Burning Ghats, First Funerals, and Illustrated Cremations: Of “Oriental” Deathways and Civilization

Jyoti Puri, Simmons University

US-American accounts of colonial India and its migrants routinely included funerary practices, especially cremation. Visiting cremation sites in port cities like Calcutta as well as the city of Varanasi, a key site of Hindu soteriology, was a conventional part of performing US-American travel and travel writing that began around the mid-19th century and persisted into the 20th century. The list of travelers visiting cremation sites in India includes lesser-known and well-known 19th century travel writers, such as Mark Twain, as well as the poet Allen Ginsberg and Jacqueline Kennedy on a state visit in the 1960s. While newspapers and periodicals included travel sections, they also reported on, or more accurately sensationalized, crematory practices among migrants from colonial India. The travelogues and the news reports were frequently supplemented with images and illustrations of cremations, even as the visuals circulated independently in the form of photos and postcards. Such images still circulate through sites such as the US Library of Congress and eBay. Coming to grips with the plural archive, this essay explores how deathways were seen as signs and indexes of civilizations. It shows that cremation provoked disgust, prurient curiosity and even horror among US-American observers, thereby generating a defense of empire and a firming of anti-immigrant sentiments. Linking these affective responses to controversial cultural practices such as Sati and child marriage, the essay places deathways in relation to the imperial and colonial nexus of race, sexuality, and gender. Lastly, it reflects on the racial and cultural erasures that were necessary to successfully make the case for cremation among dominant white publics in the US around the turn of the 20th century.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 174. Transnationality and Gender I