Asian Sojourn 7: Life and Its Endings (Nepal’s Pashupatinath Temple) (travel of 12 Jul 2025)

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.

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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.

Some Further Silences of Christina Rossetti (10/12/24)

A table of Rossetti's silences -- green for positive emotions; blue for  negative

Silence is often seen as passive—a withdrawal from the world. But as Christina Rossetti reveals through her poetry, silence can also be active, chosen, and imbued with deep emotional and spiritual meaning. Whether it symbolizes fortitude, yearning, or martyrdom, Rossetti’s silences offer a window into the human heart. Here are a few of the “types of silence” she invokes.

 

SILENCE IN THE FACE OF SUFFERING

“A long stern silence” in the face of a storm, while others “clung together… and some wept.” The silence Rossetti evokes in Repining is the silence of fortitude, of not speaking in the face of fear and suffering; of enduring and hoping without requiring of others a kind of sharing. Silence can be an act of strength—a refusal to express emotion or reveal one’s inner life. Through silence, one can hoard interiority. Silence can be a badge of pride, a signal of the sufficiency of self.

Of course, the sufferer can endure in silence for too long, turning fortitude into a virtue taken to the point of weakness. After all, barring others’ insights is isolating. Take the case of the princess of “The Prince’s Progress,” whose “heart sat silent through the noise / And concourse of the street” through all the years as the prince dallied. His deferral of their potential joy was suffered in silence until it was “Too late for live, too late for joy, / Too late, too late!” The silent heart “was starving all this while.” The Prince’s Progress might lead us to view silence as folly. Unprotesting endurance can backfire. Silence can be deadly. And yet Rossetti also sees this silence as a signal of the princess’s purity; her willingness to endure for the sake of love is read more as a virtue than a vice.

 

SILENCE OF YEARNING

As we saw in a previous post, Rossetti has a yen for the silences of loss and longing. She explores both as an attribute of age in the final sonnet of Monna Innominata. Once youth and beauty are both gone, she asks, what remains for the agèd? Naught but

The longing of a heart pent up forlorn

A silent heart whose silence loves and longs;

The silence of a heart which sang its songs

While youth and beauty made a summer morn,

Silence of love that cannot sing again.

(14^th sonnet, Monna Innominata)

The singing is now over, irrevocably cast in the past tense. Only the remembrances of former times remain to the narrator. Loss and longing are intertwined. This is not so much the enduring or long-suffering heart of The Prince’s Progress as it is a heart silent through the practices of inner stillness. With this silence, the poet suggests, love can invoked, its memory stirring a kind of aching wistfulness which can be treasured and tallied, counting up the successes of the past. Simultaneously, however, this silence is the silencing of the voice; the externalities of voiced love are no longer available to the speaker. Of the outer and inner worlds, only the inner remains to the speaker.

 

SILENCE AND SOUND

Sound and silence can intermingle, as they do in natural settings. Rossetti’s narrator goes on an emotive journey in An Old-World Thicket, but not until the stillness of the woods does rage change to despair, then self-pity, then weariness, then yearning, as the excesses of emotion gradually fall away. Only then do the sounds of nature penetrate the narrator’s attention:

Without, within me, music seemed to be;

Something not music, yet most musical,

Silence and sound in heavenly harmony.

The silence of nature is restorative, it brings sunsets and beauty, a return of visual awareness of the splendors of the world. The silence of nature is, in some ways, found inside its sounds; the eco-acoustical landscape heals, where the human self-obsessions of the regular world had merely “piled care upon my care.” Silence can be the answer to what ails us; silence can be found, unironically, in the witterings of nature. Eric Kagge would agree: “The silence around us may contain a lot, but the most interesting kind of silence is the one that lies within.”

Sound, even human sound, can also create (temporary) silence. The men of Maiden-Song are silenced by the music that they hear, as was the “herdsman from the vale,” enchanted with the merry songs of Meggan, who drew him in as she “piped a merry note,” and then “sang the heart out of his breast.” So too the result of May’s singing, that “labyrinth of throbs, / Pauses, cadence; / Clear-noted as a dropping brook, / Soft-noted like the bees.” He was transformed; “He hung breathless on her breath; / Speechless, who listened well; / Could not speak or think or wish / Till silence broke the spell.” Not until the end of the song, HER silence, does HIS muted state change. Her song controls his voice, pushing him (temporarily) into voicelessness. And the third maiden, Margaret, used her singing as a force for power:

So Margaret sang her sisters home

In their marriage mirth;

Sang free birds out of the sky,

Beasts along the earth,

Sang up fishes of the deep—

All breathing things that move –

Sang from far and sang from near

To her lovely love;

Sang together friend and foe;

Sang a golden-bearded king

Straightway to her feet,

Sang him silent where he knelt

In eager anguish sweet.

(C. Rossetti, Maiden-Song)

The challenge, of course, is that the power of song is only powerful in the moment; power reverts to the powerful once the song is ended: “But when the clear voice died away, / When the longest echoes died, / He stood up like a royal man / And claimed her for his bride.” Song may ensorcell in its magical moment, making silent the powerful and moving them into a profound space of awe, once the magic itself has faded into silence, the world goes on with its habitual practices. (Maiden-Song)

 

THE SILENCE OF PURITY

Martyrs may be silent in Rossetti’s world; in I Have Fought the Good Fight she contrasts the roaring crowd’s “Crying out for vengeance, crying out for blood” with the silence of the sainted; even when confronted with betrayal and the horrors of the lion’s gaping maw, the interlocutor has the silence of inner peace: He hears the crowd’s shouting “in silence, and was not afraid / While for the mad people silently I prayed.” His silence is virtue, an opposition to the mob, and a signal of a divinely-inspired faith.

Silence, she points out in “Then shall ye shout” (from Songs for Strangers and Pilgrims), can also be anticipatory. As with music, it is not always our turn; “Keep silence with a good hear / While silence fits our part”; we must, she says “Keep silence, counting time / To strike in at the chime.” Attention is not always our to own; silence can be a gift to the communal realm.

 

DISCOMFORTING SILENCES

Silence is not always positive; it is part of envy and of shame. “…her words reproved / A silent envy nursed within, / A selfish, souring discontent, Pride-born, the devil’s sin.” (The Lowest Room) It can also be the silence of overweening grief, a refusal of comfort “…I would not look or speak / Would not cheer up at all. / My tears were like to fall,” and, feigning sleep “no one knew I wept.” The secret kept, no one can provide comfort to those who wield silence like a shield. Not until the narrator yields to sound, that “something in her voice” that reaches past the silence into expressive sorrow, can comfort come (The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children). Silence also belongs to the haughty (Sonnet From the Psalms); the refusal to ask for “man’s help, nor kneel that he may bless” is a refusal of community, a choice of isolation.

Silence is also the language of despair; the narrator in Mirage who hangs his “harp upon a tree… wrung and snapt,” all for the sake of a dream-image. The broken heart is silent, and “Life, and the world, and mine own self, are changed / For a dream’s sake.” A misunderstanding can lead, in other words, to hopelessness. The broken harp strings are shattered hopes; happiness was only ever imagined. Silence can also be the language of rejection, as with the maid of Under Willows. She merely “stood silent and still,” though it was a sunny June day, and her suitor “passed by and whistled a tune.” That silent rejection, however, will be answered by a lonely death: “Though she live to be old, so old, / She shall die at last.”

Similarly, in The Dying Man to His Betrothed, the silence of the betrothed at her fiancé’s deathbed is one of a presentiment of grief; her silence goes with her weeping and her paleness as signals of her overwrought state. And yet, while her silence is rejected by the dying man -- “One word – tis all I ask of thee… Speak out, that I may know thy will” – it is, at the end of the poem, he who rejects her comforts in favor of religious transformation. Her silence becomes the silence of memory; he sees mercy for himself while leaving her the silence of her loss. Silence here is a discomforting gift – both hers to him, as she tries to control her emotions and not burden him, and his to her, as he leaves her with the silence of an absent and erased future together.

In an age of constant communication, Rossetti’s exploration of silence feels indulgent, even nostalgic. Her poems remind modern readers that silence, whether chosen or imposed, can be a powerful response to suffering, love, and loss. And in such silences, we may find strength—or risk of isolation—or find ourselves immersed in the eco-acoustical quiet where contemplation best resides. Silences, in other words, have contexts as well as meanings.

 

Poetic texts from (and assessments based on) The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti, Macmillan and Co, 1904, https://books.google.com/books?id=C_k_VgeqssMC

Christina Rossetti and the contemplation of silence (10/5/24)

 

Portrait of Christina Rossetti from The Poetical Works (1904)

I’m preparing to teach a medievalisms class, and Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) came back across my attention-field. Among her various offerings is this:

“Echo” (by Christina Rossetti)*

Come to me in the silence of the night;
Come in the speaking silence of a dream;
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
As sunlight on a stream;
Come back in tears,
O memory, hope, love of finished years.

O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,
Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,
Where souls brimfull of love abide and meet;
Where thirsting longing eyes
Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.

Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live
My very life again though cold in death:
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
Speak low, lean low
As long ago, my love, how long ago.

        (18 December 1854)

Here Rossetti’s silence is that of the “speaking silence” of a dreamed-of love, a memory of one who has passed through “that slow door” of death. She acknowledges the bliss of a paradisiacal state – where others’ love will greet the newly entered soul – but asks the beloved instead to haunt her dreams, enlivened through an energizing memory. Pulse (hers) for pulse (the lover’s) and breath for breath, her dream self will recreate a simulacrum of the lover. And the payoff? The silence of night and parallel silence of a dream state together allow her to imagine the whispered confidence of the past as still present in her life.

Loss and longing are intertwined with the hush of night, with the quiet togetherness of lovers, and with the superimposition of past and present in a world beyond wakefulness. The poet emphasizes the remoteness of the memory, the “finished years” and the doubly-emphasized long-ago nature of their time together.

From the perspective of silences, it is the silence of night – not just the absence of daytime conversations and engaged world of the waking self, but also the silence of solitude – that allows the speaker’s remembering dream state to evoke memory and pastness. Indeed, we are invited to consider whether wakefulness is antithetical to memory, since it is only the narrator’s dream state that can re-imagine the embodied other. Wakefulness is distracting; the dream state and the silence that go with it allow for introspection. While the speaker imagines the utterances from long ago, it is silence that allows her to do so. Moreover, she may imagine that spoken voice from the past, but she continues to exist in a world of silence and nighttime. No words are spoken in her here and now in spite of her repeated command to the beloved to “come” to her.

Likewise, that re-imagined other is known to be “cold,” their corporeal body – corpse – no longer reflecting the wished-for sparkle of eye like a dappled brook. Instead, the once seeing eye becomes the silent tear, first of the speaker herself and then, perhaps, in stanza 2, the brimfull nature of the beloved’s community, their eyes too lingering on the spot of transition from life to death, from this place to that one, a transition still ongoing, and yet one that happened “long ago.”

It is the silence, the absence of active hearing, that allows this recreation of the visual sense, along with the implicit story of how the narrator and beloved once rejoiced in each other, making palpable and poignant the loss that is still ongoing these many years later. Cold body vs warm memories, silent nighttime vs thoughts of whispered confidences, the presence and poignant absence of the beloved—the invocation of silence compels the reader to “come” with the speaker on a journey into profound yearning.

* Image and poetic text from The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti, Macmillan and Co, 1904, https://books.google.com/books?id=C_k_VgeqssMC