Privileging the Study of the Dead

Sometime ago I got the opportunity to read Cyrus Mistry’s classic novel, Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer. Set in pre-Independence India, the book, as the name suggests, chronicles the lives of corpse bearers in the Parsi community of Bombay who carry the dead for burial. Having read the novel, I was looking forward to reading more on the subject of death and funerary practices, albeit from a non-fictional perspective. Given this, the present book could not have come at a more opportune time. Divided into five chapters, Ravi Nandan Singh’s book studies concepts related to death and the dead from a sociological perspective. The area of study of the present volume is the modern city of Banaras. Within Banaras, the author locates these concepts in multiple locations including hospital, crematoria, morgue and the aghorashram. It may be noted that while other institutions are referred to in singular, crematoria is a plural form. This is because, as the monograph notes, in a crematorium close-door electric furnaces and open-air manual pyres function simultaneously.