Dead in Banaras- Enthnography of Funeral Travelling

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Dead in Banaras in its inception, set out to follow the 'dead across multiple social locations of crematoria, hospital, morgue, and the aghorashram in order to assemble a contemporary moment in the funerary iconicity of the well-known North Indian city of Banaras (Varanasi). The crematoria, in plural, because the open-air manual pyres and close-door electric furnaces sit side by side within the symbolic 'inside of the city. Hospital and morgue became chosen destinations because in the 'local moral world the city is a medical metropolis anchored by a famed university hospital and storied in real-life dramatic narratives of medical emergency, saving. and untimely death. Aghorashram, an urban shaivite hermitage-clinic for ascetical transcendence, sexual and reproductive cures, works with funerary substances as pharmacopoeia. Then the actual stepping into the fieldwork materialized through the event of my father's death in the city. The funerary journey, now altered from within, the same select sites of fieldwork henceforth spoke through the sensory logic of my father's death. Dead in Banaras is then both an ethnography of being in the dead centre of the funerary city and an autobiographical funeral travelling (shav yatra) that narrates the city through a mourner's logic of using the pyre to illuminate the dead as multiplicity in Banaras.

The ethnographic and the autobiographical colours involved in the making of this book run deep. I will limit myself to some hues that illuminate 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 families 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 journeys. 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.

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 effect: 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 social 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 anthropological 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 chronicling 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 electric crematorium, falls short from the typecast. In the years between his book and my fieldwork, the electric crematorium sat lonely and was sparingly 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 technologies but that of ethics with which the dead are tended to amidst the assemblies of funeral travellers.