Today’s post starts with a content warning (#CW); #Death, #cremation,
end-of-life ceremonies.
It feels a little bit “Harold and
Maude”; we went to Nepal and went to other people’s funerals. But
it is evidently accepted practice, and is paired at the Pashupatinath
Temple with the festival-like celebration of life that occurs on the
other bank of the Bagmati River.
Still, some readers may choose to skip
the rest of this entry, since I include images of the cremation
fires, and that’s not to everyone’s taste.
Once we decided that the day’s
adventure included watching end-of-life ceremonies in the evening
(gates of the Temple open at 5p), the next question was how to get there. I am VERY
grateful to my traveling companion, Nissa, that she’s a good sport,
because “let’s walk” took us into parts of Kathmandu that
probably don’t get a lot of tourist traffic. If any. Oh, there’s
plenty of (regular) traffic, but it was rather seedy in places. I was
glad I had boots for the broken concrete of the sidewalks, for
instance. Still, there were moments that took our breath away. A
stupa, and a crowded street:
When we got to the Hindu temple, we paid our NPR
1,000, but we also hired a guide. I’d recommend doing that, since
he took us places I would NEVER have dared to go, fearing to intrude.
Our guide
kept up a
running commentary about the Hindu belief system, the representations
we were seeing, the kinds of events we would be seeing that evening,
and the places we were within the temple complex. Be forewarned,
though, those guides are on a timetable; it felt more akin to a slow
jog than a tourist tour! Also,
he asked for his tip in “our” currency, so have an appropriate
bill in a ready-to-reach pocket. ($5 is considered adequate, $10 is
generous. He was worth $10. By
comparison, entry to the temple was about $7 USD.)
We
did get a glimpse of the famous Nandi
bull, a
representation of
Lord Shiva
in animal guise. That’s the representation that gives the temple
complex its name: Pashu = animal and Pati = lord, so Pashupatinath =
Lord of the Animals. The more you know...
But the ceremonies of
cremation were our principal
concern, in part because I have a course I’m creating on music and
death. So we observed with interest the several facets of the
ceremony.
The
mourning crowd waits on the bodies to be carried out to a spot down
by the river. Here we are in anticipation – you can see the
platform where the bodies will be put.
Do stop reading here if
actual bodies make you uncomfortable.
For
the rest of you…
The
bodies are then carried on a stretcher, accompanied by a crowd, until
they come to the appointed spot for the cremation fire. These
platforms
are covered
so that the fires can burn even in monsoon season. (As
of 2016, some cremations have adopted a new technology of electrical
fire, saving on the cost of wood, but
many families have chosen the traditional wood-burning method;
see Hadders 2017 and
Poudel and Uprety 2017).
The
platforms for the cremation proper are, like the greeting of the
body, located by the river, and each platform becomes the center of a
gathering of friends and relatives. (The
cremation grounds are called the “Aryaghat,” a “ghat” being a
flight of steps leading down to a river.)
Unlike Southern U.S. deaths
I have attended, though, there’s no viewing of the face, just a
wrapped body. Nor is the kind of dressing up to which I am
accustomed; the crowd seemed to be a very come-as-you-are. Death is
here seemingly represented as an occurrence of the middle of life,
not as an exceptional ceremonial event.
The to-and-fro of people
and the gathering of crowds are similar to funerals I’ve attended,
but there seems to be less focus on the bereaved family, and more on
the departed. That difference, I’ve
learned, reflects a distinct understanding of what the ceremony is
meant to achieve. Poudel
and Uprety argue that “The prime purpose of the cremation is to
depurate the dead body and free the soul from the body of the
deceased ones to secure a safe journey to heaven.” The fire is
cleansing, clearing the body of impurities, and allowing the
spiritual cycle to progress.
What’s
amazing is that across the river are the ceremonies which reinforce
life. Singing and joyousness are acoustically juxtaposed with the
murmurs of the cremation crowds, and the two ceremonies overlap, with
death starting the evening and the music of celebration picking up
closer to sundown. I'd share a video, but by that point my phone had decided that it wasn't going to cooperate, and somehow I didn't grab Nissa's videos before I left the country. Sadness.
Our stamina and crowd
tolerance didn’t take us to the end of the evening’s events; we
bowed out with about an hour left to go. And having walked there,
we’d certainly finished our step count for the day, so we made our
way to the taxi stand, and took a taxi home.
It
was a solemn evening, but a profoundly moving one.
Having
seen all of this firsthand, I couldn’t help but start asking
questions -- the kind of questions that pull me out of “traveler
mode” and straight into “researcher mode.” What does it mean to
modernize something so steeped in ritual? Who decides when tradition
gives way to technology?
If
that sounds like the beginning of a mini-lecture, well… it kind of
is. The next bit digs into some of the scholarship around cremation
practices in Nepal and how modernization has reshaped them. It’s
less “travel diary,” more “academic curiosity at work”—so
fair warning if you came only for the story part.
WOOD
OR ELECTRIC? TRADITION OR ENVIRONMENTALISM
After
leaving the temple that evening, I found myself thinking not just
about what we had seen, but about how these rituals adapt—or resist
adaptation—in a changing world. The practices at Pashupatinath
aren’t fixed like
a fly in
amber; they live at the intersection of faith, environment, and
economics. The option of an indoor electric cremation is nowadays a
choice that Nepalese
families
can make. There are several reasons that one might want this “modern”
(and
technological)
solution to the cremation challenge. It is cheaper, a not
insignificant consideration in a country with the high poverty levels
of Nepal. It is also environmentally beneficial; the pressure of wood
usage has degraded forest levels, and pushing particulate matter into
the air is at odds with “clean air” regulations. In short, the
electric crematorium represents both a practical and ecological
response to modern pressures. Yet families often continue to prefer
the traditional methods. Dal Bahadur Singtan found that “Resistive
behavior of people due to cultural and religious attachment was found
as the major problem for change” (Singtan
2014). This “resistance” is less about stubbornness than about
meaning: cremation, here, is not merely disposal, but a final act of
devotion, bound tightly to ideas of purity, release, and continuity.
Costs
of cremation can be relatively high. Singtan lists
a series of costs: “Rs.
200 for registration of a corpse, Rs. 400 per kg wood, and Rs. 1200
per Brahmin for cremation. Other expenditure would be in purchasing
ghee, sugar, dried wood pieces, flowers, garlands etc…” He
finds that a minimal ceremony – baseline costs -- would amount to
around 6,000 Rs. per corpse (Singtan
2014, 39-40). Costs can be higher, of course; heads of state might be
burned with sandalwood, but the corresponding budget puts such
ceremonial enhancements far, far
out of reach of the average household! In this way, even death
participates in the hierarchies of everyday life.
The questions of what
one can afford, and what one must forego, shape
how the sacred is enacted.
In
their interview-based study of Nepalese participants’ choices in
the modern (electric) cremation vs traditional (wood) cremation
practices, Poudel and Uprety (2017)
found that many participants make the choices they do because
“respondents believe that significant number of tourists come to
visit Pashupatinath temple to observe open pyre cremation process.”
Here, tourism has
become
yet
another
layer in the story: the act of cremation, once private and familial,
now carries a public and even performative dimension. The families
see themselves as promoting local culture; performing a kind of
cultural heritage in public is
a tourist draw and a kind of public education, layering an
outward-facing meaning onto a ceremony that is also inwardly
beneficial. Families reported that they preferred the traditional
method because “it increases the sense of belonging, identity and
maintains the beauty of the performed rituals” (Poudel and Uprety,
2017). Seen this way, maintaining the open-pyre tradition is not
simply resistance to change—it is also an affirmation of identity,
a choice to be visibly and proudly part of a cultural continuum.
In
all of this, what stands out is how layered the act of cremation at
Pashupatinath has become—spiritual duty, ecological questions,
an
often emotionally fraught economic
calculation, and cultural performance are
all
folded into one. Families choose between modern efficiency and
traditional sanctity, and those choices reveal as much about identity
as about practicality. To witness these rituals, then, is to glimpse
not just the end of a life but the ongoing negotiation between faith
and change, private grief and public meaning. It’s precisely this
tension—between devotion and display—that has drawn scholars to
situate Pashupatinath within another, more global frame.
DARK
TOURISM:
Scholars,
too, have turned their attention to this intersection of ritual,
observation, and meaning. Kunwar et al. have argued that
Pashupatinath might helpfully be more actively framed as part of the
dark tourism industry. That term, dating back to the 1990s,
encompasses “the
presentation and consumption of real and commodified death and
disaster sites.” (Foley and Lennon 1996). In this view,
Pashupatinath is not just a sacred site but also a destination shaped
by the gaze of those who come to witness death—tourists like us,
whose presence inevitably changes the experience itself.
Kunwar
and his colleagues suggest that, since tourists are shaped by what
they see and seek, the temple might intentionally cultivate the
spiritual dimension of that encounter. The act of watching, they
propose, could “engage or trigger within their visitors some issue
of social conscience, or … some shared emotion or an experience of
involvement.” Learning, in this model, becomes potentially
cathartic. That argument reframes spectatorship not as intrusion but
as a possible form of empathy—an unsettling idea, but also a
generous one.
They
also acknowledge that some respondents would prefer to develop the
site more holistically, emphasizing not just the cremation grounds
but also the temple’s broader ecology of devotion—the Yogis, the
Sadhus, the everyday flow of pilgrims. In that balance between ritual
spectacle and spiritual depth lies the continuing tension of the site
itself: how to honor what is sacred while accommodating what is
seen.
Indeed, the framework of dark tourism itself has been
challenged. Bowman and Pezzullo (2010), for instance, question the
negative charge of the word “dark.” Must the curiosity that
brings us to such places always be morbid? Or can it be a gesture of
respect, even affirmation—a way of learning through witnessing?
After all, macabre is in the eye of the beholder.
For us, that
distinction felt personal rather than theoretical. We were curious,
yes, but not morbidly
grief-stricken. I did find myself thinking back to a family funeral a
few months earlier, but not in an emotional way—more as a quiet
comparison of practice and meaning. The scholar in me wanted to
understand; the traveler in me wanted to bear witness. Nor was our
curiosity meant to be intrusive. We had confirmed ahead of time—both
through our guide and in the literature—that respectful observation
by outsiders was not considered offensive. If seeing and
understanding are done with care, then perhaps looking itself can
become a form of cultural exchange.
And
that brings me back to our end of evening. The music rising from
across the river—the songs of the living—seemed to answer the
smoke of the pyres in a kind of dialogue between presence and
departure. That strong life-affirming and concertizing
element served
not just as a geographic counterpoint but as an emotional one, giving
meaning to me personally for the evening as a whole.
In the midst of life we are in death (Media vita in morte sumus), as
the chant reminds us. But in the midst of death, Pashupatinath
reminds
us, we are also in life.
The
evening left me thinking that perhaps what defines a culture is not
how it celebrates life, but how it allows death to remain visible
within it.
REFERENCES
Bowman,
M. S. & Pezzullo, P. C. “What ‘s so ‘dark’ about ‘dark
tourism’?: Death, tours and performance.” Tourist Studies, 9(3)
(2010):
187-202.
Foley,
M. & Lennon J. “JFK and dark tourism: A fascination with
assassination.” International
Journal of Heritage Studies,
2(4) (1996):
198–211.
Hadders,
H. “Establishment of electric crematorium in Nepal: continuity,
changes and challenges.” Mortality
(2017): 1-16.
Kunwar,
R. R., Homagain, B., & Karki, N. “Exploring the Prospective of
Dark Tourism in Pashupatinath: A Hindu Pilgrimage Site, Nepal.”
Journal
of Tourism and Hospitality Education,
11
(2021):
93–127.
https://doi.org/10.3126/jthe.v11i0.38248
Poudel,
Rojisha, and Mina Devi Uprety. “Traditional and Modern Practices
of Cremation: Significance and Challenges” [conference paper].
International Conference on Social Structure and Social Change,
Pokhara, Nepal, 2017.
Singtan,
Dal Bahadur. “Resistance to change in cremation practices in
Pashupati area.” M.A.
Thesis, Kathmandu University School of Education, 2014.
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