Manjari MishraEleven years later, Lakshmi Gautam can still recall with startling clarity the precise moment when compassion overruled centuries of man-made customs and conventions.It was a scorching May afternoon in Vrindavan. A pall of heat hung over its labyrinthine lanes, temples and ghats, when the now-retired professor of Ancient History and Culture came across the unattended body of an old woman.Radha, a 76-year-old Bengali widow — well known in the vicinity for selling tea to labourers and autorickshaw drivers — lay in total disarray on the small platform. The septuagenarian had died in the early hours, and decay had already begun to claim her emaciated frame.No one seemed willing to touch the body, let alone claim her. Gautam watched with incredulity and dismay. Then she did something that would send shock waves through the conservative heart of Braj. “I will do her ‘sanskar’- (last rites),” she declared.There was something — steel in her voice, perhaps, or fire in those coal-black eyes — that shamed the detractors into silence.Ninety minutes later, Radha lay atop a neat stack of wood and shavings, covered with a ‘Ramnami’ and garlanded with marigolds. Beside her stood the lean but erect mother of three, dressed in a colourful sari, a vermilion ‘tika’ bright on her forehead and a flaming torch in her hand.“I first lit the fire and then called up my family,” Gautam recounts. By then, the news had already travelled home. “Tumhari biwi murda phoonk rahi hai,” her husband, an SBI officer, was informed.He was not scandalised. Gautam had already ruffled many feathers with her report on the plight of Vrindavan’s widows. As a member of the committee set up under the direction of the Supreme Court, she had witnessed the despair, neglect and sorrow to which these women fell victim.And she had also added a paragraph about the ultimate cruelty that continued to haunt her — the disposal of bodies in gunny bags barely half their size. The dead, it seemed, were being denied even the space they deserved one last time. Deeply traumatised, she wanted to do something. But what? The question had no easy answer. Until Radha happened.“I could not have left her to rot or be nibbled at by dogs and crows. All she needed was a decent farewell in the city of Krishna. And someone had to step in,” she says matter-of-factly.She did, and then she kept doing it. Gautam is now available on call 24×7, and the numbers are mounting every day.Has she kept count? “Oh, I have left that job to Chitragupta,” she says with a hearty laugh. Death, after all, keeps its own accounts.“You always act on an impulse. Such an act is never pre-planned,” endorses Pushplata Singh, who has been making the final journey easier for the friendless and forgotten in Gorakhpur.For Singh, too, the work is less a calling than an instinct — something she does because, at that moment, there is simply no one else willing to do it.This Wednesday was particularly busy. She left home early and returned only at 3 pm after ferrying four unclaimed bodies back-to-back. “Oh! I have seen busier days,” she says.The busiest days, however, came during the coronavirus crisis. “I remember braving the cold, standing at the cremation ghat for twelve hours at a stretch, waiting, preparing and lighting bodies one after another,” she says.The 54-year-old schoolteacher is single. By choice. “I am wedded to my mission,” she says. Coming from her, the cliché sounds remarkably sincere — less a polished line than a plain statement of fact.The trigger was an old, ailing and destitute ascetic whom she had been nursing for more than a year. When he died, his cremation posed a problem. The old man had renounced his family.His family had disowned him and was not willing to help with the final journey. “Ab maut aur mitti toh kisi ka intezar nahi karti (Death and dead bodies wait for none). So, someone had to take a call,” she says.But stepping into a male preserve comes with a price. There was opposition. There were allegations. There was a systematic vilification campaign. And it has hardly stopped even now.“People shun me. They avoid calling me to any ceremony. They suspect I carry the spirits from the cremation ground,” she says with a sad laugh. The irony is difficult to miss. If men fail or err, should women remain silent spectators?For these women, the answer has been an emphatic no. Interestingly, this defiance is not entirely new. One of the earliest such incidents in India was reported on Nov 28, 1890.Savitribai Phule, who, along with her social reformer husband, had campaigned extensively against the practice of sati, stirred a hornet’s nest by lighting her husband’s pyre.“The childless couple had adopted a boy named Yashwant. Since Yashwant was the son of a Brahmin widow, Phule’s relatives strongly objected to his eligibility to perform the last rites,” says Dr Manini Srivastava, coordinator at the Institute of Women and Gender Studies at Lucknow University.“Impervious to – and perhaps repelled by – the objections swirling around her, Savitribai quietly picked up the earthen pitcher, performed the customary parikrama of the pyre and lit it herself. No argument. No confrontation. Just a woman walking up to a funeral pyre and doing what everyone around her could never imagine. It was the ultimate act of defiance by an indomitable feminist crusader,” she says.More than a century later, that defiant spirit resurfaced in Prayagraj.Gulab Tiwari, an illiterate woman born in Prayagraj on the banks of Rasoolabad Ghat, became popular as Maharajin Bua.The formidable matriarch carried the torch, literally, for more than six decades, until her death in 2002. In her cotton ‘seedha-pallu sari’ and sports shoes, Bua became a legend. She is said to have stepped into her dead father’s shoes at the age of 11, taking responsibility for her mother and siblings.This was despite the fact that she belonged to a Mahapatra Brahmin clan, where, as a rule, male progeny was trained in ‘kriya-karma’.The pre-teen broke the rule. Bua lost her husband while still young, and there are stories of how she would bring her infant son to the cremation ground while performing her duties. The boy eventually became her apprentice. She is said to have cremated more than a million bodies, including that of the celebrated Hindi poet Mahadevi Verma.After her death, several women tried to emulate her, but the attempts were short-lived. They soon learnt that cremation ground is a citadel harbouring social hierarchies, gender codes and centuries-old rigid notions of propriety.“Male egos are fragile, and you are trampling upon them by trespassing into what is considered an male preserve,” says Gautam.Noted Vedic scholar from Vrindavan, Shrivats Goswami, seconds her claim. “There is no gender bias or absolute injunction in our ancient texts. Even though the male successor remains the preferred choice, Garuda Purana does not prohibit women from performing last rites. The scripture also authorizes the act done in discharge of ‘aapaat dharma’ (under exceptional circumstances or in emergencies). The intent to discourage women from this ritual must have been to spare them the trauma and distress and not to bind them to a ruthless edict,” Goswami says.Whatever the scriptures may say, the cremation ground demands something more than theological scholarship. Courage.“Cremating a dead body is not for the lily-livered. It does require nerves of steel and grit,” says Shalini Saini, another “torch-bearer” from Muzaffarnagar.A single mother, Saini helped cremate victims of Kedarnath flash floods. The work came with its own professional hazards.“I am more of a social outcast. People say ‘Shamshaan ghat mein rehti hai, apshagun hai’ (living in a cremation ground, she is inauspicious),” she says. But this hardly affects her. Perhaps because she has seen the one place where all such labels finally lose their meaning.“The ghat is the final destination. One must not forget that. My fiercest critics will also land up there sooner or later,” she says.On a serious note, she claims to be God’s favourite child. And perhaps that is the thread binding these women across time and geography — from Savitribai Phule and Maharajin Bua to Lakshmi Gautam, Pushplata Singh and Shalini Saini.They are not merely challenging patriarchy; they are confronting the indifference and apathy that deny a decent farewell on the last journey. “When the living walk away, someone still stays behind. Someone has to gather the wood, buy the garlands, arrange the shroud and light the fire. And ensure that the last journey is not also the last indignity,” says Gautam.So, to them, the cremation ground has become a second home. “They know where to find me if I am not home,” Saini says.So, has she ever been afraid of handling a corpse? Her answer is philosophical and chillingly simple. “The dead, I guarantee you, are totally safe. “It is the living who need to be feared.”
