Thirteen days after he died, my uncle's funeral ceremonies ended with a feast. I went around to invite a few people and they all looked ashen faced. All parties shuffled their feet, spoke banalities, attempted sadness but no one really articulated that an invitation to a sumptuous lunch was a somewhat inappropriate ending to an unexpected tragedy. For both my uncle's age and circumstance meant that the ceremonies had divided the family. What eventually took place was the entire thirteen day traditional ritual, an expensive one to boot. Moral relativism meant that no one could quibble, it made people happy, it was the way things were done. In fact the days had more than a tinge of gaiety to them, expected when people are at home with little else to do. Yet nothing in the funeral rites felt right. On the one hand, there was a disconnect with the ritual itself. It is not possible to believe in this thirteen day journey of the soul, not because one is deracinated, but because it seems as foolish as the proposition that the earth lies at the centre of the universe. The persistence of what should be cultural artifact is perplexing. More disconcerting to me is that the rituals also perpetuate region and caste even though in our daily lives we are somewhat removed from both. Even more disconcertingly, they require a vast expenditure, a public display of wealth and benevolence that has more than a faint reek of vulgarity. Yet they do bring a psychological satisfaction, especially to older people steeped in tradition, and this becomes the rationale for continuance. Others had a rightful precedence in how the last rites were to be conducted. But whatever I felt was completely divorced from the events I was passing through.
Fifteen years separate my mother's death and my uncle's and yet nothing had changed in the way we as a family chose to conduct ourselves. One can't force change so I merely felt sadness that my family had never chosen at any point to eschew the obscurant aspects of the religion. Our collective minds, clever and inquiring in some ways, become closed when it comes to so many matters. Hindu reform is not unknown, many people I know follow their own dharma, their own pieties, their own charities, not necessarily those prescribed by the shastras (which are so open to interpretation that everyone has their own long supremely correct way). We, on the other hand, chose to follow the shastras (at least as practised by Tamil Brahmins in Mumbai) and will continue to do so in the name of tradition. Left to myself, I would rather that we had dignified both my uncle's passing and our mourning with discretion and simplicity.
Fifteen years separate my mother's death and my uncle's and yet nothing had changed in the way we as a family chose to conduct ourselves. One can't force change so I merely felt sadness that my family had never chosen at any point to eschew the obscurant aspects of the religion. Our collective minds, clever and inquiring in some ways, become closed when it comes to so many matters. Hindu reform is not unknown, many people I know follow their own dharma, their own pieties, their own charities, not necessarily those prescribed by the shastras (which are so open to interpretation that everyone has their own long supremely correct way). We, on the other hand, chose to follow the shastras (at least as practised by Tamil Brahmins in Mumbai) and will continue to do so in the name of tradition. Left to myself, I would rather that we had dignified both my uncle's passing and our mourning with discretion and simplicity.
