Burning the Dead by David Arnold

Author:David Arnold
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520976641
Publisher: University of California Press

CREMATION REVISITED

Earlier chapters showed how many British travelers and residents felt—and voiced—a deep repugnance for Hindu cremation practices, an antipathy echoed in the debates over cremation in Britain itself in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Even among supporters of cremation in the West, India often served as a model of how cremation should not be practiced. That said, this negative representation of Indian cremation, and, through it, of India itself, was not entirely inflexible and unqualified, whether among distant commentators in the West or among the increasing number of Western visitors to India in the late nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. The reasons for this more empathetic engagement are complex. One factor was that, as cremation became a more familiar method of disposing of the dead in the West, the means by which it was performed in India, in cremation’s homeland, in the open air and on a flower-strewn pyre, began to be more acceptable, and, to some, appealing. While many Western cremationists extolled the superior virtues of mechanized cremation, others saw in the “traditional” Indian technique a method that was far more dignified, spiritual, and respectful of the dead.

Bound up with this was a new mood of what Richard Fox termed “affirmative Orientalism.”13 Just as some Westerners took guidance and inspiration from India for their vegetarianism, others (possibly the same individuals) saw in India a preferred way of disposing of the dead. In this lay moral choice and ethical predisposition rather than the self-interested pragmatism of a colonial regime and its reluctant acceptance of an immutable “other,” or simply an appetite for something that was exotic, new, and unconventional.14 Allied to Western occultism, this New Age vision saw India, not as a place of unremitting hardship and unspeakable horror, but as possessing a spiritual energy and aesthetic vitality far nobler and more appealing than the dull, grubby, profit-hungry, materially obsessed civilization of the modern West. Even in an age of strident imperialism and belligerent racism, India had its earnest enthusiasts and cultish devotees.

There were more immediate reasons, too, for the increasingly appreciative reception afforded to Indian cremation by the late Victorians and Edwardians. As argued previously, cremation had a particular appeal to Western sanitarians and their followers, who believed that “scientific cremation” was (as they saw it) the means best suited for the hygienic disposal of the dead in India. The cremation movement could be expected to command a greater degree of support there than in Europe. But that was not all. On a more personal level, whether from sanitary conviction or from individual sentiment, some European residents in India sought cremation for themselves. A small number opted for cremation in the modern crematorium opened in Calcutta; a few, more strikingly, chose to be cremated in (or something closely resembling) the Hindu manner. Religion, especially the eastward-looking cult of Theosophy, helped motivate this; but so too did the apparently widespread fear of being buried alive.15 For others again there was a desire for

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