Hindus urged to adopt 'green' cremation

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Hindus urged to adopt 'green' cremation

 

By Bruce Wallace, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

September 3, 2007

 

VARANASI, India

 

Cremation fires crackle all day long on the chipped concrete

steps of this riverside holy city, the blazes spewing ash and

flakes over the mourners who crowd its famous piers.

Sweating, bare-chested men stoke the funeral pyres,

squinting against the sting of smoke as they lug and stack

the bundles of logs needed to burn the procession of Hindu

dead.

 

And when the bodies are incinerated and the families have

taken away the ashes of their loved ones, the men sweep the

residue into the Ganges River. The detritus of death,

mingling with life.

 

Devout Hindus regard cremation as an essential rite that

frees the soul from the body, enabling its journey to the next

level. But with India's Hindu population of about 800

million ensuring a massive number of open-air cremations,

there is a growing awareness that this adherence to religious

orthodoxy carries a toll for the temporal world.

 

It takes a lot of wood to burn a body: The demand for

funeral pyres strips the country of more than 50 million

trees annually, according to some estimates. Cremations

also release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And the

body parts sometimes dumped into rivers and streams add

further toxicity to water that is already badly polluted.

 

" We have come to a stage where if we don't come up with a

solution for dealing with the dead, we are going to affect the

survival of the living, " said Anshul Garg, director of

Mokshda, a nonprofit group in New Delhi that is

campaigning for an environmentally friendly approach to

cremation.

 

In traditional Hindu cremations, the body is placed atop a

pile of wood. The corpse is then covered with more wood

and burned in the open air. Mokshda says this method

requires as much as 880 pounds of wood to burn a single

corpse (though the wood porters in Varanasi say the amount

is closer to 600 pounds), a process that can take as long as

six hours.

 

Mokshda's alternative is the " Green Cremation System, " a

cremation bier it developed 15 years ago and has been

tinkering with since. The organization believes it has

perfected its design, saying it can burn a body using a mere

220 pounds of wood in a third of the time.

 

Wood is integral to Hindu cremation rites, a symbolic

connection between the body and the earth, which is why

the first layer of wood is laid on the ground. The Mokshda

system's innovation is to place that first layer of wood on a

raised metal grate, allowing for better air circulation. A

chimney is placed over the pyre to cut heat loss.

 

" We have improved the flow of air and where there is a

proper flow of air, your combustion efficiency increases, "

Garg said. " This is not a new technological gizmo. It's a

simplicity, like improving the efficiency of a wood stove. "

 

Mokshda's system has made only tiny inroads so far. It has

12 units of its latest model, which on average costs about

$30,000, in operation, with orders for 80 more in the

pipeline. But the potential demand is enormous. Mokshda

says it has identified 800 crematoriums across India as

possible users. The Delhi metropolitan area alone has about

350 crematoriums, their flaky residue occasionally drifting

over nearby neighborhoods.

 

But the Mokshda system faces two big obstacles to

acceptance. For one thing, improving cremation methods is

a low priority for cash-strapped municipalities facing a host

of public health issues. An even greater obstacle is the

resistance of traditionalists who don't want to mess with a

matter as sensitive as the fate of a loved one's soul.

 

" We have changed other rituals -- marriage, eating habits,

clothing -- but rituals around death are the hardest to

change, " Garg said. " People are hesitant to talk about death;

there is a fear. So they say they'll stick with what they've

been following through the ages. "

 

The government also has largely failed to get Hindus to sign

on to environmentally friendly cremations. Beginning in the

1960s, municipal governments began installing electric or

gas-fueled crematoriums, offering to dispose of bodies at a

fraction of the cost of traditional cremations, which can be

$50 to $75, depending on the quality and amount of wood

used.

 

But most Hindus have balked at this option, saying that

oven-like crematoriums prevent them from carrying out

important rituals such as the mukhagni, in which a fire is

lighted in the body's mouth, and the kapal kriya, in which

the corpse's skull is shattered by a blow from a bamboo

stick to release the soul.

 

It is mostly unclaimed corpses that are burned in electric

and gas crematoriums, stigmatizing them as being for the

poorest of the poor. " It's a good method -- there's less

pollution because you are not dumping lumps of flesh into

the river -- but we don't get many bodies, " said Panchdev

Singh, 47, the operator of Varanasi's electric crematorium.

There are no bodies awaiting Singh's attention. One of his

two machines is out of order, and business has fallen off

since 2000, when the municipality raised the price to about

$12.

 

" Now the only people who come here are the very poor or

the ones brought in by the police, " Singh said.

 

Mokshda says its system can succeed where the electric one

failed because it allows Hindus to perform traditional

rituals. The challenge is to convince devout Hindus that

using less wood does not break with orthodoxy. Even Garg

acknowledges that it will be a while before Mokshda's

cremation bier is welcome in a place such as Varanasi.

 

" I doubt it would be a hit here, " said Dinesh Yadav, 21, who

has taken over the family wood business, running a gang of

10 porters for cremations on Varanasi's ghats, or riverside

steps. " People want to do it the Hindu way. Older people,

especially, will never settle for being burned with less than

the required quantity of wood. "

 

Yet the realities of the outside world intrude even on this

holiest of Hindu cities. Yadav recalled the wood shortage of

2005, when scarcity meant the bodies backed up on the

ghats while they waited for supplies. The price of wood is

50% higher than it was five years ago.

 

" A time will come when we'll probably have to move to a

new way, " he said.

 

And in his office on Varanasi's back streets, Kameshwar

Upadhyay, a Hindu scholar known for his strict views,

looked thoughtfully at photographs of the Mokshda system

and didn't dismiss it as heretical. He acknowledged that

India is groaning under the stress of an expanding

population. And if he was not about to welcome the

Mokshda system in the spiritual center of Varanasi, he

thought it might not be a bad idea in big cities.

 

" There is a provision that after death, a person needs to be

completely de-linked from this Earth, and fire helps in that

goal, " Upadhyay said. " But there are changing situations

that come to us on Earth and we have to work out

compromises for that. As long as mukhagni and kapal kriya

can be followed, there should be no problem.

 

" Fire, " he said, " is fire. "

 

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