Draw up a list of the world’s most religious nations and India (population 1.4 billion) will almost always be somewhere near the top — especially if you focus on the world’s largest nations, in terms of population.
What makes India unique, however, is its incredible religious complexity. While Hindu believers make up about 80% of the population, 15% of the population is Muslim. In terms of sheer numbers, India has the world’s second largest Muslim population (after Indonesia). India has small, but historically important, Christian communities, mostly Catholic and Anglican.
The tensions between India’s various traditions are quite stunning and complex. But so are they way that the major faith groups overlap and blend into a larger whole. The bottom line: There are very few issues in this amazing land that are not, to some degree, touched by religious traditions — even if people struggle to describe the details.
This brings me to a stunning Associated Press photo feature that ran with this headline: “Mass funeral pyres reflect India’s COVID crisis.”
Pause for a minute and ponder this question: How many story angles — some of them quite controversial — can you imagine that are linked to funeral pyres and Hindu traditions? Now, imagine the complex issues that waves of COVID-19 deaths would create in India’s faith communities, with their unique traditions linked to death and dying.
Now imagine dedicating a mere one sentence to only one of those angles. Here is the overture, describing the larger crisis:
NEW DELHI (AP) — Delhi has been cremating so many bodies of COVID-19 victims that authorities are getting requests to start cutting down trees in city parks for kindling, as a record surge of illness is collapsing India’s tattered health care system.
Outside graveyards in cities like Delhi, which currently has the highest daily cases, ambulance after ambulance waits in line to cremate the dead. Burial grounds are running out of space in many cities as glowing funeral pyres blaze through the night.
India’s surge in coronavirus infections, growing at the fastest pace in the world, has left families and patients pleading for oxygen outside hospitals, the relatives weeping in the street as their loved ones die while waiting for treatment.
There are, of course, health and environmental issues linked to these mass cremations.
This brings me to the single reference to a religion angle in this dramatic news feature.
A stark symbol of the crisis are the overwhelmed graveyards and crematoriums, stacked to the brim with the dead.
In the central city of Bhopal, crematoriums have added pyres. One has been forced to skip the exhaustive rituals Hindus believe release the soul from the cycle of rebirth.
Overwhelmed crematoriums reflect the collapse of India’s already fragile health care system. Hospitals are unbearably full, with two or three patients to a bed in some cases. Officials are racing to add beds, ventilators and more oxygen to help the sick breathe.
Wait. Only ONE crematorium has had to skip the “exhaustive rituals” Hindus observe when a believer dies? How are the others managing?
Here is a very, very simplistic statement about what is involved here:
Those of the Hindu faith prefer to die at home, surrounded by their family who will keep vigil. According to Hindu funeral customs, the body remains at the home until it is cremated, which is usually within 24 hours after death. The ashes are typically scattered at a sacred body of water or at some other place of importance to the deceased.
Obviously, the scattering of ashes on bodies of sacred water has to be next to impossible right now, in terms of the high number of deaths India is facing — with record death totals day after day.
Can you imagine the crush, right now, with people attempting to reach the tributaries of the Ganges, an especially sacred body of water which has become an environmental nightmare in recent decades? If this crisis has not intensified in recent weeks, then there’s another story. Why not?
Also, note that Hindu believers are, when possible, cremated within 24 hours of death. Then, add in the fact that Islamic traditions call for the burial of the dead within 24 hours. It’s hard to imagine the pressure this is generating on families, health-care professionals and staff members at hospitals, crematoriums and mortuaries.
I realize that this is a background feature accompanying a photo essay. Still, you know that the waves of pain and grief shown in these photos are linked to families having to endure the deaths of their loved ones and then, on top of that, feeling that they are failing to keep the faith traditions that attempt to give meaning to their losses.
Maybe more than one sentence was needed? Maybe a paragraph backed with a single quotation?
Just asking.
FIRST IMAGE: Illustration from The Siasat Daily.