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I have read and I accept the Privacy Policy. This was partly due to high installation and maintenance costs and unacceptable levels of air pollution considerations that had Western parallels , but also because the Indian environment, the physical nature of Indian waste and established waste-disposal practices militated against the wholesale adoption of this technological innovation.
In the cremation case, ideas about the desirability of burning as a means of disposing of the dead travelled in both directions, to and from Europe, and received further impetus from the South Asian diaspora: even then Indian and Western practices remained distinct. With incineration, the traffic in technological objects and expertise was essentially one-way—from Britain to India—but it gained no automatic acceptance thereby.
Burning the bodies of the dead was an ancient rite and practice in India. It was observed among Buddhists, Hindus and Jains from well before the start of the Common Era, and was later adopted by Sikhs. While the primary rationale was religious—to free the soul from the defunct body—and grounded in sacred text and ancient custom, sanitary arguments were sometimes made for cremation, especially the rapid decomposition caused by a hot, humid climate.
Originating at a time when India was still heavily forested, cremation may also have been environmentally more appropriate and sustainable than, for instance, the mummification practised in the dry desert air of ancient Egypt. Cremation was thought to have spread from South Asia to other parts of Eurasia, thereby constituting an early form of technological and cultural diffusion Eassie : 4; Erichsen : 7; Richardson : 1—2, The identification of cremation with ancient Hindu and Buddhist civilization as well as with Greece and Rome was even more marked in North America Prothero : 19, 39, The idea of cremation travelled more readily from East to West than the actual technology of its performance.
It is possible that the rite of sati , or self-immolation, by which a Hindu widow was burned on the funeral pyre of her husband, added to the sense of horror and repugnance that cremation engendered.
Despite the outlawing of sati by the English East India Company in , many negative associations remained attached to cremation, especially among Europeans resident in India. Apart from personal sensibilities, Europeans decried cremation as a health hazard due to the clouds of foul smoke issuing from the burning grounds or ghat s. Before the s Hindu cremation was unregulated by state agency, occurring in places, usually close to a river or by the sea, where the ashes could be immersed in water and preferably in sacred rivers, such as the Ganges.
Although the burning of the dead was attended by relatives and friends of the diseased, as well as by priests and the attendants who provided wood and other necessities, the sites themselves were unpoliced and unbounded. Worse still, in the Western view, was the way how half-charred bones and unburnt body-parts littered riverbanks and streams as a result of incomplete incineration, attracting dogs, jackals and vultures. Fire could be a very imperfect means of disposing of human remains—just as it proved to be for urban waste.
During famines and epidemics, when firewood was scarce and the number of dead immense, or even in more normal times when the costs of cremation were too high for the poor to afford, bodies might simply be dumped in rivers or abandoned on their banks Bengal : Hence, far from constituting a favourable model, worthy of emulation, to most Western eyes cremation in India presented a practice that was technically deficient as well as morally repugnant.
European disgust at Indian burial and burning grounds became instead an incentive for early schemes to construct in-door crematoria in India Martin : 1—2. For compelling social and political reasons, there could be no question of the colonial government banning cremation, but ways had to be found within the evolving urban infrastructure to accommodate it and make it, as far as possible, compliant with sanitary expectations and environmental controls.
Some officials called for high perimeter walls to restrict the public visibility of cremation grounds or proposed that an adequate quantity of wood be available to ensure the complete destruction of human remains.
Prominently marked on maps along with Christian cemeteries and Muslim burial grounds, cremation grounds became conspicuous features of the urban landscape: they were also one of the sites through which the municipal authorities sought to enumerate the dead and register causes of mortality Bombay : 6; Conybeare , appendix H, 16; Buckland : 1, —, — Hindu cremation commanded its own social infrastructure from the Brahmin priests, who presided over funeral rites, down to the low-caste attendants, who haggled with mourners over the price of wood Madras : The burning of the dead required large quantities of fuel, including, among opulent Hindus, expensive sandalwood and copious amounts of ghee and coconut oil to fuel the flames and disguise the smell of burning flesh.
By contrast, the cremations of Indian paupers in early twentieth-century Shanghai were cheap and simple—a dozen bundles of firewood, a cotton winding sheet and some oil, costing altogether no more than ten to twenty dollars.
Cremation on such a scale thus required a large and constant supply of wood—one reason why there was a large number of wood-yards in Indian cities. For instance, in Bombay in the municipal authorities issued licenses for timber-yards, including that sold sandalwood Bombay : The use of wood in cremation pyres created additional pressure for legal and illegal timber extraction from state-managed forests and private woodlands.
In the late nineteenth century a significant shift occurred in attitudes to cremation in both India and the West. One factor in this was the rise of cremation societies—in Italy, France, Germany, Britain and the United States—which campaigned for the legalization of cremation and the building of crematoria for the indoor burning of the dead Parsons : —; Jupp : 46— Apart from land shortages in cities like London, the cremation movement in the West was also driven by a growing secularization of attitudes towards the dead.
India, still early in its industrialization, was ill-equipped to match these technological advances and showed little evidence of secularization. However, given the scale and antiquity of cremation in South Asia, India served the movement as a model, in which the less desirable aspects of local practice were ignored or minimized, and as an authoritative demonstration that cremation was not, as critics claimed, inhumane and godless.
Physicians and administrators with Indian experience became de facto experts, qualifying claims about the supposed universality of cremation in India while plying European audiences with accounts of how well and how nobly cremation was managed in India Robinson : — Guided by press reports and personal correspondence, he referred in particular to the recent cremation of Narayan Wasudeo, a prominent citizen of Bombay in and that of the Maharaja of Kolhapur, who died in Florence in November and whose body was ceremonially burned in a public park alongside the Arno Eassie : 90, As will be seen shortly, the needs of Hindus and Sikhs who died abroad were also a significant factor in the spread of cremation outside India.
Among the first thirty individuals cremated at the Woking Crematorium in Surrey, following its inauguration in , were a Brahmin woman and a follower of the Hindu reform organization, the Arya Samaj Times of India , 4 March 6; Thompson : Although Indians were among the beneficiaries of this first working crematorium in Britain, they had played no direct part in its creation. The bodies of 53 Hindu and Sikh soldiers, previously hospitalized in Brighton, were burned on the Downs above the town, one of only two occasions when open-air cremation was permitted in Britain White In British India, too, support for cremation was growing, though not necessarily along lines favoured in the West.
Not only did Hindus strenuously defend their practice against European criticism Correspondence : 13—14; Ghosh : ; the colonial authorities themselves began to regard it with qualified approval. For them the principal argument in favour of cremation was not religious but sanitary. Invoking contemporary western ideas of miasmatic poison and epidemic contagion, colonial medical officers argued that Indian burial grounds had become dangerously overcrowded and unhealthy.
Compared to European burial grounds, they were breeding grounds for disease Douglas : 24—31; Hehir : — Cremation, by contrast, when properly conducted, was deemed a safer, more sanitary way of disposing of bodies and of eliminating the miasmas emanating from decomposing corpses Bombay : This implied, however, a reform of existing practices with tight restrictions on open-air cremation sites or the construction, along Western lines, of enclosed, brick-built crematoria.
In February , the Gazette argued that from a sanitary and environmental perspective cremation was by far the best means of disposing of human bodies in conditions where putrefaction was rapid and the risk immense of transmitting typhoid, cholera and other diseases from the dead to the living. Among Indians, too, cremation was acquiring a growing popularity.
In the past cremation had largely been the preserve of high-status Hindus, with members of the lower castes, unless exceptionally wealthy, burying their dead. Infants of all castes were also buried. For instance, in Bombay in only 43 percent of the Hindus who died in the city were cremated—that is, 5, out of the 13, dead Bombay : There is, however, little clear evidence for this change before the s.
In Bombay between and , and excluding Parsis whose bodies were exposed on the Towers of Silence, cremation rose only slightly from about 30 to around 33 percent of those who died in the city. However, in , as bubonic plague struck the city, causing 11, deaths, 24, corpses were buried and 22, burned, temporally raising the proportion of those cremated to nearly 48 percent Bombay : In addition to a long-term shift towards cremation among Hindus, a further factor in its increase was the growing reliance of municipal authorities on cremation to dispose of the unclaimed dead, especially during famines and epidemics.
It is partly this municipal recourse to cremation that explains the sharp rise in Bombay in In Bombay, in the s and s, many orthodox Hindus claimed that indoor cremation was utterly alien to them and incompatible with their traditional funeral rites. In this regard, municipal cremation bore something of the same stigma as the dissection of unclaimed paupers in nineteenth-century Britain, a maltreatment of the dead inflicted on those too poor and powerless to escape such a demeaning fate Richardson If in Britain cremation progressed down the social scale from the upper and middle classes, in India Western-style cremation began with the low-caste poor and struggled to gain acceptance among high-status communities.
Colonial policy might further technological change, but not necessarily the specific forms of technology the West itself favoured. Thus, a further factor in the increasing recourse to cremation in India lay in changes in colonial administrative practice, especially in the jails. Until the s it had been customary to bury the bodies of Hindu prisoners, unless they belonged to the higher castes, and the cost of their cremation was met by relatives or prisoners of their own caste.
Even then a corpse would not be released for extramural cremation or burial if the authorities believed that it might be used in anti-government demonstrations. By the early twentieth century the practice of cremating the unclaimed bodies of Hindus and Sikhs who died in prison, had become formally incorporated into provincial jail regulations—just as Muslims and Christians were routinely buried.
For them the argument was religious, not sanitary. They also faced demands from diasporic Hindus and Sikhs for the right to cremate their dead and have officially assigned space for that purpose. In many places the civil authorities or local residents continued to regard cremation as uncivilized and un-Christian or, as in the Middle East, un-Islamic.
A more technical objection was that cremation might conceal poisoning and other murderous acts since it destroyed almost all physical traces and precluded exhumation. While in India cremation continued to be a highly visible process, with wood pyres and burning grounds open to the elements, in Western countries cremation was performed indoors, out of sight, in enclosed, purpose-built structures, using gas or electric burners that generated very high temperatures and so rapidly reduced a corpse to ashes.
In India, where the earlier form of cremation continued largely unmodified, not only was the technology pre-industrial, it was also sanctioned by rite and custom.
The visibility of the body during cremation and the continuing attendance of mourners and priests for most of the burning were aspects unmatched in Western cremation. The separate chambers were intended to allow Hindus of different castes to be burned independently and for their ashes to be collected unmixed with and unpolluted by those of other castes Martin Four decades later a Cremation Society was set up in Calcutta, mainly patronized by Europeans.
A small crematorium was constructed, equipped with a gas furnace imported from Paris at a cost of 40, rupees. The latest cremation technology thus travelled to India but to little effect. Even though the charge for each cremation was modest, only five or six cremations were performed annually during its early years.
Most Britons retired back to their own country and died there, while the largely Roman Catholic Eurasian and Indian Christian communities were opposed on religious grounds to burning their dead Times of India , 5 June 8. Cremation was, and in some respects remains, a practice closely identified with India, though not always positively. Especially in Muslim countries it continues to be regarded as indicative of a backward and uncivilized society Ghosh : —, The destruction of human remains by fire was a widely practiced technology, which in the Imperial Age was widely disseminated across the modern world, in part due to the highly visible example India provided as well as the presence of cremation-practising Hindus and Sikhs in the South Asian diaspora.
Likewise, modern modes of transport, including air-travel, now allow Indians all around the world to either carry the ashes of their deceased back to India for dispersal in the Ganges, or even to have their bodies flown to India for cremation. Modern technology has made the Indian form of open-air cremation more than ever visible, familiar and symbolic. The Indian mode of cremation retained a cultural prestige and social value that the industrial-style crematorium of the West failed to usurp culturally and politically.
As an essentially public act, cremation created political opportunities that worried the colonial authorities. This was especially the case, after the provincial government allowed the Hindu nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak to be cremated on Chowpatty Beach in Bombay in August , that quickly became a memorial site and a focus for anti-government demonstrations Times of India , 4 November The very public and internationally reported cremation of Mohandas Gandhi after his assassination in January , followed by that of Jawaharlal Nehru and other political leaders over the following decades, demonstrated not only to India but to the world at large the importance of cremation in the visualization of the Indian nation.
Coverage and, even more so, photographic images of these ceremonial burnings were relayed nationally and internationally through newspapers and by means of radio and television. Denying Indians the right to cremate their dead became regarded as an insult to Indian nationhood Times of India , 19 September Cremation became a right, not just a rite. When Indians soldiers, airline pilots or politicians died overseas, it was a mark of national respect that they should be ritually cremated, and for this event to be publicized and memorialized in the national press.
In the iconography of Indian nationhood, cremation has emerged as a symbol, emblematic as sati once was of suffering, sacrifice and devotion. Modern technology—air-travel, photography, mass media—has not dispelled Indian cremation practices, but rather given them a new visibility and an enhanced political valence. By contrast, cremation among those of South Asian ancestry in Britain has moved in the opposite direction. Along the way, the crematory will take care to make sure that:.
Many facilities allow the family of the deceased to witness the cremation. Space is often limited, so it is best to check with the cremation facility to find out how many people can attend. Cremation reduces the body to its essential elements through a process that exposes it to open flames, intense heat, and evaporation. This takes place in a specially designed furnace called a cremation chamber or retort. Many crematories require a container for the body, such as a casket appropriate for cremation or a rigid cardboard container.
Cremation produces 3 to 9 pounds of remains. The exact amount depends on the size of the body and the process used by the crematory. The first step is to make sure that they have permission to take care of the cremation. Identification regulations vary by state. In most cases, you complete paperwork that provides the crematory with your authorization. The form will also ask for information such as who will pick up the remains and what type of container to use.
The facility you use defines the specific identification procedures based on industry recommendations. A typical identification procedure will include having a family member confirm the identity. Next, a metal ID tag is placed on the body. This will remain throughout the process.
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