What researching cremations of the dead in colonial India taught me about life in our cities today
Mortuary work is an essential service because humans are mortal. But who works for the dead, what are the technologies involved and what does history tell us about them? The public inattentiveness towards mortuary work is pervasive. Even archival documents of colonial India, reflecting histories of caste prejudices, are silent on mortuary work.
When I started my research on the technologies of burials and cremations in colonial India, I met D Sahoo, the special in-charge (or “SI Babu”, as he is fondly known) of Sirity Cremation Ground in Kolkata. He gently laughed at this archival omission: “Obviously the books don’t tell you anything about us.”
Instead, Sahoo and his colleague Pradip Kumar Gain carefully outlined a methodology for my research: “Be our witness. You can compare our present with the past, and then write the history.”
Between 2017 and 2019, I spent about 180 hours in different cremation grounds and morgues in Calcutta to understand the craft of cremation, trying to gain insight in the 21st century on how mortuary experts worked with the gas and electric cremation machines in the colonial period, a technology that was unique at that time.
Caste stigmatisation of mortuary work has ensured that workers are erased from being...
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