene and Ganga Ji as Mirror Concepts 116
Forms and Formats of Crematorial Architecture 118
Bacteria, Virus, and National Microbes 122
Ganga Aarti, Pyre Show 125
Thresholds 127
Dead as Multiplicity 127
Dead as Maati (Clay) and Body 127
Touching and Handling the Dead 131
Dead as Madh (Cadaver–Carcass-Carrion) and Laash (Corpse) 131
Cremation Ghat to Aghorashram 134
Dead as Murda (Not-living, Dead) 134
The Dead as Irreducible Surface of Names 137
Care 138
Remains of the Dead 138
Notes 141
Bibliography 155
Index 161
Acknowledgements
The ethnographic and the autobiographical colours involved in the

making of this book run deep. I will limit myself to some hues that illu-
minate 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 un-
spoken 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 rev-
elations. 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 fam-
ilies 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 jour-
neys. 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
x Acknowledgements
my way through the young voice. I also acknowledge the darkness of my

failure to include this sombre and solitary cremation place in my ethno-
graphic 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 en-
gaged 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 ex-
ceptionally welcoming. Rajaram Ji, an in-house sevak resident, meticu-
lously 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 organ-
izational 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 manu-
script. 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 dir-
ections 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 sub-
sist 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 in-
puts 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 com-
ments 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 facili-
tated 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 is-
land, 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 photo-
copy. 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’
xii Acknowledgements
language of North India). Dr. Arvind Kumar Sambal for directing my

attention to Hans Kashi Ank and Hans Aatmakatha Ank. Sincere grati-
tude to the NK Bose Foundation. Specially for the fact that the access
to the foundation’s archive was topped with a homey welcome and deli-
cious 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 c hapter 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 pa-
tience 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. Nana-
Nani 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 ef-
fected 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
Acknowledgements xiii
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 em-
phasis of special characters. However, in the spirit of standardization and
for reading convenience, all non-English words are italicized. The excep-
tions 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 c hapters 3 and 4 standard kinship nota-
tions 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 ef-
fect: 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 so-
cial 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 an-
thropological 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 chron-
icling 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 ex-
ample 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 elec-
tric crematorium, falls short from the typecast. In the years between his
book and my fieldwork, the electric crematorium sat lonely and was spar-
ingly 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 tech-
nologies 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
xviii Preface
way that my ethnography stands in comparison to Parry’s work or can

establish and withstand such an enduring connection. In my own assess-
ment, there is a different dimension to this ethnography that may enable
us to see and make new connections: a devotion to a genealogy of fu-
nerary 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 ethnog-
raphy, 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 auto-
biographical 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, re-
ligious, 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 pos-
sessed 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 contem-
porary. 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
Preface 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-en-
abîme 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 vigi-
lance. 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 sym-
metrical 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 infrastruc-
tures 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 rea-
sonably 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
xx Preface
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 illu-
minated 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 rec-
ognize. 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 trav-
ellers 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 laby-
rinth 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 pre-
sent 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, ampu-
tated 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 substan-
tive 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 con-
tinuing inherence and disappearance of death. I also wish to displace the

2 Dead in Banaras
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 in-
volves 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 dif-
fused 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, un-
like 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 in-
habit 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 atten-
tion 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
Following the dead 3
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 expres-
sion here is through a comparative frame of how home and hospital ex-
pose 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 sim-
ultaneous 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 dif-
ferent 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
4 Dead in Banaras
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 phenom-
enal social solution to all concerns of human dangers inherent in the
morally imagined world. These dangers are far ranging. They may in-
clude 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 per-
spective: 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 bac-
teria 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 di-
mensions 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 anthropo-
logical 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 rela-
tion 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,
6 Dead in Banaras
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 mani-
fest 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 rep-
resentation 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 ra-
ther than collapsing them into one uniform, metaphoric funerary com-
plex 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 ac-
counts 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 recog-
nizing 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 put-
ting 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 com-
plex 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 transcon-
tinental 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 continu-
ously 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
8 Dead in Banaras
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 tech-
nologies, 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 con-
ceptualization 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 cer-
tainly 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 an-
thropological engagement has been on the question of organization of so-
ciety 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 dis-
tinct from the profane—into the discussion of the negative cult, we en-
counter 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 remem-
bered 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 ma-
teriality that both unsettles established symbols and also inaugurates sym-
bols 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 socio-
logical 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 Radcliffe-
Brown 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 associ-
ation of fertility and regeneration firmly on one side, on the other side the
link between death and sexuality acquired sideways support in psycho-
analysis and cinema, giving rise to a new post-war corpsely mise-en-scène.
10 Dead in Banaras
In cinema, the snuff, mondo, and documentary combination of ru-
mour, stranger’s corpse, and visceral graphics depicting death, dead,
and the sexual typified an aesthetic that simultaneously alienated forms
of death from their embedded communitarian settings and activated
these alien forms of dead with desire (see Kerkes and Slater 1995, 2016).
Meanwhile, in psychoanalysis, Freud’s tortured efforts to delink and re-
store sexuality and mourning, Eros and Thantos had led to a complex for-
mulation in Lacan (2004). Taking Freud’s formulation further, in Lacan,
the link with death was not that of desire but a drive, alluding to a re-
petitive, hauntological, continuum that relies only partially on the bio-
logical. For George Bataille (1986), who returns to the Durkheimian
and the Hertzian contributions, the link between sexuality and death
is that of a unifying excess. The tender contrast between Lacan’s drive
and Bataille’s excess is that drive comes to be hosted in bodies and thus
is an immanent- concept while excess is a transcendence- concept.
Returning to Durkheim, what is important in this genealogy is that the
Durkheimian dark potentiality, which could never be fully rounded and
averted and thus held the social structure as stricken in degrees, comes
to be the rather stable idiom in this intense career of death as a twentieth
century concept.
Dismantling this privileging of death as a concept we find in Gilles
Deleuze (1988) the remaking of life as a concept, if at all it can be named
as a concept in the traditional sense of the term. This idea of life is dif-
ferent from the anthropological legacy of life cycle. And what may this
life as a concept be? A possible response is that life for Deleuze is a halting
continuum of relations, territories, and substantiveness that shift in in-
tensities, conceding to the repetition of death but always within the folds
of life, moving from one threshold to another.
Deleuze’s well-known criticism of psychoanalytic plexus of desire
and sexuality stops us from seeing that he also undid the structural split,
showcased in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, of sexuality (de-
sire) and death (drive). While the psychoanalytic split brought in the
admission that the truth of death is different and higher from the truth
of sexuality, Deleuze brought desire and death into the same orbit, and
death never becomes the transcendental site in his work over and above
life. From a different vantage point, Veena Das arrives at a similar affirm-
ation of desire and death sharing common grounds rather than separated
by any fundamental split to make two absolutely distinct realms. Ranging
through her large body of work and variegated engagements with dif-
ferent linguistic materials, the formulation emerges in her early work
(Das 1983) in an analysis of sacrifice within the Hindu ritual imagination.
Extending this proposition through Wittgenstein and readings of Indian
grammatical contributions (Das 1998, 2015a), she arrives at a privileging
of language as life rather than language in life.9 Thus, we find a gradual
acknowledgement of death and desire on the same side, and similarly,
we come to witness how language and life share a form of vitality. To use
Deleuze’s terminology, we come to understand how death is interiorized
in life and is not external to it. In this sense it seems to me that death
can be recorded in its uneven scattering and ambiguous obscuring within
the narrative continuity of the ordinary rather than in an unambiguous
abstraction of an event.10 And, as argued earlier, the dead as multiple
social condition can be the compass to guide us. On this note, let us con-
sider another snapshot, the site of my fieldwork, the funerary complex of
Harishchandra ghat.
Postcard Bookmark
Back in Banaras. The spatial architecture of the ghats in general is such

that although they have their mainland and borders, they are not phys-
ically bound and restricted and thus hold out an open sensory access to
anyone who may visit this part of the city.11 I invite you to hold this small
description of Harishchandra ghat as a virtual postcard into the rest of
the discussion when you need to pause, ponder, and mentally return to
the central station. While you flip this postcard in and out of your mind,
remember that the basic irony of the dead as a surface is that through
the contingent repetition of death, it also provides a continuum with life.
This is a text then dedicated to discerning and showing what that halting
continuum may look like. You can set your eyes on a burning corpse and
a strolling tourist in the same field of vision. Yet, funeral travellers, the
people who accompany their own dead, on their arrival to the ghat are
stunned and transfixed by the place and its proceedings, as if they are
seeing the dead being cremated, up close, for the first time. The dead, in
plural, lying wrapped in shrouds, on the floor, on the bamboo bier, at the
12 Dead in Banaras
edge of the water, set on a pyre, burning on pyres, burnt and waiting, ar-
riving on shoulders of men down the staircase are absent and present,
human and ex-living, one and too many. For the funeral travellers, they
hold power like nothing else possibly can. You can see that a melan-
cholic affect is intensely at work here as it emerges as thought, concept,
and a living materiality. This affect is articulated in this aesthetic setting
through what I call as sighing speech.
Sighing Speech
Take out your Harishchandra ghat postcard. If you gaze long enough you
will notice that not all funeral travellers and certainly not at the same time
are under the spell of the scene. Nor is the effect one and the same, some
go inordinately quiet and some are overtly boisterous. In the evanescent
time period of being stunned by the dead’s presence and being distracted
from it, this spell (the living transfixed on the dead) is received as an af-
fect. We see this affect mirrored in people’s sighs and speech at the ghat.
In my decade long multi-sited fieldwork in Banaras and several re-runs
to the ghats and other crematoria, I have attempted writing several re-
constructions of the field. It is in these writings that these sighs became
very conspicuous. Notwithstanding the dazed presence of some funeral
travellers at the ghat, there is noise, sound, speech, and milling around
as many others spread themselves around in small groups. Some huddle
together to play cards while others chat over chai. One notes the mix of
languages spoken at the ghat: Bhojpuri, Hindi, Urdu, and occasionally
English. A careful observation would further enable one to note the mix
of forms of speech. Sighing speech is one such instance. It is not a genre
like funerary dirges (Khari Birha) or economic bargaining (Domghouse—
a Bhojpuri slang-name for the practice of soliciting as much as one can
get through an unceasing asking) that are performed at the same ghat
by different sets of participants. Sighing speech, to the extent that it is
not generic, stands in contrast to some of the other speech activities of
the funerary, crematorial, and corpsely ambience. There are two kinds of
utterances in sighing speech. One is of enchanted desire where the on-
looker utters loudly in a first person imperative: ‘I will also burn like this,
majestically, with the pyre flames joyfully leaping and the body splitting
and cracking’ (ki hum hoon khoob barab aisainhi dhoo-dhoo chat-chat kar
ke). The other, more common, sighing speech is uttered as an imperative
in third person plural and it is both self-directed as well as to everyone in
general: ‘Eventually, everyone will be here.’ A common Bhojpuri version
goes as: sab ke ghum-phir ke aihijuge aa vey key ha. The Hindi variant goes
as: ghum-phir ke, sabko, yahin, aana hai. Although directed to the self and
the world it is uttered in reciprocity to the dead as a general entity am-
biguously placed between human and non-human, as an object and as a
subject, as one absent and as one present. The emphasis on ‘eventually’ is
mine to highlight how a scepticism is introduced between death and the
desire for it. While the first half of sighing speech makes it appear as if
the funeral traveller might jump into the pyre, the second half of sighing
speech intervenes to express that desire differently, that while one has to
come here, it will be at an eventual time. This funerary speech varies from
the obituary or the memorial service narratives, and thus, how the dead,
self, community, and the world enter into a significatory relation in this
case is worth considering through a closer analysis. The phrase itself is one
of the most mundane sayings within everyday parlance in Banaras with
contextual, varied, usage. It evokes an ironical, playful but law-like wager
to the hearer about how the social works. You will return to this setting-
situation-scene-speaker-subject-ground zero, while you may not know
now, when, and how? At the face of it, the desire to ‘burn majestically’ and
‘returning here as self ’ may appear exclusive to a Hindu crematorial prac-
tice. For sure, such a vertical dimension of meaning can be read in con-
junction with what Veena Das (1983) describes in relation to the Hindu
sacrifice as desire.12 At the same time, we notice quite remarkably how
an everyday phrase of Banaras comes to aid the funeral traveller in both
accepting and explaining death’s logic to himself and the world. This is,
of course, a very terse ground and without the narrative continuity of a
mourner’s relation with the specific dead but it does give us a hopeful way
to think through how the ordinary returns in an uncanny way, even mim-
icking death’s own logic in language, to make comprehensible and accept-
able that which appears as an absolute encounter with life’s alterity.
With this background discussion of the sighing speech, it is easier to
bring to life the empirical scene within the fold of this speech. The dead
at the ghat, who I refer to as the newly dead, showcase this scene. I am
concerned here not so much with the empirical condition of the dead but
14 Dead in Banaras
the dead as social condition. And, it is the empiricism of this multiplicity
of social condition that we are after. Consider, the case of the dead at the
cremation ghat. It may seem obvious that these are the newly dead in the
chronological sense of those who have recently died. True, except the fact
that the background to the dead at the ghat is made by the complex con-
temporary link of hospital, home, and morgue, a link that I explore in the
following chapters. Allow me to describe this social condition of the dead
at the cremation ghat to enable our understanding of the sighing speech.
Domghouse
Domghouse, in Bhojpuri, is a slang name for the economic bargaining that

funeral workers undertake at the ghat which involves a relentless asking for
more than what the funeral travellers may initially offer. Jonathan Parry,
in his classic monograph Death in Banaras (1994), has exquisitely shown
the social and economic organization of funerary work at the cremation
grounds through caste and lineage-based heirship. He shows how the work
of cremation operates through devolution and rostering and how a non-
standardized format of seeking cremation fees is operationalized by the
practitioners. This format is indeed of a painstaking and time-consuming
bargaining between the funeral workers and the funeral travellers. How
may we view Parry’s discussion in light of the fact that this mode of bar-
gaining is an ethicized practice equally used in varied other social contexts,
for example, bargaining for dowry or bargaining for paying less than the
quoted fare in daily commute. We notice that there is a name for it and that
it is a performative practise that continues beyond the cremation ghat into
everyday social relations. The name is ‘Domghouse’. The prefix Dom in this
case is the caste name of the community associated with cremation work.
The participation in the economic bargaining entails an active involve-
ment from the funeral workers and in response a gradually intensifying
reciprocal participation by the funeral travellers. Visualize with your post-
card, the high heat of June at the ghats. More people than usual are dying
as they do in extreme weathers. Most dead are old people. The ghat is full
of colourful biers. The biers of the old are decorated to honour their good
death and auspicious exit. Crowds of funeral travellers are congregating
and dispersing. A new corpse enters the scene. The funeral travellers find
a place to keep the bier on the floor and a few head to the funeral-in-charge
(Dom raja/Chaudhary). Questions are asked, information exchanged. True
to their higher control in the bargaining, the funeral workers ask key socio-
logical questions to weigh the auspiciousness of the death, stature of the
dead and the place from where the funeral has travelled. Like any other
occupation based on behaviour observation and fee improvisation, the fu-
neral workers are mostly spot-on in profiling the funeral travellers. A quote
is made for the sacrificial fire by the senior funeral worker. The funeral trav-
ellers balk. They quote back a much reduced sum. The funeral worker says
the day is exceptionally busy and he does not have time for haggling. He
gestures, wagering, go, go. Time is passing. More funeral travellers join the
bargain. The bargain resumes. The senior funeral manager does not talk
directly to this set of funeral travellers. Instead, he gestures and directs his
workers to get busy with organizing the pyres for which the fee is agreed.
The funeral travellers express agitation. Some senior members chide the
young and the inexperienced, asking them to stop speaking out of turn and
plead their counterpart senior funeral workers to get the whole thing going
for a reasonable sum. The senior funeral worker complies and quotes a new
price. Then pauses, and adds two quintal grains to the quote. Another up-
roar amongst the funeral travellers. Never mind the grain sacks. A new
price is quoted to counter the funeral worker’s quote. A senior member
points at the bier on the floor and urges everyone to wrap up the bargain.
A new urgency settles in. The bargain is in its closing rounds, tempers are
high and then something snaps. It has to be resumed again. By now, it is a
topic of parallel conversations amongst the funeral travellers. There is slap-
stick marvelling and laughter. Then someone announces that it is settled.
A young Dom is allocated to oversee the pyre. Meanwhile wood is weighed
and bought. The worker who sets the pyre is different from the one who
gets the sacrificial fire. The latter enters into another round of bargaining.
Then the worker who sets the pyre and does the work of cremation enters
into another bargain at a final ritual stage.
What makes this practice feasible is that it is generic and it activates
its own sustained continuity. The marvelling over the bargain while the
dead is lying on the floor may appear remote to comprehension but its
sensibility arises from the activity itself and thus it is not unethical or
cruel to the participants. Jonathan Parry evokes ‘shares and chicanery’
(1994: 75–118) to make sense of the whole proceeding but when looked the
16 Dead in Banaras
way outlined above it appears as a self-referential terrain of dramaturgical
practice with its own communicative rationality. Sure, variations make
the bedrock of the continuity of the generic. The grain sacks are suitably
pitched among a host of other desirable things like TV set, bicycle, land,
refrigerator, mobile phone, bottle of rum, and so on. In contrast, the electric
crematorium, on the side, has, in municipal theory, a flat fees charge. But
our concern is, how do we think of the dead in this transactional relation.
Anecdote
Let me narrate a small anecdote from Harishchandra ghat. The protag-

onist is called Postman Baba (PB), who you will meet in c hapter 5. It is
adequate to reveal here that in the day PB distributes postal mail and
at night he is at the cremation ghat gleaning wood from the final stages
of the pyres for what Ron Barrett (2008) calls as ‘Aghor medicine’.13 PB
exuded and helped constitute the awe of the cremation ghat in local lore.
Even the funeral workers thought of his work at the ghat as daunting,
not to speak of his colleagues at the post office. In one of our early con-
versations, pointing to the burning pyres, he told me that this ‘here’, the
cremation ghat, is a place where you once arrive, you forget worldly mat-
ters. That, that is the truth of death. It is the only reality. Then after a long
pause, breaking our mutual spell of gazing at the pyres, he said citing a
proverb in Bhojpuri: ‘the moment you start climbing the stairs away from
the cremation ghat, one, two, three, steps, all you are thinking, already, is
how to rig your weighing scales so that you can sell the quarter less than
one as quarter more than one’ (jab le aie jug bada, ee hey sat ba, mood
la, seedhi dhaila, ek, doo, teen, ki hum kaise teen pao ke ser bhar ka ke
baichab). As an eventuality is being realized on a pyre, we notice that a
new ‘eventually’ of life has sprung afresh and it is in this contingent fluc-
tuation of intensities that the halting social continuum lives.
Circumstances
The enactment of the dead as multiplicity makes the spirit of this book and
the chapters are lined in a cadence of descriptions based on my following
of the dead in Banaras. I initially drew the concept of ‘circumstance’ from
Robert Gardner and Ákos Östör (2001) as described in their conversa-
tion on the making of the ethnographic film Forest of Bliss (1986). The
duo use it in relation to the ideas of chance and intention. Subsequently,
I found the Italian counterpart circostanza. The Italian ‘circo’ is similar to
the English ‘circum’ but ‘stanza’ in Italian has an architectural reference,
meaning a ‘room’, a ‘standing and stopping place’ or a ‘waiting and resting
place’. I borrow this evocation into the English circumstance to refer how
the movement of circum blends into the contemplative stations of room,
waiting or standing. The book develops this idea further with the help of
‘rest post’—an architectural shelter created in the city for funeral trav-
ellers to rest before resuming the travel with the bier on their shoulders
(see chapter 3)—as a site of contemplating with the ‘dead’ in between.
The chapters of the book use the circumstances described as their ethno-
graphic stanza or as rest-posts of language and death. A brief summary of
the chapters follows.
Chapter 2 is on the city of Banaras. Much has been written about the
city, in fact, it is one of the most researched city in North India. This long-
standing interest of scholars can be better understood if one imagines the
city, one of the oldest in the world, as potentially instantiating a direct
continuity between age old civilizational Indic forms and the archetypal
Hindu world. Deep into their subject studies, however, most scholars
realize that this was a lure and they were played by the city. That the city is
such an active, playful, partner in the making of knowledge, such a recog-
nition further fuels the interest of scholars. This, in turn, may explain the
life-long association of innumerable scholars who are harnessed to the
place while plugging away anywhere in the world. I admit, going through,
the same rites of passage. But, isn’t this a character of any city? Of course, it
is. After all, ‘the city’ is a fetish before it is a character and as a character its
fetishes are all too real because they are walking and breathing epistemes.
Consider Banaras as the city of lights (of spiritual illuminations) or the
city of liberation (from re-deaths). Consider it publicly exhibiting open
mass cremations turning the place into a death town but also enjoying the
epithet of the holy city of Hindus. Consider it Hindu for the temples and
the lore, the traditional and modern Sanskrit learning centres, and the
meditative cows as street pets but then you have the Buddhists, Muslims,
Jains, Theosophicals, Kabirpanthis, Ravidasis, Catholics, Protestants,
18 Dead in Banaras
Sikhs, Vaishnavs as dwellers and owners of the place. Consider it the in-
dustrial town of saree weavers and wooden toys, but then it also has a
vibrant market for sex work. One of my field sites, a local archive, N.K.
Bose Foundation run by city sociologist Baidyanath Saraswati was in-
strumental in providing me a good halt.14 This chapter was conceived
through a feverish engagement with the N.K. Bose archive and later grew
substantially in conversation with other texts outside the archive. The key
concern of the chapter is to locate the city in its many names. In noticing
that the city is simultaneously referred as Kashi, Varanasi, Benares, and
Banaras, in the contemporary, the question worth pursuing is what are
the implications of such a pluralized place–name usage? Is this one city
known by many names or it is many different cities in its many names? If
the latter is a possibility then what kind of social relation these names and
these cities may have for the speakers, imagined audience, and different
publics? I show in the chapter that the different names play dead and they
do not unite into any one place but rather the maintenance of difference
becomes a sheltering system.
Chapter 3 unfolds the chronology of my initiation into fieldwork in
Banaras that coincided with the death of my father in the same city. As it
turned out he was hospitalized and cremated at the places that I eventually
went on to do my fieldwork. I had already decided upon Harishchandra
ghat as my central field site, much before his arrival in a private city hos-
pital. Harishchandra ghat, as I have remarked earlier, houses both the
manual and electric crematoria. The sociology of this mixed premise
held promise given that manual cremation has been studied rigorously
by Jonathan Parry. The hospital ethnography described in the chapter
emerged through my stay by my father’s side at the hospital. Unlike the
cremation ghat where post father’s cremation I could still persist doing
fieldwork, in the case of the hospital, it involved a series of failed attempts
at sustaining it as a field. This is the reason that I do not have an extensive
account of the hospital morgue as I would have liked. These aborted at-
tempts were early signs of the field forcing me to find alibis to my intended
places and modes of study. I have made the jaggedness visible through
this chapter. You will notice that in some cases I have managed to prevail
and in others have tellingly failed. Take the following instance. In my ini-
tial rounds at the cremation ghat, I did not take extensive notes or use a
recorder for obvious disciplinary reasons of trust and rapport building.
When I returned to the field after my father’s death, I simply could not
bring myself to ‘interview’ the funeral travellers. I was not helped by the
fact that funeral travellers are a mobile population and in transit. While it
may appear, with the general conviviality of the place, that one can easily
enter into a conversation about death, the few times I tried I accomplished
awkward impasses. So, I work with few individual voices of the funeral
travellers. There can be no substitution for this lack, although through
a different meticulousness, I participated in a method of listening to the
place through close observation of patterns, speeches, and practices at
the ghat. I do think that these descriptive accounts can be a critical con-
tribution if we are ready to expand our understanding of phenomenology
of death and the dead. Let me return to the moment of my father’s death
that constitutes the substantive description of this chapter. I must con-
fess that in its strange logic, this return to the same set of places where
my father died and was cremated has been the reason why this account
had seemed impossible to write and also why it eventually got written.
Initially, I was thinking of this ethnography by excising his death out of
it or by including certain details that I could not help but write. As I re-
wrote, his death found more and more space in my writing. His presence
in fact called in a host of his and my dead relatives into the descriptions
and the result is this chapter on such a necrology. An autobiographical
accent in anthropology may seem to diverge from the classic, consensual
scheme of methods and expectations with which aspirants are sent to the
field. However, it is perhaps a testimony of the same discipline that when
it sees damaging consequences of its textbook research methods it allows
you to bend the inherited knowledge so as to register, record, and archive
this damage too. After all doing fieldwork is one form of doing of the so-
cial. In this sense, I think of this chapter as staking of the autobiographical
rather than strictly auto-ethnographic.15
Chapter 4 can be read as a necrological account of the dead as kin.
In his little great book, American Kinship, David Schneider is tellingly
asked by some of his interviewees, as he notes in the chapter on ‘Relative
as a person’, if he wants to know about ‘the dead ones too?’ (Schneider
1968: 69). This chapter can be read as both saying ‘yes’ to that question
and also instantly turning around like a miming joker to provide an
elaborate response to it, becoming that surveyor and becoming that re-
spondent in turn. The social condition of the dead that emerges here is
20 Dead in Banaras
that of recursivity—in the ways in which the dead congregate around
their kin and also how that congregation builds an anticipation that the
living are going to die the same death as their dead, with a different mise-
en-scène of course. We see in this chapter that the foreshadowing of one’s
own death and recognition of the dead as hauntological extension of
ourselves do not necessarily cancel out or diminish potentials of life but
sustain a low echo of permanent mourning into the everyday as invisible
linings of that potential. Perhaps, that is the reason why potentials can be
recognized but never fully realized.
Having followed the corpse to the hospital, morgue, and home, we re-
turn to Harishchandra ghat again, as our postcard settles into a still life. In
this final chapter, an ethnography of the word parvah is attempted. This is
how local funeral travellers describe the process of cremation compared
to how the municipality names the process at the ghat. The municipality
uses terms like ‘shav-dah’ (burning-the-corpse) and in regular par-
lance, terms that connote last rites or burning include antyesthi, sanskar,
jalana, and phookna. The metonymic standing for the metaphoric is not
an ethnographic surprise but the fact that the name of the process is a
multiplicity has parallels with other silent shifts that have come about in
relation to how river Ganga is now affectively reimagined and used in
Banaras. That is the reason I treat parvah not so much as a metaphor but
as a minor language that in visualizing a relation between language, death
and the dead also leads us to circle back to the relation between the river
and social collectives through very different metonymies: bacteriophages,
polythene, Ganga Aarti, cremation pyres on one hand and the link be-
tween Bhojpuri parvah and its two companion words, Sanskrit–Hindi
pravah and Urdu parvaa/parvah on the other. The attempt here is to dis-
cuss the terms available to think of the river, owing to spectres of indus-
trial pollution, in a language of plain mortality and cosmic immortality. It
is here that Banaras as a city and civilizational topos comes in for a socio-
logical comparison with some of my findings from a brief ethnography of
crematoria in Denmark. I undertake this comparison through what I call
as a ‘conversation of pyres’, an idea that I borrow from the river’s poet
Gyanendrapati (1999: 69). It is also here that I show how Banaras, the en-
during stone motif of Hindu civilization, undergoes a periodic renewal
when the river swarms with floods every year. Finally, in showing the us-
ages of parvah pervaded by Sanskrit, Hindi, Bhojpuri, and Urdu semantic
imports drawn collaterally from pravah and parvaa/parvah, I return to
the concern of multiplicity of names. In case of the side-shadowing of
Banaras, Benares, Kashi, and Varanasi, we find that the sliding of the city
names provides shelter to difference. In case of parvah (Bhojpuri), pravah
(Sanskrit/Hindi), and parvaa/parvah (Urdu), the same difference is ob-
scured within a funerary canvas of language and death.
The chapter also builds upon the classic discussion in anthropology
about dead and their names. While earlier chapters already ground this
concern, it is here that we witness not just an ontology of how proper
names are lost at death but also how the corpse comes to occupy different
generic names as it moves form one threshold to another. The socio-
logical matrix of funerary work, municipal handling of the dead at the
electric crematorium and other associated concerns find mention here.
The study of these generic names come closest in exhibiting a potential
in which the dead can be recognized as collective subjects and objects.
This register is different from how the dead as kin is seen as a relational
subject. The dead who returns home as a name is different from the dead
who remains in between the ghat and the river. Different social imagin-
ations are invested onto these two different entities. Anthropologists have
rightly approached the meaning of death by following the route of the
funeral, from the cremation ghat to home. I have done the same in this
chapter, but I also do the converse. I stay at the ghat after the respective
funeral travellers are gone, and I record their dead, like any other dead, as
social relations of remainders.
The remains of the dead in Banaras come to occupy multiple
names: clay (maati), dead animal (madh), divine body (shav) and the in-
animate (laash and murda). However, as is perhaps evident, the names of
the dead run parallel to that which is unnamed or unnameable amongst
the dead. This brings us to the centerstage of an important ritual associ-
ated with cremation in Banaras, that is, immersing the saved (through the
process of cremation) bone-stump of the dead in the river as the conclu-
sive endpoint of any given cremation at the ghat. This bone-stump does
not have a name. However, this unnamed bone-stump is unmistakably
recognized as the person of the deceased by its respective funeral trav-
ellers. This affective recognition sustains the continuity between the de-
ceased person and the remnant bone-stump saved for parvah as of the
same person. The bone-stump (referred by the funeral workers as ‘it’ of
22 Dead in Banaras
parvah) is then immersed into the river, marking the end of cremation.
However, this impoverished materiality of the person returns as a social
relation in the form of the name. The name returns, haltingly. The dead
person lost her name when her corpse came to the ghat becoming the gen-
eric maati, body, shav, murda. But when the funeral travellers go back to
the dead person’s home after immersing her bone-stump (as her person)
in the river, it is her name that they regain through the remaining death
rituals at home. It is the same name that would act as the affective sub-
stance in the rigorous time-bound mourning rituals at home. Here we go
back to another classic question in anthropology—how may we imagine
the idea of community with respect to the name as the substance of the
dead? Concurrently, there is another line of enquiry that runs apart from
the community question and that is tied to the non-home presence of the
dead. How do we begin to think of the unnamed remainder immersed in
the river after the funeral travellers are gone? What registers of human
can be evoked to think of this space between cremation and the river
Ganga linked with the archive of these remainders? A hint of an answer
lies in recognizing that cremation is a process for Hindus in Banaras not
the name of the process of last rites. The name, lost amongst other names
that equate it with the process of cremation or burning, is the Banarasian/
Bhojpuri word parvah. The word parvah in its everyday usage in Banaras
alludes to a gesture towards remembrance and care. Thinking of this as
an alter-name for cremation in Banaras, I venture into the final chapter to
locate a link between language and death to reveal how care is involved in
the funerary imagination with which the unnamed remainders of multi-
tude of dead are left in the sanctuary of the river Ganga in a time of indus-
trial pollution.
2
The City Multiple
Place-Names Play Dead
Some ethnographic customs involve simple routines. One such routine

entails that the place of study is indicated at the outset—and for good
reason too. Like other routine practices, such a practice conveys a sense
of the real co-ordinates in the reader’s mind. The fact that this place is on
the map, in the atlas, in this world, and can be identified as a dot on the
globe or more intimately seen and felt through a google search harnesses
the descriptions into an ascending sense of the real. Similarly, those in
the business of anthropology must locate their study within the matrix
of prior studies of the same place, and any such new study is weighed
word by word, image by image, argument by argument for a greater ap-
proximation to that same old place. This is the case even when sensitive
accounts conjure up a fictional name for their local sites of research while
retaining the real name of the broader location. This holds true in the
contemporary where places and people may be tied up with many equally
real, virtual locations. Part of the reason for this practice to have become a
stable custom is because place-names, even as they tend to have changed
over time, are considered with the unilateral function of designating
an overall physical setting within which identifiable social actions take
place. Now, could it be that like other proper names, place-names may
also have a complex social relation with what they are supposed to des-
ignate, the place? Could it be that place-names may enact very different
places, including places other than the physical locality with which they
are associated? Could it be that place-names like the dynamic places they
refer to may have their own dynamism? Could it be that place-names
may create and sustain their own realities rather than be strictly reliant
on the physical boundaries that they are supposed to refer to? And finally,
how may one answer these could be questions when we have more than

24 Dead in Banaras
one place-name simultaneously designating the place of study? Or, even
further, how about when each of these place-names highlight difference
within the place, but may also evoke, when needed, common referenti-
ality of the lived and the living?
Welcome to the ancient–contemporary city of Banaras, Kashi, Benares,
and Varanasi. You are invited here to turn the looking glass called place-
name into its own mirror. While keeping sight of the enduring custom
mentioned earlier, allow me a slight change in this ethnographic itinerary
as I take you to visit the place-name(s) as our first stop in the journey to
the postcard place. Let me evoke the different itinerant ways in which the
city is reached and experienced.
Visiting the Place-Name
Take the Train
Imagine taking the train from New Delhi railway station to the city. The
travelling ticket will tell you that you are going to Varanasi. The train you
will board could be the ‘Kashi-Vishwanath’ or the ‘Shiv-Ganga’ express.
Both these overnight trains have hand-painted plaques inscribed and in-
stalled on the first and the last coach with their respective names, train
numbers, and to-from destinations. The destination plaques would offi-
ciously read as ‘New Delhi to Varanasi’ in both English and Hindi. Once
comfortably inside the train, and on your seat, a co-passenger is likely to
ask you gently: Are you going to Banaras? Your reply, of course, would
be, yes. In the morning, the train nearing the destination city, some co-
passengers, always up before you, would wake you up with their early
morning gushing at the sight of familiar landmarks. You are likely to see
and hear someone exult and say: here we are, back to Kashi nagari! Once
at the destination station, you will notice a new shiny steel hoarding with
the words ‘Varanasi Junction’ beautifully hand painted in black letters
against an amber yellow backdrop in three different languages—Hindi,
English, and Urdu in that respective order. Venturing towards the exit
gate you will be greeted with a small wave of voices: Welcome to Banaras,
hotel, city tour? And then through your stay you will have these names,
The city multiple 25
Banaras, Kashi, Varanasi, and occasionally Benares, bidding you to the
place, the place you would really like to go to while you are right there in
the city.
Take the Bus
You have had enough of the city and want to explore the nearby towns.
You are directed to the bus terminal—there are, in fact, two. One is a
private-run inter-district terminal that operates on the efficiency of an
art form that can be called as commuter snatching. The operation is
very simple. The bus that fills itself first with passengers snatched from
a crowd of potential travellers goes first. On the other hand, the staid,
state-run bus terminal is its absolute contrast. Once you have occu-
pied your seat in the private-run bus, you will notice that the destin-
ation is inscribed on the front windscreen glass with white chalk. Into
the journey you will realize that the other descriptions like ‘non-stop’,
‘super-fast’, and ‘luxury coach’ inscribed alongside the destination
were actually white chalky lies. For the return journey in the evening,
it is likely that the same bus will be waiting for you with that knowing
bus-art smirk about your return to the city. The commuter-snatching
bus ‘conductor’ will be shouting, ‘Banaras’, ‘Baanaraas’! The front
windscreen glass will have, the same white lies—‘non-stop’, ‘super-
fast’ ‘luxury coach’—etched on it with the same white chalk alongside
the name of the destination ‘Varanasi’ in Devnagari script. Now sup-
pose you decide to take the staid state bus instead of the private-run
transport for the return journey. Your bus will have a small, cozy, per-
manent hand-painted strip lodged into a slot at the forehead of the bus
stating that it belongs to ‘Kashi Depot’. The ticket in your hand will
have Varanasi inscribed on it in dot-matrix print, along with a mys-
tical looking icon of the state bus transport service. The conversations
you will overhear through your commute back will have ‘Banaras’
in it, smattered with great enthusiasm. ‘Banaras’ this, ‘Banaras’ that,
‘Banaras’ like no other ‘Banaras’. Once back in the city, you will like
it more than before. But, decide now, which place you wish to go to?
Kashi, Banaras, Varanasi, Benares?
26 Dead in Banaras
Take the Plane
A short flight from Delhi would take you to the Lal Bahadur Shastri
International Airport that caters to the city. Like the railway station and
the bus terminal, your official destination is Varanasi. After landing
and once inside the airport, you will see big, laminated Indian National
Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) maps positioned in-
side the waiting area. These maps belong to a genre called ‘sacred geog-
raphy maps’, and right at the top you will find embedded in bold font
the words: ‘Courtesy INTACH Varanasi’. The maps will typically have
prominent temples and ghats of the city marked with small spinning
top signs matched by a short description of the sites on the side margin.
The right side of the map depicts the city river Ganga ji. Towards the
lower end of the river you will find inscribed the words ‘Banaras’ in
Roman and Devanagari scripts. Above the inscribed names is the depic-
tion of the river goddess, seated on her animal vehicle, the long snouted
Indian alligator, Ghadiyal. Outside the airport hall, with your luggage
in tow, you will come across a ‘photography/selfie corner’. The corner
will have a well-known miniaturized motif to represent the city. Sample
this motif—a row of ghats and the river Ganga ji running parallel to the
ghats with its numerous temples. A small marble slab pointing to the
tableaux of the city reads as follows: ‘Ghats of Benaras: Reverberating
with life, colour, culture, tradition, spirituality and religion, the es-
sence of Varanasi is best felt among its 87 ghats. The prominent Ghats
of Varanasi are Dashashwamedh, Manikarnika, Assi, Maan Mandir,
Scindia, Harishchandra . . . and many more.’
Amongst the prominent ghats you will find a mention of the
Harishchandra ghat, and you are here, to our postcard place. Be that as it
may be, what is common to taking the train, bus, and the plane is that you
will be bound to, rephrasing Annemarie Mol’s coinage of the ‘body mul-
tiple’ (2002), a city multiple.1 I do not mean here that the plurality of the
names make it a city multiple.2 What I wish to bring to your attention is
how the names enact a multiplicity in their usage. From the preceding ac-
count, it is likely that you might think of the city as a unique wonderland.
But that may not hold true because most of what is described above tallies
with the anthropological knowledge of how place-names are indeed used
as proper names. To identify what might be slightly unique in our case,
let us encounter how proper names, including place-names, have been
understood within different domains of social life.
More Than a/One Name
It is a well-known signature of human socialities that often enough

more than one proper name come to occupy the social scene very deftly.
Relatives are known by their social positions and formal names, but the
same people are also known through names (or more general terms) of
endearment and avoidance. School and work socialities are typical little
factories that produce alternate names for peers and characters endlessly
and are by no means alone in such social productions. Similarly, terms
of endearment used amongst kin, be they conjugal couples or (grand)
parents and children, are known to anthropologists as a human universal.
In a sombre essay on mourning names, Rodney Needham (1954) brings
to the fore the case of death-names being used amongst the Penan. Claude
Lévi-Strauss (1966) systematized Needham’s findings in his essay ‘The
Individual as a Species’ to arrive at a universal scheme of classification as
a social and cultural fact of human existence. Based on Lévi-Strauss’s sys-
tematization of Needham’s discussion, every Penan can be described as
having at least three kinds of names at different junctures of his/her life-
time. First, autonyms, names of the self. Second, teknonyms, names that
are descriptors of a certain dyadic kin relation, usually between parents
and children. Third, necronyms, names taken up at the time of death in
the family. Amongst the Penan, on the occasion of death in the family, the
autonym is shed and a name describing death of certain specific relative
is adopted. Similarly at a new birth in the family, the teknonym and the
autonym are reconsidered and contextually readopted. Following from
the brief imaginary passages on the train, bus, or the plane, our interest
here is more in terms of the usage of proper names. So we will not dwell
on Lévi-Strauss’s strain on classification as a universal human faculty and
human product but glean what may be useful to our discussion. Allow me
to paraphrase Lévi-Strauss’s own conclusion that is disapprovingly dir-
ected towards the common, analytical proposition of proper names be-
coming, through their signifying function, unfailing pointers of things.
He says that it is rather the case that the ‘passage’ from signification to
28 Dead in Banaras
pointing is not unidirectional and is ‘in fact discontinuous’. He further
states that the limits of this discontinuity are a cultural matter that sets the
‘thresholds differently’ (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 215). In other words, we must
tap and hear each name—Banaras, Benares, Varanasi, and Kashi—to find
out more about the discontinuous collective that they make and what and
how these thresholds stabilize and improvise. Let us call this a maximal
approach to an understanding of how each name makes the passage into
a discontinuous surface of history and myth. I call it maximal because it
invariably relies on the seemingly endless narrative labyrinth of myth and
history. For the sake of clarity, let me divide the discussion into two parts.
The first part discusses the question of place-name through existent
studies on the subject, while the second is a long discussion on the so-
cial relation of history, tradition, legend, and myth to each of the names,
Banaras, Varanasi, Kashi, and Benares. Meanwhile, from Needham and
Lévi-Strauss it is possible to visualize that while one aspect of the social
usage of proper names depends on a one-to-one referential correspond-
ence, the same names also operate as rich sites of intertwined reflexive
usage that allow different names to slide and substitute each other under
different contingencies. Importantly, the latter social usage does not in-
clude only the continual living link between the name and the named en-
tity, but it also involves a reference to the absent (erstwhile named entity).
In this sense, Needham’s original discussion in his Penan essays goes well
beyond the tenet in anthropology about a dead person losing its name
to suggest that names, in fact, constitutively, carry the dead as a social
condition. To theorize this process where names perform this work of
social sliding, we can find some help in Alf Hiltebeitel’s (2001) discussion
of the epic, Mahabharata. In his discussion on the narrative techniques
used in the epic, Hiltebeitel suggests that apart from fore-shadowing
and back-shadowing, it is ‘side-shadowing’ that ‘allows the shadow of
an alternate present to fall on the episodes’ (Chatterji 2012: 264).3 We
see that this ‘side-shadowing’ enlivens a contingent and complex possi-
bility of social outcomes while providing different potential chances to
characters and social situations. Borrowing from Alf Hiltebeitel, let us
use the term ‘side-shadowing’ for the ways in which the social usage of
names Banaras, Kashi, Benares, and Varanasi enliven the city multiple.
This enlivening contains the aspect of dead as a social condition because,
as we shall see through this chapter, the idea of history of the city into
the contemporary is predicated on how certain names were discarded
and new ones were adopted. What is at stake then in such a place-name
sliding and ‘side-shadowing’?
Irony Lives in Place-Names
Keith Basso in his Wisdom Sits in Places (1996) wonders about what is sen-
sorily entailed in Apache Indians’ ‘place making’ with ‘descriptive names’
and whether the process has anything more to do than having a ready-
to-hand referential distinction of one place from another. He argues for
a linguistic position where ‘meaning’ is seen as perpetually ‘emergent’ in
specific utterances and ‘particular’ usages (1996: 76). Substantiating the
idea that place and name may have complex mediation through historical
narratives, cultural pedagogy of morality, notions of personhood, sen-
sory affiliation, idioms of death and the dead, he notes that there is an
ironical way in which referentiality itself gives way to a multiplicity of re-
lation between a place and a name.4 In fact, borrowing from T.S. Eliot and
Seamus Heaney, he says that place-name as a shorthand can operate as
‘resonating ellipses’ (1996: 77). Following Basso, we see that a relation of
excess binds the place-name and its referential capacities and such is the
paradox that they may have an equipoise only in ironical stances.
Diana L. Eck’s later writings (1999, 2012) focus on this cryptic associ-
ation between place-name and the place. Rejecting literal readings of sa-
cred geography, she argues that instead of indexing the city as the ‘Hindu’s
holiest city’ in the vein of Mecca and Jerusalem, if one begins to see it as an
‘imagined landscape’ then a whole different social constellation of regis-
tering and feeling the world of Hindu beliefs can be productively brought
to the fore. In that case, one will notice that Kashi and its sacred geography
must not limit us to that particular empirical place in North India. In fact,
the stories can actualize the place Kashi in very different regions than the
North Indian city. This is how one must approach the well-known mytho-
logical fact that Kashi exists in all four directions: east, west, north, south.
And, at each place, the respective Kashi is tied into local stories and sa-
cral and non-sacral socialities. Eck succeeds in showing that the North
Indian ‘city of light’ cannot be equated to Jerusalem and Mecca, without
deep qualifications, as a singular empirical location. Rather, the city is
30 Dead in Banaras
portable through its name at the collective and the individual level. The
place can be actualized where the place-name is invoked. Let us see two
contrasting instances of the usage of the place-name Kashi to under-
stand Eck’s delineation better. One, recapitulating Eck, if the four car-
dinal directions, north, south, east, west in present day India have their
own Kashis’ then how do we think of Kashi as an actual empirical place?
Two, how do we make sense of the strict South Indian ban on the utter-
ance of the name ‘Kashi’ during auspicious occasions? The name Kashi,
it is believed, should not be uttered since such an invocation might
actualize an inauspicious death-event because it is the name of that
death pilgrimage place in North India.5 We note in these two counter-
instances two different properties of the invocation of the name Kashi.
It is unmistakable that while both Basso and Eck are illustrating that
social usage of place-names are tied to irony and imagination, they are
also showing that the same names have strong referentiality. In Basso’s
case, the place is indeed sensorily moored into an empirical location,
but the place-name operates with multiple designations. In Eck’s case,
the place-name has such a strong referential performative capacity that
it can effect the empirical place wherever that actualization is carried
out. Deepak Mehta (2015) in an essay on another North Indian city,
Ayodhya, makes an aspect visible that is not considered in Basso and
Eck’s versions. He asks: how does one begin to understand not just the
enlivenment of place-name essences but also the deadening of some
of those elements of the name. He argues on the lines that just as the
usage of names bring about the ‘activation’ of the polythetic texture of a
place-name, similarly the (non/mis)usage of the names can ‘de-activate’
that living capacity so as to circumscribe the referential limits to a re-
stricted symbol (2015: 14). Indeed, discovering that such a deactivation
or deadening is realized within the juridical context in Mehta’s reading
of Ayodhya and its namesake sacral complex, we should not be lured
into thinking that it is only within the realms of political renaming of
places that such a deactivation might happen. That said, my sense with
respect to Banaras is that such an activation and deactivation are inte-
gral to the everyday usage of place-names. It is precisely this aspect that
I wish to bring to our attention here. Compared to Basso and Eck, what
we gain from Mehta’s discussion is undeniably the question: what re-
stricts and limits the spiralling relation between one name and another?
And, if one were to pose this in the context of Eck’s illustration of the
city Kashi as portable, the questions that her account does not ask are
the following: How do we think of the significatory relation between
Kashi, Banaras, Benares, and Varanasi? Is Kashi equivalent to Banaras,
Varanasi, and Benares? If it is not, which clearly seems to be the case,
how do we begin to think of this empirical place called Kashi that is also
Banaras, Benares, and Varanasi? Basso, Eck, and Mehta’s descriptions
help us notice two important distinctive features to which we turn now.
One, it is not one-on-one place-name and place reference but a com-
peting set of place-names referring to a place-multiplicity (real and vir-
tual) that is our case. Two, we find that as the names in their social usage
slide, they bring about not a double referencing that may thicken the
referential connection but in each instance they rather introduce social
difference. Anticipating this feature of difference and its social poten-
tial, I have introduced Alf Hiltebeitel’s (2001) idea of ‘side-shadowing’
adapted to our case. With this background, let us enter into a suitably
long discussion about how we may understand social difference and its
side-shadowing in the usage of Banaras, Benares, Kashi, and Varanasi.
I present an ethnography of diverse textual material to showcase how
the city names are implicated into a narrative multiplicity while ac-
quiring major and minor characterizations. This approach to studying
names can be thought of as a maximal approach because it does some-
thing counter to the very ease of usage of names where the simple fact
of using names is precisely to abbreviate (or even side-step) the ex-
panse of past into a ready-at-hand designation. The ease of usage and
name sliding is what we wish to understand but to be in a position from
where that can be apprehended we must go through this exercise of
the maximal approach. My efforts here are not centred at representing
the city but in deepening the other side of names where we see names
inaugurating a generative surface of perlocution.
A Talkative Landscape
The American humorist Mark Twain (1897), after visiting the city in the
late nineteenth century, wrote about ‘Benares’ that it is ‘older than his-
tory, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old
32 Dead in Banaras
as all of them put together’ (1897: 480, emphasis added). On a good day,
the sarcasm about the ‘looks’ in Twain’s quote would be outwitted by the
local humour of the city. However, in present day Banaras, the alliterative
sentence plucked out of the original text —much like the ghat–temple
tableaux mentioned earlier in the imagined plane journey—is displayed
at several prominent places in the city. In this receptive celebration, per-
haps it is the allusion to the grandeur of the olden old that touches a chord
with people. Or maybe it is something even simpler—the endearing idea
of discovering value of self through the love of another. Following this
present-day reception of Twain in the city, let us use his reverse chron-
ology of history, tradition, legend, and the time of before to put together
an assemblage of the city multiple through the surface of its names.
History
In his locally celebrated text Kashi ka Itihaas (History of Kashi),

Motichandra (2003 [1962]) laments that the city is primarily tied to as-
sociations of Hindu pilgrimage and several other indices like that of
industry, economy, architecture, knowledge, art, succession of rulers,
and variegated religious cosmologies are flattened out in such accounts
(2003: 1). He thus echoes a common refrain often asserted in the late
twentieth century about the ‘orientalist’ construction of the city as the
paramount place of Hindu pilgrimage. Motichandra’s lament is equally
about the local indifference to ‘history’ as against the supposed readi-
ness to identify with myth. In his own account, the alterity of history
and myth is registered to claim that the city, as the earliest records show,
was not called Kashi, and was not of any religious significance, least of
all in Hindu terms, as it is known in the contemporary (2003: 25). This
is one story of the beginning of the place that stands in sharp contrast to
the much-adulated account of the fish-shaped place Kashi aligned atop
lord Shiv’s trident and thus protected from an ominous future time of
destruction and crises (2003: 2). A close reading of the text, however,
shows Motichandra cautiously pitching his account adjacent to these two
originary idioms. He is sceptical of the radical claim of either. The book is
self-consciously written in post-colonial Hindi, with the author declining
the publication of an English translation (2003: xvii).
A rich tapestry emerges in Motichandra’s account where the familiar
twentieth century, city of his own time starts resonating with names,
images, and practices from that of the long past. This long past is inter-
preted using varied sources that include archaeological findings, Vedas,
Puranas, Jatakas, oral testimonies, anecdotes of acquaintances, fieldwork,
and museum records. The repetitive trope of city names utilized to do the
work of narration in the text emerges in the following way. The book is
supposed to be based on the History of Kashi. We notice gradually that
the name Kashi recedes in the backdrop as a sign post. Instead, the newly
emergent names of the city corresponding to the rapid succession of kings
and kingdoms find their way into the text. As the ‘first’ name of the place,
Kashi, is under severe contest, Motichandra posits, with some scepticism,
the name Varanasi as older than Kashi. Kashi, nevertheless, lurks in the
narrative background as a projected metonym of that olden place. The
most distinguishing aspect of his account is that the actual descriptions
are held under the citation Banaras. Banaras is activated as that intimate,
one’s very own, endearing, relatable, place. Here is how the history of the
city is put into a narrative order through the device of place-names. The
relatively ‘fixed’ reference to ‘Kashi’ as the olden, originary place of myth
and cosmogenesis is what he uses in the book title but the substantive
textual discussion is sceptical of that claim suggesting that it is in fact not
the olden name of the place. That olden name is Varanasi. Curiously, what
sustains the historiographic narrative consistency of the text is a name
that is neither a contender of that olden, original name nor is the one that
is quoted in any of the early sources he cites in his discussion. That name
is Banaras. Thus an accent on the actual usage and a history of present
wins over the rigour with which Motichandra tries to instil a sense of true
history to his readers. The name Banaras wins here just as it does in the
local moral world of the city.
We find in Motichandra’s account an instance where all the four names,
Kashi, Varanasi, Banaras, and Benares, make their appearance. You may
wonder how is Benares present when it is rarely mentioned in the main
text? Benares in fact is the very spectral name that Motichandra sets out
to disband in his post-colonial adoption of Hindi and in using the name
of endearment, Banaras, as his intersubjective companion. In narrative
terms, Motichandra relies on the template of colonial historiography
describing successive reigns of kings, dynasties, lineages and summaries
34 Dead in Banaras
of areas conquered, lost, and regions conceded to opponents. Yet, the text
is also marked by an authorial signature that unmistakably decentres the
colonial template. This decentring comes not so much through an incorp-
oration of the Sanskrit, Pali, and Apbrahnsh accounts alongside archaeo-
logical evidence, a template, that was also stylized within the colonial
oeuvre of historical writings. It can rather be assigned to the powerful
intersubjective presence of the name Banaras as the affective register
that makes people of the place recognize it as their own history. We will
see this name-sliding later in this chapter within the mahatmya or tes-
timonial literature that encompasses scriptural citations, commentaries,
place-praise digests, astrological formulae, and cosmo-sacral events. Let
us turn to tradition for further directions.
Tradition
Aajkal is a monthly journal of literature and culture (sahitya and sanskriti)

run by the Government of India since 1945. The journal is published in
both Hindi and Urdu, each with its own exclusive content. Because of
the Government patronage, it is available even after fifty years of its in-
ception at a nominal cost of ten rupees a copy. The Hindi edition of the
journal under the guest editorship of Dr. Om Prakash Kejriwal, in 2006,
published a special volume as ‘Kashi Visheshank’ (Kashi edition) with the
title Paramparaon ki Nagari Kashi (Kashi: The City of Traditions). Special
editions on the city are not new, and the editor conveying a sense of being
overwhelmed at representing the city afresh is also not exclusive to this
edition. Before we turn to a brief summary of the ‘traditions’ that are de-
scribed in the said special edition, here is a little illustration about the
name Banaras in continuation with Motichandra’s discussion.
In a volume titled Kashi: City of Traditions, highlighted as a special edi-
tion on Kashi, where every essay of the anthology is described either as of
Kashi (Kashi ka) or in Kashi (Kashi mein), the first editorial line and sub-
sequently the rest of the editorial text and the essays, one after another,
without fail, may appear mind boggling to linguists who insist on a hard
wired referential felicity to a proper name. Kejriwal opens his editorial to
the volume with the following lines (the explanations in parentheses are
added for your greater access to the main text):
In one of my childhood textbooks, I had read a piece by Bedhab Banarasi
called ‘Banarasi ekka’ (Banarasian horse drawn wagon). It has been
nearly forty years but I have not been able to forget that piece of writing.
When I started writing the editorial to this volume, I asked various ac-
quaintances of mine to retrieve that article for me. With much diffi-
culty, the piece was eventually found. In re-reading it, I discovered that
apart from speaking about the ‘Banarasi ekka’, it also discusses Banarasi
Sari (one-piece long cloth worn in stylized, draped layers by women
in South Asia), Banarasi langda aam (a local variety of juicy mango)
and the Banarasi thug (the spiritually personified trickster, not the vio-
lent hooligan, who is called Goonda). In my opinion, it is not just the
wagon, sari, mango and the trickster but the sheer number of things
Banaras is famous for is unmatched by any other city in the world. Here
are my examples for you. The Ganga of Banaras, ghats of Banaras, tem-
ples of Banaras, paan of Banaras (a preparation of betel leaves chewed
as a stimulant), the alleys of Banaras, the singing tradition of Banaras,
Banarasi Babu (the Banarsian gentleman; counter figure to the trick-
ster) and so on. When the idea of this volume was put forth, I was told
that there are more than three hundred books and countless special vol-
umes published on the specialities of the city. So the challenge was to
choose a perspective which while representing the distinguishing fea-
tures of the place allowed the volume to remain different from those
published before. Thinking through, it struck me that there may not
be any other city in the world with as many traditions inherent to it as
Banaras. That was it! With this perspective I imagined this volume that
you are now holding in your hands.
To tell you the truth, Banaras is a unique city. It is not only one of the
oldest cities of the world, it is one of the holiest as well. Also, how many
cities can boast of the custom that if you die there you attain moksha
(liberated from re-birth and re-death). (Kejriwal 2006: 2)
Kejriwal continues and narrates about an uncle who arrived thrice in

Banaras for ‘Kashivaas’ (last living station to be spent in Kashi to seek a
‘good’ death and moksha), ‘hoping that he will die there’, but each time
he instead recovered his health in the city. Eventually, he did not die in
‘Kashi’ but in his own city, Muzaffarpur. Kejriwal concludes this an-
ecdotal account by reiterating the popular saying that not only does one
36 Dead in Banaras
needs the grace of the city deity Vishwanath to live here, but one dies here
only if ‘He’so wishes (2006: 2).
Notice the recurrent side-shadowing between Kashi and Banaras
in Kejriwal’s narration. Further, sample the list of chapter titles in the
volume: ‘Kashi in Indian History’; ‘Chronology of Kashi’s history’; ‘Kashi:
the centre of religion and culture’; ‘Eighteenth century Banaras’; ‘The
scholarly traditions of Kashi’; ‘The Vedic tradition in Kashi’; ‘The origin of
Kabir’s tradition from Kashi’; ‘Practice of astrology in Kashi’; ‘Inseparable
from the culture of resistance: the literary traditions of Banaras’; ‘The
tradition of dictionary making in Kashi’; ‘The tradition of scriptural and
grammatical commentaries in Kashi’; ‘The tradition of Hindi Journalism
in Kashi’; ‘The unique tradition of musical practices in Kashi’; ‘Unique
tradition of popular entertainment: Lakha fairs of Kashi’; ‘The dramatics’
tradition of Kashi’; ‘Ramleela of Kashi’; ‘Dimensions of art in Kashi’;
‘Illustrated art of Kashi’; ‘History of architecture of Kashi’ with a con-
cluding ‘Photo feature’ titled ‘Kashi Darshan’ (2006: 1).
The essays in the anthology written under the citation of Kashi, in actual
referential terms, fall back upon the name Banaras with occasional refer-
ences to Varanasi and once to ‘Benares’ (2006: 49). The essay ‘Eighteenth
century Banaras’ (2006: 22–25) portraying the city of that time with cata-
logue citations from the National Archives could hardly have avoided
mentioning ‘Benares’ but it does. It superscribes Benares with Banaras.
This is one instance of an up close and cautious interactivity, where the
colonial ‘Benares’ is superscribed. But, can names be deactivated so
easily? We will see that as long as the empirical and spectral presence of
Benares remains, the account of a contemporary Banaras cannot make it
absent even when it may deactivate it ever so cautiously and deliberately.
Not just that, Indian English ensures that it takes Benares as a colonial
proviso and then engages with it in many protracted post-colonial ways.
It would not be incorrect to say that Benares even operates as a side char-
acter that emerges from the shadow of colonial modernity to enliven al-
ternate accounts of the city.
As we have seen, Kejriwal puts on record the Banarasian mango, the
famous alleys, the trickster, paan, sari, and such miscellany of great
local and ‘world-famous’ things but simultaneously tricks us by not
incorporating an essay on any of these in his anthology. This omission
marginalizes a possible account of traditions in a language that could
have captured the place-sense with a difference than the accent on the
‘high’ traditions outlined earlier. In a small, cultish tract, not the religious
kind but the one that smells of street spirit of Banaras, Bana Rahe Banaras
(Long Live Banaras), the irrepressible Vishwanath Mukherji (2013
[1958]), who incidentally shares his name with the city’s guardian deity,
pays homage to these ‘world-famous’ things—the Banarasian mango,
alley, paan, picnic, and the trickster. The most significant of these local
traditions is the daily Banarasian rhythm of ingestion of a cannabis drink
prepared with greatest love and attention to material details. The rhythm
of ingestion is kept in tune with the morning–evening ablution routine
named as saafa-paani (2013: 45, 78–81). The tract, as can be guessed by
now, is invertedly modelled on religious praises of the place found in
mahatmya or testimonial literature that are available in both high-priced
compendiums as well as cheap copy versions, complete with coloured
pictures, at various ghats of the city. The immediate provocation to write
the tract and name it ‘Long live Banaras’ is the official rechristening of
the city name as ‘Varanasi’ on the ‘2500th anniversary of Buddha’ in
the year 1956 AD (2013: 5). In popular understanding, this was done at
the behest of Dr. Sampoornanda, who wanted to restore the name to its
Sanskrit original. Mukherji, differs with that understanding and offers a
different genealogical description of names of the place. While echoing
similar sentiments as Motichandra about the origin and etymology of
Kashi and Varanasi, he is perhaps the only Hindi author to acknowledge
that the British name for the city is Benares (2013: 5). He further notes
that the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, who in most accounts of the place
is mainly associated with destruction of many temples, including that of
the central deity, had named the place as ‘Muhammadabad’ in his own
tenure (2013: 5). This casting of self and the other finds contingent ex-
pressions in the city. In these contingencies we get to notice a remarkable
aspect of the city. Though many religions like Buddhism, Islam, Sikhism,
Ravidasis, Kabirpanthis, and Udasis have had founding moments of their
religious expressions in the city, all the names of the city that we have
witnessed are harnessed into Hindu origins and meaning.6 The question
is how does the founding of other religions and religiosity introduce an
element of interactivity within the surface of the city names?
The most strained negotiation seems to be between the Hindu and the
Muslim collectives of the city. The fact that this dyad of Hindu–Muslim
38 Dead in Banaras
is seen interlaced with spectres of great collective hostility has meant that
the onus of negotiating with the charged motifs of violence is also very
high. Moving from Mukherji, sample the following instantiation within
one of the great novels of the city that inscribes different forms of violence
and their afterlives as another site of tradition of the city. A tradition that
finds echo in the deployed police presence through the sensitive religious
zones of adjoining temples and mosques on important days of the week
or during times of religious festivities.
Abdul Bismillah (1987) in his Hindi novel on the everyday world of
Banarasi Muslim weavers offers a narrative account of how Muslims think
of the Gyanvapi mosque; the same mosque that in common knowledge
of the place is associated with the partial demolition of the city deity’s
temple. Bismillah narrates the ‘story’ in the ethicized voice and words of
the most aged and pious character of the novel, Uncle Raouf:
There was a well known, very prosperous merchant in Kashi by the

name of Gyanchand. His daughter called Vapi was young and beau-
tiful. Like any other day she went to the Vishwanath temple to do puja
and there she was dishonoured and murdered by some unscrupulous
figures. The merchant Gyanchand wrote to the then reigning emperor,
Aurangzeb, requesting him to bring down the temple as it had hidden
cellars and tunnels that opened into the river, Gangaji. Gyanchand
speculated that religious guides were involved in molesting and mur-
dering women. They would then flush down the bodies through the
hidden channel into the currents of the river. Hearing this, Aurangzeb
immediately sent his army that was stationed at Lallapura. That is
the reason why that habitation is even today known as Aurangabad.
Eventually, the temple was brought down the same night. The associ-
ation (taluq) of Gyanchand and Vapi with the mosque led everyone to
call it as Gyanvapi mosque (Bismillah 1987: 76–77).
Bismillah rounds off this narration by citing a verse imputed to an

anonymous ‘Persianised Brahmin’: ‘O Emperor, look at the miracle
of my idol house, even as it breaks down, it becomes the house of God’
(1987: 77). The old, third-person, narrator in the novel delicately and dis-
cursively participates in the acknowledgment of violence and remaking
of the sacral (notice the honorific Ji in the mention of the river Ganga).
This inscribing brings the cosmological underpinnings of city names to
the level of local topographies and everyday textures of religious places
and neighbourhoods.7
Baidyanath Saraswati, the resident city anthropologist, however,
has a different take in his short ethnography Kashi: Myth and Reality
of a Classical Tradition (1975). A take that inscribes sacral bound-
aries into the city’s demographic and residential topology. He quotes a
popular saying about living in Kashi to interpret how the sacral bound-
aries of Kashi can be imagined. The quote goes as ‘Kashi basein to kya
basein, basein Aurangabad (what good is living in Kashi if you live in
Aurangabad, a neighbourhood (mohalla) which lies beyond Kashi’s ter-
ritory)’ (1975: 43).8 Leaning back to Bismillah’s account, we know that
Aurangabad is indeed within physical proximity to the central deity’s
temple. Clearly then, what is motorized in this saying is a sophisticated
inscription of borders within the ‘sacred geography’. In other words, sa-
cred geography is not a physical map but a discursive theatre of the city.
In this sense, we can say that the history of violence is also part of the ‘im-
agined’ sacred geography of the city.
At this juncture, let us turn to note how the inside of the sacred com-
plex is under discursive contests. Let us move to the way of the legends.
The following discussion on testimonial literature (mahatmya) also
weaves in other narratives and discourses that may together be identified
in the family forms of history, myth, and story.
Legend
Varanasi Vaibhav (Splendour of Varanasi) by Pandit Kubernath Sukul

(2000 [1977]) is a formidable text that commands respect amongst
Brahmin scholars of Sanskritic texts and mahatmya curators who regu-
larly glean from textual sources to update hermeneutics of the city (see
Bakker 2006; Gengnagel 2011). Kubernath Sukul inherits the legacy
from his grandfather, Kailashnath Shukla, the well- known author
of one of the earliest illustrated maps of the city called ‘Kashidarpana’
(Mirror of Kashi) (Gengnagel 2006: 145–146). His compendium text
Varanasi Vaibhav draws from many a textual sources—‘Ramayana’ and
‘Mahabharat’, ‘Kashi Khand’ from Skandapurana, ‘Kashi Rahasya’ from
40 Dead in Banaras
Brahmaveyvart Purana, as well as citations from Padampurana. Similarly,
his medieval systematizations are sourced from ‘Tirthchintamani’ by
Vachhspati Mishr (1460), ‘Tristhalisetu’ by Bhattnarayan (1580), and
‘Tirthprakash’ by Mitra Mishr (1620) (Sukul 2000).
These medieval texts written in Sanskrit were perhaps in exclusive
use by the Brahmins at the time. However, given the tradition of writing
commentaries and preparing popular astrological almanacs in the city,
it seems likely that a wider dissemination may have occurred. More so
because these commentaries are equally centred on mapping and pro-
viding testimonial descriptions of temples and deities present in the city
of their times, almost like modern day travel guides. The visual (sachitra)
cosmographs are onomatological (for example, Kashi Darpan) while
descriptive commentaries have scalar and metric location of individual
temples mentioned in the cosmographs (c.f. Sukul 2000; Gengnagel
2011). Sanskrit texts to cosmographs to calendar art, there is then a long
tradition of visualizing and circulating images of sacred geographies. The
other mode is that of storied place-praises, place-making, place-world
(Basso 1996) testimonial digests on individually named deities and ac-
counts of boons and blessings that particular deities may be locally well
known for. Into the present, these different forms transducted via new
multi-media technologies nourish an ecology of religious aesthetics,
thought and politics. Varanasi Vaibhav, although informed by a host of
texts from cosmographs to testimonial literature largely uses non-visual
discursive modalities to outline a cartography of temples, deities, and
Shivlingams in a projected cosmological picture of Varanasi. Descriptions
of sacralization and resacralization of the place are well recorded, and
the idea that the local is not just a cartographic flat surface but a com-
plex topology of stories and counter claims is equally made present. In
my reading, Varanasi Vaibhav, discursively creates an experience of the
potential contentions of violence that saturate the everyday life of the city.
Sukul echoes a familiar lament about the gradual extinction of these
ancient texts from twelfth century onwards owing to the Islamic reign
and religious vigilantism in the city (2000: 1). As an exception to this
larger trend, he evokes Mathhew Atmore Sherring’s Benares: A Sacred
City of Hindus as exemplifying a common tradition with the systematized
medieval Sanskrit texts of coding the sacred geography of the city. He
argues that while the Islamic invasion and their reigns ‘destroyed’ the
temple complexes and choked the Hindu and Buddhist learning culture
of the place, the British heralded a complex new engagement that sim-
ultaneously privileged Hindu sacred geography and colonial secularity
(2000: 2). In the same breath, however, he suggests that the British must
be held responsible for introducing and spreading the culture of athe-
istic secularity as a new way of life. His depiction of the Islamic-British
continuum can be paraphrased as a movement from anti-Hindu cul-
minating into the atheistic secular. This depiction allows Sukul to hold
on to the picture of Hindu life, which in his view is besieged in the con-
temporary in a struggle over axiomatic values and outlooks (2000: 2).
Anthropologists who have written on the city have responded to some
of the questions raised in Varanasi Vaibhav with great nuance in their re-
spective works. What is interesting here is to witness how this discursive
sphere constitutes the city into the contemporary. I will turn to one such
instance through Baidyanath Sarasawati’s contribution on the question
of secularity in a subsequent section. It is sufficient to reiterate here how
‘Benares’ (à la Sherring’s Hindu sacred city) is indeed at work once again.
Sukul’s discussion even in its broad strokes portrays the contrasting prac-
tices that come under the name ‘Benares’. One of secularity and the other
of authenticating the sacred geography of the place based on a one-to-one
correspondence of the deity and his ‘original’ dwelling place. We know
from the mahatmya treatises that the discursive practice of authenti-
cating the sacred geography of the city precedes colonialism. However,
it is under the colonial name, Benares, that a new side-shadow of names
comes into effect and another assemblage emerges vis-à-vis that name.
Diana L. Eck’s (1999, 2012) cautious proposition is that pilgrimage,
circulation of myth, stories, and written–oral testimonies enable modes
of imagination and embodiment, architectural or otherwise, for people
to think of their ‘own’ places including the nation as ‘sacred geography’.
This engagement takes up questions raised by Sukul with great sensitivity
and alertness. Where Eck and Sukul would perhaps part ways is in the
fact that for Eck the claim of ‘place-making’ for Hindus does not rely on
‘yahin’ (this exact place), the physical empirical spot, the actual and the
original place, of a particular deity. In her discussion on names, Kashi is
not so much ‘that’ (vahi) city that I am writing and you are reading about,
it is in fact the portable name’s capacity to actualize a place for the seekers
wherever it portends well. In Eck’s use of the proper name, the name is
42 Dead in Banaras
invested with the power to present its corresponding graced place wher-
ever it is uttered, thus delinking a strict name-place correspondence in
physical terms. For instance, a Kashi in south is possible because of the
invocative power inherent in the name itself, and that name, in turn,
draws from a stable main source. In other words, she deflects the referen-
tiality of hyphenated name-place combination to a reflexive pair, where
the name pairs with any geographical place, person, or idea. For Sukul,
however, ‘that place’ (vahin) is of great stake. It is with this conviction that
he provides a corrective reading to the revised edition of Motichandra’s,
posthumously published, Kashi ka Itihas (History of Kashi, 2010 edi-
tion). Sukul draws out a narrative of splendour from the Vedic to the con-
temporary, owning up in metaphoric sweep the Yakshas of yore, along
with the golden Vishwanath of the present, discrediting Motichandra’s
historiographic scepticism. What is ‘splendid’ about Varanasi Vaibhav
then? Could it be its potential to open up a scope to rethink the interpret-
ations about the past of the place, that is, of mapping its historiography?
While Sukul’s ‘place-making’ starts with an overt resistance against
Motichandra’s ‘historical-truth’, my reading is that caught in his own side-
shadowing of names he is ethicized into becoming a part of that inter-
activity which holds forth the contemporary. Ultimately what is at stake is
the affective idea of the splendour of the place. But as it can be imagined,
while looking for the source of splendour for long, eventually, one may
return to the tautological idiom of the place-name and splendour may
become its own reality as a synchronic embodiment into the name. That
is how the name Varanasi is perhaps activated as a legend in Varanasi
Vaibhav.
The Time of Before and the Time of Now
All texts cited so far agree on a time of before, a time before Kashi or
Varanasi. A time when the place was neither the olden old Kashi, nor
the splendid Varanasi, nor the luminous Banaras, and of course not the
strange-tongued Benares. The people of that time are described as pre-
vedic and on other occasions as non/pre-aryan but the place-name is
unknown and thus unnamed. This lack of a name does seem to create
a haunting aporia to the onomastic registers of the competing names
Kashi and Varanasi. Let us move to the chronicles of the city anthropolo-
gist Baidyanath Saraswati and Nand Kumar Bose Foundation (NKBF) to
follow how times of before are interlaced into the times of now.
Temple and University
Baidyanath Saraswati (1975) views anthropology as a form of ‘sacred sci-

ence’ because for him it is the only system of study that reclaims science
and is sympathetic to the vitality of myth, religious practices and experi-
ences. His work, self-proclaimed as an anthropology of Brahmins is in
my reading imbued with the anthropological in a way that Brahminical
practices and their ironies both get assembled and recorded together. In
his efforts towards chronicling the city, Saraswati set up the NKBF as an
innovative research centre devoted to archiving city events. I encountered
rich insights both in Saraswati’s work as well as in the Foundation’s col-
lection of anthropological ‘monographs’. Gleaning through the archive
helped me to think of the anthropological and the ethnographic as prac-
tices of thought and observation that perpetuate in different forms at
different places. The relation of different forms to the wider practice of
the discipline is not a given but has to be arrived at through an up-close
reading. For instance, Saraswati’s ‘monograph’ on ‘Kashi’, based on an
ethnography of Brahmins in the city, does not have a single bibliographic
reference. Intriguingly, it oscillates between the first and the third person
as if the author is at times reclaiming his own Brahmin habitus while at
other times using it to call out the Brahmanical apparatuses of the city.
Recognizing this tension in his work, I learnt to treat the Brahmanical
as a metonym rather than a metaphor. This tension that permeates the
monograph also led me to think of his work in relation to indological
writings and only gradually I realized that Saraswati’s work does not sit
easily within the indological frame either because of his emphasis on the
voice of fieldwork and his self-positioning as a native anthropologist.
Here it may be useful to evoke his own perspective on the limits and ex-
panse of his anthropological enquiry. He writes:
‘Kashi is outside the rigid circle of any customary understanding of

culture. The more proximately I try and inspect the more distant and
44 Dead in Banaras
difficult she appears. The anthropologist in me becomes restless. I have
started to feel that in understanding Kashi, the anthropological vision is
insufficient and the religious vision is mandatory. Can it be that we con-
verge both perspectives to see if that works?’ (Saraswati et al. 1983: 1).
In an Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) review on soci-

ology of religion, while he beckons the anthropological community to-
wards greater attention to textual sources, his own methodological
initiatives through the foundation are diverse: involving texts, statistics,
and real-time investigations (Saraswati 1985). This appeal to the anthro-
pologists to study texts persists in his later initiatives. When the inaug-
ural issue of the foundation’s journal, Sacred Science Review (2003) was
launched, he renewed his plea once again. The said issue is on ‘death’ and
Saraswati notes the irony of doing something deliberately ‘inauspicious’
for an inaugural issue. Nonetheless, Saraswati justifies that given the
foundation is based in Kashi, death may be a fitting way to start (1985: 3).
Kashi is Saraswati’s name for the city and is consistently present through
his wide oeuvre of writings. The name dictates Saraswati’s research inter-
ests to a large extent, and he echoes the perspective that his respondents
evoke in their accounts of the place, that is, Kashi is the place to die when
the time comes, to seek liberation, not from any one kind of suffering but
from the embodied life itself. His writings are noncommittal to historio-
graphic citations and are reasonably assured like an ordinary believing
Hindu about Kashi’s claim of liberation. For sure, he does not cast this
belief as an uncontested discourse but rather lets it live with the equally
prevalent doubts about such transcendental claims. So once again we en-
counter how the ironic is constitutive of his anthropological perspective.
Take note of the preceding account of the city, where he evokes it as the
cosmological Kashi. Now if we go back to his monograph, Kashi (1975),
we find it embedded in the empirical heat of the newly independent
nation’s Hindu city that is negotiating architectures of temples and uni-
versity to suit the moment. It is not a surprise then that in the monograph,
Saraswati’s descriptor for life in the city is named as Banarasipan that is
the simple cultural fact of being a Banarasi, aside from religion and caste.
In fact, his anthropology is a substantive instance of presenting a complex
terrain of faith and scepticism co-existing with each other. It is within
such a framework that he writes of a research, supervised by him, on the
widows of the city. The research makes a plea to see the widows at par
with male ascetics who come to seek liberation in the city by extending to
the widows the parallel of entitlements based on the practices of asceti-
cism (Saraswati 2005). As is evident, Saraswati’s moral investments are
towards defending what he calls the ‘classical tradition’ of the city, and it is
with this perspective that his contribution acquires a certain productive
consistency. Let me discuss two amongst his many texts from the vantage
of the city names: Kashi: Myth and Reality of a Classical Cultural Tradition
(1975) and Shri Kashi Vishwanath: Aastha aur Vyavastha ka Prashn
(Shree Kashi Vishwanath: Question of Faith and Temple Organization)
(Saraswati et al. 1983)
Reminiscent of Keith Basso (1996), Saraswati enables us to recognize
a link between names and ‘place-making’ within the local moral world
based on sensory perception. He activates a very delicate world of how
sensory gestures of touching (sparsh), seeing (darshan), and speaking-
hearing (appellation, invocation of names/naam-bhed) mark scenes of
living and the dead. In these social scenes, the living and dead could even
be the city deity, Vishwanath, either as an embodied personage of stone
body or enacted through materialities of names.
In his monograph Kashi: Myth and Reality of a Classical Cultural
Tradition (1975), Saraswati discusses the Gandhian movement and the
ideological principle of Varnashrama dharma in the context of the life
of Mahamana Madan Mohan Malaviya. Saraswati cites Malaviya as a
pious Brahmin who founded Banaras Hindu University (BHU), with
the promise of an education in science and technology in the germinal
warmth of Varnashram. The fact that BHU has a Kashi Vishwanath
temple and regular recitals of Gita are done within its premises exempli-
fies this vision. Saraswati argues that this particular gesture by Malaviya
to construct a temple within the campus was opposed by the nationalists,
and they instead established Kashi Vidyapeeth as the ‘national school for
revolutionaries and freedom fighters’ (1975: 64). Eventually the way the
matter was resolved went beyond the refrain of ideology. Let’s encounter
it in Saraswati’s own words:
Those who joined Vidyapeetha were mostly anti- Brahman and

non-Brahmans. In order to discredit the orthodox sanatanis they
wanted to put on the brahamanic garb, and the vidyapeetha enrolled
46 Dead in Banaras
non-brahmans, particularly the so called untouchable castes and
Moslems for a course leading to a diploma, called shastri—the title
obviously derived from the Sanskrit system of learning. Thus as soon
as the organizers of the vidyapeetha fell into the temptation of the
Sanskritic symbols the syndrome of Brahmanic indrajal began to op-
erate. And so although the Vidyapeetha produced many Moslem
and Harijan shastris, it eventually failed in altering the course of the
Brahmanic thought in Kashi. One of the founding members of Kashi
Vidyapeetha was Dr. Sampoornanda, a Kayastha by caste, who wrote
Brahman sabdhana, deriding the Brahmans. But this affected his per-
sonal life and political career so intrinsically that he, essentially a liberal
sanatani, soon was stricken with guilt conscious. In order to expiate his
“guilt” he founded the Varanaseya Sanskrit University with blessings
from the Brahmans of Kashi. (1975: 64)
We approach a new, post- independence, mise- en-scène (roop-

rekha; kaya-kalp) of Banaras, Kashi, Varanasi (in Varanaseya Sanskrit
University). We can sense a reflexive reenactment of the socially corro-
sive and restrictive past on saying–hearing Sanskrit by certain collectives
in a complex new form. With this excerpt in the background, let us invest
into an imagination of this complex expression and how the social mi-
nutely bears upon the tongue–ear relation. The earlier scene brimming
with charged events can be relived not only in reading the text fragment
but can enact itself to different degrees and scales in the everyday life of
the city as the following example will show. I offer an instance of how
touching and seeing are equally circumscribed, quite like the tongue–ear
relation posited above, through a frequently, re-enacted story with re-
gard to the Vishwanath temple. The incidence relates to the supposed de-
consecration of the primary Vishwanath temple that was subsequently
rebuilt in 1777 under royal patronage. The temple housed what appears
from the textual sources (largely testimonial literature) as the earliest
and the ‘main’ lingam of Vishwanath. The present-day lord Vishwanath
temple that was opened to worship by all Hindus during India’s inde-
pendence seems to have a labyrinthine but straight narrative link to the
1777 temple of the principal deity of Banaras. Saraswati recalls that until
India’s independence, the ‘untouchables’ were socially banned from en-
tering the premises. After independence, and following much protests,
‘Harijans’ (ex-untouchables) were allowed to enter the temple premise.
From then on, Saraswati records, the temple is open to all caste members,
representing a ‘liberal sanatani sacred tradition in Kashi’. However there
is a story between this story of transition. After the state’s decree to open
the temple to all caste members, there were incidents pertaining to the
‘deconsecration’ of the idol. Saraswati pitches the event as follows:
‘On the entry of the Harijans into the Golden Vishwanath temple,
the orthodox Brahmans under the leadership of swami Karpatrijee
built a new Vishwanath temple where no one, not even Brahman de-
votees, could enter into the sanctum sanctorum, as is the custom in
most south Indian temples. Only the priest was allowed to go inside.
The builders declared it as a private temple. The manner in which this
temple was built and the lingam of Vishwanath consecrated is signifi-
cant. The orthodox Brahmans and ascetics who resisted Harijan entry
into the Golden Vishwanath temple were thrown away by the liberals.
Immediately after this a rumour spread in the city that the night pre-
vious to the entry of Harijans, the Pundits took away the “life force” from
the lingam of Vishwanath by performing Vedic rites of pranaharana.
When the new Vishwanath temple was built by orthodox Brahmins this
“life force” of Vishwanath was duly infused into the lingam, brought
from the Narmada river’ (Saraswati 1975: 64–65).
Reflecting on this event that is both discursive and haptic, Saraswati

writes: ‘Kashi succeeded in establishing a new temple to preserve the
pristine purity of the Brahmanic sacred tradition. The purpose of cre-
ating a myth of Pranaharan of Vishwanath indicates the ingenuity of
the pandits of Kashi’ (Saraswati 1975: 65). Saraswati’s anthropology of
Brahmins may appear veering towards a eulogy of the subjects studied,
even then it is quite possible to suggest that his proposal of ‘ingenuity’ can
be considered as an acknowledgment of emergent double powers, one of
democratic politics and the other of supremacist caste practises. The caste
symbolic of restricting touch returns, yet again.
To continue with the story of the temple multiplicity, let us move to
Saraswati’s discussion of the university temple. While one outcome of
the contest over the touch and darshan of the main deity was the estab-
lishment of a private temple, another resolution was to establish a third
48 Dead in Banaras
temple of Kashi Vishwanath. The third temple was instituted within
the premises of the Banaras Hindu University (BHU). This temple wel-
comed everyone independent of caste, gender, religion, and nationality.
Kubernath Sukul (2000: 138–139) mentions that there is yet another
claimant for the original Visheshwara adjacent to the Razia Mosque.
Thus, we note how the ‘original’ and its doubles sustain a charged vir-
tuality of social contestation. The question of the lingam rendered ‘life-
less’ and ‘dead’ or re-suffused with life is repeatedly enacted in narration
and practice. Diana L. Eck (1982) records a similar episode of the pres-
ervation of the Lord Vishveshvara (another name for Lord Vishwanath)
through the destructing spree of Mughal emperors right from ‘Firauz
Shah Tughlaq of Delhi, Muhmud Shah Shaeqi of Jaunpur, and Sikandar
Lodi of Delhi’ till Akbar oversaw its (re)institution. Subsequently, Eck
narrates, Aurangzeb ‘tore down’ the temple in 1669 to build the Jnana
Vapi mosque (1982: 135). Anticipating Sarsawati’s account of the post-
independence pranharan narrative, she says:
‘Half-dismantled, it became the foundation for the present Jnana vapi

mosque. According to legend, the linga of Vishveshvara was saved from
the temple before it was desecrated by the armies of Aurangzeb. It was
thrown by a provident priest into the deep waters of the Jnana vapi. In
1777, the queen of Indore sponsored the construction of the present
temple’. (1982: 135)
Saraswati et al. (1983) return to this question of deity’s life and death
in a small tract called Shree Kashi Vishwanath: Aastha aur Vyavastha
ka Prashn (Shree Kashi Vishwanath: Question of Faith and Temple
Organization). The tract takes up an event of thieving at the Kashi
Viswanath temple—the oldest one, which is also now popularly known
as the golden Vishwanath or simply the golden temple because of the gold
plating in its outer and inner architecture—wherein gold and deity’s pre-
cious jewellery are discovered as stolen. Allow me to present the account
in present tense as the text does while recreating the thieving event at the
temple.
A research survey is conducted by NKBF in the city, in real time, while
the police are still looking for the stolen valuables. The research survey
conveys the horror and excitement of who may dare and stoop to steal
from the temple and of the deity. Post this survey that was carried out by
the volunteers of the foundation, NKBF calls forth an open house focus
group discussion of learned South Indian Brahmins. Meanwhile, in the
same real time, parallel, new associations have mushroomed by the day
pressing upon their own agendas. Some are meant to create pressure on
the administration and some are soul searching about the dark present
time (Kalyug) when such a thing could happen. The text provides a de-
scription of city-wide protests. The familiar ones, where women hand
over bangles and old saris to policemen to signal their ‘masculine’ inept-
ness as protectors. And unique ones, like beggars striking their begging
work for a day. There are political demonstrations that are given to scat-
tered violence and there are religious and musical congregations too, in-
cluding one in which it is sung, ‘our deity is so playful that he must have
encouraged the thieves himself ’ (Saraswati et al. 1983: 11). The superin-
tendent of police meanwhile makes a religious pledge that when the valu-
ables are found and thieves are caught he will go on a 1,000-km barefoot
pilgrimage from Kashi to Kedarnath (Saraswati et al. 1983: 12). Outlining
the survey findings, Saraswati writes that more women think that it is
Kalyug than men and they seem more worried about the possible terrible
consequences if valuables are not retrieved soon enough. Forty-three
percent of the surveyed people think that the splendour (mahatmya) of
the deity has faded, else this would not have happened (Saraswati et al.
1983: 14). Similarly, the open house focus group discussion brings up
‘shastric’ questions while engaging with various kinds of doubts and as-
persions doing rounds at the time. One version is that the deity of Kalyug
must be a dead idol without power and grace who could not defend his
own place, things, and person. A related version is upheld by the ex-
King of Kashi, who had backed Swami Karpatrijee in constructing a re-
stricted (to Brahmins only) Kashi Vishwanath temple, when the golden
Vishwanath temple was opened to all Hindus after independence. It is
held that the believers moral world has become so corrupt and degen-
erated that the idol must have become deadened and without any grace,
anyway. The king’s view relayed through a newspaper report creates a
shastric context of discussion around grace and disgrace to the lingam.
It is suggested that the thieves could not have taken the jewellery without
‘touching’ the lingam and thus the lingam cannot be the luminous deity
anymore. To this, it is added later that the police team went to the temple
50 Dead in Banaras
premises with their shoes on and had taken a sniffer dog to the sanctum
sanctorum for investigating the case. This is presented as another proof
that the idol is rendered ‘lifeless’. The foundation’s open house puts out
the question in so many words to the Brahmins gathered. Should the idol
be purified, replaced, or should nothing be done about it? (Saraswati et al.
1983: 16). The references cited by the invited audience at the open house
evoke a time period spanning over 500 years, covering the emergence of
mahatmya literature and the city’s memory of warring over sacred com-
plexes. The Brahmin experts who participated in the focus group argue
that if one follows textual norms in infusing life to the deity then why
would one not apply the same norms and textual directives to diagnose
the idol dead? Saraswati et al. take a position as well. Their position dif-
fers from associating the purity of the idol with textual directions and
they offer a very different set of reasons to legitimate the splendour of
the temple. One is the presence of gold and people’s belief in the purifica-
tory capacity of gold. Second, the fact that so many people believe in the
temple becomes a proof unto itself of its sacred splendour. They add that
why certain temples have a huge following and others do not is a com-
plicated question by any means. Back to the event, Saraswati et al. report
the experts remedies: two interrelated perspectives are offered to restore
the purity of the lingam. One formulation suggests that a lingam bearing
‘barred’ touches or one that is moved, broken, or even removed from the
‘original’ place still has grace. In fact, the formulation adds that in case the
idol or lingam is completely removed, the place itself can be worshipped.
The second formulation suggests that in Kalyug the deity Vishwanath
takes the preservation upon himself, considering the need for extra grace
in such a time. At an auspicious cosmic time he goes to Manikarnika and
takes a bath to bring his own luminosity and ‘life-force’ back (Saraswati
et al. 1983: 16–18). So one just needs to get the valuables back and every-
thing would be in place.
On the seventeenth day, the valuables are found, the thieves are caught,
the superintendent of police is garlanded before his on-foot pilgrimage
from Kashi to Kedarnath, and the people at large are occupied with de-
tails about the gold retrieved. The learned South Indian Brahmins had
recommended a prescriptive rite at the conclusion of the focus group dis-
cussion. They had said, ‘we hope that the lingam will be plated with gold
again. This task should be undertaken in a special ceremony where all
four vedas must be recited. All this should happen under the excuse of
gold-plating but not in the name of “sudhhikaran”/“purification” or re-
installation of life force’ (Saraswati et al. 1983: 18). We do not know if
this ‘ingenious’ prescription was indeed followed, but at the time of my
fieldwork, the temple stood for all its glorious splendour amongst the
believers.
We have arrived to the end of this demonstration that sampled referen-
tial entanglements. Entanglements that show the city multiple being con-
tingently materialized in relation to the names Banaras, Kashi, Benares,
and Varanasi. How may we descriptively name this process as enacting
an ethical multiplicity. If the enactment is in the form of side-shadowing
what can be its second name?
Playing Dead
The chapter in its itinerant ways has roamed and idled at many discursive
spaces through the place-names, Banaras, Kashi, Varanasi, and Benares.
The substantive multiplicity of the city attempted here is not so much
about the representation of the place but the ethicality of its place-name
usage. It is not a surprise that these plural place-names carry the power to
simultaneously invoke complex strands of history, myth and legend, into
the contemporary. Such is the power of place-names in general. What is
worth noting here is that the powers of place-names do not simply lie
in their invoked referential presence but equally in their participation
as dead actants. When any one name is referentially invoked the other
names play dead on the side, waiting to rise and enliven the context. You
invoke Kashi; Banaras, Varanasi and Benares come into the side-shadow,
ready to slide next to Kashi. In the interim, the side-shadowing names
can be visualized into a form of play akin to playing dead. In this playing,
the social condition of the dead that the names use creates an ethical
register. The ethics lie in how the side-shadowing responds to the selective
coding of the symbolic history of the city. Indeed, it is the ‘hauntology’
of multiplicity of names that provides the different dwellers of the city a
sheltering system. This is then not the celebratory eternal substance of
unity in diversity that can be pitched as an episteme of separate names.
That would imply that the names participate in the referential events
52 Dead in Banaras
based on their own separate terms. In that case, each name would be a
separate place subjectivating respective subjects. Such as: Kashi is an-
other place from Banaras. Benares is another place from Varanasi. Kashi
belongs to the Brahmanical Hindu. Banaras belongs to the pan Hindu
and the non-Hindu. Benares connects the colonial imaginary of the ‘most
sacred Hindu city’ to a globality of such ‘world-religion’ cities into the
present. Varanasi emerges as the scriptural-textual Sanskritic coding of
the modern, constitutional and the municipal, nation-state. And all these
diverse place-name subjects can be shown inhabiting the same physical
city. If this were to be an ideal of unity in diversity, this ideal does not
take into account the fact that diversity is not a once-and-for-all given,
it can be under stake even in the simple act of uttering a place-name,
leave alone matters of being and belonging. To think of each place-name
referring to a strictly different place would be to cathect specific sanc-
tuary and danger, actual or virtual, to the respective inhabiting subjects.
In my view, as the illustrations in the chapter show, it is rather the case
that the threat is partially deflected and the different sanctuaries ensnare
and subsist in the side-shadowed sliding of names playing dead. Such a
sliding of the place-names does not allow the difference of a particular
place-name to materialize into a wholly different radical other place. The
side-shadowed names slide in before that happens. These sliding names
of the city multiple play dead and rise to the occasion to form a sheltering
system: everyone is shown and told, no one is exposed as all alone.
3
Good, Bad Death
Family Necrology and Hospital Sojourn
A death strikes. We embark on funeral travelling. Necrological accounts

make the narrative movement. Funerary rest-posts make the stanza.
Funerary restposts or ‘Shavyatrion ke vishram ke liye’ in Hindi refers to
designated architectural spaces in Banaras for funeral travellers. Such
spaces are spread through the city centre and the bazaars. Here I am
speaking of a time when funerals were exclusively carried on foot with
accompanying chants of ‘Ram naam sat hai’ (the name of Ram is sacred)
and were ferried in high traffic adding to the exuberant bustle of the
market. In one of his well-known poems, Shrikant Verma (2003) evokes
Kashi, as such a surreal, two-way funerary geography (Verma 2003:107):
Tumne dekhi hai Kashi

Jahan jis raste
Jaata hai shav
Usi raste
Aata hai shav.
Have you seen Kashi

where the path
a corpse departs
is the same
for a corpse to arrive.
These rest-posts continue to dot the city architecture but their desig-
nated usage has declined with the onset of passenger vehicles operating
as corpse carriers. The organization and maintenance of these rest-posts
is informally shared between the city’s municipality and philanthropic

54 Dead in Banaras
practices. New rest-posts were being freshly constructed by the munici-
pality during my fieldwork at Harishchandra ghat. The designated pur-
pose of both the old and the new rest-posts is to provide temporary rest to
the pall bearers, the fellow funeral travellers, and perhaps the corpse too.
At Harishchandra ghat, the newly constructed rest-posts also provide
shade and shelter to the funeral travellers during the scorching summer
heat. In both instances, the time of resting and gaining breath, with the
corpse in between them, becomes a time of contemplation for the fu-
neral travellers. Veena Das (2006) and Steven C. Caton’s (2014) reading
of Henri Bergson allows me to view these temporary settings of funeral
travellers with the corpse at the rest-posts as a time animating memorial
thought—a time activated right in the middle of the market’s bustle, a
rushing of memories associated with the dead and the world. In bor-
rowing the concept from Bergson, Das and Caton emphasize that such
a mixed ‘duration’ of willed reflection, occasioned contemplation, and
unintended reflux of past scenes must be understood as the ‘very condi-
tion of subjectivity’ (Caton 2014: 241). In what follows, I posit these dual
conditions of corpse (as a loud ironic agent of listening and causing a si-
lent interlocution) and memory (as a dynamic subjective social mirror)
as companions in building a part hospital ethnography and a part necro-
logical, narrative account that spans my father’s death during fieldwork.
Needless to say, this writing is heavily systematized. Nonetheless, I view
this writing as a form of funeral-travelling. There is a formal attempt
to work with limited headings to simply maintain the narrative. In this
sense the account may appear in its descriptive turns a lot closer to the
narrative movement of a story or a novel, but, again, I hope that it can still
find rest and shelter within the abode of ethnography. After all, it is not
that either dramaturgy or dramatism are new to ethnography. The ‘I’ of
the account is an autobiographical idiom and thus is more than the usual
referential way in which it emerges in ethnographic writings but is less
than what a full-fledged autobiographical account would have because
this ‘I’ is constantly deflected by a self-conscious privileging of a relative
over self. To recall from c hapter 1, this account tarries between a ‘sighing
speech’ kind of proximity to the dying and the dead and an expansive
journey of an ‘eventually’ that draws from distant social horizons through
narrative connections. Although there is an unmistakable singularized
event of death in this tarrying, I hope to convey by the end of this chapter
Good, bad death 55
that this death too is tied to a multiplicity and is enacted as an event and
an eventuality in language and experience through recursive narrative
rushes, staggering stops, and remainders.
Unfolding Itinerary of Funeral Travelling
In the shiny simmering spring of 2005, awaiting the viva voce and result
of my M.Phil. dissertation on Notions of death and the community, I had
already made a visit to Banaras as my near future field site for the up-
coming doctoral research work. My maternal uncles, based out of Delhi,
have professional engagements in Banaras so they had set up a small,
two-room, rented accommodation for their own visits. The place was
maintained in their absence by a caretaker. In the continuing spirit of
their long-term guardianship, from days of bringing me to Delhi from
Ghazipur for senior secondary schooling, they graciously offered the
accommodation for my stay at Banaras during the survey period. The
said accommodation in Ravindrapuri was proximate to Baba Kinaram
Aghorashram and Harishchandra ghat. I had by this time decided to
choose Harishchandra over Manikarnika because it had provisions for
both electric and manual cremations and also had a new back-packers’
hotel overseeing the view of burning wooden pyres. The Banaras Hindu
University (BHU) hospital, including the hospital morgue, was the third
site that I had zeroed in to record the possible shift of death event from
home to the hospital.1 Thus, the troika of Baba Kinaram Aghorashram
(a hermitage of a Shaivite ascetic order invested in the human corpse as
a metaphysical and, increasingly, a medicinal substance), Harishchandra
ghat (electric, manual cremation with a hotel view of pyres), and BHU
hospital (place of death events distinct from home death events; morgue
as a social institution) converged oddly and all things considered made
for an all too familiar, contemporaneous present. From research proposal
to the field, it ominously appeared like a little magic mountain of my own
making. The foreboding would come true, soon. But, before that was a
satisfactory trip back to the university in Delhi.
The mixed excitement remained with me as I returned to Delhi and
followed up with a reworking of my research proposal. In the following
month, few of us, friends from the university were to travel to Bangalore,
56 Dead in Banaras
South India, and then to Shimla, North India, for a fellow friend’s wed-
ding. First for the South Indian, Orthodox Christian ceremony in
Bangalore and then for the North Indian Hindu one in Shimla, respect-
ively, as the partners belonged to these two different religions and places.
After the Christian wedding, returning from the long train ride from
Yeshvantpur, Bangalore, to Nizamuddin railway station, Delhi, another
friend was waiting at the station with the news that my father’s health
is not very well with the further direction that I should go to Banaras
(not Ghazipur) as soon as possible. My younger sister had contacted my
friend since I did not have a cell phone back then and any how cellular
connections would not have held up in the travelling train at that time.
There wasn’t any immediate precedence of my father’s bad health. In fact
he had nearly recovered from his grievous injuries received along with
my mother, sisters, maternal aunt, cousin, and the driver in a road acci-
dent on their way to Banaras railway station in one private vehicle from
home (Ghazipur) in the year 1999 when I was pursuing my under gradu-
ation at the University of Delhi. The vehicle they were travelling in met
a side collision with a passenger bus and rolled and tumbled beside the
pavement a few feet down the elevated road. Father was on the front seat,
next to the driver, and bore direct brunt. His left rib cage was crushed
along with other injuries. Mother suffered internal head injuries and re-
mained unconscious for days before a year long slow recovery that was
punctuated by bouts of amnesia and suicidal proclivities. Other people
in the accident received injuries to various body parts, and everyone was
hurt and shocked including the immediate kin who were not involved in
the physical accident. Father’s lungs were damaged and through intensive
emergency medical aid in Banaras he was restored to a hopeful condition
of recovery. He perhaps went back to the physical exertion of farming too
soon or the wound was not properly taken care of in the first place that
he promptly came down with a worsening lung infection that debilitated
him more than the original injury. I had accompanied him on my visits
home to the government city hospital in Ghazipur, and with his slow re-
covery, things had become glum for all concerned, but he did gradually
fall back into routine work.
When I heard at the Nizamuddin railway station that there is an emer-
gency and I must rush, I immediately assumed that my father is dead.
The disclosure of death to a relative not present at the death scene is done
Good, bad death 57
through this culturally acceptable norm of relaying the news in a lan-
guage of emergency of dying. This is done, I imagine, to prevent naked
shock to the hearer and also to ensure that the journey back home is not
mired in further hurts and injuries caused by havocs of grief. There is also
due recognition of the cultural fact that openly relaying news of death
without the proximate intimacy of close relatives to console is akin to vin-
dictiveness and naivety. It is in this sense that there is often a complaint
made in Bhojpuri Birhaas (literally, lamentation; it is a popular genre of
song making, laced with narrative and sonorous lamentations about well-
known death events) about modern modes of communication that de-
clare the news of known and loved people with those direct words and
thus potentially enact the event of instantaneous death to the hearer. This
death by instantaneous disclosure is conceived not so much as a physical
death but as a death of some fundamental vital essence in the hearing
person. This is an insight I learnt much later in the field, particularly by
listening to Khari Birha at Harishchandra ghat. Khari Birha is a sub-form
of the same genre and is sung by men within physical proximity to fu-
nerary and mortuary spaces. These late-night unplanned performances
at the cremation ghat by certain individuals perform the bare fact that
death is real but it repeats itself contingently and mysteriously. As soon as
the singing performance begins a make-shift listening public of funeral
workers and funeral travellers huddles around the singer.
At the news of emergency, I assumed my father dead because I had par-
ticipated in exactly the same management of death news to my roommate
and friend at the university hostel, a few years back. After the death of
his father, in a very quick succession his mother too died, and his friends
including me were trying to convince him that she is under urgent med-
ical supervision and he simply needs to visit her. No doubt, there is a
deceit involved in this ethics like many other ethical gestures. There is a
curious sense of betrayal that the speaker must participate in relation to
the hearer. I sensed a replay of the same ethicized manipulation, and with
my secret assumption that my father is dead, I moved from one station
to another, and took a train from New Delhi railway station to Varanasi
junction. In the meantime, I had contacted my sister and she had asked
me to come meet them either at the Ravindrapuri residence or at the pri-
vate hospital H, adjacent to the university hospital. To my sceptical ques-
tion, why not the university hospital, she replied that they could not get a
58 Dead in Banaras
bed for him there. The assumption of father’s death accompanied me in
the overnight train journey from New Delhi to Varanasi junction with
occasional attempts to think that everything must be alright, and when
I was on this line of thought, I kept avowing to myself that I will re-invent
my relationship with my father. He and I were barely on talking terms for
over a decade that roughly coincided with my shift to Delhi, spanning last
few years of school and early university education. It had aggravated for
worse in last few years after a scrap I had with him, accusing him of mur-
derous neglect as my grandmother lay dying of rabies in the village in the
year 2001. After my grandmother’s death, I moodily oscillated between
resentment and love towards him. For him, the scrap had caused irrevers-
ible damage to our relationship, perhaps, and in the train with a return of
foreboding about his death I felt slain by remorse and guilt.
Early next morning, I went straight to hospital H from Varanasi railway
station and found my parents in the corner-most segment of the ‘General’
ward. My mother was attending to my father who lay sedated on the hos-
pital bed. The sisters, elder sister (eZ) with her newborn son (eZS) and
her husband (eZH) and my younger sister (yZ), were due to arrive from
the Ravindrapuri residence to take turns attending to father.2 Seeing me,
there was that acknowledging sign of intense despair on my mother’s face
and she roused father to pass that sense in a bodily way initially without
saying anything and then by uttering my name and announcing my ar-
rival. Father, it turned out had a severe case of diabetes which had gone
undetected till his feet were infected and had become gangrenous. Even
in his sedated sleep his hands were involuntarily pointing towards the
legs that had lost most flesh, stank and were bony and decomposed. I do
not recall any further conversation at that moment. I also do not re-
member whether I asked my mother to come out for tea or she did but we
were suddenly at the tea stall. While having tea just outside the hospital
premises from a makeshift tea stall, H appeared in a magnificent profile
and became an address and an object, a new sociological reality of a pri-
vate hospital that entered into our conversations. Mother told me about
her month-long struggle with father’s new illness. She had just begun to
recover from the days of his lung infection and this return to full-time
care marked a resigned acceptance to what fate may have in it for her and
us. She told me that she received the news of his bad health from the vil-
lage. In the village house, he was all alone and perhaps ill for long, but he
Good, bad death 59
did not send her a message. Once known, she and my younger sister, who
lived at our maternal grandfather’s house at Ghazipur, went to see and
fetch him. His legs were swollen and had a telling bad smell. Of course, he
could not walk, so with the help of varying people and using different
modes of transport he reached the Ghazipur house. Once there, my
mother and sister were advised by the local doctor to get father’s blood
glucose tested. The test required him to be ported to the diagnostic centre
and once again my mother and sister took the job upon themselves.
Intriguingly, the result from the diagnostic centre indicated his blood
glucose as normal which perhaps led the doctor to consider it as a case of
bad infection that could improve with antibiotics and disinfecting
washing solutions. My younger sister (yZ) till much later after his death
held that diagnostic report as the mistake that caused his death. She saved
the document, under the mattress along with other important things of
the house routinely hidden there, awaiting the day of dramatic confronta-
tion and moral accusation at the diagnostic centre. The confrontation
never happened. When father was alive there was no time to quarrel, and
after his death all sense of confrontation was fatefully deflated. His disin-
fection routine continued at home for a fortnight. Understandably, it did
not have much recuperative effect, and the skin of his swollen ankles
started sloughing under home care. Back at the tea stall outside hospital
H, my mother remembered this time mostly as an overwhelming and
daunting effort directed at cleaning out the smell from the room where he
was lodged in the Ghazipur house. She recalled that visitors and relatives
never failed to point to the smell emanating from the room which was in-
terpreted as her failure in effective care work. Ironically, the actual de-
composition remained hidden from sight because of the emanating smell
that kept everyone off. As the situation worsened, it was decided that a
second opinion should be sought. At recommendation, he was taken to a
Muslim charitable hospital of good repute in Mau, an adjacent district to
the north of Ghazipur. My mother said that the doctors and nurses were
sympathetic to the living sad picture of family album trio of mother, fa-
ther, and young daughter. They promised aid but the result of blood sugar
showed multiple times the normal limit and they turned down his admis-
sion citing the situation to be beyond their means. They recommended
that he should be taken to the university hospital in Banaras. The univer-
sity hospital, like most government-run hospitals of good repute is always
60 Dead in Banaras
packed to the brim, and there is no way to rush in looking for room.
I learnt about the episode, much later, from my maternal grandfather’s
(MF) diary entry. He had invested himself deeply into pulling in all
known acquaintances and relatives in Banaras to get my father admitted
into the university hospital but to little avail. I also learnt from the diary,
something my mother never disclosed to me, that she had asked my ma-
ternal grandfather, her father, for a loan to take father to Mau,
underscoring the fact that it was not merely diagnostics that kept them
waiting for a better turn. This is how then father landed at the basement
ward of this magnificently imposing H. I had noticed and made a mental
record that my mother out on a road-side makeshift kiosk having tea with
me was a rare and exceptional outing. In between some awkward silence,
I stutteringly asked why did they not inform me earlier. It was my younger
sister, true to herself, who had stopped everyone from informing me be-
cause she felt that I should not be disturbed between my all-important
research work. In turn, she compensated for me and my elder sister by
assisting mother. I was feeling diminished and overwhelmed as this par-
ticular conversation spiralled. We, I and my mother, fell silent at the ar-
rival of an ambulance affiliated to H. The hooting siren sound that it made
appeared embarrassing and felt as if it was sinisterly directed at us. We
looked at each other, confirming an ‘emergency’, like the one we were in
between. Mother kept staring at the description embossed on the side of
the vehicle. Painted in Devanagari Hindi script, it had the English words
inscribed: ‘Accident and Trauma Services’. The word trauma written in
Devanagari has a physiognomy of an absurd toy word. I looked the other
side, she kept staring there. Banaras is stubbornly Hindi. Hospital adver-
tisement hoardings across the city can be found describing ‘disease’ not as
the common place ‘rog’ but as the sanskritized ‘vyadhi’. My mother, the
master observationist had already noted in her brief stay that H has a
morgue called ‘shantigrihya’ (Silent Home), which was tucked next to the
General ward and that such a place was deeply uncanny (conveying a
sense that might fall between inauspicious and unavoidable). She con-
tinued to stare at the Devanagari ‘Accident and Trauma services’. Then
she asked me, in so many words, what is trauma? Astonished, I slipped
out a Freudian description. I told her, it is that from which we can never
fully recover. She looked surprised and doubtful because this description
could hardly fit with the ambulance’s iconic display. I revised my
Good, bad death 61
description and told her in an equally mangled utterance that it is about
physical tears, shocks to body, and nearness to mortality—fatality, fatal,
fatalness. It was this end of the conversation that strangely inaugurated
for both of us a foreboding context of life lurking inside H over the
coming days. Meanwhile, later that day, when my sisters arrived, I was
protectively sent to have home-cooked food at Ravindrapuri. I was asked
to eat, bathe, sleep, rest, and then come back to H afterwards. When I re-
turned, I carried with me the Salomon backpack that I had borrowed
from my close friend before coming to Banaras from Delhi. I organized
the medical documents, medicines, and the money I had saved from my
research assistance to an action aid project on female foeticide in North
India, along with a supply of PET mineral water bottles in its various
compartments. Salomon became my dress and prosthetic through the
hospital stay, and since it now housed things at one place that were dele-
gated and diffused to different persons and places, it surprised me how
quickly it all fell in place, the sociological ontology of role playing as a
son, with Salomon enacting its agency over my shoulders.
Father as a Relative
All of us, barring my father and his mother, lived at my maternal

grandfather’s (Nana; MF) house in Ghazipur. The house was called ‘dera’
or a ‘halt-house’ in between other real houses—my Nana’s own ancestral,
patrilineal village house across the river Ganga ji and my father’s village
still further down in the same direction but situated in a way that MF’s
village and my father’s village could have affinal relationships. The fine-
grained perceived cultural supremacy of my father’s village to wrest the
status of ‘wife takers’ was agrarian. In his village, most people were landed
and select ones including father’s extended set up had their own home
reared, well-groomed, pair of oxen to plough. More specifically, they
grew the kind of paddy crop that produced thin long pearly rice grains
and superior pulses than the coarse grains and cattle pulses that were sup-
posedly grown at my MF’s place. This is how my mother explained her
match, sometimes as though she believed in the description but mostly
in irony and sarcasm. Later on, the perspective was perhaps also shaped
by our anthropology of kinship discussions that she and I had during my
62 Dead in Banaras
university vacations. MF’s halt-house was an act of faith that character-
ized him. After retirement from the army as an instructor of tank ma-
chines with an honorary title of captain, he bought a piece of land along
with few other fellow caste men from his ancestral village. He persuaded
them to invest in the forsaken piece of land in Ghazipur’s rural zone (the
postal address was called Dehati, Urdu for rural). The land was storied
in colonial indigo ruins, dacoits, and a wandering naked mad woman
who ate stone pebbles. It had no electricity, no water connection, and
no temple and was situated on the highway that connected all northern
residents to take this road for their on-foot funeral travelling towards
Ganga ghats. He drew maps of his own and built the house which has
a crazy quilt-work inspiration from all the places he was posted during
his army service, ranging from Sangroor, Punjab, to Ahmadnagar,
Maharashtra. For water supply, he dug a well that continues to be pre-
sent today and now with him gone too, I have a recurring nightmare
that his quilted house that half shares the foundation over the well and
other half over the ground will all melt into each other. Water, bricks,
loose soil will become one like the days when the house was being con-
structed overseen by him. With the house built, water was called forth,
electricity was sanctioned by state agencies. But his fellow land holders
never actually stayed at their new land and did not return to settle for
another decade. A factory of spun pipes came up on the adjacent land,
the other three sides were surrounded by forest gardens. This halt-house
was constructed for the children to study—his own four, two daugh-
ters and two sons. My mother was the firstborn and her sister, my ma-
ternal aunt (MZ), was the last born with two maternal uncles (MB1 and
MB2) in between. In time, we siblings, my eldest sister, me, and my two
younger sisters, all fell under his shade. The quilt house became so em-
broiled in this agenda of children’s education that soon his acquaint-
ances requested him with their own sons to be thrown in the mix; MF
admitted them in and took this opportunity to declare the halt-house
as home-ashram. But between his children and his firstborn’s children,
a lot had happened. In his days of Ambala, Sangroor, and Ahmadnagar,
my mother as the firstborn had become his joy project. He mentions in
his diary about her birth and naming. He had named her Sukhda Prabha
Arya alias Maya with joyful details of her birth at his ancestral house.
The name Maya became the school name and a clarion sound tissue for
Good, bad death 63
all my maternal relatives. My grandparents or us children or our father
were teknonymically addressed as Maya hyphen so and so. Just the two
men, MF and my father called her Sukhda, and Prabha Arya only existed
in the diary. She was admitted at a public school in Punjab. He bought
her dresses from Chandni Chowk in Delhi and a bicycle too to make
her independent. Mother did not disappoint. Even though her earliest
schooling was in MF’s and her own village school, she picked up litera-
ture and was sharp in mathematics in the city schools. Then, in one of
the trips back home, he was persuaded to marry her off. The urgency to
marry was found over many ordinary details, including daughter as a
young woman, small pox marks on her face, sun burnt complexion that
I inherited from her, the common precedence of marrying young, and
fate and divine providence, as MF always believed. Father as a groom
was equally green. She had finished her eighth standard exam, and he
was trying to pass his tenth standard yet another time, a standard that
he could eventually never cross, and this perhaps was one of his first
formal failure in a series of such failures that marked his married life.
He had land though or his family had. They had oxen too, more than one
pair. All of this crumbled soon though and inheriting the divided house,
with his own father long dead, he lived with his widowed mother and
my mother, with slightly more than an acre of land and one architectural
part of the ancestral house as his cherished and self-chosen share. This
choice involved having his mother live with him and taking his younger
brother’s architectural division, which had the cattle shed and kitchen
but no pucca house as his other brothers had. A decision that my mother,
typical of her entire married life, both loathed and praised—loathing
for the obvious consequences, extending to the fact that for thirty years
after her marriage owing to children’s educational expenses they dwelled
amidst the shed and the kitchen, and praising for his ethics, a disavowal of
self-interest and an identification of self with moral earning in extended
familial contests, that marked him. Father did not want my mother to
stay in inconvenience and exposure and that was an additional reason,
apart from the main reason of children’s education that mother stayed at
MF’s halt house, while father and his mother stayed at the village house
until their death. After the wedding, it was soon clear that farming would
not work with the collective aspirations of MF and mother who had seen
various school worlds. MF must have been deeply disappointed to have
64 Dead in Banaras
jotted this entry between his 1971 war posting, when my father was re-
jected for recruitment in the army.
Brahmdeo had gone to Ahmadnagar for recruitment while he was

still recovering from his surgical operation. He was even recruited but
unfortunately I was moved urgently on to a war posting in 1971 and
another doctor rejected him three months into the recruitment, on
the basis of falling short of the required height. He was dropped. (6th
July 1971)
When my parents firstborn, my elder sister (eZ) came by at my father’s

house, MF had his joy project rekindled. It was agreed, I think on a spur of
enthusiasm that my mother will stay at the halt-house for the child’s edu-
cation. My father would visit his wife and children, and since this was not
the ancestral house, so permanent residence of my mother at her natal
house could be discursively defended. What MF could not do for his first-
born daughter, now both MF and my mother wanted to do for his first-
born granddaughter. Based on his diary entry, I say, spur and enthusiasm
because the terms of this engagement were never set or perhaps they were
foreseen and avoided, the burden of which fell on my parents and now
that I painfully recognize it, most on my father. The suggestion took fur-
ther shape with my birth at MF’s ancestral house. My birth at his village
repeated a providence for MF which had great echo in his own biography.
He had written the following in his diary, in 2002, describing his birth
and childhood after my long-standing request to write about himself in a
more detailed and chronological order.
‘In a family of three paternal brothers, my father was married at the age
of sixteen. In due time and after five daughters, I was born. The exact
date is not known but according to the school record it is 1st July 1933.
I do know though that the correct month is May of 1933. By this time,
my father’s elder brother’s wife was widowed and his younger brother
had not yet married. People in the neighbourhood, womenfolk in par-
ticular maintained that if my mother had not gone to her father’s house
when she was carrying me in her womb, I wouldn’t have been born (re-
ferring to the vitiated domestic environment at MF’s father’s house).
My maternal grandfather was delighted at my birth and it blossomed
Good, bad death 65
into a love for me that continued all his life. Mother was the only
daughter and was dearly loved by her parents. While my own father
harassed (pratadit) and disrespected my mother through her life, she
was loved by everyone in the neighbourhood. She had her mysterious
(rahasyapurna) ways of getting things done for me while keeping them
hidden from my father. Mother must have been left with little choice
though that she decided to stay at her father’s house for five years and
returned only when my initiation ceremony was to be conducted. After
her brothers got married the relations with her natal family slackened
but as fate would have it, her elder brother died and soon after, her
younger brother left home and became a sadhu (a wandering ascetic).
After mother died, my maternal grandfather decided to will his prop-
erty on my name. My father returned the will and other documents
claiming responsibility for me and requested his father-in-law to name
the property after his sons’ surviving families. I have thought about my
father’s decision many times over in life and have always felt great satis-
faction in his unselfish and others-first values.
My mother’s natal house (nanihaal) has had a close and intimate effect
on my being. I have always wished to live up to those ideals to this day.
My maternal grandfather’s comfort with solitary (ekant) environment,
his ability to effect and register his endearment and oneness (apnatva)
even when physically apart, his aspiration towards higher ideals of kind-
ness (udaarta) and love (prem) through practices of sacrifice and devo-
tion is what I have always sought to adopt. I have always wished to truly
recreate that environment in my life and extend his affection to others
through myself.’ (From MF’s diary entry marked as ‘Childhood account’.
The account was written by him in 2002 on my request).
It was secured that Maya and her children will stay at the halt-house
and Brahmdeo, my father, who would be busy farming and sheltering his
own widowed mother will stay at his ancestral village. This flux between
patrilineal and matrilineal moulds is reflected in an oneiric event when
my naming was being considered. It was agreed that I should be named
Ganesh, after the deity who is the happy one, is first to arrive at auspicious
occasions and likes to eat a lot of sweets firsthand. Features that my
mother often said I expressed as a child. Just that from the night the name
was floated my mother started seeing in her dreams a tall man who was
66 Dead in Banaras
trying to say something to her but was unable to. Perhaps because they
were apart in age or status and thus could not communicate. After more
of the same appearances, spooked, my mother confided to her husband
and his mother. It was my paternal grandmother who said that the ap-
pearance matched with my father’s grandfather and it all made sense as it
surfaced that he too was named Ganesh. The name was immediately shed
off and I was named after the only graduate in my father’s village without
any further imagination. Even then a celestial and astral naming pattern
had unfolded, with MF as Mahindra, MM as Kesari, Mother as Maya,
Father as Brahmdeo, elder sister (eZ) as Sandhya, and I as Ravi. The sister
born after me was named Usha, and the last born, most cherished to fa-
ther, died at the age of five of brain fever without a proper name. Father
who could not make it during her illness and always regretted the same,
would wistfully remark till much later after her death that Rinki (her pet
name) should have been given a proper name. Yet, this structuring pat-
tern produced other names too. Pet names, names of endearment and
perhaps the most important double of Maya and Sukhda, my mother’s
two names. The former represented the matrilineal world and the latter
the patrilineal one, with the complex scape of both my father and MF
calling her by the same name Sukhda. The dream of the visiting patri-
lineal ancestor became my mother’s mysterious introduction into her
husband’s family as much as I think it must have been because of the birth
of a son to the family. Mother remembers the family genealogy starting
from Ganesh Singh by heart. The narration almost always starts with the
re-accounting of the dream. She had helped me with names and descrip-
tions many times earlier but before writing this part of ‘field work’, I asked
in particular for the necrological–genealogical details while we were vis-
iting father’s village looking for documents a few months after his death.
Both the necrology (for the disclosures of the deaths) and her awareness
are intriguing because it appears that no one else in the extended family
remembers these details barring some knowledge of the previous gener-
ation. The genealogy starts with Ganesh Singh and moves to his sons. The
eldest Sitaram Singh was married and his wife died during childbirth. He
did not marry again and died of old age. Ram Virich Singh was married to
Kusma Kunwar and they had one daughter Kalawati Singh. Ram Virich
Singh died during the Plague. Ram Kirit Singh, the next son, married
Lahasi Devi and had a son and two daughters. Lahasi Devi died in
Good, bad death 67
childbirth and Ram Kirit Singh married again, to Manaki Devi, my
grandmother (FM). They had four sons, including my father. Three sur-
vived and the fourth died. FM after the division of the son’s coparcenery
set up, stayed with my father until her death. In fact, for most part of his
adult life, father and his old mother lived together, and after her death, he
lived by himself. Ram Kirit Singh, my father’s father, died of tetanus and a
fatal social wound. After abandoning his house over a domestic quarrel,
he walked through the night full of rage and was discovered in a swamp.
Ganesh Singh’s youngest son was Ram Kaar Singh, who died unmarried
of the same plague that killed Ram Virich Singh. The odds of good death
and bad death were unevenly stacked, and like all children, the sons had
to keep looking at the sky every once in a while to know through some
secret channel about the indeterminate inheritance of the turn of dice.
For father, it soon fell into a long, slow, pattern of lived descent that con-
verged with his own father’s death. After the failed army recruitment, he
turned to learn welding. Mother says he even tried for a while to establish
himself professionally as a welder in Jalandhar, Punjab. At the time of
MF’s retirement, he was working with MF at an Ex-soldiers’ ration shop
and subsequently at the printing press that MF had started. They had
worked together at Allahabad in a similar ration shop but had to return
under threats of Hindu–Muslim strife. I remember the knock at the halt-
house, late in the night in 1986. In those days, it was an all-women house-
hold with both my mother’s brothers away for their higher education. We
could hear muffled voices of my father and MF calling out Sukhda. As
they stepped in, they looked stricken with fear and anxiety, a synchronic
image that is engraved into my memory. This episode grounded them
both, and father returned to farming while MF settled to the pension he
received. The rest of us were dependents—thus started another domain
of heartache with money, ration, pen, pencil, crayons, compasses, tiffin,
textbooks, fees, and uniforms. All of us were stationed at Ghazipur while
my mother’s brothers pursuing their professional degrees lived away
from home. Father took upon himself to bring in grains and that lasted
for a while. Then it shifted to him buying vegetables and groceries when
he would come. Before this shift, the only time I had seen him truly elated
was when he had decided to buy a tractor along with his younger brother.
On the day of purchase he had come with a wad of currency notes tied in
a chunri, most of it came from a piece of land that he had sold. The tractor
68 Dead in Banaras
was bought on loan and interest, an interest that mortified my mother.
She would call compound interest as chakrvridhi vyaja, a term from her
school day math, and when translated in keeping with her fearful tone, it
would appear in English as vicious-accretion interest. It was vicious. It
punished the moment’s exultation with long-drawn, menacing loan peri-
odicity. First went the trolley, then when the battery went down, the
tractor engine was started with a mechanical lever. The battery was never
changed though the tyres were replaced with second hand ones. And
then it stopped and was long parked like an orphan in one of the fields
close to our village home. It must have looked the part when father left the
place to die. In all of this, more land was sold. First to pay the interest,
then more was sold to build a concrete home and toilet, which could
never get completed and stands today reminiscent of same quilt work de-
sire and architecture with which MF had made the Ghazipur house. The
characteristic difference being MF succeeded and father failed in com-
pleting what he had started. Scaffolded by these invisible forces, father
seemed struggling when we, or at least I, as children could not see or place
the enemies proximate to him. He would come home to Ghazipur and
speak very little. At times, he would leave early in the morning while we
children were still asleep, a gesture I felt to be unbearably harsh
throughout my childhood. At MF’s insistence and out of their magna-
nimity, I was brought to Delhi by my maternal uncles for further
schooling. Sharing their subject positions when they were away from
home studying, I felt embarrassed and humiliated with the same old har-
rowing complex of fees, dress, food, books, and allowances. Father had
little or nothing to send and I found myself under duress that was at times
unbearable. My parents’ common gift, however, was that I had picked up
reading literature from them. Both of them shared the habit of reading
books, and once my father had noted that my mother really liked to read,
he started the ritual of loaning books from the local, Zamania college li-
brary. All their children are witness to this never expressed fact in the
family that this ritual was their ritual of love. They rarely wrote to each
other. Incidentally, my MF who never had a literary interest wrote in all
painstaking details, ranging from where he had tea on a particular day in
1961 to his daily chronicle of laments and prayers over family events. This
was a practice I inherited from him, and it constituted a bond that re-
mains one of the most endearing facets of my childhood and adolescent
Good, bad death 69
years. I could never understand then why father did not write. But, he did
not. The scaffolding tightened even more as the younger crop of men at
his in-laws place became successful and spoke derisively of him and occa-
sionally with him, when they did. Then there was the accident of 1999,
which he survived. Soon after his own recovery, his mother died due to
rabies, and thereafter he lived alone. Just before the accident, he had tried
to make things work again and had taken several people’s land on rent to
till on his own. An initiative that did bring temporary joy to both my
parents. After his mother’s death, it must have been very lonely because
out of all of us, paucity of money had affected him the most. He would al-
most never do anything for himself. After his dowry radio had conked, he
never bought a new one, leave alone, a TV. The Cinni table fan had to be
exorcised each time with hand-held vigorous shakes and thumps before it
would moodily start but he never considered changing it. Books had long
dried up and he would just pore over his old, preserved copy of Shiv
Purana that he had bought from a railway station book stall. It fits in that
he was ill and his illness was compounded by loneliness. But not
disclosing it to my mother fits in with something that I gather MF eventu-
ally did to himself as a matter of secret complaint. MF practised Yoga
through most of his work life and more rigorously after his retirement. It
must have been effective for him because for more than two decades that
I had seen him he had fallen ill only twice, once with high fever and an-
other time with a week-long bout of cough. He had labelled himself as
home-renunciate (grih-vairagi) and often talked about dying in an ar-
rangement overseen by his most worshipped mother goddess.
In his diary, he has an entry few months before my father’s death
describing his prayer for his own death. He writes: ‘Give me a pleasant,
satisfactory, peaceful, gentle lap of death and do not make me a burden
to be cared for’ (Mujhe sukhad, santoshjanak, shantidayak, mrityu ki god
dena, bina kisi ke seva kee aavshayakta pradaan kiye).
This was not to be. Late summer in 2010, I noticed missed calls from
my mother after I finished my afternoon lecture at the college where I was
teaching sociology at the time. An unspoken, anticipatory pattern had
settled around our phone call etiquette. I was the one to call home. When
I got a call from home, it meant there was an emergency. If my sister
called, it meant another road accident, and when my mother called, it
meant some death news. This time it was Nana’s (MF) turn to be ensnared
70 Dead in Banaras
by death. On my return call, my mother said, your Nana (MF) has gone
mad. His knee is profusely bleeding, and he is ranting. She said that he
was not letting anyone come close to him. My Nani (MM), my mother,
and sister (yZ) were trying to reach to the wound to stop it from bleeding,
and he kept screaming in a resounding, theatrical way that do not come
close, ‘this is Angad’s leg, no one can move it’. Angad is a character from
Ramayana. A short book called ‘Ram Katha: The Story of Rama in Indian
Miniatures. Activity Book for Children Aged 8–100’ (Vasudevan and
Mathur, 2013) from the National museum in Delhi has the following ac-
count of Angad while describing a miniature dedicated to the scene.
Rama is full of compassion. Although Ravana has abducted his wife,

he does not wish to have a war. So he sends Sugriva’s nephew Angad
to Ravan’s court as a messenger to politely request the return of Sita. . . .
Look at Angad’s foot. His foot is firmly planted on the ground. He chal-
lenged all the demons in Ravan’s court to lift his leg and if they suc-
ceeded, he would go back to Rama and never ask Sita to be returned.
But no one could lift the leg of Angad and thus Ravana had to prepare to
fight Rama to give Sita back (Vasudevan and Mathur 2013: 33).
Nana’s madness was in thinking of his wife, daughter, and grand-

daughter as demons—the madness of turning familial characters upside
down. His physical illness, of course, was an aggravation. He had a long-
diagnosed condition of high blood pressure and had suffered a massive
cardiac stroke. There was another inversion, this time of his own death-
wish prayer for a peaceful death. He was admitted to and discharged from
five separate hospitals spread over the entire National Capital Region
starting from east Delhi and ending in Gurgaon—where he died without
anyone in attendance from the family, including me. But unlike my fa-
ther, because of his army provisions, he had regular medical check-ups
and knew about the necessity of having his blood pressure medicines on a
daily basis. Daily discipline was anyway his embodied character, he need
not be reminded of things to be done that day or the next. At a very tender
time of family crisis with his closest family members he silently avowed to
stop all his medicines and told his wife, my Nani, that the doctor has ad-
vised him so as he was found to be fully fit and had recovered from high
blood pressure with yoga. And, he did. He stopped taking the high blood
Good, bad death 71
pressure medicine. I discovered this episode from his diary; he combined
his death-wish prayer with this anti-prayer. It is the same that my father
seems to have done, deciding to die, secretly and vengefully to the family.
Father as a Dying Relative
Back in H. Hospital’s daily routine of disinfection of his gangrenous legs,

powdering his bed sores in sedated state with my mother as the spousal
assistant to the medical staff reintroduced me to my own mother.
Mother and father together in this situation appeared as if their lifelong
performative reserve of invisible intimacy was condensed and thrown
open for everyone to see. Before my arrival to the scene, my mother and
sisters performed the daily scrubbing and washing of his body along
with changing of underclothes. Certain tasks would invariably go to
mother as spouse. I was assimilated quickly into the tasks substituting
my sisters but never my mother. Her exclusivity could be as much about
the social position of the spouse as that of my mother as a person but
together it appeared to be a luggage of all of our lives weighing on her.
In my slow efforts to talk sporadically about her quiet days at H in years
subsequent to father’s death, she confided that before going to H when
she would clean him and the room daily to remove the emanating smell
at the halt house, he spoke of her graciousness towards him. That she
never missed her daily prayer in their entire married life became a sub-
stance for him. In one such conversation, moved by her care, he invoked
god to take good note of her deeds and grant what is due to her. In an
old school reverential gesture no wife observed in the house, including
my mother’s mother, my mother touched his feet. She embraced his ob-
servations as a continuity of his position to bless her. But on this occa-
sion, on his death bed, it was as if he supplicated that blessing for her
to live by wagering his own life to death. At H, after the daily routine of
scrub and disinfection with antiseptic wash, there was the moment of
changing his sheets. Two young medical assistants would come to do
the chore. They were also the ones who cleaned the wounds. Their sense
of completion of the routine was slightly different though from how we
felt that completion to be. The change of sheets below the patient’s body
was a trained gesture. They would pull it out slowly with one person
72 Dead in Banaras
putting his arm under the patient’s back to raise his hips. The same pro-
cedure was applied to put in the new sheet. Once done, it was now the
turn of the top sheet over the patient’s body. This is when a glee would
return to their faces. They would pull the sheet, first in a slow tending
movement and as the sheet would reach the level of the patient’s navel
they would pull it down rapidly. Then their exultant and uproarious
laughter at the sight of him, attempting to cover his scrotal region. That
he is sedated and still awkwardly grimaces at this gesture tells us some-
thing about different personages of body organs. For the boys though
it would never fail to kindle that uproarious laughter, even though it
all lasted a few degrading seconds, so fleeting that it could hardly be
converted into a language of complaint. Notwithstanding our own em-
barrassment at their meticulous care of the legs without flinching about
the smell and the sight. Julie Livingston (2012: 146) in an account titled
‘Pain and laughter’ within the context of an oncology ward in Botswana
hopes that such a hospital laughter is a means to ‘autopalliation’. She
means it for the patient in pain, but as her ethnography shows, it can be
easily extended to the care givers as well. To extend this equivalence, an-
other way to see this laughter (as we, I and my sister, did at the moment
of witnessing the sheet act) would be in terms of the classic relation of
laughter and death as two vitally opposed but socially and consequen-
tially linked terms: ‘to laugh at others is to ask for one’s own death’. In
other words, if in a final moral evaluation no one deserves death, who
must die? The one who laughs. The famed Vijaydashmi or Dussehra fes-
tival in Banaras is staged by propping up a gigantic papier-mâché ten-
headed Ravana along with his brother and son to be killed using crackers
stuffed inside their hollow endoskeletons, enacting a symbolic assassin-
ation by Rama. How may the synchronic, comic, and fierce image of ten-
headed Ravana communicate its evilness? The organizers use recorded
laughter (‘canned laughter’) as Ravana’s continuous embodied eman-
ation. He laughs unceasingly and that is why he is killed. What laughter
does in our case is to introduce us to forms of death that haunt care work.
There is the overt and ordinary mocking relation that is structured by the
adage: our work is to laugh and your work is to die. Far from thinking that
hospital is the only place for such ‘degradation ceremonies’, to borrow the
well-known description from Arthur Kleinman (1988), it is apt to think
that it rather makes explicit the derision and laughter in home settings
Good, bad death 73
where care work must face its own proximity with variegated versions
of death.
Exactly a week into this routine, the consulting doctor suggested that
father must be taken to another floor where the surgical ward was located
to be examined by a set of doctors, including the surgeon. My mother
had introduced me to the said doctor, but it had not registered to the
busy doctor and when we spoke again he asked me what I did. I told him
briefly about the research work. He noted that with a pleasant smile and
said will inform us about the time. The scheduled time came, and with
father on the stretcher helped by one staff member, we wheeled him
through the elevator to the top floor where he were to be examined. The
arrangement was such at the hospital that as and when a medicine was
required the patient’s relative was asked to fetch it from the in-house
chemist so that the hospital did not have a huge due to settle at the time
of patient discharge. I was asked to wait outside for such a task. No such
thing was called for, and from the shadow of the stretcher I could sense
that he was not being examined yet. Soon he was wheeled in closer to
the lights for inspection and one could hear the talk, the main points
of the case being spelt out. It still surprises me that the place with all its
physical boundaries of restricted entry and exit was so clearly within
the acoustical hearing range. It was obvious that his legs could not be
saved from what I had seen over the week, but it still hurt me piercingly
when I heard them that they will amputate his legs. Recovering soon,
I had to resist my own disbelief when I heard in their collegial din there
was a discussion over amputating just the left leg. When the stretcher
was brought out, briefly, the surgeon too came out along with the con-
sulting doctor and acknowledged that he knew about my research. They
both did not disclose at that moment or even that day about the ampu-
tation and father was wheeled back to his bed. That the sonic architec-
ture of the ward gave away is another matter, otherwise, it is clear that
the doctors were participating with great care about such a disclosure
and its effects. My mother kept asking me as if like me she also wanted
to confirm what we all had come to acknowledge individually. I told her
the truthful lie, half the story that I had heard upstairs. That his upper
legs above the knees were not yet infected and no further damage had
happened to the lower legs compared to the earlier diagnosis. The next
day, the consulting doctor came and met my mother asking to speak
74 Dead in Banaras
with a ‘gent’ of the house. My mother, looking stricken, spontaneously
pointed to me. He did not look convinced and could have done with
someone more gent than me but nevertheless asked me to accompany
him to another part of the same floor. It is ironical too that while clearly
restricted architectural separations cannot prevent seeping of voices, in
the din of general ward, amidst all noises, such disclosures can be ar-
ticulated just to the addressee. The doctor told me, and told me not to
disclose the same to my mother, considering her frailty as a ‘woman’, and
to tell her at an opportune moment at home. He started with the same
assurance that I had given my mother the night before, except that he
told me the other half of the narrative as well. That his knees are strong,
with one leg intact, the other knee can easily adjust to a prosthetic. It
is more difficult when the knee is not there, a thigh cannot as easily
adjust to a prosthetic and is prone to further infection. In all this con-
versation, things were referred carefully, metonymically. Amputation,
the English word, was not used. Instead he said that they will have to
‘remove’ (‘hatana’) the leg even when he surely would have had the
medical parlance at the tip of his tongue that is to ‘cut’ (‘kaatna’) the
leg. I asked more about the prosthetic leg, and at the conclusion of the
conversation he reminded me once again to not disclose to my mother
right away. As I greeted and left him, a stirring scorn welled up in me
over his repeated advice. My mother and sisters emerged as persons
having lived with the threat of father’s death over and over, as his health
declined progressively. While walking back to the ward, I strangely
remembered my mother’s poised stricken face just as it was when my
youngest sister, Rinki, had died. Before entering the ward I was in doubt
whether to disclose it to her now or later. She had come up to the aisle
looking out for me. When I met her, I paused, hesitated, but eventually
disclosed including the impending immediacy of the same. It was due
the day after. She was waiting, I realized, less for me and more to cry
out, and she did but with the same poised stance of not letting others in
the ward know that she is crying. The doctor anticipating the scenario
came rushing in. He scolded me over my betrayal. Did I not ask you
to wait till she got home? My mother, after her crying ceased, echoed
the doctor’s words that a woman’s heart is weak and I should have been
more careful. Julie Livingston (2012) in the same ethnography referred
earlier on the oncology ward in Botswana has a small interlude chapter
Good, bad death 75
called ‘Amputation day at Princess Marina Hospital’. She opens the dis-
cussion with the following words:
“It’s Amputation day at PMH!’ I wrote in my field notes at some point

just after lunch one day in June 2008. By that point, there had been
too much amputation talk for one day in this small oncology ward—
too many breasts, legs, feet, and testicles to be removed, too much ab-
straction, cajoling, rot, angst, and loss.” (Livingston 2012: 85).
As she begins to close the discussion in the short chapter, she

says: ‘Amputation, of course, is not a day’ (Livingston 2012: 91). My
father’s staid general ward does not compare to an oncology ward ampu-
tation theatre but her indexing of amputation as a surgical event, a cut-
ting, a removing that is tied to familial and personal senses of rot, pain,
and loss and that which has an afterlife if you do it, and if you do not do it,
does echo all the same. I am thinking about the bad news management
though, including the news with which I started this account. Why is it
that in the subcontinent, bad news is always overheard? It seems to be
the same at homes, hospitals, TV soaps, and movies, except for the
straight faced ‘News’. Everywhere, while good news comes with boxes of
sweets, bad news leaks from curtains, windows, doors, walls, and PVC
partitions. In order to understand the spatial link between death,
laughter and leaking of bad news we must think of an invisible ‘perfor-
ated sheet’3 as a real and palpable acoustic wall which takes different
forms in homes, hospitals, TV soaps, and movies. I clearly erred in
disclosing bad news to my mother. This must be the reason why everyone
in the ward was looking at me with a projected naivety. Soon my sisters
got to know and then there was that same muffled crying but also a new
context of conversation and anticipation emerged. Meanwhile the
doctor had asked to arrange for two units of blood for the surgery, and
alongside my elder sister’s husband, I got drawn to that work. Soon we
had relatives and neighbours from Ghazipur who agreed to donate the
unit that could be swapped for the matching unit from the blood bank of
H. The next day, while my sisters were by father’s side, I took mother out
for a stroll. I had noticed the prosthetics shop tucked in a corner at Lanka
(market place near H), and this is where I was taking her. The imme-
diate reason for this was another breakdown for my mother, when
76 Dead in Banaras
she wailingly despaired about having to take care of him for the rest of
her life. In the same despair she mentioned the stigma of an amputated
leg. Add to the list of laughter and disclosure, it is crying too which
shares a definite relation with the tact and tactlessness of care. At the
shop she remained quiet. The shopkeeper sensing that this was not a
purchase visit offered his own experience of other people in similar
situations to visibly console my mother and instil a sense of recovery.
There was very little time to recover though as the surgery was scheduled
the next day. My MF was informed, and from his diary entry I can see that
he had informed my uncles too. The day of surgery came, and the same
procedure of wheeling his stretcher to the surgery room was followed.
My mother and sisters had made father wear a polo t-shirt that I had
brought for him at an earlier visit. At the surgical ward, the doctors
handed out a list of medicines and equipment to be bought. At the
chemist counter, looking at the white pouch that described the surgical
blade inside I felt a shudder. I held it firmly and handed it over along with
other medicines to the staff, back at the surgical ward. I and my sister’s
husband waited outside to fetch things as demanded. As the surgery was
concluded the surgeon asked me in, identifying me as the one who was
doing doctoral research in Banaras. He sternly told me that since I was
from social sciences and would not know about such things, my father
has to be fed a protein-rich diet. Then he called out for one of his col-
leagues who came in with a polythene bag. The surgeon took the poly-
thene bag and said in the same stern tone that this is the leg. He asked me
to keep it and immerse it in Ganga ji as was the norm. In his handing
over of the amputated leg I realized that he was going out of his way to
respect a certain ethos that did not entirely fit within the medical frame.
His stern tone hid this ethicality, and he moved away without any further
ado. The polythene flesh bouquet in my hand with my brother-in-law
waiting outside and father to be wheeled to the ward, I opened my
Salomon and inserted it between the mineral water bottle and a pair of
change clothes. Everyone was already waiting downstairs, including MF.
As father was transferred from stretcher to the bed, everyone was
training their gazes hard to both see the absent place of his leg and also
avoid being seen that they were doing so. Everyone knew about it by
then, except father himself. I asked my MF out and told him about the
leg in my backpack. Together we had been part of similar situations at
Good, bad death 77
the Ghazipur halt-house: Should a dead pet cow be immersed in the
river or sent to the skinners? Should a stillborn calf be sent to the same
skinners for taxidermic work so that the cow has the make-believe calf
doll and does not go into mourning (causing her milk to dry) or should
one try milking her more than twice (the way a young calf would latch
many times in the day) as a possible remedy to her loss. Should a street
dog that died in front of the halt-house, crushed by a highway truck, be
buried on our land or left to the crows? I did not need to remind him all
of this. I asked him to bury it at the halt-house and told him that we will
plant a tree later on at the same place. It was our kind of pact, similar to
our cultivation of writing diaries, registering barely recognizable events
in the passing of our own lives, including that of plants and pet animals
at the halt-house. At his suggestion we organized another polythene bag,
transferred the already polythene-wrapped leg into the newly acquired
bag, and I handed it over to him. Much later I learnt that Nana (MF) had
passed the bouquet to his brother to immerse it in Ganga ji. I should
have known that just as the bad news hangs in the air till it finds that
exact subject who must know it hurtfully, similarly, equivalent bad
things find their way to Gangaji’s waters. The surgeon must have known
this social fact through countless introductions to the anatomies of local
knowledge. Back in the general ward, father was still slightly sedated and
it looked like he would take time to recognize everyone. Also most vis-
itors realized it would be slightly awkward to face him once he wakes up
from his anaesthesia, and as evening was approaching the relatives left
one by one. One relative, related to mother not as consanguine nor from
her own marital family network but as an affine (MZH), let’s call him
‘PS’, nevertheless, decided to stay for the night. PS took charge of things
as he entered the scene, asked my mother and sisters to go home and re-
tire, assuring that the three of us—him, I, and my elder sister’s husband—
would manage. With reluctance they all left. Tired, I sat next to father,
waiting. An hour had passed when he gradually whirred up in some dis-
comfort signalling pain. I got the head nurse to see from her station, and
she said this was a regular symptom after a big operation. But, it didn’t
subside and it looked unusual. I frantically looked for PS and my elder
sister’s husband and having found them gestured to look into what was
happening. PS rushed to emergency services and requested for a quick
check-up. The doctor who came in advised that father should be put on
78 Dead in Banaras
ventilator and recommended that we get him admitted into the intensive
care unit. PS insisted with the management thereafter to get father trans-
ferred to the intensive care unit. It could not be done as it was already
occupied, and instead they decided to put him on ventilator in the ward
itself. Before that could be done, two young male doctors arrived to look
into the emergency. One of them checked his heart’s rhythm with the
stethoscope while the other doctor tried to rouse my father by physically
shaking him. Father did not stir as he should have. The doctor who was
trying to rouse him into response asked me the patient’s name. I told him,
it is Brahmdeo Singh. The doctor started calling out father by his name.
He realized that his calling out was not resonating so he asked me to hold
father and scream his name loudly, close to his ears. I did as I was told. As
I screamed his name to him I felt his death in me. There was that mild
scolding in my screaming, a scolding tone that I became familiar with as
fresh aggrieving tone later on in my fieldwork. His unresponsiveness
continued, and the doctors wrote out emergency tools and medicines to
be bought from the in-house chemist. I accompanied my brother-in-law
after PS gestured us to go together for the medicines. I noticed a blade
again on the prescription list and felt it through the paper cover while
fetching it to the ward. One of the doctors was thumping father’s chest
with the palms of his hands, and as the medicines and the blade were
handed over, he quickly shaved father’s chest and made a gash. The other
doctor had prepared the injection by then, the shot was injected at a
place close to the gash. The syringe held vertically, the medicine went in
gushingly. He did not stir, and now when they were touching father, his
body parts moved not so much in sensory terms as clayey physical terms.
The doctors checked his heart again, ran their hands over his chest and
forehead, waiting for their own, well-known golden last sign. Or is there
such a sign? One or many, the answer must necessarily be semiotically
mediated. The doctors called me and PS and gestured towards father in
half-baked nervous words, appearing to be unambiguously telling us
that he, the pointed one, is no more. Like all communication, language,
including gestures in which death has to be communicated, does not
have to entirely come from the announcers, the surviving complete the
circle, they fill in the blanks and gloss the stutter of the other. I had not
noticed until then that after we fetched the emergency medicines, PS
had sent my brother-in-law to fetch mother. As the doctors declared
Good, bad death 79
death in their stuttering but unambiguous ways, PS immediately ges-
tured to halt the doctors in their formalities, wanting to communicate
something urgent. As the doctors leaned towards him, he whispered to
repeat the last minute procedure as the dead’s wife arrives such that she
feels she could see him in his death. The young male doctors, surpris-
ingly, agreed and even understood in that half told account just as we
had understood their declaration of death. As my mother arrived they
resumed, at the sound of her rushed footsteps, the thumping of father’s
heart. Holding his hand at the place where the gash was made, one of the
doctors fiddled for the second vial of the heart reviving drug and then
realized the injection was junked by then. In a great quick manoeuvre he
thumped the heart again. Then the two doctors repeated the exercise of
checking, confirming, and declaring, this time with greater poise than
the first time. My mother must have completed her share of the circle of
communication of death, from distance, when my brother-in-law went
to fetch her. She screamed during the faux proceedings that she served
him all her life and here he left without her being there, when she was
gone just for a while. I felt choked and overwhelmed by the doctors’ eth-
ical rehearsal, and later during fieldwork when the same material prac-
tices were cited by many as hospital’s way of keeping the biologically
dead on the ventilator to earn more rent on it, the sense of gratitude per-
sisted even then. The death certificate, says that he was suffering from
‘Diabetic foot’ that was ‘Bilateral’ and had ‘Septicaemia’ too, and he died
of ‘cardiac respiratory arrest’ at 10.45 pm. Death certificates nag with the
survivors’ understanding of cause(s), time, condition, modes of treat-
ment, its finality as well as its surreal empirical certainty. Just as my
younger sister (yZ) had father’s misdiagnosed blood sugar report under
the mattress in front of the TV for years, similarly my mother had his
death certificate locked into her aluminium trunk under a big iron lock.
These coded documents are cathected with power and are seen and ex-
perienced with awe and revulsion, as the case may be, mirroring the
whole constellation of uneasiness and intensity that the mixed world of
hospital and patients inhabit in Banaras. Back in the hospital, after the
second declaration, the service staff which was in emergency mode for a
while rushed to cover father with the linen of his bed and quickly trans-
ferred him to a morgue stretcher and then that stretcher was left parked
inside the morgue with him under the cover. To my younger sister (yZ)
80 Dead in Banaras
and my mother’s safe keeping of the cathected medical documents of
misdiagnosed report and the death certificate, this is the story from the
other side. First time declaration of death and the second time declar-
ation of the same death conjoin two phenomenological worlds of doc-
tors and patients’ survivors. Back to the morgue, the gates were promptly
locked from both sides and father was out of bounds both as a particular
person, since the bills had to be cleared, and as a general dead, since the
living must be reassured of this distinction. Hospital as an organization
that finds itself in the volcanic immediacy of social institutions of related-
ness has to still perfect the suitable place for weeping and the clinical dead
in the same frame in Banaras. But then do we have these perfect, suitable
places even in the age-old realms of family and kinship? At this good, bad
death in the hospital we turn, in chapter 4, to the dead. And, to the realm
of ‘tuneful’ weeping in between home and hospital leading to the possi-
bilities emergent in the mournful language of ‘wept statements’.
4
Crying and Listening
Forms of Mourning and Community
Let us return to the idea of the rest-post again. Recall the place desig-
nated for funeral travellers to keep the bier down and gain breath before
resuming the hurried walk to the cremation ground. Is it not ironic that
the word ‘rest’ that is so often associated with the dead can actually be
a ground of turbulent memories, memories that now constitute grief?
Indeed, the same can be said about the word, ‘waiting’, which is otherwise
compulsorily associated with suspending and freezing of activity. I high-
light the ambiguity of these ordinary words woven with funerary texture
because as we move through the descriptions (Chapters 3 and 4), we find
ourselves in the middle of this familiar–unfamiliar world of the living and
dead. This chapter starts with the dead, my dead, as social and cultural
facts and slowly moves with attention to words, rituals, practices, and ges-
tures towards offering a recognizable texture of mourning as a vital part
of human sociality. The autobiographical tone and substance continues
from Chapter 3 and in fact, join these two middle chapters (chapter 3
and 4) as two arms of a shirt. Between writing and rewriting of this book,
this space of what now constitutes these middle chapters kept growing,
the way rest and waiting get filled up with the sense and the memories
of the absent (dead). These two chapters grew from an anecdote into an
account and from an account into a narrative and from a narrative into a
narrative form of necrology and from that form to a phenomenology of
the absent–present (dead) as a condition of the social. Curiously, even in
this expanded form it appears densely contracted, reminding me of over-
whelming details that had to be left out. In abstraction, the dead are the
least demanding. But once we recognize ourselves in them, we enter into
a social and existential labyrinth of the lived and the living. It is time to
resume funeral travelling.

82 Dead in Banaras
Father as a Dead Relative
It was past midnight when the accountant arrived to clear the bills.
Meanwhile, PS (MZH) kept insisting with the management to open the
lock of the morgue (Shantigrihya) so that my sisters could see their fa-
ther. The lock was not opened till the bills were cleared. In the emotional
melee with an indignant and agitated PS, I noticed that the manage-
ment did not say an outright no to the opening of the gate. Managerially,
they just kept delaying, one way or the other. Crying outside H’s prem-
ises in a huddle, my mother, sisters, and the elder sister’s (eZ) newborn
stood waiting. The place had similar huddles of people all around, lying
down, sleeping, waiting on their patients who were lodged inside. There
was a small gathering around our huddle now, people were looking at us
crying, in close silent observation. After clearing the bills, PS stormed out
of H declaring a final exit, signalling in great agitation an avowal to never
return to the place. He soon realized the folly of his avowal as he asked
us to wait at the gate of the morgue and once again went inside to get the
lock opened. He returned soon, calmer than before. The same attendant
who had wheeled father to the morgue opened the lock and stood at the
gate. My mother kept insisting that my sisters should not go inside. When
she saw they were unrelenting, she took the infant from my elder sister
(eZ). As we approached the morgue, my sisters entered inside holding
me from either side. I identified his stretcher and pulled over the Hospital
linen from his face. In the few hours that had passed, his face had swollen
up and the erstwhile hollow cheeks looked supple. I noticed that the t-
shirt which my mother had put on him before the surgery was not on him
when he had returned after the amputation. It was there, now, lying next
to him. My elder sister (eZ) could barely breathe, my younger sister (yZ)
was lamenting to father in ‘wept statements’ about not recognizing what
mother and she had done for him. Why else would he decide to leave?
And how cruel to leave when they were gone for a short while. Woe to
him, woe to such an agency.1
Amongst us three siblings, my youngest sister (yZ) had come to
mimic my mother’s tone of expressing love to father by deprecating and
mocking him. A mocking that was mostly playful but it could get ser-
ious too, like my mother’s occasional stinging words towards him. I could
not fail to notice that the ‘tuneful weeping’ that my sister echoed at the
Crying and listening 83
morgue reflected the same old grammar of my mother and her talking
to him. It was as if my younger sister (yZ) was weeping as my mother
and his mother (FM) at the same time; as an ancient person and a child
folded into one crying unit. It occurred to me that it indeed was a cruel
agency on part of father as I heard her ‘wept statement’ about him leaving
while she was away for a while. It was my younger sister (yZ) who kept
protecting me from the hard task of his care till it became exceptionally
difficult, and for all their care, my mother and she, could not see him
go, while I did. The accusations in ‘wept statements’ also articulated a
curious hidden matter: the idea that the living have a secret agency to
bring their own death. An agency for which father was being made ac-
countable having successfully carried out his deceitful threat. Now dead,
he must nevertheless hear the lament for what he secretly brought upon
himself. This communication becomes possible across the twin spheres
of living and the dead in ‘wept statements’, a context created by weeping
itself. More importantly, with respect to the newly dead, this inaugurates
a new personage that the dead must get used to. In her essay, Voices of
Children, Veena Das (1989) offers a comment on the social making of chil-
dren and their worlds as different from adults but yet mediated by them.
She describes how a mother playing with her infant may not just ‘talk’ to
the child but ‘talk the child into being’, ‘giving it an embodiment in lan-
guage’. A living embodiment that could very well count as a ‘gift of self
and the world’ to the child from her mother (Das 1989: 265). Take the fol-
lowing example: The mother is speaking to her child and then promptly
occupying the child’s voice she replies from the voice position of the child,
often countering her own first utterance. This act, may appear as one-
sided play, but in fact, becomes a site of agency for the child’s voice to be
carved out. It seems to me that in ‘wept statements’ a similar agency is cast
on to the dead with the crucial difference that while the child is antici-
pated to be eased into a life of speech, the dead is enlivened by conferring
upon it an agency of special listening. This is the reason why in wept state-
ments, acts of speaking to the dead and the reciprocal responses merge
into a different tone of lament that, while on one hand, mirrors the double
texture of the mother speaking to the child and the mother speaking as
the child in turn, but on the other, is also forced to acknowledge death
as a special fact. This in turn makes us aware that in wept statements, the
mourner must mourn not only for herself but also for the dead, for what
84 Dead in Banaras
he left incomplete, for the future of the living in which he cannot par-
ticipate any longer as his old self. Thus there is a double talk, just as be-
tween the mother and the infant, but the agencies granted to the infant
and the dead are different in due acknowledgement to the mixed signs of
life and death.
My sisters had to be extricated from inside the morgue. On their exit,
they resumed the crying huddle now in front of the morgue. PS pulled
my mother and me out of the huddle to discuss what had to be done.
Mother’s relatives had been informed and since no one had come to see
father from the village, the question hung in the air, whether to proceed
with the cremation in Banaras or wait for the relatives to arrive? Mother
promptly said, ‘it’ can be done here and now. She looked at me and warned
me about not doing anything unusual like the electric ‘thing’. I recall that
in the entire conversation mother did not utter the Hindi/Bhojpuri term
for cremation or burning but referred to the whole procedure as ‘it’. As we
discussed ‘it’, with PS and mother, I assumed that we were discussing the
following morning when transport to the ghat and funeral merchandise
could be organized. It was at this stage that we noticed that the personnel
who had wheeled our father to the morgue was standing right next to
us, accompanied by another man. Both were overhearing our conver-
sations and waiting for an appropriate cue to approach us. They told us
that everything could be organized right away. The acquaintance accom-
panying the personnel introduced himself as someone who had helped
people with such things. PS spoke to him separately at length and agreed.
The man had an auto-rickshaw with strong coir ropes under the driver’s
seat. He play-acted how he would tie the bier on top of the vehicle to PS,
me, and my eZH. The huddle by now had broken into two small groups,
one of my mother and sisters and the other of PS, me, and my eZH. The
man returned with incense sticks, a one-piece funeral cloth for father,
a bamboo bier, and different kinds of ropes. He planted the lit incense
sticks in front of the morgue’s gate and asked us to bring the ‘body’ there.
We lifted father from his morgue stretcher and brought him to the floor.
What could have been a home-borne moment of bathing the corpse and
then wrapping it with the shroud was improvised, and saving a difficult
initiative of undressing the dead in front of a small crowd of onlookers, it
was wrapped with the shroud as it is. After preparing the bier with PS ex-
pertly guiding everyone, the bier was put atop the vehicle. Once atop, the
driver swiftly tied the bier to the props with his reliable strong ropes. The
driver had by then prepared the bier with reassuring ease. I was handed
the burning incense sticks while we took our seats inside the vehicle and
in that fragrant daze, with dogs barking viciously at the strange-looking
vehicle, we arrived at Harishchandra ghat. The electric crematorium,
which comes first, looked just the same as I had seen in my first round of
fieldwork. Only this time, the hand-painted notice on the front wall of the
crematorium building appeared more ironic, and even sarcastic. The no-
tice read ‘Crematorium is On’ (shavdah chaloo hai). It was meant to refer
to the fact that after being non-operational for long, it is working now.
In its literal sense, it however meant that it worked even at this ungodly
hour. That it was On. It was always On like the eternal flame of the manual
cremation ghats, the fiery substance that powers the funeral workers gift
to the dead. Nothing could have been more distant to the actual phys-
ical reality at that time, with a municipal streetlight shyly lending a weak
yellow light over the dark closed building of the electric crematorium.
My mother should not have bothered to warn the other men about my
possible choice of the electric ‘it’. PS woke up someone who was pointed
by the funeral workers as the barber. Out of his slumber, like the trained
midnight sleepy pee, he dug out his equipment from under his coat, and
instantly the hair tufts from my head fell to the ground as the metal razor
scraped against my scalp. PS and eZH got another funeral shop at the
ghat opened and bought me a white shroud cloth and other ingredients
for the pyre including cow’s milk fat and sandal–wood mixture. After the
tonsure as I was throwing off the jeans and the t-shirt and changing into
the shroud cloth, I was surprised by my own resistance to throw off the
Chinese remake of my waterproof Teva floaters that I had procured just
the year before from a Tibetan refugee market. I asked PS and my eZH
if it could be kept and not thrown or offered. They looked surprised but
allowed me to keep it so I quickly stuffed it in the Salomon backpack that
was now being carried by my eZH. As the wooden pyre was set, the Dom/
Chaudhary fire owner at the ghat enquired to PS about the particulars of
my father, what he did for a living and the place of his bearings. When
he learnt that the dead was a landed farmer, the funeral worker spon-
taneously added a quintal of the best quality rice to the agreed money
as fees. The worker said that he would come to fetch it himself and asked
PS to remember his word. PS wistfully said, yes, looking in the loose
86 Dead in Banaras
direction where my father’s pyre was set, next to the river in the middle
of that September night. Later in the morning after ‘it’ was done, the fire
lender came running as we were leaving and noted down father’s address
insisting that he would come for sure. In the village, I half waited for him,
he never came, but thinking back it was in that morning conversation
while handing out the complete address on a scrap of paper that father
had become his name, all over again.
Back to the pyre, it was lit with the fire lent by the Dom owner, whose
turn must have been going on at that stage. The pyre slowly took a fiery in-
consistent shape. The two workers who were busy working with this pyre
finally moved to other pyres. Then the fire died down and one worker
came to check. He started complaining in a scolding tone that we did not
tell them about the ‘maati’ (clay/corpse), blood had all turned into water.
It was oozing water and he insisted that it must have been cancer. We re-
ceived the complaint and no one spoke, there must have been embarrass-
ment about father turning himself into water when he was supposed to
be just clayey. I compared the pyres and indeed ours was watery. It kept
extinguishing the fire and the September late-night low temperature
was not helping the cause either. At the break of dawn, some observant
local children came to us after sifting through the clothes that were there
to be taken. They offered to sell a ‘powder’ which could make the pyre
flames ‘touch the sky’. We purchased the fire inducing pyretic chemical
and it instantly broke through the resistance offered by the blood turned
into water. As the sun rose, the pyre was still being worked at but it soon
came to the stage when I was to circumambulate it with an earthen vessel
and then do the parvah (the ritual act of tossing the last remain, a bone-
stump, into the river Ganga ji).
After the due purifying bath at the river (at another ghat), as we walked
back towards Ravindrapuri, we consulted each other if everything went
all right and nothing untoward happened. Close to the residence, PS re-
membered that I must not go inside the house as I had offered the sac-
rificial fire to father. Since the place was a rented accommodation and
the owner had graciously agreed to the commotion of hospital days, it
was felt that we must not inadvertently harm his house by defiling it with
death pollution. I stayed out and waited. My eZH brought out his old hat
fiat and helped me into the back seat. He also got mineral water, which
I promptly gulped down. PS was not approving about me consuming
anything but let it pass. And then I was waiting again till everyone packed
their life goods. Outside that house, in the backseat of that car, it appeared
shamefully ludicrous when I recalled how I had assumed my future field-
work after that first hurried round of fixing stations. As my mother and
sisters came out with all their belongings, this house indeed became dis-
tant, difficult to come back to. They looked at my tonsured state and there
was an instantaneous enlivenment of last night’s hurts, and this time our
huddle wept and sobbed inside the car. My mother requested my eZH not
to take the detour via the halt-house but head straight to my father’s vil-
lage. My eZH followed and off we were, going to his place without him.
Half an hour into the journey, when no one had spoken, I surmised that
did not father always joke about the fact that his place, Zamania was ac-
tually in Kashi and not in Ghazipur. His allusion to the details of sacred
geography was part of the banter to run-down mother’s place as spiritually
inferior to his own. Mother said wryly that it was true. She said we were
on that road that linked Banaras to Zamania and we would soon be in his
Kashi. But sooner than that, taking everyone by surprise, she requested
my eZH to first take us to the Ghazipur halt-house, to her parents house.
I stayed in the car even there and my mother’s mother (MM) came to
cry-meet (milni) me with her ‘tuneful weeping’, talking in her ‘wept state-
ments’: about my state of fatherlessness, being tonsured, being hungry,
thirsty, all the children being so young, the youngest daughter still to be
married (asking who will do her kanyadaan now). She kept repeating that
she had given birth to an ill-fated daughter (referring to her eldest child
and my mother). In her wept statements, she cursed father for leaving
abruptly and going away, just as my mother and my younger sister (yZ) did
in their wept statements the night before. Unlike my younger sister’s (yZ)
wept statements, she did not utter his side of the story about how helpless
he must be feeling in not being able to hold his infant grandson (my eZS)
in his lap, in dying without one leg and not being able to see his daughters
and his wife at the instant of his death. My MF greeted me from afar and
I only gradually learnt how this had touched him. In his diaries, there is
an entry for the day my father died as, ‘Brahmdeo died’ (praanant), and
then for days, the pages are left empty with just the dates inscribed and no
content. It was now that we had to turn to the route that father had shut-
tled all his adult life, between the halt-house and his own house, between
his uxorilocal residence and his natolocal, patrilocal, virilocal household.
88 Dead in Banaras
Dead Father as a Relative
We arrived at his village by late afternoon. I was surprised how far the car
could go. His tractor stood right there where we parked our car. I had a
sudden intense foreboding spotting it, tyres deflated and run into the
ground, its sheen lost from the original toyish crimson red to metal grey,
the brand insignia of Hindustan Machine Tools (HMT) still shining
though in its embossed silver letters. The whole assemblage looked like
an art installation adjoining the paddy fields. This moment, however, of
the son carrying news of his father’s death had precedence in my parents
married lives with us children as witnesses. Father would narrate of the
time when he and his younger brother were toddlers, playing in front of
the ancestral, pale-coloured mud house when his dead father’s funerary
convoy arrived. Someone whispered to them that their father is dead. The
two boys had known death in the village as synonymous to feasts since at
each such death they had accompanied male elders to the death feasts.
The boys asked the members of the funerary convoy: ‘now, will there be a
BIG feast, or no?’ My mother never failed to narrate this anecdote at odd
times, sometimes to relay father’s fatherlessness from a very young age—
the word used was tour in Bhojpuri, which would roughly translate to the
English word ‘orphan’, erasing the fact that father’s mother was still alive.
The point of mother’s speech was mostly to sarcastically mock the iconic
naivety of which father became representative. Now I fathom that be-
cause of his frequent presence at his wife’s residence, the structure of
joking relationship had acquired a large life. While technically such a re-
lationship would have involved my mother’s younger consanguine rela-
tives, we children too had absorbed the joking sociality and thus
unwittingly posed ourselves as mother’s consanguine. No wonder it
found a deep presence in the ways in which we all interacted with him.
Not disappointing, he always played the lead in his self-deprecating jokes
about himself and his village. I was barred from this joking sociality
somehow. We barely spoke but I remember all his repetitive jokes. My
younger sister (yZ) replicated both my mother’s sarcasm and undying
care towards him. As we stepped out of the car, she was already falling ill
out of crying for now close to a day. My mother was losing poise and my
elder sister (eZ) was trying to manage her infant and the situation step by
step. In the brief journey, I had forgotten my state as a symbol and it
became immediately apparent with full force. My one-piece white shroud,
tonsured head, clean-shaven face, and bare feet announced to the first
person who spotted us and to the next and the neighbourhood in no time
that my father is dead. People pointed to me as they broke into wept state-
ments, crying, and sobbing. This ‘look at him’ and pointing was another
site of the declaration of death. More accurately, it was a first, in a long
series of gestures and statements within the broad sphere of ritual
mourning of registering and re-registering the death. Or perhaps it pro-
vided an altogether alternative way of construing the death than the hos-
pital version had allowed. It is clear that the physical act of cremation is
not enough to certify the dead’s non-existence. Or said differently, since
absence is such a common condition of the living, the dead effortlessly
slip into that who is not there but must be around somewhere. Everyone
was under the assumption that he was absent but must be living. At the
conclusion of the thirteenth-day ritual observations, the Brahmin priest
during the havan asked me to chant names of my forefather, father’s fa-
ther, father and my own, as if they were all in the same horizontal pres-
ence, the dead, and the living. In that brief moment of incantation, it did
not matter whether I was living and they were dead except for the fact
that I had to voice the names. Meanwhile, the womenfolk held my mother
who was now crying vigorously. It was a ritualistic requirement in no un-
certain terms but it could also be the fact that in close to four decades of
their marriage, this was the first time when he was neither accompanying
her—walking twenty yards ahead of her as she would trail behind was his
North Indian way—nor was he waiting for her at the threshold of his
house. The funerary convoy had become bigger with more women, men,
and children joining. My eZH was narrating to a huddle of men how fa-
ther was cremated at Banaras. There was a brief talk about the illness. The
amputation story was avoided. Was it the amputation that made room for
the swift cremation without waiting for his kin to arrive at the scene? It
could be but it was also the fact that no one had enquired about him when
he was in the hospital, no one had come visiting, my mother had quietly
built a rage about it. It was this rage that was expressing itself in her crying
now. It was as if she was freed from ritual requirements and was indif-
ferent to other women crying next to her. It was as if this crying was a pas-
sionate, grieving conversation with my father and his cathected
homestead. The kitchen garden had few rows of garlic bulbs, lying
90 Dead in Banaras
floppingly under the yellow-flowered oleander tree that my grandmother
had planted. The small engine machine that was used by my father to
pound paddy into rice, was gone, the wooden planks were still bolted to
the ground. He had sold it during his illness. The outhouse toilet door was
broken, the lock was kept safely above the asbestos sheet. It was a break-in
for usage, not for pilferage. I was looking around, when everyone was
trying to open the wooden main door to the house that had jammed. It
was finally opened with a wooden plank as a lever. Suddenly it shut-
opened like an eyelid in a big blink. There was a forest inside the house.
On one side my grandmother had planted flower plants and shrubs. The
roof and walls were concrete but the floor was muddy. Father had planned
to get it cemented. As we entered, close female relatives held mother
gently but assertively. They gently led her to a concrete pillar and collect-
ively raised their crying voice as they swung my mother’s arms to break
her bangles. It was an elegant move. I did not even register the event till
my sisters ran towards mother, stopping inches away from her to embrace
her, waiting for the act to get over. The women repeated the gesture,
noticing that a few bangles remained. This time without much ado but
with the same tough gentleness and elegance the gesture was repeated.
My mother had once broken her arm at the halt-house, as she slipped and
fell on her arm. This was not too long ago and the doctor at the city hos-
pital had advised a plaster cast. I was visiting home then and listening in
to her conversation with some elderly women visitors. She was narrating
how she had panicked at the doctor’s suggestion, wondering if it would be
auspicious to cut the bangles with surgical scissors or that she rather use
soap to slip them out one by one without breaking them. I noticed then
that she had not worn the vermilion and the red dot bindi on her forehead
from last night and now with the bangles gone, we mirrored each other,
mother and son, first amongst other ritual emblems. The womenfolk
along with my sisters had now settled into a ‘tuneful’ crying and it looked
like it would never stop. In between, there were enquiries by close rela-
tives about tea being served to everyone and spiceless food for the mother
and son which my uncles’ households were to serve. As crying continued,
one of my aunts, a senior to my mother and her longtime confidante
began shouting at everyone to stop, ‘quiet now, quiet now’, she uttered.
Turning to my mother, shoving my sisters aside, gesturing everyone to
stop crying she said, ‘quiet now, everyone has to die, all of us will die too’.
My mother who in these past hours of crying seemed to have shed her
rage, uttered back, to my surprise: ‘true, if it were not so, the grief would
instantly kill us’. This ‘wept statement’ uttered in grieving senses has
stayed with me. As an idea, it appears to suggest that grief normalizes this
thymotic, anti-structural sentiment that the generalized dead should be
reassuringly present in the past and future for the living to live when con-
fronted with the immediate, empirical condition of the dead. Gradually,
the hoarse crying turned to sobs and my younger sister’s (yZ) long-drawn
acidity burps would break the drawl. The confidante aunt turned to the
forest in the house and told my mother, now speaking in first person and
addressing her directly by her name that this forest should not be here, it
is inauspicious. The forest was chopped down to stumps. Young boys
milling around, innumerable cousins wanting to seek tasks on the ritual
occasion were treating orders as activities, dutifully dividing it amongst
themselves. One got the axe, one dragging the green foliage with flowers
sloughing off in tow, one throwing them in the pond in front of the house,
one supervising everything and a boy-man nodding at us that it is all cov-
ered. By this time PS who had escorted one of my paternal aunts to the
village had arrived and was already busy supervising the proceedings.
Water had to be organized, electricity had to be brought home from the
poles with a fishhook, a cooking gas cylinder had to be called forth, the
activities multiplied themselves. It felt like semi-primal settling down
into just about a workable modernity, ready at hand, within the span of an
hour or so. Here, now, good to go, have a pleasant mourning!
A miniature event followed. The spiceless meals were brought in for the
mother and son. My mother glanced and signalled that she was turning
down the food. I am standing there, not sure what to do. She prods me
to eat, saying I will fall ill otherwise. My sisters join her and soon there
is a chorus, similar to, ‘look at him’. I make a move to sit down on the
floor. As soon as I am seated, I am asked to stand up. A few hands move
to hold me while simultaneously turning my direction from facing west
to facing south. In between, in the fraction of a minute of these acts with
my mother unblinkingly staring at me, a curious memorial rotation takes
place in our mutual selves, making us re-register father’s death another
time. This memorial rotation and recognition were linked to a re-run of
a practice from my school days at MF’s house. My sisters and I would re-
turn from school in the afternoon, all together, and in no time we would
92 Dead in Banaras
be pacing the small kitchen of the house where food was served. Mother
would lay food on the plates and we would be seated in turns. My younger
sister (yZ) and me together and my elder sister (eZ) and my mother after
us. I have my first morsel inches away from my mouth and here comes
the scolding from mother. How many times have I told you not to eat fa-
cing south? And with a teenage shrug, I would sigh loudly, budge a hair’s
length and look back at her to say, is this better? This practice covered
all my growing up years and I was so reliant on her alertness that I never
cared to check directions on my own. This moment of mutual recogni-
tion between us when mother must have wrung herself with all her might
from stopping me from eating while facing south, enacted death of my fa-
ther as the death of my father. I had a few morsels facing south before my
stomach churned and I felt ill and overwhelmed. The prodding returned
but I managed the situation by asking for tea instead. The crying meetings
(milni;bhet) had started now. A new female relative or a close acquaint-
ance would enter the door crying aloud in wept statements about what
had happened to my mother and mother would have to join in the crying.
This went on till late evening. My sisters and the confidante aunt started
murmuring about the visitors that they will kill my mother, making her
cry endlessly. Night fell though and the crying meetings stopped. For all
my observations, I had missed the entire gamut of taunts and stingers that
had catalysed the crying after the initial first round for my mother. Once,
most people had left, mother told me that everyone was insinuating that
father died because of lack of care. It was being said that once father’s
mother had died, father had lived all alone in the house, missing anyone
closely related to him. This is not a true or false situation. I have come to
think of it as an emergent situation that was hidden from revelation till
the death happened. Now that it was being said that this situation killed
him, leaving in its wake, paradoxically, a clear and crystallized portrait
of blame imputed to the close relatives, this was a moral interpretation
of grave consequences. This is a retroactive condition of the dead that
comes to rest on the living, inaugurating new complicities between the
dead and the living. Now that I was told this, I could note and hear this
all around over the next fortnight that I stayed there. I remember wanting
to act possessed by my father and exonerate the living in a few dramatic
seance performances. In this sense, I felt that the dead were actively being
pulled into a portrait of bad death even when the hospital story and the
amputation were unknown to the people here, which would have really
pickled the verdict. Were we paying back the cost of improvisation of so-
cial structures of kinship? An improvisation of living in transit between
patrilineal and matrilineal residences. An improvisation devised to de-
part from the peasant agroscape. But are not structures sheltering be-
cause they allow improvisation? Another revelation came to the fore. My
mother’s paternal aunt, who had come down with PS to assist, had made
fast acquaintances with the entire segment of the extended family that
was touched by the death pollution. It seems she had narrated the hos-
pital story in no time and everyone was updated with great details. It was
strange then that no one mentioned it to our faces. This too is an impro-
visation. Yet another revelation emerged. My elder sister (eZ) told me on
day two that the amputated leg was put to parvah. MF had disclosed the
same day at the hospital to everyone after I had handed it to him in the
polythene bag. He got his younger brother to take it to the river and let it
be flown into Ganga ji at Ghazipur. This is how then improvisation, shel-
tering, and exposure co-exist.
Meanwhile, a daily ritual routine had to be followed that was infused
with conversations, boredom, more crying, and some unanticipated vis-
itors. Each morning I had to walk barefoot through the main pathway
of the village to the other side of the main road where the canal carrying
Ganga’s water flowed noisily (the water released from the main dam for
the second irrigation of the paddy crop) to take a bath, and do the offer-
ings. I was accompanied by my consanguineous cousin brothers and the
walk to the canal was filled with chit-chat about impending panchayat
elections, Hindu–Muslim relations, the fate of the village and the country,
days in the army, the current crop, early morning fishing, heroin addicts
in the village and their new tricks at stealing and scoring, amongst other
things. I remained mostly silent. Partly because I had little to contribute
and I was making mental notes as a way of coping, but also because some
of these folks had scrapped with father a decade back over land divisions.
They had waylaid and hit him and when his mother came to save him
they had hit her too, breaking her leg. I was moved that such animosity
and dutifulness can co-exist, yet it did, and I think, they were relieved
at my silence because the violent episode was not being nourished into
new variants with hostile exchanges. I had to take the same route in the
evening but this time not up till the canal but to the adjacent Peepal tree
94 Dead in Banaras
(Ficus religiosa), a few hundred metres before the canal, next to a primary
school. An earthen pot was hung there with Ganga’s water. A tiny hole
was made at the bottom of the pot and then it was half clogged with a
small cotton wick to let the water slowly trickle down with a deferred gap
so that drops continued to trickle overnight. I had to refill the pot every
evening. The Brahmin priest who oversaw the installation on the first day
had said with great kindness that you don’t have to go up to the canal, you
can fill it with the hand pump’s water from the municipal machine located
outside the gate of the school. Canal’s Ganga ji was already an improvisa-
tion (the ritual bathing as a norm must take place at Ganga ghat), this
was an improvisation over an improvisation. Such layered improvisations
filled the ritual observations, departing in little detail from an accepted
frame of norms but departing in a way that if norms were to be people
themselves, they would understand the departures and let them pass.
Mother in her continued state of grieving had opened the iron suit-
cases of the house. They were all part of her dowry, they had MF’s name
painted on them. She took out some letters, written by father from the
time when he was participating in the army recruitment in Punjab, and
flung them on us. It is all in the open now, read them, see how he was,
she said. The letters were anxious and endearing like love letters are but
were also filled with an awareness of failure intimately chasing father.
During the early stages of writing this account, I requested mother that
we go looking for those letters, a decade later, in the village house. The
letters were not there. I instead found, a whole range of agrarian bureau-
cratic receipts, and acknowledgements and a bundle of bank letters with
his name inscribed, formally warning him with a polite honorific prefix
about pending loan payments. I found father’s copy of Ramcharitmanas
and Shiv Purana too. Back to mother. The suitcases opened and the letters
flung, it was as if she wanted to immolate her and his things. Things that
were tucked for years into these wooden army luggage gear. The violent
ease with which she was opening and shutting things in front of the chil-
dren, it was, as if nothing mattered anymore of her and his intimate one-
ness of marriage.
People came to visit mother and me. Some who came were barely ex-
pected, and with others I was not familiar at all. And then mother and
we children started anticipating, expecting certain people. Hoping, they
would come. Important amongst them were father’s friends and fellow
farmworkers whom we had known from childhood. We had their names
by heart. No one came. Aggrieved, I have thought about this for many
years and it appears to be the case that father’s lack of ‘proper’ household,
particularly after his mother’s death, did not allow him citizenship of or-
dinary sociality and commensality in the village like other full houses
did. He could not be involved in village matters and then he let it slip and
pass voluntarily, helplessly. A feature that mirrors and merges with his
position at his wife’s. This resonates with the hurtful diagnosis of his lone-
liness causing his death and underlines the recognition of how deadness
enters the living. Let me call this a posthumous recognition of human
causes of death and return to it after the following account of the conclu-
sion of the mourning period.
Meanwhile, halfway into crying-meeting (milni) scenes, mother had
started worrying about the feasts that were to be organized at the conclu-
sion of the mourning period. A village elder, fraternal classificatory con-
sanguine to father, was chosen for the responsibility of conducting it. She
herself went and requested him. This uncle, senior to father, with his par-
tial paralytic disability from neck to legs and with a Kashi in his name, not
only agreed but went on to conduct the feasts with great gusto, gesturing,
pointing, delegating, and swearing around at everyone, mourning family
included. I was tonsured once again. This time in a ritual gesture to offi-
cially free me from the prescribed work of mourning. The first feast was
at the premises of the primary school. The earthen vessel was brought
down from the Peepal tree. It was for Brahmin men only, but most of the
senior men did not come since this feast was still on this side of the inaus-
piciousness of death. As the teenage boys and the little children sat down
for their meals in lotus mudras on the ground mat, I had to participate
in a gestural waving of hand fan with a gamcha, a one-piece cotton stole.
Later, I touched their feet one by one, some of them were visibly embar-
rassed and some others smirked and extended their feet pointedly so that
their peers could see while I bent to touch. This was followed by a sacri-
ficial rite of havan with my mother by my side. Both of us were in new
clothes that were procured, as required, by mother’s family members. In
between, mother and I were to be served a back-to-normal spicy meal by
our father’s patrilineal relatives. Father’s younger brother decided to make
the meal and it had the compensatory red chilies of the last thirteen days
competing with the yellow colour of the turmeric. There were black crows
96 Dead in Banaras
all over the house courtyard with bent beaks at slant angles in vague as-
tonishments and they cawed incessantly for food. Seeing the crows, there
was a round of muffled crying to mark the auspiciousness of their arrival.
The ancestors were amongst us and maybe father had joined them too and
was cawing for food. The evening feast began with Brahmins eating first
followed by other male members of the village and finally the womenfolk
in the end. Feasts are vicarious and boisterous, creating their own warm
energy, death, or no death. The morning after there were empty whiskey
pint bottles and squeezed-out polythene pouches of cheaper brews lying
strewn in the courtyard outside the house. As the feast concluded just be-
fore midnight, mother and I, along with the officiating Brahmin family
priest marched out of the house with wholesome amounts of all the dishes
that were prepared. With food packets by our side, we went towards the
sacred geographic border (dih) of the village. The priest asked us to call
forth father and offer the food, completely assured of the dead as a lis-
tening subject. After instructing in Bhojpuri, he quietly followed up with
a recitation of Sanskrit verses. The place was right next to the field where
father’s tractor was parked. Mother started sobbing. Then the priest asked
us in loud Hindi to ask father to leave the place and go away and not enter
the boundaries of this village. As mother and I finished addressing the
present–absent father, a wave of loud wailing emanated from mother that
eventually transformed to hiccup-ridden sobs and did not stop till the
early hours of next morning. And that is how a journeying which had
involved stationing at many homes and hospitals, nicking at the borders
of bad and good death with the dead drifting from one condition into
another under the complex ambit of the collective, familial, spousal, par-
ental, personal, and that of a named North Indian male patrilineal sub-
ject, inhabitant of an ex-sacred land of Banaras came to a ritual end. In
the anthropology of mourning, there is often, a walk back home after the
funerary march with the hope that there will always be variants of some-
thing like graves to which the survivors could re-return to talk and up-
date the dead. There is no such thing here in the cremation cultures that
I studied over time in Banaras. Memories2 make and unmake the dead as
social condition. Here is how: x as a storied example, a trope of a person;
x as the absent–present subject at future family events; x as a perspective
of desire and revulsion (liking what he liked, hating what he hated). Or, x
in sightings: a marriage video of yesteryears is pulled out by someone in
the family, father is strutting around, all smiles, living up to what the Zen
Haiku poet Aki-no-bo (Hoffman 1986: 134) says in his death poem:
No sign
in the cicada’s song
that it will soon be gone.
Father’s Dead Relatives
Father’s Father
Unlike MF and father who secretly wished their deaths to come true in
their own different ways, Father’s Father (FF) literally brought it upon
himself. In all three instances though, it emerged from an ordinary
quarter of domestic life. When I locate things within the wider findings
of my own work, a saying mother often evoked rings true, that in help-
less situations when you actually wish and ask for death, you do not even
get that. How the two combine, the wish and the consequence, is what
this concluding section confronts. FF had had a scrap in the muddy joint
household. It seems he could not get his solitude (ekant). The quarrel with
his young, second wife, had started with something very mundane. Oats
had to be grounded and the stone slabs used as manual grinders needed
mending or replacement. He wanted to finish reading his Ramayan first.
The quarrel spiralled, from one thing to another. Apparently, hurt and
insulted, he threatened to leave the house, become a mendicant and die
his own lone death, away from the daily turbulence of the family weather.
Such threats are manly but in actual terms can be enacted by both men
and women. My MF’s recourse to a similar situation at the halt-house
would be with a never-failing threat that he would leave the household
and go build an ashram for himself where he would eventually, die quietly.
He never actually did that. His wife, my MM, did it without ever boasting
about it. There was the usual situation of being short on money and the
men of the family, father and sons, were convinced that selling a piece of
land was the answer. MM said, No! Next thing, she slipped out of the halt-
house at night and soon a search began. She was found sitting close to a
well that was part of a long-abandoned colonial Indigo blue factory, and
98 Dead in Banaras
which had over time turned into a haunted forest with sinister rumours
about people committing suicide in that well and unknown dead buried
in that complex. The land was not sold and the idea never ever came up
again after that act by MM. But unlike MF, FF did it. The same evening,
he marched out in his tall strides, without anyone noticing him. He was
later discovered with lacerated wounds that had turned tetanic. The itin-
erary of his hurt has been narrated to me like this. He had gone walking a
hundred miles wanting to go to Gorakhpur, maybe to an ashram he knew
there. During one of his nightly journeys, he found himself in a swamp, it
was there that he got lacerated with rusty nails. On being discovered, he
shared his address with the people who had come to help him. Relatives
from home reached the spot and rushed him to a hospital, closer home,
in Dildarnagar. He did not recover and was then ‘rushed’ to Kabirchaura,
Banaras into a well-known government hospital. He died there. Father
was four then, playing with his youngest brother, who was two, at their
home courtyard, when the news of the death arrived. When told about
his father’s death, he had asked whether there would be a sumptuous
death feast. He would not have known, would he? Forty-six years later,
he would die in the same city of Banaras, tracing those same roads and
neighbourhoods in a foreboding torpor. It is yet another social condition
of the dead. It creates its own structure and context. You die the same
death that your father died. The condition shared by the dead and the
living is one of repetition, the condition of the living is that of reminis-
cence, and here too the dead come to inhabit in a shadowy way.
Father’s Mother
Father’s mother (FM), always in a hurried social motion of duties and

work, elegantly encased within her white sari and long white blouse—the
only apparels I have ever seen her wear—in her ripe old age had a habit
of once a day, mandatorily meeting up with another widow (musmaat), a
friend of hers, who was the same age as her and lived a few houses away
from her own house. On this day too, she was gone and was rushing back
in the evening to tend to her middle-aged son. This is when, out of no-
where, a dog came and bit her. Much later, she narrated to mother and
my elder sister (eZ) that she was ruffled not so much with the dog bite but
by the fact that a path that she had taken daily for decades and thought of
as familiar protective territory, could produce such a danger. It seems to
me that this disbelief over her more reliable and reassuring sense of habit
won over her sense of danger. She disclosed the event to her son after per-
forming the home remedy of peering at the waters of seven wells. She and
her son (my father) shared a relationship of entitlement and affection,
where the latter’s way of showing love was to speak in scolding terms and
her’s was to never talk back to him. Was this her way of mourning for her
husband, who left to die over a home quarrel? I now think it was. This,
too, is a laboured understanding emerging from this work after more
than a decade of her passing. Mother repeatedly narrated that father had
asked his mother to visit the hospital for an anti-rabies shot. It was the
wheat planting season and he must have requested her to go to the hos-
pital with someone. FM had said she would. The asking-nodding con-
tinued for a while and then they let it go. Meanwhile, it was the Kumbh
mela at Prayag, Allahabad in 2001 and my mother, who was at the halt-
house all this while and did not know about the dog bite until then organ-
ized a week-long itinerary for FM. FM had a long-standing wish to take a
dip at the Kumbh and mother always wanted to fulfil it, so this was their
moment. Mother sent someone to escort FM to the halt-house and along
with my sisters, they all went. My elder sister (eZ) retrospectively recalled
that FM had reacted strangely when she fetched her a glass of water at
her arrival at the halt-house. At the time of the morning dip, in between
all the fanfare and religious exult, FM, inches away from the river’s water
started having a paroxysm of hydrophobia. Sensing the cruel climax, the
womenfolk held her with all their might and drenched her neverthe-
less with Ganga ji’s water. Transport was organized with great difficulty.
Everyone wanted to come to the Kumbh, no one wanted to go away, is how
my mother had described the difficulty. She was not taken to Banaras, the
city they had to cross to arrive at the halt-house because they thought she
should meet her son before dying and equally the son should meet his
mother before she died. In an intermittent relief, she ate some food but
would not drink any water. She was taken to the city hospital in Ghazipur
where the doctors said, take her to a place where she can die peacefully.
I was informed over the phone and I consecutively hopped in three dif-
ferent trains, a bus, a jeep, and walked a few miles to finally reach my
father’s house. FM recognized me and kept blessing me endlessly in her
100 Dead in Banaras
own wept statements. She was living out her death. I was mad with rage
over the act of superstitious peering of wells and confronted father who
was busy de-husking paddy from the rice grains in the courtyard. I said
to him that he killed his mother, my grandmother, by negligence. That
was my only direct confrontation with him. Even in his grieving senses,
he recovered soon from the shock and went back to the task at hand. FM
worsened by the day, and could barely pronounce words now with her
limbs and mouth having their autonomous mad, frenzied movements.
The sound and gestures appeared frightening. The sound resembled an
animal grunt. As a child at the halt-house, we once had a neighbour’s dog,
who had turned habituated to leftover food at our place. The dog would
sneak in through the metal bars of the middle gate and slip in and out
surreptitiously. Once, startled by someone’s footsteps, it leapt towards the
metal gate but missed the usual one through which it used to slip out and
got lodged in the narrower gap of the metal bars. In that instant of sensing
what had happened combined with the seeming irreality of two adjacent
metal bars which had deceived it, the dog grunted in long wails instead of
barking. All of us watching were frozen with the horror of what was un-
folding. MF true to himself broke out of the frozen frame, emerged with
an iron rod, then inserted it diagonally into one of the metal bars and bent
it to create more room so that the dog could extricate itself. It instantly
did but refused to stop the wailing and stood there grunting in disbelief.
It was this same animal grunt coming out of the hydrophobic, parched
throat of FM. Then she had another seeming sign of recovery, all quiet,
appearing ‘normal’. My father, having forgotten the scrap or perhaps as a
response, said to me, my mother (FM) will recover. I had final year prac-
tical exams to appear for at the university and my mother asked me to re-
turn back to Delhi. I did, with that same rage, returning without touching
father’s feet, another exclusive gesture. All trains departing from Banaras
were routed via Allahabad because of Kumbh and were impossible to get
in since they were running completely packed. It was suggested that I take
the bus to Allahabad and from there take the overnight train to New
Delhi. The bus that brought us to Allahabad was stopped by the police at
some outlier place. We were all asked to walk from there to our respective
destinations. I got a lift on a hand cart with people taking turns pushing it
and commuting on it. It took us till the river’s bridge, which was further
cordoned off, even for the hand cart. Walking over the bridge, halfway,
I noticed below the river Ganga, illuminations, tent camps, people, and
sounds. This was where they were, this is where she started her fright of
water. An agonizing echo of what her state must have been, unable to
take that dip while metres away from the river, swept through me. I re-
called that as a child I too was once bitten by a dog, but I never disclosed
it to anyone in the family, fearing that I would be scolded. Crossing the
bridge, I thought if I had died then perhaps my grandmother would have
been given the shots and saved. As I passed the bridge overlooking the
illuminations of Kumbh and the cruel river flowing in the chiaroscuro
shades, I felt her death. The next morning in Delhi, when I reached my
maternal uncle’s house where I was staying then, after giving me a glass of
water and waiting for me to finish, my aunt told me that my FM is dead.
She died the same night. Father lived alone ever since in that house, and
any insistence by my mother to join him there was turned down by him.
After his mother’s death, this was his compensatory avowal to be alone
and suffer so as to perhaps upstage the iconic juvenile naivety of seeking
that death feast at his father’s death.
Father’s Youngest Daughter
Rinki was my parents ultimogeniture, the last born, the youngest. No

doubt, they were looking for another me, another son. Nevertheless,
Rinki soon became father’s last ditched effort at a life closer to its poten-
tial happiness. As she grew up, she doted at him. By age three, she would
stand at the door for hours insisting that he is going to visit her today.
A symbolic system of announcing unexpected but pleasant arrival that
till then and after Rinki was reserved only to the mad, afternoon cawing
of the crows on the halt-house terrace. And he would be there, even if just
for a few hours, carrying toys and sweets in both hands. These were his
busiest days, he was maintaining, like many migrant workers do, seasonal
crops and working in Allahabad in MF’s ex-soldier’s ration shop. Once,
as he left to board his bus from the usual stop, a good two hundred yards
from the halt-house, Rinki, aged four, slipped out onto the highway with
transport trucks and state roadway buses plying on the same road, went
up to that spot and sat on a wooden bench where father usually waited
for his mini-bus. A frightened acquaintance brought her back. Mother
102 Dead in Banaras
beat her to pulp and all women of the house cried and wailed that it was a
death that had not actualized. Her young siblings sobbed too at the sight
of everyone crying. When father was told he trembled with the imagin-
ation of grief.
She came down with fever because of the worms she had been infected
with. We could not relate the two till the onset of the fever. Mother took
her to the ever-reliant homoeopathic doctor, a Bengali doctor of great
fame in the city. He explained the illness; ‘brain fever’ must have been his
phrase, that’s how we all started naming her illness.
Homoeopathy would appear negligent and perhaps fit into the sep-
aration, well known in social scientific literature, between sons’ medical
care and that of daughters’ in North India. In this case, it was my mother’s
undying belief in both homoeopathy and the doctor, who exuded kind-
ness and glow gifted health by his mere presence. A brief account would
clarify. Not long after Rinki’s death, I started having searing chest aches.
I would cry unceasingly at its onset. Mother took me to the same doctor.
He examined and provided medicines. On our way back, the pain re-
turned and as soon as we got on to the cycle rickshaw I started crying
again. After offering some consolatory words and pats, she too broke
down and here we were on the cycle rickshaw, mother and son out-
competing each other through the main market of the city. She recovered
at the sight of the city’s biggest stationery shop and bought me few things
hoping that I would stop crying. I have this image of everyone around
the shop looking at both of us crying locked in my memory. Much later,
during fieldwork in Banaras, I began noticing women on cycle rickshaws
in proximity to the hospital, wailing and doing the wept statements act.
I gradually understood these acts and started associating them with the
news of a death in the hospital. Unintended, public mourning through
wailing created yet another Banaras. A city of crying passage. This gradual
understanding enabled me to solve a social riddle that I did not realize
I was carrying with me in the interim. I now understand that the image
I was carrying of a crying duo, mother and I on a cycle rickshaw that day,
was a well-known image of grieving relatives emerging from the adjacent
civil government hospital after a death. The sympathizing people must
have thought that we were newly bereaved.
Yet another instance of love for homoeopathy comes from mother’s
own illness. After the road accident in which she suffered head injuries,
she was on allopathic medication for more than a year as the doctors had
advised. In the conversations reminiscing about father’s death against the
backdrop created by my probing for this writing, in a sudden surge of
memory, my mother told me that after she had completed the due course
of the allopathic medicines, she had an irresistible urge to do things like,
say, touch the nichrome coil of the electric heater over which food was
cooked. Not that she had not fiddled with those coils earlier with 2000
watts running between them. Each time when there was a short circuit,
she would fix it but with the help of a potato peeler, while holding its
short wooden handle. This time when she felt the urge to touch the coil,
she meant just grabbing them with her hands. Her favourite old Bengali
Homoeopath had retired by now, so she went to another senior doctor
at the homoeopathic college in the city to seek help for a seasonal allergy
that caused red and itchy eyes. After discussing the allergy, she just de-
cided to speak about the urge. The doctor told her that this is a suicidal
urge: ‘I am surprised you have not killed yourself yet.’ He put her on medi-
cines and the suicidal urge declined over time.
Her favourite homoeopathic doctor must have told her to seek allop-
athy for Rinki’s brain fever, at which she went to the biomedical doctors as
an emergency. The fever did not subside though and Rinki died the next
morning. Father missed her dying, her death, and her funeral too. Her fu-
nerary bier was not carried over by four male pallbearers. She was carried,
shrouded in one-piece white cloth, on a male lap. The posture of the dead
child in the lap is the posture of dead Rohit in the lap of his mother Tara
in the Harishchandra temple at the Harishchandra ghat where Rohit was
returned to life, where my father was cremated, and where I subsequently
studied the co-presence of manual and electric cremation, in Banaras.
It seems to me that even when a burial site or the date of death are
missing, there are enough ways in which multiple conditions of the dead
come to be with the living, offering loose structures of sights, evocation,
narratives and propensities of language, and events to enliven the dead.
I returned to Delhi after the mourning of my father’s death, to my hostel
room, waiting with photocopied books, at the university. And soon I was
wrapped up in a high fever which did not recede with the medicines pre-
scribed at the university health centre. I checked into a charitable hospital
at the adjacent urban village to the university where I had lived before and
was familiar. The illness resembled the symptoms of dengue fever, but the
104 Dead in Banaras
doctor stopped short of diagnosing it as such. Into the shock syndrome
with just closest friends aware of the illness, I was counselled to disclose
the fatalness of the syndrome to my family. I repeated what my younger
sister (yZ) had done to protect me from bad news and did not convey it to
the already aggrieved family members. This was turning epistrophic. On
29 October 2005, Delhi experienced consecutive bomb blasts, including
one at the busy Sarojini Nagar Market. We, I, and close friends who were
looking after me, learnt this when a middle-aged woman with a broken leg
arrived in my ward. She was hurt in the ensuing stampede at the market.
She could not bear to be in the noise of the government hospital so had
come here. At the turn of the day, Diwali followed. Since there was a death
in the family, I knew lamps would not be lit at home, puja would not be
held and in marking this occasion, father would be missed, all over again.
The woman was discharged the night after, for the festival. My dwindling
situation too came to a halt and took an about-turn, I started recovering.
On the day of Diwali, the ward was nearly empty. Convinced, I will make
it from here, friends who were quizzing each other on their favourite
films asked me if I had seen this particular one. Learning that I had not, a
viewing session was immediately planned with TV and Video Compact
Disc (VCD) player on hire from a rental shop next to the hospital. We all
sat down in the evening to watch, what could be loosely translated as ‘the
heart just does not listen’ (‘Dil hai ki manta nahin’).3 In the meantime, to
borrow and rephrase, Theodore Worozbyt’s (2003) lines, the field I had to
go back to had changed for me inside its ‘mass’ in ‘slow, rigid, molecular
patterns’ from the time that I had gone to do a survey to come back and
settle temporarily into a following of the dead in a tripartite inter-zone of
the hospital, aghorashram, and the conjoined sites of electric and manual
cremation at Harishchandra ghat in Banaras.4
5
Conversation of Pyres
Seen and Unseen Passages of Crematorial
Aesthetics and Ethics
We return to the Harishchandra ghat. We return to the riverbank of

Ganga ji. We return to the pyres. But what may this return entail? We will
see in the chapter that this return to Harishchandra ghat takes us to dif-
ferent folds of the contemporary. We will encounter two notable multipli-
cities in this return: names of the dead and three acts contained in the two
verbs, pravah and parvah. Recall from Chapter 1, the ordinary language
adage, of ironic detours and an eventual return to here (ghum phir ke sabko
yahin aana hai), uttered while pointing to the ablaze, luminously glowing
dead on their pyres at the cremation ghat. I have called this form of the
spoken as sighing speech. The sighs present to us the seeing of something
uncanny, the burning of a dead human as a loud public spectacle. We
have seen that the evocative distance between the spoken and the referred
is caught into various multiplicities. It is thus fitting to argue that while
the distance between the physical dead and the funeral traveller may be
merely that of a smouldering pyre between them, it can only be accessed
through ironic meanders. You are invited to think of the quietened and
the heightened, double intensities of the ghat as a rest-post and a place
of meandering returns. You can visualize that both the tether of here and
the meander of elsewhere are present in the figure of pyre–smoke and the
river. The chapter takes its name after a poem titled ‘chita-samvaad’ (con-
versation of pyres) from a poetry anthology dedicated to the river Ganga
ji and her banks by the city poet Gyanendrapati.1 In the poem too, the
pyre is the place and the smoke is the meander. The river, of course, is the
original open museum of meandering. While largely based on my field-
work in Banaras, the chapter, is also partially informed by my subsequent
research on crematoria in Denmark (Singh 2015). Thus the conversation

106 Dead in Banaras
of pyres moves locally as well as between continents. I offer here a portrait
of contemporary Banaras through a decade-long mapping of crematorial
shifts. My ethnographic report is primarily framed within the aesthetic
and ethical scaffolds of the place. When I say aesthetic, I do not mean
pleasant or unpleasant but rather how a natural-social setting of Ganga
ji’s waterfront (nearshore) is seen as a receptacle of life, even when this
life is scenically dotted with cremation pyres. Materialities such as envir-
onmental pollution amongst others are then recognized within the ma-
trices of this aesthetic continuum. My emphasis on positing an aesthetic
may appear out of place when most mediatized coverage of the place re-
port worsening pollution but, in my view, it need not be so. It seems to
me that in locating a continuum of the aesthetic and the ethical we can
begin to think of environmental pollution in the vocabulary of the local
moral world. The chapter is broadly divided into three parts. The first part
has an explicit accent on the aesthetics of the place, spatialized by various
characters that figuratively exist between Harishchandra ghat, Ganga ji,
and the funeral travellers. The second part lays accent on the ethicality
of different names of the dead. This account moves between the home,
hospital, and Harishchandra ghat and thus has an echo of the preceding
accounts of the book but in a different form and style of narration. The
third and concluding part is a small discussion on two verbs, Sanskrit–
Hindi pravah and Urdu–Hindi-Bhojpuri parvah. The book concludes by
suggesting that both the verbs enfold and disjoin in the everyday life of
Banaras. They come to stand for the river-run (pravah) of things but also
for burning, mourning, thought, and care (parvah) instantiated by the
empiricisms of the dead as social conditions. With this, we turn to the
first discussion that is centred on the periodic aesthetics of the place.
Eco-Aesthetics
Seasonal Variations of Hindu Civilization
Early on in my fieldwork at Harishchandra ghat, I experienced the un-

folding of the monsoon season as an all-too-familiar disaster. As the river
surged and started to flood, the low-lying places of manual cremation at
the riverbank were gradually inundated. The pyres were moved to the
Fig. 5.1. 01. First: The Harishchandra Ghat
01. Second: A funeral bier descending to the river’s edge
108 Dead in Banaras
concrete steps of the ghat. And, as the flooding progressed, the pyres were
moved even further up the stairs. When all the steps of the ghat were sub-
merged, the funeral workers set the pyres on the road between neigh-
bouring houses and shops. The electric crematorium at the ghat, planned
keeping in mind this annual flooding, has tall cement pillars as stilts, in
order to raise the ovens in the building to the level of the residential habi-
tations in the neighbourhood. Not surprisingly, the electric crematorium
is in great demand only when the river is inundated. However, since the
crematorium has only two ovens, the high funerary traffic is managed
by the Dom funeral workers by setting up pyres on the road. Into my
second monsoon at the ghat, I realized that the flood may be considered
a seasonal natural disaster but for the funeral workers of both the manual
(open-air) and the electric (in-door) crematoria, it was akin to hosting the
annual event as a calendrical phenomenon. As the flood would ebb, the
pyres would gradually be brought down the ghat with the same rhythm as
they had come up. By early winter, the riverbank is organized as a three-
tiered grid. At the top most level, we encounter a wide platform between
the concrete walls and the steps of the ghat, filled with stacks of logwood
brought in trucks and boats from the satellite cities and the other side of
the river (us paar). Given the long period for which the logwood piles
remain idle, the moths tended to assume it as their eternal dark abode in
the winter months. The middle space between the log wood piles and the
river’s edge functioned as the common pathway for everyone. Finally, the
ground closest to the river bank is where the work of manual cremation
takes place. The ambient coziness from the fire and warmth of the open
pyres in the winter months gradually starts diminishing with the coming
of the summer. The sun beating down directly on the ghat, the place whis-
tles its emptiness as hot winds build and pass in swarming proximity to
the burning pyres. The electric crematorium, in the meantime, is all but
forgotten and largely utilized as a shelter from the scorching sun. The
combination of natural heat and wind make the open-air cremations
really efficient; although, the searing heat makes the work unbearably dif-
ficult for the funeral workers. In between the stilts, under the cover of
cool shade (of the ovens as they remain unutilized in summer) funeral
travellers wait while playing a game of cards, sipping hot chai, or drinking
coke. Then, with the onset of monsoons, the ghats are drenched in muddy
hues. But the rains and the flooding at the ghat are not directly linked
Conversation of pyres 109
because the flood arrives with an assemblage of summer glacier melt-
downs, Ganga ji’s tributaries adding volumes, city sewage draining water
into the river, and the complex system of opening and closing of dam
gates at remote upstream places. This mismatch between the sparse vol-
umes of rain received locally and the extent of flooding on the banks pro-
vide high drama each year. The annual flooding is seen as a dramatic but
divine agency of Ganga ji. The assemblage of dam gates, melting of the
glaciers, sewage drains pouring rainwater thicken the plot. Thus comes
to an end an ecological year. It took me a couple of years to capture this
rhythm and few more years to register another kind of variation. Down at
the ghat, close to the manual, open-air pyres, there are a few temples. Of
these, two in particular are notable. One is a concrete structure with the
Shivling as the main and the only installation. The other is a small temple
dedicated to the family of the namesake of Harishchandra ghat. The said
temple has the iconic and the storied effect captured in the idol of the
poor, penniless, mother Taramati who with her dead son Rohit had come
begging to Harishchandra, the righteous ex-king (and her husband)
to permit their child’s funeral. As is ascribed in the locally well-known
story of Harishchandra, from once being a mighty king, he was turned
into a toll collector at the cremation ghat under a conspiratorial divine
test of his truthfulness. During the final test, he indeed did not allow his
own son’s funeral without the mandatory fees. Adjacent to the Shivling
and Harishchandra’s temple, there are two other idols. One of Kali and
the other of Bageshwari Devi. Bageshwari Devi is storied differently than
Taramati. Senior Doms and the priest at the Shivling temple explained to
me that Bageshwari Devi was found floating in one of the floods and was
installed here thereafter. A parallel was evoked between the discarded fe-
male foetuses in the river and the Devi as both were of no known origin.
Devi was installed in front of the Shivling temple without her own temple
complex. It struck me that every year when the low-lying areas are inun-
dated, the idols and the temples too submerge in the water. Re-emerging
in winter it can be difficult to recognize the idols given what they looked
like the summer before the monsoon. Each year a fresh imagination
of design, colours, and motifs are brought into the act of restoring and
decorating them. That a copper plating was added to the corroded stone
Shivling is not an act of material restoration alone but adding a layer of
new grace to the deity. Bageshwari Devi’s stone-carved saree with big
110 Dead in Banaras
polka dots will have different floral motifs this year than the previous
one but that does not alter her story or her complex meaning-becoming.
Kali’s lolling tongue has shifting shades of vermilion red and sunny or-
ange from year to year. Now that I could see, here was an astonishing
repetition of difference that far from destabilizing the religious symbolics
of the Hindu civilization instead settled into a cadence of seasonal aes-
thetics and repetition of variation. In the middle of this cadence, another
cadence, that of environmental pollution, has also found shelter.
The Language of Environmental Pollution
There is a strange complication registered by scholars in trying to find

a clear local ethnographic affirmation of environmental pollution. Kelly
D. Alley (1994) in a pioneering essay on the subject suggests that while
Banarasis (people of Banaras) are ready to acknowledge that the river
Ganga ji is ‘not-clean’ (aswatchh), it is their simultaneous assertion that
her waters are not necessarily ‘impure and inauspicious’ (apavitra). Ron
Barrett (2008) studying Aghor medicine, a decade after Alley, narrates a
similar account. The river is pointed to him as ‘pure’, ‘you can see it’; and
then by another set of speakers with the same pointing gesture, he is told
that ‘it is polluted’, ‘you are seeing it’.2 While both Alley and Barrett are
primarily talking of the river and speak of cremation only in an associated
sense, David Arnold’s (2017) historiographic essay on the empire and the
social life of its technology is entirely dedicated to cremation and incin-
eration in modern India. Arnold argues that nineteenth-century British
adoption of technology-intensive in-door cremation iterated India as a
civilizational site of cremation. Modern India responded by turning that
iterative motif as a national mortuary sign, but it never took widely to the
adoption of the in-door crematorial technologies as against its existent
open- air, waterfront, pyre-based, fiery-flamed aesthetics of immol-
ation of the dead. Similarly, Arnold argues that open-air or chimney-
based waste incineration did not prevail in India because, amidst other
complex reasons of vegetarian diet and low carbon waste, the smell that
burning of wet waste emitted reminded people of cremation right amidst
their urban dwellings. My fieldwork experience resonates with both these
aspects, the dithering recognition of pollution and sceptical acceptance
Fig. 5.2. 02. First: Background: Steps to Shivling. Top right: Bageshwari Devi
installed on the ground. Foreground: The trident and the dhuni.
02. Second: Bageshwari Devi: the colour and design of her stone attire
changes each year. She is adorned here in polka dots.
112 Dead in Banaras
of furnace-based cremation of the dead in Banaras (Alley 1994; Barrett
2008; Arnold 2017). And yet I think it is possible to move a step further
from these positions and show how indeed an assemblage—centred on
local articulations—can be put together that illustrates an acknowledge-
ment of environmental pollution as a facet of contemporary Banaras. To
Arnold’s argument, one may add that the ethnographic reveals that the
question of technology also runs under the edifice of a funerary symbol
as a national sign. In such an encounter the question is not so much about
whether certain industrial crematorial technologies are paradigmatically
accepted or rejected at national levels, thus marking the difference be-
tween colonial or post-colonial, but rather how the use of existent and
new technologies find a mixed, hybrid presence in modern India.
In the spirit of conversation of pyres that I speak of, let me cite an
ethnographic example of a Danish crematorium to explain how the ques-
tion of crematorial technologies may be viewed slightly differently from
the agential vocabulary of collective adoption, rejection, or counter-
symbolization. While the origin of the practice of cremation in Europe
goes back to the late nineteenth century, the Danish crematorium in the
early twenty-first century nevertheless evoked a spectrality associated
with the ‘ovens’ that were imported from Germany. In 2011 when the
crematorium began re-circulating the energy generated during crema-
tion for civil use, the municipal initiative was explained with great strain
in the Danish national context by their ethics council. It was argued that
there is a substantial difference between a dead person and energy. While
a person has a corporeal substance and organic signature in death, energy
is devoid of these and thus this recirculation must be accepted on grounds
of this difference. The furnaces were digitally calibrated to serve this elab-
orate technological complex of filtering and harnessing the heat gener-
ated during cremation. This calibration of course creates its own practical
limits. For example, in the concrete space provisioned for the two ovens,
a dead person weighing beyond the stipulated standard could not be
taken in and was sent to the capital city, Copenhagen. We see here that
the origin, adoption, appropriation, and re-imagination of technology
can simultaneously be a site of anxiety, crisis, and functionality. We noted
above that Alley and Barrett are bent upon finding a total declaration of
environmental pollution and not inclined towards the symbolics of ambi-
guities with which any social form including environmental pollution is
lived in any local moral world. Similarly, Arnold’s discussion stops short
of pursuing how the British adoption of furnace based in-door crema-
tion was and is caught in a moral double bind between technologies of
dissolution (of the dead as organic matter) and technologies of preser-
vation of the dead (organic matter as substance of memorialization). Let
me explain once again with the Danish example. In keeping with Arnold’s
line of argument, it would be fitting to say for the Danish case that there
is a ‘successful’ transformation from burial to cremation to filtering and
re-circulation of heat. I will show that this idea of ‘successful’ completely
elides the complexity of the practice. When we begin to look at the prac-
tice of cremation in Denmark, we find that it sustains crematorial tech-
nologies by adapting them to the existent aesthetics of burial. The urns
with the ashes of the dead are buried or kept in a columbarium with the
proper names of the deceased inscribed on them. Even when the urn is
unnamed and buried at an unmarked columbarium, grave garden or at
the sea, the co-ordinates of the place and the names of the dead are mu-
nicipally recorded. In fact, for the majority, cremation may not exist as
part of the funeral practice because the graveyards sustain a visual and
architectural front of burial aesthetics as if nothing really has changed.
Quite clearly then, the national in this case continues to maintain the aes-
thetics of burial. The tombs, graves and gardens project a seamless un-
broken link with the long tradition of burial as the iconic practice. Having
said that, if one goes under this national funerary sign then one can dis-
cover how cremation as a practice in Denmark has altered funeral prac-
tise from within. Thus the national has to be seen as negotiating different
normativities simultaneously. So, just as the national is pronounced in the
reclaimed aesthetics of burial in Denmark similarly the national is imbri-
cated into promoting initiatives of cremation or that of re-circulation of
heat generated during cremation. A parallel can be found in the case of
Banaras. At the launch of the Ganga Action Plan (GAP) in June 1986,
the then prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi emblazoned Ganga as a national
maternal symbol whose ecological and environmental protection was
the new imperative for restoring unity of the nation against ‘separatism’
and ‘divisive forces’.3 Although the electric crematorium was not expli-
citly mentioned in the speech or in the outline of the project initially, it
was subsequently integrated to achieve the aims and objectives of the
initiative. This founding moment is characteristic in a way that it does
114 Dead in Banaras
not mention electric cremation, reiterating Arnold’s point, yet it activates
another moment of the return of environmental technologies with its
dispositif of prohibitions and provisions. Seen this way, we get two sides
of the continuum. On one side, it is the unbroken march of the dominant,
traditional practice: open-air cremation in Banaras; burial aesthetics in
Denmark (or Britain), in spite of the actual, empirical ascendance of cre-
mation. When I say ‘actual’ what I mean is that at the level of data and
statistics, the cremation rate is shown by state and media as the new to-
talizing reality of processing of the dead for the Danish context. However,
if one were to approach funerary spaces at the level of everyday access,
it is at times impossible to locate the crematories in these places that are
discreetly tucked in one corner with the billowing smoke technologically
curtailed against the sprawling relief of natural garden of graves, and in-
scribed words. In contrast to this dominant motif, at the other end of the
continuum, it is possible to show how the constellation of technology and
the funerary is in fact already inextricably linked to environmentalism as
a global and local discourse in parallel but different ways in Denmark and
Banaras. I have already cited Denmark’s adoption of in-door cremation
as a complex civil and moral institutional practice in the face of equally
compelling imaginaries of epidemic threats or environmental pollution.
Now I turn to select examples from Banaras to illustrate how the minor
language of acknowledging environmental pollution and reformulation
of open-air, manual cremation is at work.
Complexion of Pyre and the Complexion of the River
The poet Gyanendrapati uses an ordinary but dark and ambiguous word
that is usually evoked to describe facial and bodily complexion in North
India to diagnose dead as a condition for the river Ganga ji. The word is
sanwala. In its everyday usage, the word signifies a skin tone that is a shade
lighter to a projected, dark brown complexion. It carries a more vertical
and mysterious connotation when used to describe the deity Krishna as a
sanwala deity. Gyanendrapati (1999: 68) evokes the complexion sanwala
in relation to a dead person’s face singed by the first few flames of the cre-
mation pyre. The relation of the sanwala complexion to the glare of the
sun is common place in everyday parlance in Banaras. The fierce sunlight
Fig. 5.3. 03. First: Left: Electric Crematorium on concrete stilts at the ghat with
the yet to be installed second chimney. Right: Hotel with a roof top pyre-view.
03. Second: Underground pipelines installed at the Danish Crematorium to
recirculate heat energy for civil use.
116 Dead in Banaras
is seen to effect this complexion in people who may otherwise have a fair
complexion. For Gyanendrapati, the pyre-flame singed complexion and
the dark water of the river as an inter-reference and inter-reflection of
each other is the aesthetic site of recognizing the river’s pollution. This as-
sociation echoes with the common perception narrated at the ghat about
the river acquiring the colour of the untreated city sewage drained into
it through massive iron pipes. The iron drain-pipes were introduced as
part of the Ganga Action Plan (GAP) —although the system of sewage
drainage into the river is a nineteenth century, colonial phenomena—
with the further intention that the sewage would be treated before the
water was drained into the river (Alley 1994: 131–132). Like the semi-
dysfunctional electric crematorium, the sewage treatment plant too at
the ghat is erratic and marred by the fact that electric supply is intermit-
tent. On days when the plant would work, a collective of evening bathers
would use its refreshed water for their elaborate talk and bathing reveries
at sunset. However, for most people, the open sewage drains, now in place
for over two decades, provide an icky (dis)attachment with the river’s wa-
ters. There is a muted admission at the ghats that the daily bathers must
go back home and bathe again to cleanse themselves of this icky feeling
spawned by the sight of sewage water flowing into the river’s water.
Polythene and Ganga Ji as Mirror Concepts
The fact that the river Ganga ji acts as a host to all the discarded and im-
mersed abject entities ranging from hair, human-animal remains, med-
ical bio-waste and aborted foetuses to sewage effluents, used marigold
flowers, broken-old idols to cow’s carcasses, love letters, and daily human
ablutions has led the anthropologist Ron Barrett (2007: 29–56) to call it
as a ‘cosmic sink’. Barrett develops this discussion within his monograph
on ‘Aghor medicine’. The phrase ‘Aghor medicine’ is his name for the local
shaivite medicinal system that relies on the dual aspects—metaphysical
and physical—of renewal of bodily self. This renewal is undertaken
through periodic stipulated bathing as well as partaking of crematorial
remains as medicines. The baths are taken in the Krim Kund (pond) in
the Aghorashram: the Kund stands in for Ganga ji. The crematorial re-
mains are consumed as prasad (medicine; grace; offerings) for cures
associated with infertility and sexually transmitted diseases. Women
and couples partake in it to seek birth of a child, preferably a son, and for
men, it is mostly to seek cure from sexually transmitted diseases. Barrett’s
‘cosmic sink’ then wonderfully captures the river-in-use at both levels
of immanence-transcendence (cosmic) and unthoughtful, mechanical
deposition, or even dumping (sink). Bettina Sharada Bäumer, a distin-
guished expert on Kashmir Shaivism helped me think through my field-
work with the suggestion that a good way to visualize the river would
be to think of its agency in performing reabsorption. Reabsorption is a
well-known idea in Kashmir Shaivism and conveys two facets. One, the
poisonous has to be acknowledged as integral to any form of life. Two, the
poisonous can be metabolized and this transforms both the metabolizer
and the metabolized (part of the reason why Shiva is blue in complexion
and is called Neelkanth). In other words, in the case of Ganga ji, the mech-
anical deposition or dumping is inextricable from her agency of being in
contact with the immanent sphere of things that are returned to her—
tied to ritual, prayer, and mechanical gestures of immersing, offering, and
dumping respectively—for reabsorption. Note that reabsorption differs
from the restorative loop of re-cycling. In the latter, there is a functional
transformation of a resource and its usage into another modality of re-
source and usage. The user(s) is seen as an active agent who brings about
this transformation. In the case of reabsorption, there is a sceptical horizon
tied to the question of transformation. It is not entirely clear what happens
to the reabsorbed while the one doing the reabsorbing is recognized as
both possessing grace and also involved with negotiating the abject and
the poisonous. A popular way in which this is seen in Banaras is through
construing Ganga ji as a mother. Another popular way in which Ganga ji’s
grace is described is through the Bhojpuri verb ‘tarna’. Tarna literally is
the act of fully immersing oneself during a dip in the river. Extending that
corporeal aesthetic sense, tarna implies a state of bliss. With this under-
standing of how the river runs between the divine (embodied incarna-
tion) and a natural symbol (mother), we turn to polythene as an object
par excellence of chemical modernity integrated into the local world of
Banaras. Polythene is referred to as momjamiya (wax cloth) in Bhojpuri
along side other terms that refer to it as a vessel or a container. Like most
parts of the world, polythene has intrinsically altered the everyday space
of carrying and containing in Banaras and in its rapid spread has become
118 Dead in Banaras
a second lining to the world of objects. Uncannily, like Ganga ji, it can be
used to carry the ordinary and the abject without much ado. Its arrival
in Banaras blends in with other quotidian norms of keeping separate the
pure and the impure, but the ‘new’ aspect is that they can both be car-
ried by the same person at the same time albeit in two different polythene
bags. This parallel with Ganga ji exaggerates the aspects of polythene and
the river operating as containers or as Barrett calls it, a sink. In order to
posit the different potential of transcendence that they may both share,
I wish to draw upon another aesthetic image narrated to me at the ghats.
It is the image of the bloated polythenes on the surface of the river’s water.
The bloated polythenes are said to embody the aesthetic of what is called
at the ghats in Bhojpuri as ‘utraana’. Utraana is the counter to the graceful
immersion in the river or the subjective state of bliss (tarna), and is used
to explain flotsam on the water’s surface. This flotsam can be the corpse
of a drowned person or an animal, a necklace of marigold flowers, burnt
out wooden embers, bagful of ashes or bloated polythenes. The bloated
polythene has become an index of its own ubiquity. This bloated figure of
the polythene in its celebrated ubiquity brings up the context of the limits
of Ganga ji’s own transcendental capacity. Faced with the magnitude of
incremental flotsam provided enough ground for people in Banaras to
sceptically wonder: Will Ganga ji end up reabsorbing herself (kya Ganga
ji sab pacha lengi)?
Forms and Formats of Crematorial Architecture
Compared to the ‘twenty-four seven’ efficiency of the manual, open-air

cremation, electric cremation at its most efficient is a minor practice at
Harishchandra ghat. However, if we think in terms of how it is discur-
sively pitched as an imminent form of cremating, its vector is larger than
its empirical standing. Before I elaborate upon the variegated usage of
the electric crematorium, here is a brief snapshot of how the two forms
of electric and manual cremation have been conversing with each other.
Arnold (2016) speaks of the contrast between the two forms as ‘open-
air’ and ‘in-door’ cremation. I use this distinction too but in tandem,
I also use manual cremation and electric cremation, respectively. Both
descriptions have a bearing on the practice. While ‘open-air’ describes
Fig. 5.4. 04. First: A municipal shed for funeral travellers at Harishchandra
Ghat meant as an overnight lodge but used for varying different ends.
04. Second: The hand painted signboard announcing: ‘Cremation work is
On—Flat fees 500 INR’. (2010)
120 Dead in Banaras
the potential of a spell-binding spectacle for funeral travellers, ‘manual’
describes the whole domain of funeral work and the technologies and
techniques deployed to conduct a successful cremation. Coming to the
open-air, manual cremation and to Arnold’s evocation of it as the op-
posite of the technologically intensive ‘in-door’ cremation, it is easy to
get glided into these contrasting types. Let me show instead how there
is a conversation between these forms of pyres. At the site of manual
cremation, at the water’s edge, there are two kinds of pyres. The most
common one is a makeshift one. It is started on a ground surface after
funeral workers have cleared with a broom, the remains of the pre-
ceding cremation. The idea of a fresh singularized pyre exclusively
dedicated to a particular dead was the preferred funerary practice of
both funeral workers and funeral travellers. This idea of a de-novo,
singularized pyre is indeed remarkable. It is because of this insistence
on a de-novo pyre that we do not have a simple permanent installa-
tion of a small concavity in the ground beneath the pyre to collect the
ashes. Yet, another type of pyre exists right in the middle of the ghat.
It is built as a raised platform and is called charan-paduka (Vishnu’s
feet). It is mostly used for select dignitaries or as it happened during
my fieldwork the Doms use it for their own dead. What is important
to note is that charan-paduka exists as a permanently fixed site right
next to the makeshift ones. And, by no means the pyres set up at the
charan-paduka are considered deviations from the makeshift ones. We
notice thus the difference in formats being accepted. Yet, when con-
trasted with electric ovens that are both fixed and closed, these two
manual pyre formats are congealed into one kind of practice. Not that
this means a strict rejection of the electric cremation. In fact, during
seasonal flooding, the electric crematorium is a preferred choice. As
such, it is its own inefficiency that prevents people from using it on a
sustained basis. The inefficiency of the machines—owing to complex
reasons of erratic electric supply, the bureaucratic ethic of municipal
‘office hours’, unreasonably few numbers of ovens etcetera—is in sharp
relief to the untiring ‘always-on’ efficiency of the manual cremation
work. To revisit the discussion on electric cremation in Denmark, this
plurality of funeral forms and formats is in fact the hallmark feature of
funeral practices in the contemporary. Far from the oft-quoted idioms
of total change from burial to cremation, it is the nuanced engage-
ments with the soft shifts within these two forms that define the plane
of a composite local moral world. Let me return to Banaras. In 2017–
18 the makeshift pyres acquired permanently fixed iron-grill platforms
over which the wooden logs were now to be arranged.4 These raised
platforms allow the wind to help with the burning of the pyres and thus
significantly reduce the wood used during an individual cremation.
An innovation that was institutionalized in several other parts of the
country, including Delhi’s biggest mixed-format crematoria at Nigam
Bodh Ghat. We can hear the virtual force of technology saying to the
open-air pyres, if you do not adapt to the in-door machine-based cre-
mation, we will slowly come to you. If you do not change your form, we
will change your format. The makeshift pyres might reply to that: there
are always more than enough who die, makeshift is not just a form of
the past but an ethicality that has served as a stable tradition. It is open
to contingency as well as to a possible future of repetitive, mass, un-
foreseen, deaths. Here is a tally then. Now there are two forms, open-
air, manual cremation and in-door, electrical cremation, and four
formats, makeshift de novo pyre, raised platform special status pyre,
iron-grill innovative pyre, and stove-flame furnace pyre. May I add
one more register, that of ingredient to this account? The makeshift
de novo pyre, likely to be assumed as a format untouched by mod-
ernity, during my fieldwork had an established use of a fire inducing
chemical called ‘Royal’ that was requested by the funeral workers to be
purchased along with clarified butter and other ritual ingredients. The
chemical was sprinkled mid-way into the burning pyre after it having
coursed through its initial big flame flarings. Of course, during the wet
season and winters, it was a compulsory requirement. Contrast this
with the well-known shift of ritual ingredients into a newly shaped
pre-furnace ritual for in-door cremations where flowers and incense
sticks find greater presence than the clarified ghee and sacrificial fire.
We see thus that shifts in forms and formats open up all elements to a
gradual and selective alteration. Are these altered forms and formats a
continuation of the older forms or are they altogether new forms? For
funeral travellers at the ghat, things always start in the middle because
death also comes from this strange country of too near and too far.
122 Dead in Banaras
Bacteria, Virus, and National Microbes
The riverbank of Ganga ji has always been a site of tumultuous change,

and all changes have a sense of cross-current shift or repetition of the om-
inous. A sharper genealogy emerges through the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries combined together. In late nineteenth century with a raging
cholera epidemic, the river’s ineluctable decline was witnessed when from
being fit for all human purposes its water was declared as no longer fit for
drinking. In the same spirit, into the present it is seen as unfit for bathing.
The GAP was already a response in the 1980s to this ominous turn of the
water’s fate. However, it is significant to note that it is a complex dispositif
of local, national, and international forces intertwined with scientific
findings that activate and set the stage for a conversation between Ganga’s
water as a microbial form of life and the everyday idioms of whether it is
fit for drinking, bathing, or is disease causing pathological waters. Let me
illustrate the moment of the discovery of the Bacteriophages and through
that, we may traverse into the present. Ernest Hanbury Hankin, son of
a clergyman who was appointed by the British Government as a micro-
biologist to research the spread of cholera in the North Indian plains, pro-
vides a hint about the ‘mysterious X’ property in Ganga–Jamuna’s water
(Hankin 1896). His findings were published in a paper at the Pasteur
Institute titled ‘L’action bactericide des eaux de la Jumna et du Gange
sur le vibrion du cholera’ (1896). After the publication, it took another
two decades for the ‘X’ to be recognized and given the ‘proper name’ of
‘Bacteriophages’—the bacteria eaters, by the French-Canadian micro-
biologist Felix d’ Herelle (1921). D’Herelle mentions Ernest Hanbury
Hankin in this context and begins by locating his description of the ‘vola-
tile substance’ that protects those who ‘ingest’ Ganga-Jamuna’s water
from contracting cholera. He further notes that the substance evapor-
ates through ‘boiling’ (D’Herelle 1921: 16). To D’Herelle’s mind, this sub-
stance is undoubtedly the ‘Bacteriophage’. His affirmation comes from
the fact that another English microbiologist, Frederick Twort in his study
of acute diarrhoea amongst infants, had observed a certain ‘ultramicro-
scopic’, ‘vitreous’ substance that was similarly present in the dog’s guts
affected by Hundeseuche. Twort (Twort 1915 [quoted in D’Herelle]) con-
sidered the ‘vitreous substance’ to be an ‘enzyme’ that reproduced itself
through the bacteria and survived temperatures of less than sixty degrees
Fig. 5.5. 05. First: Charan Paduka (Vishnu’s lotus feet)—the elevated
permanent stage for special funerals.
05. Second: Background: Charan Paduka. Middle: Eco-pyre with iron
base platforms to reduce logwood use and promote efficient burning.
Foreground: A shrouded corpse bamboo bier on the ground.
124 Dead in Banaras
Celsius. D’Herelle describes other sets of incidences, including what was
termed as the event of ‘suicide’ of bacterial cultures. This so-called suicide
involved that over a period of few days the bacterial culture mysteriously
turned milky in the labs and then disappeared completely. The illumina-
tive evidence comes knocking at D’Herelle’s doorsteps when the faecal
culture of a certain individual hospitalized at the Pasteur Institute for the
treatment of dysentery turns out to have the same lytic activity against the
bacteria. He calls it an ‘ultramicrobe’ that is a ‘minute living being’ but is
not sure which special class it may belong to. He also defends his coinage
of the term ‘Bacteriophage’, suggested by his wife, claiming that though the
term literally means ‘the one which eats bacteria’ it should be understood
in terms of the ‘one that develops at the expense of ’ the bacteria (D’Herelle
1921: 21). The paradigmatic shift in the microbiological sciences that fol-
lows the discovery of the Bacteriophages is about the redefinition of the
host and parasite idiom. He notes that while the Bacteriology of the time
worked with the premise of ‘Bacterium and medium’ as the ‘problem of
two bodies’ (where the medium was the organism parasitized or a cul-
ture fluid), the discovery of the Bacteriophage turned it into a problem of
‘three bodies’ that would include the ‘interactions between the medium,
culture medium, or organism parasitized; the bacterium parasitizing
this medium; and the ultramicrobial Bacteriophage parasitizing the bac-
terium’ (D’Herelle 1921: 6). A complex reception follows these findings.
The spheres of antibiotics and vaccination think of the potential ways in
which these three bodies can be tackled, while in an alternative reception,
the ‘Bacteriophage’ gets storied with Ganga’s famed purity. Mark Twain
in his travelogue (1897) cites Hankin’s finding and proclaims that Ganga’s
water has this essence of purification.5 This alternative parable of the
Bacteriophage continues in diffused ways through the twentieth century,
and at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it finds itself embedded
in a novel experiment at the banks of the river in Banaras. A local initia-
tive started as Swachh Ganga Abhiyan (Clean Ganga Campaign) by a non-
governmental organization Sankat Mochan Foundation (SMF) headed by
Veer Bhadra Mishra (popularly known as Mahant ji), became both an off-
shoot of the governmental GAP (as a ground action group) and its critic
(bureaucratic failings of GAP at the level of conception and execution).6
After initiating many local efforts, he proposed the idea of ‘biological con-
trol’ of the burgeoning bacteria at the ghat through natural predation by
the native Bacteriophages. In an interview I conducted with him in June
2009, Mahant ji disclosed his plan of ‘Integrated Wastewater Oxidation
Pond System’ based on ‘biological control’ at an upstream ghat. Through
the controlled use of the Bacteriophages, it was expected that the bio-
logical oxygen demand (BOD) caused by the bacterial increase would
come down drastically. Part of the charm of the initiative, which the TIME
magazine and the Indian government both acknowledged, was that unlike
GAP, which had assumed scarce resources like electricity as a given for its
machine-based infrastructure to combat pollution, the pond system was
based on no such reliance on electricity or any other infrastructure. The
other charm was SMF’s storied enmeshing of Ganga ji’s purity with the
scientific essence of Bacteriophages. The pond eventually did not see
the light of the day.7 However, SMF’s decade’s long participation in the
proposed biological control of bacteria at the waterfront seems to coin-
cide with another moment of the bacteria story. The department of bio-
technology, under the Ministry of Science and Technology, Government
of India, proposed a national microbial profiling under a nationwide ‘mi-
crobial prospecting’ project in 2007. Here too, the Bacteriophages return
within the ambit of ‘microbial isolations from river sediments’.8 The op-
timism is rekindled at the level of field findings, scientific certification,
and popular lore. But it is also the same decade when antibiotic-resistant
super bacteria are found at the famed archetypal contact zones of bathing
crowds through most parts of the North Indian spread of the river. Thus
the microbial surface over which pollution management is tackled is ever
multiplying into complex levels of intra and inter-species interactions.
The spectral montage of the periodic million bathers, the ghats, the open
pyres and the half-burnt corpses returns once again. But what does this
montage look like into the present?
Ganga Aarti, Pyre Show
Cremating and crepuscular bathing are iconic indices with which Ganga
ji’s ghats find an enduring passage into modernity. Yet, both are under
the strain of discursive forces that range from threats of environmental
pollution to rumours of skin disease and cancer. The everyday has mo-
lecularly altered for most bathers in their own lifetime. I was told that the
126 Dead in Banaras
daily religious bather conceived as one addicted (pujedi) to bathing was an
exception rather than the norm at all times. It is just that their numbers
have dwindled further into the present. This does not hold true, though
for the periodic, calendrical bathing festivals (nahan). In this case, women
pilgrims have increased manifold as they now come from nearby satellite
towns around the city. These mass bathing events are managed with the help
of state police, municipal infrastructure, philanthropic contributions, vol-
untary associations, and individual ghat management bodies. This coming
together provides aid on various levels like prevention of stampedes, pro-
vision of changing rooms for women bathers, and facilitating safe bathing
zones for the river dips by barricading the waters. To add to the list, vo-
lunteers help with retrieving lost children, tracking petty theft and saving
drowning bathers too. Interestingly, this sphere of volunteer presence along
with loudspeaker echoes of safety instructions and precautions seems to
have altered the collective bathing sociality at the ghats and local kunds.
The divine soliciting of prayers and mumbling of mantras by bathers while
facing the rising sun is echoed down by the soundscapes of risk and danger
coming from loudspeakers or by police and volunteer chants of ‘hurry up’,
‘move on’. In these interpellations, the bathers are turned into a crowd that
can be addressed as one. With this crowd, in turn, there are projected risks
of stampede, theft, drowning, and the unnamed rumouring pulse of the
crowd itself. Compared to this disquiet, a different aesthetic participation
can be seen taking shape around the watching of Ganga aarti at sundown—
a post-sunset sound and light ritualization of Sanskrit mantras synchron-
ized to the hand-held encircling of a brass candelabrum with many little oil
lamps. In fact by 2008, a pair of fires had found shape and an address. The lit
cremation pyres of Manikarnika ghat and the Ganga aarti at Dasaswamedh
ghat would come together in a display of light, sound, smell and the mixed
topology of Ganga’s water and sacral spaces of the two ghats. Around the
same year, an equivalent pairing was being tried out at Harishchandra ghat,
of cremation pyres and evening aarti. The evening boat view has become
a settled new way of immersing oneself into the place for different pub-
lics. This is relatable given the perennial use of the ghats for an evening
promenade by one and all. A rarer practice is hotels with cremation views
being chosen by national and international backpackers. One such hotel at
Harishchandra ghat offered the dual view of electric and manual crema-
tions from its roof-top restaurant. Streamlining these details, I have been
tempted to consider this aestheticization (Ganga Aarti-Pyre show as an as-
semblage) as a mode of re-making the sacral sites of national tourism in
the time of environmental pollution. On second thoughts, to pitch such an
aestheticization as the truth of the ghats and the river would render other
events (described in the chapter, such as, seasonal variations and municipal
restorative imagination; manual and electric cremation as an assemblage;)
as hierarchically incidental and thus lower. Instead, I invite you to think
of the different aesthetic changes at the ghats as activating an ethics of dif-
ferentiation that continually make and remake its interior-exterior uni-
verse. After all it is difficult to fully establish if the aesthetic change brought
about by seasonal flooding is more local and authentic than the spectacular
Ganga aarti. It may be more useful to think of these constellations of shifts
within a semiosis of the contemporary that in different ways might be
very similar in Banaras and Denmark.
Let us move to the second discussion on the generic names of the dead.
In this recursive return to the dead in Banaras, I build on the overt ex-
pression of the aesthetic in the preceding discussion by superimposing
upon it a more pointed discussion on how the dead as a continuum of
difference across the human and the animal become a site of ethicality
and life through the idiom of names. We will await the discussion of a key
element of the ritual of manual cremation that involves immersing a re-
mainder bone-stump in the river’s water in the third and final discussion
of the chapter. Briefly though, the concern involved there is about another
set of names for the practice of cremation. We reflect on the double of
pravah and parvah to highlight yet another moment in which the words
in their spoken capacity at the Harishchandra ghat help shift the conver-
sation of pyres from that of remembrance and memorialization to that of
an indefinite care as a possible ethics.
Thresholds
Dead as Multiplicity
Dead as Maati (Clay) and Body

A distinction often made at the ghat between death at home and death
at the hospital was linked to the varied ways of acknowledging death in
128 Dead in Banaras
these settings. Deaths at home were imbued with the qualitative insist-
ence that no matter how prepared you may be with the foreknowledge
that the dying will die, death is always a surprise. The funeral travellers
coming from the home setting would sigh and say: ‘he (the deceased) was
heartily talking when I met him just yesterday’; ‘he was speaking coher-
ently at dinner’; ‘I was only gone for a while to come back and see this’;
‘he last spoke to his eldest daughter, he was very fond of her’. When it
comes to death at home, it seems there is rarely a simultaneous presence
of a witness to record the exact moment of death in the house. This was
spoken of as: ‘when I entered the room, I saw him dead’; ‘in the morning
I came in and saw him dead’; ‘his eyes were staring blankly, I panicked
and called forth other members of the family’. These translations are
rough paraphrases from the overheard speech of funeral travellers. The
most powerful illustration of this idea of discovery of the dead was con-
veyed through descriptions of what people did once they discovered the
dead. Upon discovery, the deceased was brought down from the bed and
made to lie on the bare floor. This was spoken as nikhare suta de val jala
(the person is made to lie on the bare floor). At this stage, the funeral-
travellers abandoned the proper name of the deceased and automatic-
ally switched to calling the deceased as maati. ‘Maati’ lying bare on the
floor marks a unique temporal moment that social anthropology of death
has not cut into a special conceptual unit in its own right while talking
about the polluted nature of the dead. In this temporal realm, there is
wailing and crying about in the house but equally acts of touching the
dead, throwing oneself over the dead, shaking the corpse and abusively
lamenting it for cheating and escaping through death are common-
place. In other terms, this is a time when the dead is touchable within the
family. This scene is equally common at the hospital when the deceased is
handed over to relatives from the morgue. Gradually, the maati is separ-
ated from this temporality, as it is separated from those who can touch it
till then. The said temporal realm thus closes off as contingently as it had
opened up and is not captured within the ritually sanctioned procedures.
It closes when the corpse is laid out into the open, outside space. Once in
the open, it has become maati that cannot be touched as spontaneously as
at the moment of discovery.
In the conversations at the ghat, funeral travellers spoke of death at
home and hospital in an inter-mixed way, articulating complex narratives
of death and the dead. The following account of death at the hospital is
drawn from my fieldwork, at a private hospital (adjacent to the much-
respected Banaras Hindu University hospital) and conversations at the
cremation ghat. Incidentally, in the local world of eastern Uttar Pradesh,
Banaras is only secondarily a spiritual capital, primarily it is a hospital
town where people are mostly ‘referred’ or ‘taken’ to be saved in the worst
possible medical cases of severely ill, accident victims and misdiagnosed,
mismanaged (kharab case) patients. However, the idea of Banaras being
an ideal place to die is not a repressed and tabooed topic in the hospital.
Since the main hospitals in Banaras mostly deal with ‘emergency’ cases
from nearby districts, the following quip is often made in all earnestness,
by the in-house staff. Consoling the stricken relatives at the death of a
close member, they often remark: ‘better released’ (mukti) than all that
suffering and think of the ‘place’ (Kashi Nagari) he chose to die’! The irony
in this hospital humour is bound to the idea that if the patient is ‘saved’, it
is of course a good thing, but if the patient could not be ‘saved’ and died,
death in Banaras is worth dying for. This is not lost on the professionals ei-
ther who sell funerary merchandise at the main gate of the Banaras Hindu
University, next to the two busiest hospitals in the city. The shopkeeping
is assured by the cultural maxim that death being an enviable thing of
fate, if it were to happen in Banaras, the dead will not be taken away from
the city. At the news of death in the hospital, middlemen offering efficient
funerary preparation of the bier, transport of the corpse and reasonable
bargain at the cremation ghat are only one set amongst others who offer
to facilitate cheaper medicines, budget hotel stay and the talismanic deity
darshan (glimpse) for the praying relative of the severely ill.
Let me here come back to the scene of ‘when is death’ in the hospital.
In one case, the identification of certain emergency symptoms by attend-
ants at the hospital brought the specialist doctors to the patient (who was
none other than my father whose death has been described in c hapter 3).
The patient was in the general ward as the intensive care unit (ICU) was
full. The doctors drew the curtains and followed up with the emergency
interventions. The next of kin were given a hurriedly dictated list of emer-
gency medicines to be purchased from the in-house chemist shop. After
the doctors’ tried and tested procedures failed, they asked for the close
relatives: ‘who are his relatives?’ (inka kaun hai?). This utterance involves
the socially coded message of the declaration of death. Moments later,
130 Dead in Banaras
the doctors refer to the deceased as ‘body’ unlike the time of emergency
intervention when they screamed the name of the patient into his ear in
order to seek a response. The immediate emergency after the declaration
of death is the requirement to separate the ‘body’ from other patients as
well as everyone else who may be around. As a culmination of a set of
rapid initiatives, the ‘body’ is wheeled on a special stretcher reserved for
the task to the morgue.
Funeral travellers while talking about the declared dead ‘body’ at the
hospital would interchangeably call it ‘body’ or ‘maati’. Indeed, this was
one of the ways in which Dom workers tried to discern whether the de-
ceased was coming from home or the hospital and accordingly bargained
for cremation services: ‘body’ meant hospital death, ‘maati’ meant home
death. While municipal hoardings at Harishchandra cremation ground
refer to the corpse as ‘shav’, I rarely heard the funeral travellers use that
term. A host of funeral travellers who had received the corpse from the
hospital mentioned that once the ‘body’ was released from the morgue, it
was kept on the bare floor till others joined in.
This is analogous to what happens to the maati at home after the dead
is discovered and declared dead. Importantly, the declaration, in this
case, is not an utterance but a social performance of crying, screaming,
abusing, touching, and lambasting the ex-living ‘person’. While this in-
deed is a short period both at home and in the hospital an important
detail that many funeral travellers pointed to was about the fire that ac-
companies the corpse, once the journey to the ghat commences. For the
maati coming to the ghat from the event of a home death, the fire from
the kitchen hearth accompanies the corpse. This ‘taking’ of fire implies
that the home kitchen is left without fire used for making pucca (cooked)
food till the key death rituals are concluded. In the case of hospital death,
incense sticks are lit and carried along with the funeral, everyone mimet-
ically assuming it as a substitute for the fire that is carried from home.
In the same mimetic vein, funeral travellers spoke about the battery-
powered ‘torch’ substituting the fire for a funeral from home, in situations
of night funerals or bad weather conditions.
To return to the physical scenes of death it should be made clear that
whether at home or hospital, as the case may be, both events occupy com-
plex patterns, resisting one versus the other. Yet, if subjects were to cat-
egorically choose between death at home versus death in the hospital,
they would rather choose to die at home. The heart of the matter is that
death at home seems to occur at a secret time—a time that people grant to
the moment of death. At home, dying meets death in a secret encounter
that is deemed as the final and exclusive truth of the dead. At the hospital,
this time is drawn out from its secrecy into the open. The truth of death
lies with the doctors who are also the first to touch the dead in quest of
their efforts of saving the dying till death is declared. However, this mo-
ment of death turned into a knowable time at the hospital from the secret
time at home, is equally seen as a non-transparent time by the relatives of
the dead in Banaras. There is great suspicion about the complicity of hos-
pital staff in moneymaking. This is particularly true for situations when
patients are in the ICU and separated from the watchful eyes of the kith
and kin.
The crucial question here appears to be, what exactly is going on in the
case of discovery and declaration of death. The succinct answer is that in
both instances, the one who is absent has to be articulated. In discovery
of death, the person is ‘not there’ just as in declaration the person is ‘no
more’. However, along with articulating the absence, the naming of the
dead also comes to the fore. The proper name is cut from the ex-person
and abandoned abruptly. But procedurally, the name may persist in the
death certificate. Moving past discovery and declaration of death, in the
next section, there is an illustration of how the dead are further named
and categorized in Banaras. This discussion involves a crucial point about
the Doms distinction between touching and handling the dead.
Touching and Handling the Dead
Dead as Madh (Cadaver–Carcass-Carrion) and Laash (Corpse)

In the backdrop to the well-known GAP of the Government of India,
the decades following its launch in 1984 have seen repeated attempts at
cleaning the river of floating human corpses to reduce the visible ‘pol-
lution’ of the river. As part of these initiatives, the electric crematorium
was set up at Harishchandra ghat with room for two furnaces. The his-
tory of usage of the electric crematorium since its inception is of some
interest here. Beginning as a free municipal service for the cremation of
corpses fished out of the river to the current flat fee-based provision, it
132 Dead in Banaras
has witnessed many institutional shifts. Here, I limit myself to the de-
scription gleaned from the Dom workers narration of the twists and turns
that came to characterize the municipal service. Dom accounts of the
electric crematorium are intermeshed with references to the prominent
non-governmental organization (NGO) SMF and its flagship campaign
‘Swachha Ganga Abhiyaan’ (Clean Ganga Campaign). The campaign was
conceived and run by a retired Hydraulics’ professor from Banaras Hindu
University, known to all as Mahantji. Mahant ji was also the chief patron
and heir of the prominent Sankat Mochan temple in the city.
I was told by Dom workers at the Harishchandra ghat that with the
launch of the GAP, a practice evolved where few of them were given a
municipally owned boat and handed over the task of fishing out floating
corpses of animals and humans. Together these corpses were called madh.
While madh refers mainly to the animal carrion, in this case, the human
corpses were included in the description. As the collected corpses were
brought to the ghat, the police were required to file a First Information
Report (FIR, Panchnama), distinguishing laash (human corpse) from the
common pool of carcasses. Once the FIR was registered, the corpses were
further differentiated and their cremation was ordered. Some subjects
recalled that the common catch of madh was disposed of through the
newly built electric crematorium. The workers recollected that a muni-
cipal vessel was kept at the crematorium side of the river and their job
was limited to bringing the madh there. Gradually, the practice hit bur-
eaucratic ennui and the efforts dissipated. As per Doms, this was noticed
by SMF’s Swachha Ganga Abhiyan and young boys from the community
were deployed to do the job. However, since SMF worked with makeshift
measures, it did not have resources akin to the municipality and the boys
ended up touching the madh which, as the older Doms revealed, was
strictly avoided during the municipal fishing of the corpses. Meanwhile,
as the electric crematorium was brought to use for regular cremation
service, the boys fishing the corpses increasingly limited themselves to
pulling the madh on the other side of the river (us paar) so that it could
be scavenged by big birds and dogs. At the time of my fieldwork, the
practice of fishing for madh was stalled and SMF was making a demand
under Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (NNURM)
for a municipal animal crematorium in the city to exclusively dispose of
the carcasses of cows regularly brought to the river. In narrating these
accounts, the Dom elders revealed that what hurt them most was the fact
that while in their profession of cremation work, they never touched the
dead, in this case, they had to. Surprised, I asked how was it possible to
cremate without touching the dead. In order to substantiate their case,
I was invited to watch any ongoing cremation closely. The difference, they
subsequently pointed out, is as follows. The Doms are perceived to be
‘touching’ the dead but in their labour practices, they insist, they do not
touch the dead but handle it. However, since the caste discourse labels
them as the ones who deal with the most polluted, the dead, they stra-
tegically use this perception in claiming the inverted shaivite idiom for
themselves, reserving a link with the aghori practitioners as that of spir-
itual brotherhood (guru bhai).
The work of cremation requires that after every cremation the Dom
worker clears that space before a new pyre is set. After the logs are set at
that place, the funeral travellers transfer the maati to the pyre and more
logs are put, now on top of the deceased. The fire procured from the Dom
in exchange for a fee is put to the mouth/face of the maati by the main
mourner. The Dom worker using his bamboo stick takes it up from there
and for some time, intense efforts are made to get the fire to flare and
build itself. At a stage when the pyre is up in full flames, this flare signals
accomplishment of that particular cremation for the Dom worker. From
here onwards, it is the ‘remaining’ work of cremation with that inciner-
ated corpse that will be attended to. Once the flames are in their intense
flare, the Dom worker moves on to other pyres that await him at different
stages. In the meantime, some funeral travellers may oversee the pyre that
is up in flames. As the flames come down, the Dom worker returns to
finish the remaining work of the accomplished cremation. This stage in-
volves stirring the pyre aggressively with the bamboo stick to keep the
pyre enflamed. This technique is known as raking. After a few rounds of
staggered raking, the worker’s task is to save the bone-stump of the dead
and hand it over to the main mourner in a forceps like pinch made of
two bamboo sticks, so that the main mourner can toss that in Ganga ji to
mark parvah. Thus, from building the pyre to making it go up in flames,
to raking and saving the bone-stump, the manual cremation worker en-
sures that he does not touch the dead. In the electric cremation, raking is
turned into stoking while not touching the dead becomes more clearly
institutionalized. The key shift between manual and electric cremation is
134 Dead in Banaras
the loss of the labour of saving the bone-stump for parvah. What remains
common to both forms of handling the dead is that it is the fire that most
intimately touches the dead.
So far, we have come across at least three sets of people who find them-
selves in different positions with respect to touching the dead. Close kin
allows themselves that touch in the special time that instantaneously
starts after discovery or declaration of death and abruptly ceases after the
maati/body is withdrawn from the embraces of the kin. Going by the pre-
ceding discussion on the hospital’s procedure of declaration of death, it is
clear that the doctor as a professional is placed in the distinctive position
to be the first one to touch the dead in the process of that declaration.
The Dom workers disclaim that they touch the dead; nevertheless, they
find themselves socially defined by that touch. In the case of Doms, in
keeping with their claim of not touching the dead, there is rarely any ac-
count available that speaks of any sexual excess with the dead. In the case
of the hospital and more specifically the morgue, the links between the
dead and the sexual acquire a hushed presence. However, a set of prac-
titioners called aghories are the ones who manifestly claim to ‘touch’ the
dead and not surprisingly are also the ones who build on the link between
the dead and the sexual. Let me turn to Postman Baba who helped me
understand the link between the Harishchandra cremation ghat and the
aghorashram.
Cremation Ghat to Aghorashram
Dead as Murda (Not-living, Dead)

My Dom friends at Harishchandra ghat often talked of certain regulars
at the ghat as guru bhai. They explained that anyone who referred to the
cremation ghat as his abode, even if that person is not a Dom by birth,
can be considered a spiritual brother. Here lies the mixed articulation
of the Doms in both claiming an entitlement because of their occupa-
tional practice—thus reiterating a singular status of the community—
and equally disavowing that they come close to the actual touching of
the dead. One set of regulars at the cremation ghat who do indeed make
an audacious claim about touching the dead are the aghori practitioners.
Aghoris, within the shavite paradigm, are considered as tantriks who as
part of their spiritual practice rely on touching and occasional partaking
of what may be purported as the most polluted (bodily secretions and the
corpse). The spiritual brother known by the name of PB did not strictly fit
into the mould of an aghori as will become evident with the following de-
scription. However, he did provide a conduit between the cremation ghat
and the aghorashram. The unique figure of PB offers a telling mediation
between the regular everyday world of distributing post-mails during the
day and picking pyre wood from the cremation ghat through the night.
The Doms knew little of his biography except that he was married and
had a family with children. He used his Sunday holiday to absent him-
self from the ghat and visit his family at the village, although some of his
family members had also dedicated themselves to the aghorashram and
had moved to the city. PB’s task at the ghat required him to glean half-
burnt pyre wood from an ‘accomplished’ pyre that had fat-drips of the
cremated. To accumulate the pyre woods, PB would be mostly awake the
whole night during different rush hours at the cremation ghat and would
either pull half-burnt pyre woods from an ongoing cremation or wait for
a pyre to reach the parvah stage. The stock collected would be ferried on
a hand cart the morning after to the aghorashram. The Doms themselves
are careful about the distinct essences of woods at different stages, so they
would never mix the pyre woods of one bier with another. In winters if
they ever needed fire to keep warm, they would use new wood and not
the gleaned or residual (touched by human fat) ones. The pyre woods that
PB collected were used to feed and fuel a perpetually lit fire (dhuni) at the
aghorashram. Dhuni or the immortal flame is common in Banaras. At
the ghat too, the fire sold by the Doms for every individual cremation to
the chief mourner comes from a dhuni. Again, a separate dhuni is main-
tained at the Shiv temple at the cremation ghat. The key distinctiveness
of the dhuni at the aghorashram is that the ash that comes from the burnt
pyre woods is used for what Ron Barrett, a medical anthropologist, calls as
‘aghor medicine’, suitable for various conditions ranging from infertility,
desire for a male child to the more stigmatized leprosy and sexually trans-
mitted diseases (Barrett 2008). PB, who had been working as a postman
for decades and was now in his early fifties, recalled that as far as he could
remember, he was always drawn towards the Kinaram aghorashram. On a
fateful day, the then chief guru, Aghoreshwar Bhagwan Ram, stared in his
direction and called him closer for an introduction. In that conversation,
136 Dead in Banaras
the chief guru offered him the prized task of fetching the pyre woods and
PB readily agreed. In Ron Barrett’s descriptions of the aghorashram, one
finds that in earlier times, the successive chiefs of the ashram fetched
the pyre woods themselves, particularly in the case of Burhau Baba. PB
took the call as religious work and in speaking of the homology between
delivering post-mail and delivering pyre woods, he told me ‘both involve
transferring secrets’ (gupt kaam). In the first case, you know the sender
and the address but do not know the content and, in the latter, you gen-
erically know the content but do not know of whom it is (the dead as a
person) and to whom it would go (as medicine).
Over time, Aghoreshwar Bhagwan Ram moved to a new aghorashram
in the city close to the banks of the river. The chief who succeeded
him retained PB for his service of fetching pyre woods. PB’s son and
daughter-in-law, who had moved into the ashram during the tenure of
Aghoreshwar Bhagwan Ram, continued to live in the ashram with the
new guru. PB started his day at the post office, organizing the undelivered
mails of the previous day and classifying the new mails before he set out
to deliver early afternoon. Returning around 3:30, he reported the undis-
tributed mail to the head clerk. Out of habit, he went to his desk marked
by signature mini plastic human skulls that he also wears in a necklace
and a ring, and dozed off till tea time. As the post office neared closing
time, he headed to the aghorashram to have his late lunch there after a
bath and prayer. He told me he rarely ate lunch at office and as a religious
observance, would eat only at the ashram. What PB ate at the ashram was
not regular food though; he referred to it as mahaprasad. The said meal
cooked at the ashram on the face of it appeared to be a regular fish-rice
combo. However, it was not regular because, first, the fish is cooked on
mixed wood using both new wood and pyre wood and, second, the fish is,
as PB explained, a mahamaansh (extreme flesh). It is so because it comes
from the river where it feeds on murda (human dead) and gav (cow’s car-
cass) amongst other things. After having this meal, which was mainly
meant for the medicine-seeking pilgrims, PB usually rested for some time
before cleaning and sweeping his corner of the ashram. Around nine at
night after eating a regular meal cooked by his daughter-in-law, PB pro-
ceeded to the cremation ghat with the pull cart and a young helper. At
the ghat, he is known to be taciturn and does not mix with Doms in their
work and occupational humour. Quite like the ashram, where he has a
corner reserved for himself as a result of his entitlement built over years
of collecting pyre wood. At the ghat, he gleaned the pyre wood period-
ically through the night, to fill up his stock. In his narration, he hinted
at the complexity of precedence and his own singularity in the tradition
of the ashram. He hinted that he is non ‘upper-caste’ but differentiated
himself from both the Doms whom he considered lowly and the aghor
gurus whom he considered of ‘another kind’ (doosre log). He told me
that he had adopted the name ‘Rajaram’ and refused to talk any further
about this aspect. The fact of being a householder was another contradic-
tion because the genealogy of the ashram gurus is based on the record of
austere chastity from childhood. An aghor practitioner may indulge in
‘sexual’ activity but it has to be for siddhi (ritual transcendence) and not
for pleasure or producing an heir. PB, in contrast, spoke about his wife,
sons and daughters-in-law with great affection and considered himself
on the side of householders. At the same time, he emphasized that he has
gained merit from doing difficult work at a difficult place, assiduously. He
suggested that through his mere routine of being at the cremation ghat
each night for so many years, he perceptively ‘knew’ things that for others
did not even exist. Further reacting on who is an aghori, he explained that
the one who like the dhuni is always aflame with devotion is an aghori.
He defined himself as one made of the slow work of gleaning pyre woods
and, thus, more of an aghor worker (sevak) than an aghor guru.
The Dead as Irreducible Surface of Names

Recall the various names of the dead that emerged in the discussion,
namely, maati, shav, body, madh, laash, and murda, in addition to the
unnamed bone-stump remainder. It is possible that one can visualize a
grammatical parallel with what Veena Das (1983) calls the language of
sacrifice and find, if not names, then corresponding material states of the
dead as a sacrificial event. From the loosing of proper name at the dis-
covery or declaration of death to the outside-the-house placement of the
corpse to its sacrificial immolation to it becoming a special consumable
(as prasad) to the immersion of the residual bone-stump in the river it
does indeed point to a consistency of Hindu death as described in Das’s
reading of the language of sacrifice. Precisely, however, for that reason, if
we use the idea of a parallel, we can superimpose other readings drawn
from the contemporary to establish narrative consistency. To go back to
138 Dead in Banaras
the Denmark discussion raised earlier in the chapter, it is useful to re-
call that in the crematorium the particular dead gets substantiated into
different forms of generic names, numbers (social security number; cre-
mation serial number) and entities (unnamed and unseen dead, urns,
mercurial emissions, recyclable ortho-joints, carbon remainder, ground
and filtered ash). Again, the parallel between Banaras and Denmark is
that what may otherwise be seen as an objectification and abject redu-
cibility of the particular dead is in fact an ethicization of materialities
of the dead. In case of Banaras, it can be seen in how the human dead
sporadically merges with clay (maati), animal cadaver-carcass-carrion
(madh), divine form (shav), human form (body), non-living (murda),
and the corpse (laash) at the general level of names of the dead while the
processes activated into these categories do not have specific names. In
case of Denmark, it is the case that the specific dead loses and regains
the name in an urn at a memorial site, while the general surface of part-
ible substantiations is rendered nameless with respect to the dead. For
example, the re-circulation of heat is known by the energy it transfers, the
burial of mercurial emissions is referred to as deposition and the saved
ortho-joints of the dead are known by the process of recycling. Yet in both
instances, we find that the human dead finds a dual recognition at the
level of general dead and a specific dead. It is in this sense that the dead
as a social condition apprehend the ethical in the face of environmental
pollution. At this, we return to Banaras for our third and final discussion
with regard to pravah and parvah.
Care
Remains of the Dead
We are finally in a position to address the following question: What is the

name and import of the practice of cremating the dead at Harishchandra
ghat? Like other instances discussed in the book, this too has more than
one name. The municipal hoarding calls it ‘dah-sanskar’ implying an
immolating ritual. At the funeral merchandise shops, it is inscribed as
‘antim kriya’ implying the last rite. Then there is another name used by
the funeral travellers, parvah. While dah-sanskar and antim-kriya can
be interpreted as the use of fire and the last and final act of sacrifice re-
spectively, parvah carries a slightly different import. First of all, parvah
is the Bhojpuri spoken for pravah which in Sanskrit and Hindi literally
means river-run with further allusions to how the river-run implies
a perennial continuity and the dead must be consigned to this force of
the flow. This description captures the act of the immersion of the un-
named bone-stump saved during manual cremation. This name also
rings true for the widely prevalent practices across India of immersing
the ashes of the dead in different rivers. The gift of the city is that parvah
in Bhojpuri is also used at the same ghat in its Urdu meaning, with the
ethical import that one must care. This dream-like doubling in Bhojpuri
of the two user meanings of parvah speaks something about the language
and something about the city. We started the book by introducing the
idea that while death heroically qualifies to be a transcendent event, what
makes it converse with life is the fold that the dead as social conditions
produce into life, and again, how the dead, unlike death, allows itself back
into the ordinary one way or the other and eventually drags death too in
the middle. In the two almost contrasting strains of meanings coining
on to the one Bhojpuri word parvah, we may have a dual call of recogni-
tion of the ordinary. One, the ordinary is an autonomous social force that
flows normatively and we are brow-beaten by it, in life and death. Two,
the river-run (pravah) and its repetitive and renewed flow is folded by
death and the dead into a recognition of care (parvah). The river-run in
this sense does not remain an autonomous, external force but becomes
an imperative of care for the subjective self and its world. If we turn back
to a more linear interpretation of Bhojpuri parvah through Sanskrit and
Hindi pravah, we still have this intriguing revelation that the whole act of
cremating and immersing the bone-stump is called by the part act of con-
signing the bone-stump to the river Ganga ji. Veena Das in her essay on
the language of sacrifice cites that the rituals of remainders make a sep-
arate body of rituals called shesha (remainders) rituals compared to the
act of sacrifice as one body of rituals (Das 1983: 459). It is now intelligible
that dah-sanskar, antim-kriya, and parvah actualize different aspects of
the same moral imaginary of the Hindu dead. That is, the anonymous
bone-stump is not a site of the memorial remainder of the dead for her
survivors. It is not a site of inscription and memorializing. That purpose
is going to be served by the reclaimed name of the dead after parvah. How
140 Dead in Banaras
may then one think of the funerary topologies of the cremation ghat with
respect to the specific dead? It is at this level that we come to understand
that the aesthetics of the place—the ghats and the river—which we have
seen is by no means overtly stabilized, becomes a general ethical surface
to conceive of life and becoming for the living. Parvah in both its user
meanings of ritual mourning acts (Sanskrit, Hindi, and Bhojpuri) and
‘to reflect and remember to care’ (Urdu and Bhojpuri) introduces further
layers to how the dead as social condition can be acknowledged in the
local moral worlds of Banaras.
Notes
Chapter 1
1. It is true that the idiom of Hindu funeral that comes to the fore into the contem-
porary is mediated by many other structures than that of religious custom alone
since the dead navigate multiple institutions like hospital, municipal organiza-
tion of cremation as well as the emergent shifts in cremation. This picture of the
contemporary helps me to clarify that Banaras and its open cremation aesthetics
can be approached in conspicuously different ways. One could stay with the com-
plexity of the Hindu religion where the institutional shifts can be personalized
within a Hindu world view (see Fillipi 2005; Justice 1997). Another way would be
to treat the aesthetics of death in Banaras as a general language through which the
existential question of death can be confronted as a question of the contemporary
(see Parry 1994; Gardner 1986; Gardner and Ostor, 2001). A third way would be
to describe the corpsely ambience of the city as a metaphor of poverty and social
suffering. A searing, two volume autobiography of a Dalit communist professor as
a poor, young student in the city establishes these connections narratively. Written
in Hindi, the books are titled ‘Murdahiya’ (corpsely) and ‘Manikarnika’—after the
name of one of the cremation ghats in Banaras (Tulsiram 2010, 2014). My own
work is deeply coloured by these documents and is invested in tackling the uneven
intensities of these different approaches into the assemblages described here.
2. Banaras is a multi-religious place, and its main language Bhojpuri has a complex
confluence of Sanskrit, Hindi, and Urdu, not to mention loan words from English
that invariably pull and push the Hindu to different potentials of meaning. The
2011 census for Varanasi district (total population 3,676,841), including the rural
(56.56%) and the urban (43.44%), had the following relative shares of different
religious populations: Hindu (84.52%), Muslim (14.88%), Christian (0.21%),
Sikh (0.09%), Buddhist (0.03%), Jain (0.05%), others and not stated (0.22%)
(Source: Census 2011, Government of India). However, the census figures do not
do justice to the historical presence of each of these religions. Almost all these re-
ligions and many more, such as the Kabirpanthis and Ravidasis, have at different
junctures considered the city as central to their respective religion. For details, see
Singh and Rana (2006). I take up this question in Chapter 2 where I discuss the
city in substantive terms through its many different names.
3. For a succinct description of Deleuze’s usage of the concept, see the entry on
‘Multiplicity’ in The Deleuze Dictionary (Parr 2010: 181). Contrary to his in-
junction that multiplicity is not equivalent to plurality, I have still treated certain
142 Notes
pluralities (of names) as multiplicity all the same. What I instead find useful
in Deleuze is to think of multiplicity not as a ‘prior unity’ but as an emergent
substantive.
4. My inspiration to move from death to the dead emerges from Veena Das’s dis-
cussion of the corpse in her account of Hindu sacrificial rituals. Das writes: ‘It
would appear that the attention which has hitherto been paid to the condition of
the mourners in sociological analyses of death in Hinduism, to the exclusion of
the condition of the corpse, has obscured the importance of sacrifice as a theme
in Hindu mortuary rituals’ (Das 1977: 123). Das’s observation has been crucial in
forcing me to consider the condition of the corpse. Extending her observation,
I have found it productive to think of this condition not so much as a physical
condition but a social condition. In my reading of Das, another significant ob-
servation in her analyses of sacrifice as part of Hindu thought is that the corpse
as a substantive social matter is not just operating at the level of the most tran-
scendent object in sacrifice but it also doubles up as remainder and raises the
practical question of contingency about the end (completion) of the sacrifice. It is
in this double sense that I take the dead to be signalling an affinity to both multi-
plicity and the ordinary.
5. Here is an illuminating summary by Cora Diamond (CD) in an interview with
Silver Bronzo (SB) (2013) to her own longer discussion on the subject in The
Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Mind (1991):
SB: Murdoch is a tremendously important figure for your work in moral
philosophy. What are the elements of her thought that you have found
most interesting and fertile?
CD: First of all, the idea that I have just mentioned: problematising our
conception of what moral thinking is. That alone makes her so hard to fit
into the picture of the field of ethics in contemporary moral philosophy.
Determining what belongs to ethics is generally not taken to be a serious
problem. It is a common view that the domain of ethics can be isolated in
terms of a few basic concepts: right and wrong, good and bad, and maybe
virtue and vice. Murdoch is profoundly insistent, in different ways at dif-
ferent stages of her life, that there is already something extremely problem-
atic in this kind of delimitation, tied in with an equally problematic picture
of the nature of the world in which we do our moral thinking.
I cite Diamond here to pitch moral thought as a slightly distinct site of under-
standing the social when compared to philosophy of ethics. I believe that
Diamond’s invitation to think of the moral and the ethical as distinct, for good
reason in my view, dissuades us from considering the ethical as primary to
thought as is found, say, in the works of Foucault and Deleuze.
6. Jonathan Parry’s (1994) comprehensive coverage of the subject in Death in
Banaras shows how meaningful the practice of death can be when located within
the cultural symbols of the place. Two strains get particular attention in his eth-
nography against this reassuring backdrop. First, the organization of cremation
Notes 143
as an economic enterprise. Second, the mobilization of corpse as a substance on
different registers of ascetic practices (particularly by Aghories). While drawing
from Brahminical and scriptural sources, Parry simultaneously goes to heterodox
zones where the former are silent. For example, the elaborate understanding of
the economic organization of cremation is one such achievement. Similarly, his
discussion on the use of funerary substances by left-handed ascetics shows us
how death as sacrifice can be an insufficient ground to explain these practices.
Robert Gardner’s (1986) attempt on the other hand relies on finding a visual lan-
guage of life and death on the ghats of Banaras that is not reined in by a narrative
commentary but instead speaks through the rhythms of social action and ges-
tures with which different ‘characters’ enact themselves in the non-fiction film.
These ‘characters’ are ‘the deities, boatmen, sacred sites, animals, objects used,
and cremation rites’. Gardner and Östör (2001: 7).
7. Sample this excerpt from Deleuze’s (1988) discussion on ‘Foldings, or the inside
of thought’ that cites death thirteen times to make the literal point about death as
immanent and divisible. I also wish to draw your attention to how death folds into
life to posit an outside and inside within life and not external to it. The discussion
starts by Deleuze posing the following question to Foucault’s work:
‘If power is constitutive of truth, how can we conceive of a “power of truth”
which would no longer be the truth of power, a truth that would release
transversal lines of resistance and not integral lines of power? How can we
“cross the line”?’
Deleuze replies to his own question by showing that Foucault’s writings
manifest a recurrent negotiation with the question of life and death.
‘And, if we must attain a life that is the power of the outside, what tells
us that this outside is not a terrifying void and that this life, which seems
to put up a resistance, is not just the simple distribution within the void
of “slow, partial and progressive” deaths? We can no longer even say that
death transforms life into destiny, an “indivisible and decisive” event,
but rather that death becomes multiplied and differentiated in order
to bestow on life the particular features, and consequently the truths,
which life believes arise from resisting death. What remains, then, if not
to pass through all these deaths preceding the great limit of death itself,
deaths which even afterwards continue? Life henceforth consists only of
taking one’s place, or every place, in the cortege of a “One dies.” It is in
this sense that Bichat broke with the classical conception of death, as a
decisive moment or indivisible event, and broke with it in two ways, sim-
ultaneously presenting death as being coextensive with life and as some-
thing made up of a multiplicity of partial and particular deaths. When
Foucault analyses Bichat’s theories, his tone demonstrates sufficiently
that he is concerned with something other than an epistemological ana-
lysis: he is concerned with a conception of death, and few men more
than Foucault died in a way commensurate with their conception of
death. This force of life that belonged to Foucault was always thought
through and lived out as a multiple death in the manner of Bichat.’
(Deleuze 1988: 94–95).
144 Notes
8. I conducted fieldwork for fourteen months spread over a period of four years
between 2005 and 2009 and subsequently have been regularly visiting the field
for shorter durations. A memorable stint involved accompanying the Austrian
artist Michael Aschauer for a slit-scan mapping of the ghats in December 2011.
I have also benefited from a short fieldwork of crematoria in Denmark in the
summer of 2011. My key station during fieldwork in Banaras was Harishchandra
ghat. I chose the said ghat for its post-modern assemblage of the manual/electric
crematorium and a multi-storey hotel. My second field site was Hospital H which
under contingent contexts, described in c hapters 3 and 4, substantively produced
the ethnography that is discussed in this book. Hoping to cover both the biomed-
ical and the ritual spheres, my initial plan was to conduct a multi-sited ethnog-
raphy across the electric–manual crematoria, the hospital, and the aghorashram.
However, sometime into fieldwork I discovered that Ron Barrett (2008) had al-
ready studied the aghorashram in great detail for his book Aghor Medicine. I then
began focusing on the N.K. Bose Foundation and their rich archives became an-
other key site for my research.
9. Das (1983) cites the Hindu variation in relation to the standard conceptualization
of sacrifice and its link to language. Discussing the place of language in Vedic sac-
rifice she writes: ‘Since sacrifice is the womb of order (rtasya yoni) and creation
of order is to be sought in the sacrificial act rather than in the persons performing
sacrifice, Jaimini begins his enquiry into dharma (order, code of conduct) by
seeking a reality beyond the phenomenological and transitory reality of man. He
finds this evidence in the existence of language, which constitutes for him a true
example of an instituted reality not made by man, apuruseya. Thus it is not lan-
guage which is predicated upon human existence but human existence which is
predicated upon language. The principle of dharma (eternal order) is, therefore,
to be found in the nature of the Word’ (Das 1983: 446).
10. I am referring to the articulation of death as an event by Renato Rosaldo in his
poetry and ethnography of grief, The Day of Shelly’s Death (2014). In his more
recent writing, Rosaldo borrows from Alain Badiou’s conceptualization of ‘event’
to posit Shelly’s death (his deceased wife and fellow anthropologist) as such an
event. His poetry on the subject of her death, is for him ‘the event itself ’. Not a
representation, not an enactment but a creation of the event. Following Badiou,
for Rosaldo it is this event that has the radical capacity to intervene in the ‘estab-
lished world’ so as to ‘interrupt’ it (Rosaldo 2014: 101).
I take Rosaldo’s long-standing connection between grief and mourner’s
rage as an unparalleled contribution to how the affective and the conceptual
must be brought to bear upon an ethnographic understanding of death and the
dead. However, while Rosaldo turns to the Badiouian event to further concep-
tualize his death, grief and rage triad, staying with his earlier work for two dec-
ades I have arrived at a counter formulation. I show that death as an event must
be located within a halting continuum of the social rather than as an absolute
Notes 145
halting or a radical ‘interruption’ of a particular social. The domain of the ‘estab-
lished’ world par excellence, the ordinary, is the place where death as an event and
dead as social condition come to be absorbed into different rhythms. Into these
rhythms, death and the dead come to have their own differing logics of subsisting
amongst the living. It is these logics that ethnography to an extent can spool and
unspool. I have learnt from Rosaldo that death creates its truth in the infinite
and unsparing responsibility of mourning. However, as I now see it, this truth
of mourning is ethicized into finite and, occasionally, sparing forms of remem-
bering and forgetting (the dead) within the rough texture of the ordinary that can
contain many a poison. The relation between rage and mourning is where death’s
agency is at its most thymotic; how may this thymotic ebb, rise, fall and eventalise
is already a question of the halting social continuum.
11. There are two main cremation ghats within the old city’s inner geog-
raphy: Harishchandra and Manikarnika. The third prominent ghat Khadak
Vinayak is located at the outer periphery of the city across the bridge at Rajghat.
The practitioners of this ghat claim Khadak Vinayak as the oldest according to
their sacred geography coordinates. This claim is also made for the other two
ghats, Harishchandra and Manikarnika, by their occupants and well-wishers. In
my observation, a sparse number of cremations took place at the Khadak Vinayak
ghat, although an entire caste group of funeral workers exists here too just as at
the other cremation ghats. Adjoining each other, Manikarnika and Dasaswamedh
are two of the busiest ghats. While the former is a cremation ghat, the latter is im-
portant for its evening Ganga Aarti. Unlike Manikarnika, Harishchandra ghat
has an electric crematorium alongside the manual cremations that are ongoing
day and night. The work of cremation is associated with a designated occupa-
tional caste group called the Doms. The name Doms refers to the occupational
categorization of funeral work broadly and by no means all Doms are funeral
workers in present day Banaras. While the adjective in Bhojpuri, Domra (con-
veying Dom-like) is used as a pejorative caste slang, the caste members prefer to
call themselves by their adopted surnames of Chaudhary. Unlike Domra that is
well known as an injurious slang, another designation Dom raja (the Dom king)
or Chaudhary (the head man) is used by the cremation workers for the male se-
niors amongst them. Even then because funeral work as Doms practice it cannot
be visualized outside the caste practice of the gift of fire, the term Dom is also
used self referentially. I take up this complexity in my discussion on domghouse
in the chapter. Like all broad caste descriptors referring to occupations and mem-
bers in one unitary association, ‘Doms’ also does not have an empirical substan-
tive basis and Doms are of diverse occupational profile. It is important to note
that while most other ghats have legal ownership in the form of trusts, the own-
ership of cremation ghats has no such context, and Manikarnika, Harishchandra,
and Khadak Vinayak, all three ghats claim ownership based on Doms traditional
practice of cremation work.
146 Notes
12. For a discussion on the vertical and the horizontal ‘limits to forms of life’ see
Veena Das’s Wittgenstein and Anthropology (1998). For a discussion on desire and
sacrifice, see Veena Das’s The Language of Sacrifice (1983).
13. Aghors are ascetics who as part of their Shaivite practise hyperbolically invert
the caste norms of purity and pollution. They are commonly associated with the
usage of defiling substances like bodily secretions and the corpse—which by
some measures is considered the most defiled of all things. Aghor medicine is
the term that Ron Barrett (2008) uses for the ashen substance made at Kinaram
aghor ashram in Banaras that is mingled with the remains of a cremated corpse.
Barrett shows how this medicinal substance is combined with other ascetical ob-
servations (repeated ritual performance of baths and dips) by the devotees to get
the desired outcomes. The entire gamut of observations were traditionally tied to
curing sterility or seeking a son but as Barrett shows the medicine is increasingly
sought for sexually transmitted diseases as well.
14. I developed an interest in Baidyanath Saraswati’s engagement with native anthro-
pology in Banaras as I pored over his writings and his curated volumes in both
Hindi and English at the N.K. Bose Foundation. Apart from his own contribu-
tions, I also encountered Saraswati in some excellent anthropological works on
the city. Here are two examples: Robert Gardner and Ákos Östör’s Forest of Bliss
(2001) and Lawrence Cohen’s No Aging in India (1998).
Robert Gardner (RG) in conversation with the anthropologist Ákos Östör
(AO) on their film Forest of Bliss recalls a tender detail that went into the creation
of the film. RG and AO are speaking of the opening sequence where a quota-
tion from the Upanishad is cited intercut with the rising sun and ferociously
fighting dogs at the cremation ghat. Then a shift in the soundscape follows in the
next frame.
‘RG: The sound is intended to be very suggestive through this part, especially
now, when the present sound of the dogs, gives way to another very important
sound, that of trees being felled. Hopefully, that sound, too, has people wondering,
not because they are disoriented but out of real mystification. I hope it calls to
mind the idea of mature trees, anywhere in the world, being hacked down and
falling in the forest. That, in turn, has its extended meaning in the well-known
metaphor suggesting death, certainly the death of a tree if nothing else. I re-
member in a conversation with our friend Saraswati, early on in Benares, when
I mentioned the idea I had of looking into the whole question of wood, his telling
me about growing up in his childhood village and knowing that when he heard
the sound of men cutting down the mango trees there had been a death. As far as
the film is concerned, this sound will carry a pretty heavy meaning’ (Gardner and
Östör 2001: 25).
In his encyclopaedic No Aging in India (1998), Lawrence Cohen cites
Saraswati in relation to the old destitute widows in Banaras to highlight their
subalternity. He writes, ‘Saraswati, in his study of Kashivaasi widows, noted the
association frequently made by his Varanasi informants between widows and
Notes 147
prostitutes. Young widows in particular were seen as having few other sources
for meeting their economic needs and sensual cravings’ (Cohen 1998: 273).
What strikes me in comparing Saraswati’s study (published in Hindi in 2005) and
Cohen’s No Aging in India is the moral and the counter-moral perspectives with
which they approach the subject respectively. Saraswati’s moral understanding
of aged, abandoned widows in the city is to think in terms of how to designate
them as renunciates at par with the male renunciates in the city. This perspective
is a departure from his own earlier work co-authored with Surajit Sinha (1978)
wherein while undertaking a census of ascetics in the city they mainly counted
men. Cohen in his book is at war with precisely such a moral reclamation that
he finds empty and hyperbolic at the same time. Over time, I have come to view
Saraswati’s position as an instance of engagement in moral anthropology when
compared to Cohen’s complete disbanding of the possibility.
15. I do not want to labour the point that there is a fundamental gap between the
autobiographical and the auto-ethnographic that keeps them distinct. However,
I want to retain the autobiographical rather than the auto-ethnographic because
it allows me to concede to my doubt that a self-conscious ethnographic recording,
with all the fidelities of note-taking and scouting for voices of fellow participants,
might have yielded a different texture of narrative content and expression. Also,
I am long harnessed to Hindi literature’s generic discursive traditions of ‘atma-
katha’, ‘aap-beeti’, and ‘jeevani’ that render legibility to the different aspects of the
autobiographical, so it is fitting that I must make that connection apparent.
Chapter 2
1. Annemarie Mol’s (2002) use of the term ‘body multiple’ emerges from her chron-
icling of a Dutch, hospital-bound, biomedical ‘doing’ of a disease (and illness)
named atherosclerosis. The named disease is done through various ‘co-existent’
ontologies of evaluating, inspecting, reading, interpreting, consenting, differing,
and curing. These ontologies, within the biomedical epistemological premise,
are mediated by words, radiological images, histological scans, and other med-
ical modalities of diagnosis and prognosis. For us what matters here is that the
named disease, ‘atherosclerosis’, becomes a synecdoche for the materiality of
body and the medical doing of the disease becomes an equivalent to the medical
doing of the body. However, we witness in her elucidation that this body is mul-
tiple and its multiplicity is constituted through and within different hospital prac-
tices. Ontologically, the body multiple straddles for consistency between more
than one (the leg, the pathological tissue, the patient’s voice etc.) but less than too
many (if need be, the roughest case history can be coherently narrated by the hos-
pital staff). My paraphrased use of the city multiple departs from Mol’s depiction
because in my case neither the name is one (to her parallel instance of athero-
sclerosis) nor can the city be narratively cohered into one (to her parallel instance
148 Notes
of the body). Harish Naraindas (2014) posits Mol’s ontological portrait of the bio-
medical body-multiple on to larger social matrices of antagonistic epistemes: pri-
marily biomedicine and Ayurveda. The context of his ethnography is an urban,
upper-middle class young woman’s pregnancy and her desire to have a ‘normal’
(non-cesarean) delivery for her future child. Her parallel participation in the con-
testing medical epistemes pitches her in a situation where the mother must risk
her own death or anticipate a congenitally deformed or dead child. Naraindas,
thus shows, how the contestations between different medical epistemes create ex-
treme situations for the pregnant subject. The two epistemes cannot unite to give
her a best of both worlds medical experience of pregnancy and child birth. These
epistemes and the ontologies do not ‘hang’ together and in fact fall apart. In my
case, what seems to be ethicized is precisely this necessary condition of choosing
one place over others. The ethical interactivity in the usage of the names allows
not a ‘hanging’ together of many place-names and many people but a dynamic
‘sliding’ and ‘side-shadowing’ of the many place-names and many people in rela-
tion to the city. This is indeed why and how I call it the city multiple.
I want to thank Pradeep Jeganathan for his engagement on this multiplicity
question during a seminar colloquium at the Department of Sociology, Shiv Nadar
University in 2018. Jeganathan’s insistence that these different place-names are in
fact different places was crucial in how I eventually arrived at my present position.
2. A brief, excellent essay by Devi Prasad Dubey titled ‘Varanasi: A Name Study’
(1985) is sufficient to provide an exhaustive historical inventory of the different
city names. Dubey records the following Buddhist names of the city: ‘Surundhana’,
‘Sudarsana’, ‘Bahmabadadhana’, ‘Pupphavati’, ‘Rammnagar’, and ‘Molini’. He further
writes that ‘the Mahabhasya of Patanjali states that businessmen called Varanasi
by the name of “Jitvari”, for they reaped great profits there. In Puranas, some
other names of the city, like Avimukta-Kshetra, Mahasamasana, Anandakanana
etc. have also occurred casually’ (1985: 351). Dubey further cites adjectival
Shaivite names such as ‘Rudravasa’, ‘Shankarpuri’, ‘Sivapuri’, and ‘Sivarajdhani’
invoked for the city at different stages. He also provides a list of names that
occur in Puranas: ‘Kosala’, ‘Srinagari’, ‘Gaurimukha’, ‘Apurnabhavabhavabhumi’,
‘Tapahsthali’, ‘Mahapuri’, and ‘Dharmaksetra’. In the twelfth century AD, the city
was also designated as ‘Thaganam Stahanam’ (the abode of thieves) (1985: 351–
353). Finally the Prakrit version of Varanasi/Baranasi, Banaras, found greater
usage in the medieval times and subsequently the city was christened as Benares
by the British. In between, in the seventeenth century AD, Aurangzeb is said to
have named it as Muhammadabad with state coins issued under that name but
clearly it did not find an enduring usage.
Dubey’s essay is useful in providing a descriptive chronology of the usage of
these ‘many’ names. One may decipher from early scriptural and archeological
sources that Varanasi and Kashi were always more or less interchangeably used
names for the place, while many of the other names, cited above, were used inter-
mittently as testimonies of praise (sometimes ironically, as in the case of ‘abode of
Notes 149
thieves’). But the two names Varanasi and Kashi persisted. The two became three
with the growing popularity of ‘Banaras’, and then ‘Benares’ followed to make it
four. An originary tracing of the place-names in terms of what they mean is typ-
ical to the writings based on Sanskritic sources. Dubey shares this premise with
scholars like Niels Gutschow (1994) and Hans Bakker (1996) who follow the
names route in locating the differing (re)sacralization of the place. However, be-
cause of this methodological reliance on origin and not on the surefooted ground
of usage of these city names, their historiography is at its weakest when it comes to
the names Banaras and Benares. It is not a surprise then that, Dubey can only think
of Banaras as a ‘corrupted’ name. He writes: ‘The name of the city was corrupted
by the Muslims during the medieval times into Banaras. Abul Fazl the court his-
torian of Emperor Akbar (16th century AD) reports that Varanasi was commonly
known as Banaras. In the 17th century AD, the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb made
an unsuccessful attempt to change its name to Muhammadabad but this name
was never accepted or made current. It apparently appeared only in a few state
documents and coins of the time, and died down very soon after the death of the
idol-breaker emperor, and Banaras remained as Banaras’ (1985: 353). For a more
recent account on the question of Indological historiography and living spaces in
contemporary Banaras, see Gaenszle and Gengnagel (2006).
3. Here is a brief explanation from Chatterji on the use of ‘side-shadowing’ as a con-
cept: ‘While foreshadowing and back shadowing are the two most commonly
known techniques used to break out of a sequential ordering of narrative time,
side-shadowing allows us to think of the present as consisting not just of events
that occur but also of unrealised possibilities. Thus many of the characters and
episodes that appear in the Mahabharata also feature in stories outside the textual
tradition. Characters in folk stories often acquire a certain aura because they res-
onate with characters found in the Sanskritic—recognisable yet with different life
trajectories.’ (2012: 265).
4. Basso writes: ‘. . . the idea persists in many quarters that proper names, including
toponyms, serve as referential vehicles whose only purpose is to denote, or “pick
out,” objects in the world. If a certain myopia attaches to this position, there is
irony as well, for place-names are arguably among the most highly charged and
richly evocative of all linguistic symbols. Because of their inseparable connection
to specific localities, place-names may be used to summon forth an enormous
range of mental and emotional associations, associations of time and space, of his-
tory and events, of persons and social activities, of oneself and stages in one’s life.
And in their capacity to evoke, in their compact power to muster and consoli-
date so much of what a landscape may be taken to represent in both personal and
cultural terms, place-names acquire a functional value that easily matches their
utility as instruments of reference. Most notably, as T. S. Eliot (1932) and Seamus
Heaney (1980) have remarked, place-names provide materials for resonating el-
lipses, for speaking and writing in potent shorthand, for communicating much
while saying very little’ (Basso 1991: 76–77).
150 Notes
5. I thank Anirudh Raghavan for bringing attention to this aspect during my sem-
inar talk at the Friday Research Colloquium, Department of Sociology, Delhi
School of Economics, University of Delhi.
6. See Dubey (1985), Gutschow (1994), and Bakker (1996).
7. Talking of Persianized Brahmins, the well-known Persian-Urdu poet of Delhi,
Mirza Ghalib (2018) wrote a poetical ethnography of the city visiting it on his way
to Calcutta, the colonial capital of nineteenth century India. Like other instances
I have cited, in Ghalib too we find a sliding of names between Banaras and Kashi.
8. It is not to be missed that the present day Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS;
Hindutva cultural organization) office in ‘Kashi Prant’ is located in Aurangabad
(Mahmoorganj).
Chapter 3
1. BHU was formally known as Sir Sunderlal Hospital. At present it is colloqui-

ally referred as BHU hospital or just BHU. Owing to its century long good
name and great repute for efficacy, BHU has become the progenitor of various
clinics and hospitals in the city. Partly, this is the case as many of the trained
and retired medical fraternity run their own clinics and nursing homes across
the city. This, however, only explains the medium range medical ecosystem of
the place. The sprawling infrastructure of private hospitals, on the other hand,
has introduced competitive levels to BHU’s stature and are increasingly able
to absorb the brimming number of patients coming to the city. A common
promotion of the medical practise in the city —be it private, charitable or the
governmental—is done through periodic camps organized across different
neighbourhoods and occasionally in the satellite villages and other cities as
well. This is the reason why the city has come to function as a medical metrop-
olis of eastern Uttar Pradesh.
2. Here is the list of the abbreviations and names of relatives used in chapters 3
and 4: Mother’s father (MF; Nana), Elder sister (eZ), Elder sister’s new born son
(eZS), Elder sister’s husband (eZH; Brother-in-law), Younger sister (yZ), Two ma-
ternal uncles (MB1 and MB2), Maternal aunt (MZ), Paternal grandmother (FM),
Maternal grandmother (MM; Nani), Mother’s relative-in-law (MZH; PS). It may
appear odd to have these abbreviated, abstract signs in lieu of terms and names
of relations. In the field of kinship studies, right from the start there has been an
undertone declaiming the reduction of relationships to a language of mathemat-
ical signs. In a more recent critique, John Borneman (1996) argues that the ab-
stractness that these signs carry hide and gloss over severe forms of inequality
between different existent relationships. For example, x is married to y is denoted
as x =y in kinship terminology. My use has a somewhat different entrypoint. Since
I started studying sociology at the university I often carried the conversations
home to my mother and sisters. In these discussions, I began using my kinship
Notes 151
signs to make small charts over my mothers’ descriptions of family lines and
names of relations. My use of these signs is in this particular cathected context.
3. I have taken the term ‘perforated sheet’ from Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s
Children (1981).
Chapter 4
1. The three central concepts that I use here namely, ‘wept statement’, ‘tuneful
weeping’, and ‘crying meeting’ (milni/bhet) have been put forth by the socio-
linguist K.M. Tiwary (1978) and extensively used by the ethnomusicologist Steven
Feld (2012 [1982]). Following is a detailed description from Tiwary on how he
characterizes these concepts in the context of North India:
‘What is meant by “wept statement” is that as the women weep they make
statements on certain well-defined topics and themes. These statements are
not simply spoken or uttered as other statements are spoken and uttered;
they are given the form of weeping; hence, they are wept statements. These
statements can be made only through the act of weeping. If weeping is sup-
pressed, the message is changed beyond recognition. In other words, these
statements admit of no paraphrases. They carry a rich emotional charge
which would be lost if they were simply spoken aloud without the accom-
paniment of weeping. They are more like sung statements or statements in
poetry. The women are fully conscious of the emotive power of these wept
statements, and they do all they can by means of vocal embellishments
to enrich the emotional content of their statements. Thus, it is institu-
tionalised weeping prescribed as the right kind of response to given so-
cial situations. But only women are privileged to make use of this mode of
communication’ (Tiwary 1978: 25). Tiwary further notes that ‘the weepers
weep out well-made statements; their weeping is tuneful; their wept state-
ments have a marked structure’ (Tiwary 1978: 25). Steven Feld reviews
Tiwary’s summary description and describes how he takes it forward in his
own work on the Kaluli weeping song expression:
‘Tiwary [describes briefly] (1975) “tuneful weeping” as a communicative
mode in Northern India. Women’s “wept statements” are verbal messages
in weeping intonation, delivered while shedding tears. The social situ-
ations for this are specific, as when a woman marries and leaves her own
village for that of her husband. On the appointed day the woman, kin, and
friends tunefully weep on each others’ shoulders; their wept statements
have marked refrains that use appropriate address terms among weepers.
Tiwari notes that with age one acquires skill in this mode. Tuneful weeping
is also heard at visits, meetings after separation, and one particular phase of
mourning. In all of these cases, the texts discuss personal relationships be-
tween weepers or memories of past times. Although Tiwary describes the
code of this tuneful weeping as an articulation of verbal form and melodic
intonation performed while shedding tears, the actual processes of con-
struction, manner of interpretation, and linguistic denomination are not
152 Notes
described; these will be the points of departure for a description of Kaluli
expressive weeping’ (Feld 2012 [1982]: 88).
I add just a sliver to the rich discussions of Tiwary and Feld by situating the prac-
tice of tuneful weeping as an improvisation within the dual settings of hospital
and home.
2. One formal way in which this memory of the dead is predicated is centred on
patriliny. Pitrgathik is the day of the week when the paternal, male, relative (mostly
the father) has died. On this day, starting an auspicious activity is avoided and spe-
cific restrictions on food are followed.
3. The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) carries the English title as ‘The heart doesn’t
fall into line’; ‘The heart refuses to listen’ (1991). The film borrows inspiration
from another Hindi film of yesteryears ‘Chori-Chori’ (1956). Chori-Chori (echo
words: ‘secretly-secretly’) in turn was inspired by the American film ‘It happened
one night’ (1934).
4. Here is the complete poem by Theodore Worozbyt (2003) titled ‘Sadness’:
deceives even the closest
and most beloved reader.
Sadness listens to a pit bull
grunt, like a pig, in the rain.
Not weight, but the space
inside a mass, sadness moves
in rigid molecular patterns, is slow,
waves slowly. In its vocabulary,
O and Ah remain silent.
Without a towel nearby, sadness
never takes the luxury of a bath.
Sadness, the chummy doctor, injects
serum after serum into sunset,
but the water wakes up as blue and enticing as ever.
Sadness says, Say me! and leaves
a small ink footprint upon official papers.
Sadness shuffles little deaths
like cards played without cash.
Sadness made this up: the house burned
with the cats and photographs, and everyone
flew to safety on translucent wings.
Chapter 5
1. The poem refers to a ‘deep’ and ‘silent’ conversation between the pyres of
Harishchandra and Manikarnika ghat that is realized through the shifting colour
of flames emanating from the pyres. The poet writes that it is as if the fire and
Notes 153
light of the pyres were together dispatching ‘morse code’ signals relaying their
own experiences. These lights emerging from the pyres join in another conver-
sation with the neon lights, sleepy bulb lights and the vapour lamps of the ghats
(Gyanendrapati 1999: 69).
2. Barrett narrates it in the following way: ‘After hearing countless opinions and an-
ecdotes, I decided to formally interview two dozen people on the riverbank on
the subject (of varying observations and interpretations of the river’s pollution).
A couple of cosmopolitan looking young men told me (in Hindi) after their bath
that the ‘the Ganga is certainly pure. Mother Ganga is giving salvation to the whole
world, be it cattle, be it sparrows, be it dogs, be it man.’ Then (in Bhojpuri) they
said, ‘Certainly [the Ganga] is polluted. You are seeing it, aren’t you? You have the
proof.’ On another day, a fisherman spat a large mouthful of paan into the river so
that he could more clearly give me the opposite answer in similar terms: ‘Certainly
the Ganga is pure. Can you not see it?’ I replied on both occasions with a sideways
nod: ‘Yes, certainly. I see.’ (Barrett 2008: 41).
3. Following is an excerpt from Rajiv Gandhi’s speech: ‘The Ganga binds us together.
It imbues a unity amongst our people. It makes us one civilization, one nation.
The Ganga is a symbol of our tradition of tolerance, of synthesis, of poise, it is a
challenge to the dark forces that undermine our unity and integrity that try to
subvert our ethical and traditional values. These forces of violence and separatism,
casteism, of petty self-seeking loyalties, parochialisms, and linguistic and other
fanaticism are the forces which threaten to tear India apart. Today, we should
pledge, from here on the banks of the Ganga, to fight and uphold the unity and
integrity of India, not to be cowed down by terrorism, to preserve our traditional
values, our civilisation’ (Gandhi 1989: 162).
4. In May 2018, I collaborated with Grain Media, UK Documentary production
house hosted by Al Jazeera on ‘Winds of Change: Eco-Cremation in India and
Green Power on Samso, Denmark’. This project discusses the increasing use of the
permanent iron bars for the wooden pyres, see https://www.aljazeera.com/pro-
gram/earthrise/2018/5/22/winds-of-change-eco-cremation-in-india-and-green-
power-on-samso
5. Mark Twain in his travelogue Following The Equator (1897) writes: ‘A word fur-
ther concerning the nasty but all purifying Ganges water. When we went to Agra,
by and by, we happened to be there just in time to witness the birth of a marvel,
a memorable scientific discovery, the discovery that in certain ways, the foul and
derided Ganges water is the most puissant purifier in the world! This curious
fact, as I have said, has just been added to the treasury of modern science. It has
long been noted as a strange thing that while Benares is often afflicted with the
cholera, she does not spread it beyond her borders. This could not be accounted
but for. Mr. Henkin, the scientist in the employ of the government of Agra, who
concluded to examine the water. He went to Benares and made his tests. He got
water at the mouths of the sewers where they empty into the river at the bathing
ghats; a cubic centimeter of it contained millions of germs; at the end of six hours
154 Notes
they were all dead. He caught a floating corpse, towed it to the shore, and from
beside it he dipped up water that was swarming with cholera germs; at the end
of six hours they were all dead. He added swarm after swarm of cholera germs to
this water; within the six hours they always died, to the last sample. Repeatedly, he
took pure well-water, which was barren of animal life, and put into it a few cholera
germs, they always began to propagate at once, and always within six hours they
swarmed—and were numerable by millions upon millions . . .For ages and ages,
the Hindus have had absolute faith that the water of the Ganges was absolutely
pure, could not be defiled by any contact whatsoever, and infallibly made pure and
clean whatsoever they touched it. They still believe it, and that is why they bathe
in it and drink it, caring nothing for its seeming filthiness and the floating corpses.
The Hindus have been laughed at, these many generations, but the laughter will
need to modify itself a little from now on. How did they find out the water’s secret
in those ancient ages? Had they germ-scientists then? We do not know. We only
know that they had a civilization long before we emerged from savagery’ (Twain
1897: 499–500).
6. The following account is drawn from an extensive interview with Mahant ji on
SMF in June 2009. Mahant ji is a well-known figure and much information was
available about his initiatives through research essays and press coverage (Time
magazine had covered Mahant ji’s initiatives in its 2nd August 1999 issue). Thus,
instead of reaching out to him right at the beginning of my research I approached
him much later. This worked for me because in the interim period, I learnt about
the Doms’ side of the story which was not as widely covered in most press cover-
ages available then.
7. The plan of ‘Integrated Wastewater Oxidation Pond System’ based on ‘biological
control’ is a ‘return to the bacteriophages’. In my interview with Mahant ji in June
2009, he claimed that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had ensured that his ‘pro-
ject’ would be taken up. Sure enough in the ‘Save Ganga Mission’ announced on 5
October 2009 by the Indian Government, SMF was included. However, for a var-
iety of reasons it could not be realized as Mahant ji had hoped for. At the bureau-
cratic level, I could not track the case any further. For a fuller picture of the entire
project, see his own essay that charts out the plan (2005).
8. This was part of the project headed by Professor Vipin C. Kalra of Institute of
Genomics and Integrated Biology, Delhi. I am grateful to Prof. Kalra for dis-
cussing the relevance of the Bacteriophages in the context of his project during
our meeting in June 2016.
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Index
For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on
occasion, appear on only one of those pages.
Figures are indicated by f following the page number
Aajkal, 34 Banaras Hindu University (BHU), 45,

aghor practitioner, 136–37 51–52, 128–29
Alley, Kelly D., 110–14 Banarasian mango, 36–37
alleys, 36–37 Barrett, Ron, 110–14, 134–36
American Kinship (David Bäumer, Bettina, 116–18
Schneider), 19–20 BHU hospital, 55
Arnold, David, 110–12 biological oxygen demand
asceticism, 43 (BOD), 122–25
Aurangzeb, Emperor, 36–37 Bismillah, Abdul, 38–39
autonyms, 27–29 Bloch, Maurice, 9
Ayodhya, 29–31
calendrical bathing festivals
Baba Kinaram Aghorashram, 55 (nahan), 125–27
bacteriophages, 4–5, 7–8 Caton, Steven C., 53–55
Banaras (Benares, Varanasi, and Kashi), charan-paduka, 118–21
2–3, 7–8 ‘chita- samvaad’ (conversation of
Eck's illustration, 29–31 pyres), 105–6
ghats, 7–8, 11–12, 26 construing the death, ways, 82–
Hindu-Muslim unity, 37–38 84, 88–91
history, 32–34 hospital death, 129–30
as ideal place to die, 128–29 corpse, 3. See also dead/death
legends, 39–42 acknowledgement of dead, 3
Motichandra's account, 32–34 different names, 3
'orientalist' construction of, 32 madh, 132–33
as the paramount place of Hindu as multiple condition, 5–7
pilgrimage, 32 corpse carriers, 53–55
reaching by bus, 25 cremation rituals, 21–22, 84–97, 106–
reaching by plane, 26–27 10, 133–34
reaching by train, 24–25 antim kriya, 138–40
referentiality of place, 29–31 consumption of crematorial remains
religions in, 36–37 as prasad, 116–18
sacred geography, 29–31 crying-meeting (milni) scenes, 95–97
testimonies, 40, 41–42 parvah (funerary care), 5–7, 105–6,
times of before and now, 42–43 118–21, 133–34
traditions, 34–39 ritual bathing, 91–93
162 Index
crematorial architecture, forms and electric crematorium, 84–86, 106–10,
formats, 118–21, 119f, 123f 112–14, 118–21, 131–32
electric crematorium, 84–86, 106–10, Elliot, T.S., 29
112–14, 118–21 environmental pollution, 3–4, 105–6,
in-door cremation, 118–21 110–14, 111f, 125–27
manual cremation, 118–21 polythene, 116–18
open air cremation, 118–21
father
Danish crematorium, 112–14 death of, 55–80
Das, Veena, 10–11, 12–13, 53–55 as dying relative, 71–80, 82–87
dead/death, 8–11. See also construing as relative, 61–71
the death, ways Forest of Bliss (Robert Gardner), 1–2
Deleuze's views, 10–11 funeral capital, 3
depicting, 10 funerals, 1–2
with desire, 8–11 funeral travellers, 14–15, 18–19, 21–22,
facial and bodily complexion, 114–16 53–55, 128–29, 130
as irreducible surface of funeral travelling and cremation, 5, 55–
names, 137–38 80, 81, 84–86, 88–91
link between sexuality and, 9 accompanying chants, 53
as maati (Clay) and body, 127–31 funerary geography, 53
as madh (cadaver- carcasses-carrion) funerary speech/sighing speech, 12–14
and laash (corpse), 131–34
as multiple condition, 5–7 Ganga Action Plan (GAP), 112–16, 122–
as murda (not-living, dead), 134–37 25, 132–33
names in Banaras, 21–22 Ganga river, 3–4, 21–22, 106–10
objectification and abject reducibility Aarti, 125–27
of, 137–38 bacteriophages in, 4–5, 122–25
physical scenes of, 130–31 bathing zones, 125–27
remains of, 138–40 cremation pyres, 125–27
social condition of, 19–20 discarded and immersed abject
touching and handling, 131–34 entities, 116–18
truth of, 16 as a microbial form of life, 122–25
dead relatives Gyanendrapati, 114–16
grandfather’s death, 97–98
grandmother’s death, 98–101 Hankin, Ernest Hanbury, 122–25
sister’s death, 101–4 Harishchandra ghat, 7–8, 11–12, 26–27,
death feasts, 88–93 53–55, 56–57, 84–86, 103–4, 105–
Death in Banaras (Jonathan Parry), 10, 118–21, 125–27, 130
1–2, 14–15 Heaney, Seamus, 29
death pollution, 91–93 Hiltebeitel, Alf, 27–29
Deleuze, Gilles, 1–2 Hindu anthropology, 43
Dom funeral workers, 106–10, Hindu civilization, 106–10
130, 131–36 Hindu dead, 1–2, 17–18
Hindu death, 137–38
Eck, Diana L., 29–31, 41–42, 47–48 Hindustan Machine Tools (HMTs), 88–91
economic bargaining of funerary work Hindu world of funerary Banaras, 1–2
(Domghouse), 14–16 hospital, 3, 18–19
Index 163
in-door cremation, 110–12, 118–21 irony in, 29–31
Integrated Wastewater Oxidation Pond maximal approach, 29–31
System, 122–25 more than a/one name, 27–29
referentiality of place, 29–31
Jawaharlal Nehru National sacred geography, 29–31
Urban Renewal Mission polythene, 4, 116–18
(JNNURM), 132–33 postcard bookmark, 11–12
pravah (river run), 5–7, 105–6
Kashi: City of Traditions, 34–35 public grieving and collective
Kashi: Myth and Reality of a Classical mourning, 5–7
Cultural Tradition, 45
Kashi ka Itihaas (History of Kashi) Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred, 9
(Motichandra), 32 raking, 133–34
Kashmir Shaivism, 116–18 Ram, Aghoreshwar Bhagwan, 136–37
'Ram naam sat hai' chant, 53
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 27–29
life, concept of, 10 Sacred Science Review, 43
living embodiment, 82–84 Sankat Mochan Foundation
(SMF), 122–25
mahamaansh (extreme flesh), 136–37 Saraswati, Baidyanath, 17–18, 39, 43–45
mahaprasad, 136–37 Kashi: Myth and Reality of a Classical
Manikarnika ghat, 7–8, 48–50, Tradition, 39
55, 125–27 sexuality, 10–11
manual cremation, 118–21 Shivling temple, 106–10
monographs, 43 Shri Kashi Vishwanath: Aastha aur
mourning, 88–91 Vyavastha ka Prashn, 45
names, 27–29 siddhi (ritual transcendence), 136–37
tuneful weeping, 82–84 side-shadowing, 27–29, 36
‘wept statement,’ 82–84, 86–93, 98– sighing speech, 12–14, 53–55, 105–6
101, 102 Sukul, Pandit Kubernath, 39–40, 41–42
Muslim weavers, 38 Varanasi Vaibhav, 39–41
Swachh Ganga Abhiyan, 122–
necronyms, 27–29 25, 132–33
Needham, Rodney, 9, 27–29
N.K. Bose Foundation, 17–18 teknonyms, 27–29
NKBF, 43 trickster, 36–37
Twain, Mark, 31–32
open air cremation, 118–21 Twort, Frederick, 122–25
paan, 36–37 utraana, 116–18

Parry, Jonathan, 9, 15–16
parvah (funerary care), 5–7, 105–6, 118– Varanasi Bus Terminal, 25
21, 133–34, 138–40 Varanasi Junction, 24–25
place-names, 23–24, 51–52 Vishwanath temple, 46–47
activation and deactivation of, 29–31 Voices of Children (Veena Das), 82–84

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Dead in Banaras

1. Following the Dead: Corpse as Multiple Social Condition  1

The ethnographic and the autobiographical colours involved in the

my way through the young voice. I also acknowledge the darkness of my

language of North India). Dr. Arvind Kumar Sambal for directing my

way that my ethnography stands in comparison to Parry’s work or can

The river Ganga, addressed as Ganga Ji, with Ji as an honorific suffix, is

Bacteriophages are living parasitical contact zones of viruses dependent

In foregrounding the idea of ‘corpse as multiple social condition’, I use

The Banaras of Fieldwork

A Brief Genealogy of Death and Desire

Back in Banaras. The spatial architecture of the ghats in general is such

Domghouse, in Bhojpuri, is a slang name for the economic bargaining that

Let me narrate a small anecdote from Harishchandra ghat. The protag-

Some ethnographic customs involve simple routines. One such routine

Visiting the Place-​Name

Take the Train

Take the Bus

More Than a/​One Name

It is a well-​known signature of human socialities that often enough

Irony Lives in Place-​Names

In his locally celebrated text Kashi ka Itihaas (History of Kashi),

Aajkal is a monthly journal of literature and culture (sahitya and sanskriti)

Kejriwal continues and narrates about an uncle who arrived thrice in

There was a well known, very prosperous merchant in Kashi by the

Bismillah rounds off this narration by citing a verse imputed to an

Varanasi Vaibhav (Splendour of Varanasi) by Pandit Kubernath Sukul

The Time of Before and the Time of Now

Temple and University

Baidyanath Saraswati (1975) views anthropology as a form of ‘sacred sci-

‘Kashi is outside the rigid circle of any customary understanding of

In an Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) review on soci-

Those who joined Vidyapeetha were mostly anti-​ Brahman and

We approach a new, post-​ independence, mise-​ en-​scène (roop-​

Reflecting on this event that is both discursive and haptic, Saraswati

‘Half-​dismantled, it became the foundation for the present Jnana vapi

A death strikes. We embark on funeral travelling. Necrological accounts

Tumne dekhi hai Kashi

Have you seen Kashi

Unfolding Itinerary of Funeral Travelling

All of us, barring my father and his mother, lived at my maternal

Brahmdeo had gone to Ahmadnagar for recruitment while he was

When my parents firstborn, my elder sister (eZ) came by at my father’s

Rama is full of compassion. Although Ravana has abducted his wife,

Nana’s madness was in thinking of his wife, daughter, and grand-

Father as a Dying Relative

Back in H. Hospital’s daily routine of disinfection of his gangrenous legs,

“It’s Amputation day at PMH!’ I wrote in my field notes at some point

As she begins to close the discussion in the short chapter, she

Father’s Dead Relatives

Father’s mother (FM), always in a hurried social motion of duties and

Father’s Youngest Daughter

Rinki was my parents ultimogeniture, the last born, the youngest. No

We return to the Harishchandra ghat. We return to the riverbank of

Seasonal Variations of Hindu Civilization

Early on in my fieldwork at Harishchandra ghat, I experienced the un-

The Language of Environmental Pollution

There is a strange complication registered by scholars in trying to find

Complexion of Pyre and the Complexion of the River

Polythene and Ganga Ji as Mirror Concepts

Forms and Formats of Crematorial Architecture

Compared to the ‘twenty-​four seven’ efficiency of the manual, open-​air

The riverbank of Ganga ji has always been a site of tumultuous change,

1. Following the Dead: Corpse as Multiple Social Condition 1

Visiting the Place-Name

More Than a/One Name

It is a well-known signature of human socialities that often enough

Irony Lives in Place-Names

Those who joined Vidyapeetha were mostly anti- Brahman and

We approach a new, post- independence, mise- en-scène (roop-

‘Half-dismantled, it became the foundation for the present Jnana vapi

Compared to the ‘twenty-four seven’ efficiency of the manual, open-air

Dead as Madh (Cadaver–Carcass-Carrion) and Laash (Corpse)

Dead as Murda (Not-living, Dead)

paan, 36–37 utraana, 116–18