When We Were Strolling Players in the East

by Louise Jordan Miln

Then I saw that the cremation, which had been in full blast upon our arrival, was completed. There were two distinct kinds of ashes. The human ashes were carefully gathered into an old chattee. The authorities do not allow those ashes to be thrown into the river, and I understand that they never are thrown there in the presence of Europeans. The ashes of the wood were swept swiftly away. The bits of wood not quite burned, were frugally collected to be utilised in the next pile.

The two men had finished their curry and rice. They began to play some native game of chance. They used pebbles for the game itself, and splinters from the adjacent funeral pile did nicely for counters.

The men—my European men, I mean—came back and said that they would like to go home. So we went.

Life is so hard for the poorer natives of India that it is not surprising that they take death so coolly. They have so little to live for; they live so difficultly, so miserably, so inadequately, that to them death has ceased to be a devil, and has become, instead, an angel of deliverance.

The most satisfactory acquaintance I made in Calcutta was with a physician whose father was a Scotsman and whose mother was a very high-caste Hindoo woman. Aside from my personal liking for the man, I found him satisfactory because he could, and did, explain Hindoo customs to me exhaustively, and also in terms intelligible to my Europeanly-developed mind. A few nights after we were first at the burning ghât we asked him how an attempt to introduce Western crematory arrangements would be received in Bengal. He shook his head. He personally would welcome the innovation (he, by the way, was a Christian); he felt sure that some of the better circumstanced, better informed Hindoos would also welcome it; but the Hindoo masses would resent it bitterly. The attempt would be foolish, I think. Why force upon so strongly conservative a people a reform for which they have absolutely no need? Would it serve any good purpose? I think not. It would do nothing except widen a breach which we, for many reasons, should do our utmost to heal.

To me, the system of the Hindoo burning ghâts, of which I saw every detail, was not nearly so repulsive as the system of the Parsi Towers of Silence, of which I only saw the outside, and could but too well imagine the inside. I wish the Parsis would abolish their method of disposal of the dead in favour of another method, as sanitary, but less revolting. But the Hindoo custom seems to me entirely commensurate with the Hindoo needs and the preservation of the general health of India.

I went to the burning ghât once at night. Night is the time of Hindoo leisure, as indeed it is of most native peoples. The enclosure was crowded with burning piles.

One night we sailed down the Ganges. The outlines of the attendants of the dead and of the funeral piles were sharply silhouetted, against the black background of the dark night, by the flames of the gruesome death fires; and from that part of the shore sacred to Hindoo worship came the shrieking and the songs of many thousand half-mad devotees.

In a primitive part of interior India, I once saw a Maharajah’s funeral pile. It had cost a positive fortune. It was built of expensive spicy woods and saturated with costly oils. It was richly gilded; and the dead was wrapped in embroidered silken sheets. For an incredible distance the air was sweet and pungent and thick with the perfumed smoke.

I remember having thought when a child that the literally sweetest experience I ever had had was the attending of a High Mass at St. Peter’s in Rome. But now I must own that the sweetest smell I ever smelled was the burning of a Maharajah’s funeral pile.