Life and death in Varanasi

On his third visit to the holy city’s cremation ghats, after much wandering, DH journalist Anand Singh meets the ‘king’ of the cremation ghats

Firewood stacked up to the brim at Manikarnika ghat. The electric crematorium can be seen on top. Credit: Special arrangement

A kothi with a traditional door frame that is peculiar to Benaras. While many Dom families have migrated to modern houses, a few families still live in the old dwellings at Manikarnika ghat. Credit: Special arrangement

The picturesque skyline of Benaras, by which the city is most commonly recognised.Credit: Special arrangement

A passageway that connects to the Manikarnika ghat. It's a segment of the well-known Kachori Gali, which is the main passage used to carry corpses to the cremation grounds. Credit: Special arrangement

I have visited the cremation ghats of Benaras (aka Varanasi and Kashi) three times. It was the winter of 2004 when I first went there from Mumbai to immerse the ashes of my maternal grandfather. It was dusk, and the Ganga was shrouded in fog. I recall seeing a few ghats from the window of the Calcutta Mail I was in. Sitting in the train, I could see many fires, and plumes of brown smoke billowing out into the twilight sky.

I was intrigued and asked my dad, “Why do those ghats seem lit up?” He replied, “Those are the cremation ghats of Benaras.” A chatty passenger overheard my question and chimed in, “Those aren’t regular flames... They have been burning steadily for more than 600 years. Those are the lights of the maha-shamshaan.”

‘Maha shamshaan’ is ‘maha smashaan’, or the great cremation ground. I was an eight-year-old, and I didn’t want to ask any more questions.

Sweets and sadness

Thirteen years later, in 2017, I returned to the revered Manikarnika Ghat, this time for a funeral. Varanasi is a sacred city on the banks of the Ganga. It is said if people are cremated here, or their ashes immersed in the river, they are freed from the cycle of life and death. They attain nirvana.

Read | Breathing new life into a delicate art

At 21, the details caught my attention. I could see children playing amidst the pyres and the corpses. Foreigners sat around with notebooks, observing the chaos enveloping the ghats. The smell of death and the sight of people in their most vulnerable moments affects one profoundly.

Towards the end of the funeral, I saw something that makes people sick in the stomach. A bereaved family summoned a child playing gilli-danda, handed him Rs 50, and told him to perform a ‘ritual’. Encouraged by the money, the boy used a stick and began heaping up the ashes from the pyre. Much of the firewood and the corpse had burnt down, leaving behind just a black skull. The child, barely eight or nine, smashed the skull with the stick and dislodged the carbon deposit in one go. Another blow shattered the skull. He flung the fragments into the flames. He was unfazed. He grinned at the Rs 50 note, put it in his pocket, and quickly returned to playing.

Why were so many children playing here? I gathered they belonged to the Dom community, regarded the lowest among the Dalits. They are considered ‘untouchable,’ yet they hold a hallowed status in Varanasi as they manage the cremation grounds.

I had read about the scourge of untouchability in school, and heard that the inhuman practice continues to this day, 72 years after it was banned by law. This was my first encounter with untouchability and it was unsettling.

I learnt that the leader of the Dom community was called Dom Raja, that no pyre could be lit without his consent, and that the flame that sets off each pyre came from the house of Dom Raja. The funeral I was attending had ended. I followed the mourners to avoid getting lost in the serpentine lanes of the city.

Heading back, we came upon a famous sweet shop, more than 100 years old. Everyone from the funeral, including members of the bereaved family, rushed inside. There weren’t the only ones inside. Everyone inside was dressed in white funeral garb. I thought sweets were reserved for joyous occasions but here I was, in the middle of a heritage sweet shop, surrounded by mourners indulging in gluttony.

A shop employee carrying a tray of sweets noticed my bewildered look and said, “I know what you’re thinking. Death is celebrated here! The departed souls have been purged of all their sins because they are cremated in Kashi. Fortunate are those who die here.” He proceeded to hand out sweets to everyone walking in.

I had to board a flight to return to Mumbai for my semester exams, so I had no time for more questions.

Where’s the king?

Fast forward to 2022. I returned to Varanasi, this time as a journalist. I was determined to meet Dom Raja.

I took a cycle-rickshaw to Chowk, the city’s commercial centre. Because of heightened security in the wake of the Vishwanath temple-Gyanvapi mosque dispute, the road to the ghats was barricaded. The rickshaw-walla dropped me off.

Varanasi is a maze of lanes. No newcomer can negotiate it alone. After wandering in circles for three hours and asking for directions to Raja’s residence, I landed in a narrow lane behind the Gyanvapi mosque. A sprawling cremation area lies at the end of it and smoke was billowing out, bringing back memories of what I had seen as a child.

As I strode forward, I saw many people covered in ash. From the Dom community, perhaps? It was impossible to be fully covered in ash unless one spent hours among the pyres. I was certain now that Dom Raja’s residence was close by. People working at the ghat saw my camera and mic and assumed I was filming them. Keep the lens cap on at all times or it will be confiscated, they warned me.

A Dom said, “A lot of people come here to make documentaries. They pay us to click photos of us and our neighbourhood and we have become numb now. I beg you not to do that. If you came all this way to check out the place, then, by all means, do so. It is one-of-a-kind. You won’t find a spot like this anywhere on the planet...”

I put the lens cap on and walked to a shop selling firewood for cremation. “Does Dom Raja live around here?” I asked. The shopkeeper grinned and said, “Milwa dein? (Should I introduce you to him?)” With some trepidation, I nodded. He asked me to follow him. He took me to a place right behind the incinerators (used for electric cremation), a few metres away from the ghat, and guided me to a ‘kothi’, a river-front house.

Black moss clung to the sandstone walls of the house and the ash deposits gave it a scorched look. The shopkeeper pointed to a man sitting on a plinth-like structure, ordinary-looking but with the aura of an emperor. “He is the Dom king,” he said.

I took off my shoes and went inside his kothi. I was ready to ask him all the questions I had made a mental note of but I suddenly went blank.

“Salu Chaudhary bulaate hain humko (They call me Salu Chaudhary),” he said and decided to show me around, taking me first to a balcony opening into the giant cremation ground of Manikarnika. “This is where souls are freed from the cycle of life and death,” he declared.

I had never seen a sight like that. The dead kept arriving, the flames grew bigger, the heat was unbearable, and the ash landed on us like confetti. When it grew dark, the fires became more vivid, and were reflected in the waters of the majestic Ganga.

I was lost for words. I hadn’t asked him a single question.

So far, I hadn’t been affected by the sight of death. And, then, I saw a father, right below the balcony, unwrapping the shroud covering the body of his son, roughly my age, and wailing uncontrollably. I couldn’t speak a word.

I returned to Salu’s kothi the next day, stronger in my resolve to ask questions.

Hard truths

I asked Salu how he felt about being treated as an untouchable. “Caste, and practices like untouchability, stink more than a rotting body. I couldn’t care less. Regularly, I witness individuals ‘purifying’ themselves by bathing in the Ganga after cremating their loved ones. If they need to ‘purify’ themselves after touching the body of their own mother, father, son or daughter, keeping a distance from me does not affect me.”

“Our existence is like a permanent Covid protocol — ‘2 gaj doori, mask hai zaroori’ (Keep two yards away and wear mask),” he made light of his reality. It surprised me to see him laughing when corpses kept piling up. How does he cope with it every day? “The grace of Bhairava and Shiva keep us sane,” he says. What he meant was that people in the community drink and smoke marijuana. The latter is legally available in the form of bhaang at government-authorised shops in Varanasi.

The sight of minors performing ‘rituals’ kept bothering me. He said, “I am called a Raja today. But I was once a foot soldier. Those children are sepoys today. They will take charge when their time comes. Don’t worry about them. At least they go to schools, unlike the previous generations.”

A group of women with shaven heads entered Manikarnika ghat from a neighbouring ghat. “Ask them to go away!” Salu thundered, and some men standing around obliged. “Women are not allowed here. Especially widows,” he said. For Salu, it was a rule, for me, it was an exhibition of patriarchy and social exclusion.

I had visited Salu’s kothi twice and spent hours inside but had not seen even one woman around. “Women run the household and take care of the children. There is no hope of getting a job here because no one will employ an achhoot (untouchable). Otherwise, my wife could have worked as a janitor or cook. She doesn’t come out to the front porch because of the acrid smell of smoke. She is still getting used to it.”

Because of the pervasive fear of being treated as untouchables, the community avoids venturing too far from ‘their territory’, the ghats, (stretching over 4 kms, inhabited by nearly 300 people).

“The discrimination doesn’t generally upset me but it can be humiliating occasionally. Some Doms take a stroll till the market late at night and visit the theka (booze shops) but most stay home,” he explains.

As for Salu, his job doesn’t leave him much free time. “I have to ensure that the corpse burners do not steal gold and valuables recovered from the ashes. Some families leave gold teeth, rings, and anklets on the dead. We wait until the families leave and then dive into the Ganga to retrieve the ornaments. But it is tough to sell the ornaments since jewellers know their ‘origin’. We go to neighbouring districts to sell them.” he says. They divide the earnings among themselves once a month.

Salu had heard these questions before, and had lost interest in the conversation. Visitors have fetishised his family’s history for the longest time. “You cannot change anything. Nothing can be done. It is a hopeless world of frightened people. Those children you see there, at least they are not afraid of anything,” he says.

We left his kothi and returned to the balcony where we had stood a day earlier. We spotted a pack of dogs scavenging at a partially charred pyre. “This (scene) should address most of your doubts, sir ji,” he quipped. We shook hands and I was ready to leave when Salu asked me, “Why do people live sham lives when death is everyone’s expected destination, and they have to come to us, to those they refuse to touch?”