On the Ganges

by George Black

  Pitting technology against cosmology, the British had argued for years for an electric crematorium, but it had been built only in the late 1980s after the death of the powerful Dom Raja of the day, Kailash Chowdhury, who had opposed it with every sinew as a threat to jobs, income, and tradition. There was a small shrine with the sacred swastika at the foot of the ramp that led up to the entrance. The iron concertina gate was half-open, and I strolled inside to take a look. The custodian and two friends were sitting cross-legged on a mat, playing cards. Above them was a poster advertising Spiritual Yoga and a Shiva calendar published by Vishwanath Associates (“A” Class Approved UP Government Electrical and Civil Works). The custodian had a few words of English. Business was slow today, so I was free to poke around. He went back to his card game.

  The only sounds in the crematorium were the slap of the cards and a low-pitched electrical hum. There were cobwebs everywhere. There were two cold concrete ovens, stencil-numbered 1 and 2, and there was a simple metal slide to get the bodies inside. It was hard to avoid morbid associations, thinking of the swastika outside, how the Hindu symbol of good fortune had mutated into the Hakenkreuz.

  I asked the custodian how many bodies came here on an average day. Maybe ten, he said, only about a third as many as were cremated down on the ghat. He thought that was too bad, because the electric method was a bargain for poor people—except, of course, when there were power cuts, which could have unfortunate consequences if they happened midway through the proceedings.

  * * *

  “The electric crematorium?” said a man I had met in a spartan office in South Delhi. “We will not say it is a success. In those days, as part of its Ganga Action Plan, the government put in such crematoria all along the river, twenty-eight of them, in all the main cities: Rishikesh, Haridwar, Allahabad, Kanpur, Kolkata. But they were never really used except by the middle classes in Kolkata. In other places, they were just for unclaimed bodies brought in by the police. And how can they work when often there is no electric power for twelve hours a day?”

  His name was Anshul Garg. He had been born into a pious Hindu family, trained as a computer engineer, studied in Bangalore, India’s IT capital, and worked for a while with Microsoft. For the past fifteen years, he had been working on another solution to the problem of hygienic cremation, one that might also save a chunk of the country’s vanishing forests. The name of his company was Mokshda. Moksha means salvation; the addition of one letter changes the meaning to “the one who gives salvation.”

  He did some back-of-the-envelope calculations for me. India’s population was one and a quarter billion. Ten million die each year. Eighty percent of them are Hindu, and almost all are cremated. Five or seven maunds of wood each on average. By Garg’s count, that translated into seven hundred and fifty square miles of forest cut down every year, just to burn bodies. And think of all the ashes dumped into Mother Ganga, which was already an open sewer.

  “We have developed a system that uses a third as much wood,” he said. He took me to see one of the first working units, where a cremation was already in progress. I could have watched it without leaving New York, because there was a built-in video camera that allowed for live streaming for absent relatives and NRIs—nonresident Indians.

  The apparatus had perforated metal sides and an adjustable convex hood that had the effect of superheating the pyre and consuming almost all the particles that floated upward. All that emerged from the tall, tapering chimney was a faint wisp of pale gray smoke. A rack beneath the body collected the ashes. They could then be removed to cool, and the platform would be ready for the next body within three hours. Mokshda had not patented its design, Garg said, because it was a “social cause for the benefit of humanity.”

  However, he was unhappy with what was going on when we arrived. The corpse was almost completely burned, but several charred logs were strewn around on the ground. He glowered at a priest who was standing by. “They didn’t have to use that much wood,” Garg complained. “These pandits are the problem. They double as wood sellers here, and all they’re interested in is making money.”

  It took years to fine-tune the design, he said. “In the first phase, we installed about fifty units. But there were technical, operational, social issues, questions of religion and ritual. The more religious the town, the more resistance we faced. It’s a tough task, changing practices that go back to ancient times. People say, ‘My forefathers did it this way and went to heaven. What about me?’ I understand that it’s very sensitive, and change will come only slowly-slowly. But every ritual in this society has evolved over time. The way we marry, the food we eat. Just not this one final ritual, because no one knows what will happen to them after death.”

  The conversations with religious authorities continued. Gradually, he said, they had come to see the virtue of Mokshda’s design. It left the pyre open. Unlike the electric crematorium, it took all the ritual needs into account. You could circumambulate the body the requisite five times. You could light the fire in the mouth of the corpse. You could break open the skull.

  Varanasi, not surprisingly, was the hardest sell. “It’s a big threat to the wood sellers there, and they’re very powerful,” Garg said. “To save their bread and butter, they will go to any extent. Although, of course, it’s the Doms who have the real power. Our negotiations were with the widow of Kailash Chowdhury, the old Dom Raja, and her two sons. They are the most powerful family among the Doms, and they were also the most positive. It took us seven or eight years to convince them, and now they will convince others. We will install the unit right there at Manikarnika.”

  The only flaw in this scheme was that the Dom Raja’s widow and her family seemed totally unaware of it.

  KEEPERS OF THE FLAME

  There were three ways you could refer to the old lady. She was Saranga Devi, Saranga being her birth name and Devi—the mother goddess—being a term of respect often applied to a woman. She was also the Dom Rani, widow of the Dom Raja. And she was the Bari Malkin, the elder of two sisters entitled in the complex hierarchy of the Doms to preside over the cremation grounds. The dispute between Saranga and her sister, Jamuna, over where exactly each of them belonged in this hierarchy had been tied up in the courts for almost forty years in an Indian version of Bleak House.

  Today Saranga had the pari, her turn in a rota system, dictated by ancient and arcane formulae that are written down in ledgers and determine the periods during which a particular Dom can sit in the prime spot on the arcaded balcony, next to the ever-burning flame, supervising the workers, making sure there is enough wood and that the bodies are thoroughly burned, and raking in the proceeds of the day. Saranga had the pari for three and a half days a month. She would be here until sunrise on the following day, when she’d go home and take a shower.

  I found her dozing on a pile of pillows against a sky-blue wall. Next to her, some of her workers were preparing the morning puja to honor Kallu Dom, pouring country liquor into clay cups. Saranga wore a pale lilac sari with a faded floral pattern, several heavy brass bracelets, and a large nose stud. Flies were crawling around on her dupatta, but she ignored them. She had hard, indifferent eyes behind black-framed glasses. Her face was deeply grooved by frown lines, and her expression said, Either peel me a grape or leave me alone.

  Saranga had married Kailash Chowdhury, the old Dom Raja, when she was fifteen. He had left her a widow in 1986, when she was still only in her thirties. Did she mind if I asked how old she was now? She said about sixty-five. One of her sons, Sanjit, was seated nearby. I asked him the same question. He said he was about fifty-five. So that made no sense, though I wasn’t entirely surprised, since poorer Indians often give their ages as approximations. Sanjit had a shock of bleached-out orange hair and a bristling white beard, and the upper part of his body was an archipelago of pink-and-white scar tissue. He was swaying a little, with a strange, off-kilter smile on his face, clearly having made an early start on the country liquor.

  So
what did the Dom Rani think of Mokshda? She turned to her nephew, who was sitting next to her listening to the conversation, and he returned her blank look. Mokshda? The word meant nothing to either of them. I told them about my conversations in New Delhi, and she waved a languid hand. “Maybe someone came,” she said. “It’s possible. I don’t remember. Many people come here to talk to us. If we did talk, I didn’t take it seriously.”

  I described what I’d seen of Anshul Garg’s method, and the frown lines deepened.

  “Our traditions have come down through the centuries. How could we provide the fire for this thing? The government would bring its people in, and our workers would lose their jobs. And the wood sellers. Many families for half a kilometer around the burning ghats depend on this for their living.”

  Besides, where was this contraption supposed to go? She gestured at the mourners milling around the cramped and crowded ghat. It seemed a reasonable question, especially thinking of the monsoon, when the river could rise forty feet or more and lap at the balcony where we were sitting.

  Saranga made it clear that she was bored by the topic. She dozed off again. I sat there with my eyes stinging from the smoke. Flecks of ash settled in my hair. Eventually she opened one eye. The annoying foreigner was still there with his questions.

  I asked her when women had gained the status of malkin.

  “In the old times, only men had this right. But then there were some problems.” That was all she wanted to say.

  “Many people in the Dom community have these problems,” the old lady’s nephew said eventually. “If the son can’t take care of his duties, his mother takes over.” It sounded like a general statement of principle, but there was only one son and one mother on the balcony, and her sister, Jamuna, was childless. I tried not to glance across at Sanjit, who was far away in a world of his own sozzled imagining.

  * * *

  Strictly speaking, there is no single Dom Raja. Whoever holds the pari rules for that day. But there was always one figure with charisma and connections who was regarded as the first among equals and had the right to live in the Sher Wali Kothi, the Tiger House, a garish building close to Man Mandir Ghat that was surmounted by life-size statues of a male and female tiger.

  The Bari Malkin’s husband, Kailash Chowdhury, had been the most powerful of all the Dom Rajas, celebrated for his phalanx of bodyguards, his briefcase bulging with cash, and his pet alligator. He was said to have become fabulously wealthy on the proceeds of the cremation grounds, with prime real estate holdings in Varanasi, other parts of Uttar Pradesh, and the neighboring state of Bihar.

  Kailash and Saranga had seven children, four sons and three daughters. By the normal process of succession, the eldest son, Ranjit, should have inherited the title and the Tiger House, but he had died young—of alcoholism, it was said. That left Sanjit next in line, but while people sometimes allowed him the honorific of Dom Raja, they were only being polite. “He is dying of cancer,” one of the wood sellers had told me. “He will soon go up to heaven.”

  I heard two stories to account for the scars on Sanjit’s chest and arms. One said that a cylinder of gas had exploded at a wedding, the other that his family had thrown him out of the Tiger House because of his drinking, and his response had been to pour kerosene over his body and set himself on fire. He was in no condition to tell me which of these stories was true.

  Saranga had fallen asleep again, and Sanjit had shuffled off somewhere, so I walked down through the smoke to the river’s edge. Some of the Doms were collecting whatever the mourners had left behind, the perks that went with the job: shrouds, bamboo, partly burned logs that they would take home for their cooking fires. The shrouds and biers would be resold and reused. Boatmen propelled themselves along the river with bamboo-handled oars that were fashioned from the recycled frames of cremation biers.

  The water was a thick black slurry of ash, and half a dozen Doms, teenage boys and young men, were waist-deep in it, sieving the muck in flat baskets like nineteenth-century miners panning for gold. A boat glided toward them. An enormously fat man, dressed all in white, sat in the boat on a pile of cushions under a sheet that had been rigged on four culms of bamboo, like the tester on a four-poster bed, to shield him from the sun. He smiled down on the workers like a beneficent Buddha, and at intervals, they reached into their pans and handed him a small coin, a jeweled nose stud, a gold earring—whatever last trinkets could be retrieved from the burned bodies of the dead. The fat man put each of them in a pouch on the seat beside him. He caught my eye, smiled, laid his palms together, and inclined his head slightly. The divine in me honors the divine in you.

  Clearly this was where the true authority lay, not with the sad, ruined figure of Sanjit Chowdhury but with his younger brother Jagdish, who everyone on the cremation ground agreed was now the man who really merited the title of Dom Raja.

  * * *

  I went to a modest house in a neighborhood of Doms to see Saranga’s younger sister, Jamuna Devi, the Chote Malkin. Her nephew Bahadur took me there; today he had the pari at Harishchandra Ghat. We sat together on a mattress in a multicolored room. On a shelf, next to the usual pictures of Shiva and Krishna, there was an ornately framed portrait of Kailash, the old Dom Raja. He had fierce, dark eyes and heavy eyebrows that swooped down like bat wings to the bridge of a large nose, and he wore his hair in a dense Afro that was parted precisely in the middle and topped with an incongruous Nehru cap.

  Jamuna had an open and generous manner, quite unlike Saranga’s. She must have been a great beauty as a young woman, and it was hard not to wonder, looking at the portrait of Kailash on the wall, if the acrimony between the sisters might not have been about something more than their property and pari rights. There were rumors.

  “I was born and brought up in a village near Benares,” she said. “My father was a farmer, and he conducted the cremations there, one every four or five days. I got married when I was nine, then lived with my father for another seven years. After that, I moved to my husband’s house. He was Kailash’s older brother, and his father lived with Kailash in the Tiger House. But I was widowed four years after coming to Benares. Saranga was hard-hearted. She said I should go back to my village and my parents. She said that I had no right to any part of the Tiger House.

  “After my husband died, we all went to the Tiger House for the daily mourning rituals. When the thirteenth-day ritual was over, Kailash told my brother to take me away to his house. My brother protested. He said, ‘But you’re so wealthy, you have many servants, let her live here.’ But Kailash refused. So my brother filed a lawsuit. That was thirty-five years ago. He said, ‘At least give her one pari to live on.’ Still Kailash said no. Finally, the court ruled that the paris should be divided equally between me and Saranga. After Kailash died in 1986, I got a pari of three and a half days in a month, the same as my sister. A police inspector came to enforce the court order.”

  But Saranga refused to accept the settlement, and the case still dragged on in the High Court in Allahabad, all these years later. “I have struggled all my life, and I will go on struggling until this case is settled,” Jamuna said, “even though I don’t know if I will live long enough to see that day.”

  She knew that she would never be welcome in the Tiger House, even though as many as forty people lived there—not just Saranga, Jagdish and his family, his sisters and theirs but also an assortment of menials who were given room and board. Instead, Jamuna’s brother had found her these cramped rooms with their yellow walls and blue metal doors. I asked her why the portrait of Kailash still hung there on the shelf, and she glanced up as if noticing it for the first time. “The former tenants put it up there, and I’ve never taken it down,” she said.

  It was a complicated family.

  IN THE TIGER HOUSE

  The next time I went to Varanasi, I wrangled an invitation to visit the Dom Raja in the Tiger House. As a piece of architecture, it was almost as eccentric as the electric crematorium. Its blind
brick wall reared up thirty feet or more from the ghats. The lower half was painted in horizontal stripes of ocher and brown. Above that was a tier of white cement, and above that a balustraded balcony, fancifully tricked out in yellow, maroon, and blue. There was a curious triple-arched structure in the center that jutted out into midair like a miniature Florentine loggia. The two tigers stood at the north and south corners, glaring out over the river.

  Next to the Tiger House, on Man Mandir Ghat, was an imposing palace, built in 1600 by a maharaja from Rajasthan, and behind that was the eighteenth-century observatory that one of his descendants, a mathematician and astronomer, had built to study the heavens. A twisting lane led to the Kashi Vishwanath Mandir, the Golden Temple. It was the most sacred in the city, but caste considerations meant that the Doms were unwelcome there.

  It had been less than a year since my previous visit, but I was shocked at the change in Jagdish. He seemed even heavier than before. Gone were the white clothes and the air of serene authority. I found him dressed in a filthy green T-shirt that was stretched tight across his sagging breasts and belly, with an orange-and-white scarf looped around his neck. For such a big man, his voice was surprisingly thin and reedy, and his cheeks were crammed so full of paan that he seemed to be speaking through a mouthful of pebbles.