Rites of passage

The Final Farewell

Author: Minakshi Dewan

Publisher: HarperCollins India

Price: Rs 499   
Pages: 312

It is intriguing to witness how bereavement evokes in some people a grief so debilitating that they want to shut themselves off from the world for as long as they can, while the same experience of loss leads others to connect with fellow humans and understand how they make sense of death, the social and psychological significance of rituals, beliefs about the afterlife, and the logistics involved in honouring the deceased while taking care of paperwork.

Minakshi Dewan, who completed her masters in social work from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai and has a PhD in social medicine and community health from Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, lost her father in 2019. The mourning period, which involved lighting the funeral pyre and immersing her father’s ashes at Haridwar, got her interested in understanding the what, how, where, when and why behind all the ceremonies, the variations in these given India’s regional and cultural diversity, and also the lives of individuals who earn a livelihood from providing death-related goods and services.

She has written an intelligent, well-researched, and engrossing non-fiction book titled The Final Farewell: Understanding the Last Rites and Rituals of India’s Major Faiths. Combining scholarly rigour from her academic training with insights from personal experience, she has chapters focusing on Sikhism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Hinduism. One hopes that a future edition of the book will feature Jainism, Buddhism and Judaism in a substantial way and the practices adopted by interfaith families and atheists.

The author skilfully shows how contemporary mourners negotiate tradition and modernity. In the chapter on the last rites of Zoroastrians, she writes, “Dokhmenashini, or sky burial in India, was thought to be one of the most environmentally friendly ways of disposing of the dead until the extinction of vultures a few years ago.” To deal with this challenge, solar concentrators were installed at the towers of silence where community members leave corpses for scavenging birds. The concentrators are ineffective during the monsoon, so burying and cremation have emerged as new alternatives. These are not approved by all, so people who make such choices have to face the censure of fellow community members.

The chapter on professional services in India is quite revealing. Indians who live in nuclear families find it tough to marshal the community support that is required during rituals and to deal with various kinds of formalities that interfere with the grieving process. 

Dewan profiles businesses that have emerged to fill this gap. While they aim to “professionalize the industry by delivering top-class funeral services in India, just like the West,” they have to also come to terms with deeply ingrained ideas around purity and pollution associated with death, and the perception that making money off somebody else’s tragedy is unethical and exploitative.

That said, a variety of offerings are now available in the market for people who are willing to pay. Hindus who do not live in India but are keen to follow traditional rituals are already paying for live streaming of ceremonies such as asthi visarjan, shraadh, and brahman bhoj. 

While it is easy to judge overseas clients, the author reminds us to be empathetic especially through her chapter on deaths during the Covid-19 pandemic. She profiles online initiatives that came up to support and comfort mourners who were unable to attend funerals in person.

Empathy is also needed if one is a professional service provider but that is not enough. The author points out that “funeral organizers have rich experience in either event management or the hospitality industry. Other skills and traits needed for a funeral service provider are communication skills, compassion and a desire to comfort those coping with death.”

She is of the opinion that the demand for these services is likely to increase in future because a large number of urban Indians are unaware of what they need to do during the last rites. The book does not dig into the need for regulatory mechanisms required in this industry so that we do not see a repeat of the horrors that were unleashed during the Covid -19 pandemic, where people had to pay exorbitant amounts to give their loved ones a funeral or burial.

In his famous poem “Death the Leveller”, English poet James Shirley wrote, “There is no armour against Fate;/ Death lays his icy hand on kings:/ Sceptre and Crown/ Must tumble down, / And in the dust be equal made/ With the poor crooked scythe and spade.” However, this book challenges the poetic notion that everyone is equalised after their last breath. The chapter on caste discrimination in last rites includes examples of dominant caste groups in villages that have stopped Dalits from using roads leading to the burial grounds. At times, Dalit mourners have been humiliated with verbal abuses and by throwing stones at them.

Dewan writes, “These heart-breaking stories of denial are shocking — mirroring the state of our society. It is a pity that, regardless of technological advancement, we live in the shackles of caste-based prejudice.” Using anecdotes, and instances from literature and cinema, the author also raises important questions about the discrimination that women face, not only in life, but also in death, because of patriarchal norms. In many parts of India, widows are forbidden from attending auspicious rituals like marriages and naming ceremonies. Unfortunately, many widows internalise such beliefs and seclude themselves.

This is a book that deserves to be read widely for the lessons that death can teach the living.

The reviewer is an independent journalist and educator based in Mumbai. He is @chintanwriting on Instagram and X.