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.
