Why Rizvi Sahab was Finally Buried?

[anveshan]

WHY RIZVI SAHAB WAS FINALLY BURIED?

-BY MUKUL DUBE-

(The Indian Express, March 17)

 

"Death has a religion and not every corpse can be consigned to ashes.

 

A man died last year. It happens that his name was Rizvi, which identified him as Muslim at least by birth. It happens also that his wife was of another religion, which probably made him a not very good Muslim. It happens, finally, that he had specified that he wished his corpse to be disposed of by cremation: which certainly left him no kind of Muslim at all.

 

But it was feared that at the electric crematorium his body would not be accepted for cremation. Why not? Because, Sir, Muslims are buried, not cremated. But he really did not consider himself a Muslim, and he specifically said that he wanted cremation. No matter, Sir, his name was Rizvi, so he was a Muslim, and Muslims are not cremated.

 

 

Had not Safdar Hashmi’s body been turned away? Was it not the sheer weight of the activists with it which caused it finally to be accepted? Maybe Rizvi Sahab’s corpse too would have been accepted eventually, but those in charge of it feared it would not — and fear is a very real thing. Those who have lost a friend or a father do not wish to enter into squabbles.

 

The crematorium of which I speak is worked by electricity. No firewood is used, nor ghee, nor even furnace oil. The key operator is a person trained to handle large currents and throw big switches, not a man who can recite the required bits from the Hindu scriptures. Nevertheless it is the second kind of operator who has the real say.

 

The crematorium of which I speak is a municipal service, in theory available — just like the water supply and anti-mosquito fogging — to all who are of the city. There is no sign or notice anywhere which says that the facility is for Hindu waste matter alone, that the waste of other religions is not permitted. But water and malaria and rabies have no religion, while death clearly has. It seems that only Hindu bodies are readily accepted by the crematorium, and that it is difficult to protect even the body of an atheist from the prescribed Hindu rites.

 

However that may be, Rizvi Sahab, Muslim but in name, was buried in a Muslim graveyard, because in the hot weather his corpse would soon have become a nuisance and a health hazard. He would not have liked that: he was, after all, a responsible, free citizen of the capital city of a free country; and to him freedom meant other things than rotting and stinking and spreading disease.

 

Rizvi Sahab had wished to be burnt. Maybe he sought to make a statement, more likely he did not wish his remains to occupy land, a commodity which he knew to be scarce and to have several other uses, some of which he might have considered more productive.

 

Rizvi Sahab’s last wish was not respected. Should anyone care? He himself probably would not have given a damn. After all, he was dead and gone, and what was done with his remains was a matter of civic waste disposal for a society of which he was no longer part and in the affairs of which, therefore, he had no say."

 

(Is a posthumous conversion possible conversion or re-naming of a corpse possible according to Hindu rites, so that some forthcoming Rizvi Sahab's wishes could be fulfilled?= Anveshan)