Flames, Death, and Tourists
We had a good first day in Nepal, seeing Kathmandu with an excellent tour guide, organized by our trekking company. He took us to of some of the city’s major sites, including the old palace complex of Bhaktapur, the Boudhanath Stupa—famous for the eyes that look down from atop a white half-globe, adorned by prayer flags—and the Gaurighat temple complex.
At Gaurighat, by the bank of the Bagmati river, locals come to cremate the bodies of their dead. The fire carries the soul away, and the ashes are washed down the river to join the great mother Ganges. Before the cremation, the bodies are placed on a short ramp near the river, anointed, blessed, and adorned with marigolds. This whole ritual is one of the stops that the touring rounds make, so much that our guide says sometimes when he brings tourists there for days in a row, seeing so many dead makes him sad.
I asked if the mourners found it disrespectful that tourists come to see the rituals, to take pictures of the mourning, and he said no, for Hindus, death is a part of life, not that the families aren’t sad, but death is not a thing to be hidden, and mourning is something done in these public places, with the community.
I hope that’s true. The smoke against the backdrop of the hazy sky, slashed by powerlines and filled with pigeons (like doves, considered to be birds of peace) makes for compelling photos. But I still found it odd, to pose with smiling Indian tourists with the burning in the background.
The guide also talked about the sky burials in the high places of Nepal and Tibet where wood is scarce. There the undertakers, instead of feeding the flames as they do in Gaurighat, have the task of dismembering the dead and feeding it to the holy vultures. These burials have attracted tourists as well. Unlike the river-side ghats, where, during the cremation, the body is hidden by wood and flames, there, the body could not be more exposed. Tibet has tried to outlaw tourism at sky burials, which are considered private and sacred, but people come anyway, for a glimpse of something gruesome.
If you want to learn more about this and other death practices in different cultures, I recommend From Here to Eternity by Caitlin Doughty. She is passionately interested in funeral rites, and also very careful only to go where she is invited, to write about what she learns in a way that centers the mourners, even while documenting her own experiences.
And while I feel uncomfortable with the cremations being a tourist spectacle, it seemed to be done respectfully enough. For the most part, tourists stay on the other side of the river from the ghats. No one seemed to be bothering mourners. Gaurighat is a holy Hindu pilgrimage site, frequented by many Indian Hindu tourists, who leave their piles of shoes before entering the temples to pray barefoot, and then snap their own pictures by the side of the river, sometimes with a giant American strawberry blonde lady. We visited other sites with signs everywhere prohibiting photography, so I suppose if they wanted to, they would.
Perhaps I’m running up against my own ambivalence about death, and about sharing emotional experiences with a large community. I do believe that Westerners should be more open about death, less frightened and more loving in the face of loss, and today I saw an example of one way to do that. Death in the middle of life: commerce, tourism, blessings, and cremation, all in one place.
Tomorrow we take a bus to Pokhara, and then will be trekking for a week in the Annapurna region, among some of the highest mountains in the world. See you on the other side!
Photos by Seth Miller.
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