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Updated: June 27, 2025
A doctor was summoned in hot haste; but ere his arrival the poor old man had expired in Samarendra's arms. His case was diagnosed as one of failure of the heart's action. Samarendra and his mother were prostrated by this sudden calamity; but there is no time to be lost in hot weather. Calling in three or four neighbours, they had the body carried to Nimtala Ghat for cremation.
One morning we drove to the burning ghat, and from personal examination of cremation, I am able to express my preference for Christian burial. The business of burning the dead for in India it is a business like any other, and belongs to a low caste is carried on in the most heartless manner.
We could see the high tongues of fire shooting up into the air. "It's pretty awful," muttered Lord John, more impressed than I had ever seen him. "Well, after all, what does it matter?" I remarked. "The world is dead. Cremation is surely the best burial." "It would shorten us up if this house went ablaze." "I foresaw the danger," said Challenger, "and asked my wife to guard against it."
Those who favor cremation suffer again a still more frantic disesteem; and yet every one deplores the present gloomy apparatus and dismal observances of our occasions of mourning. Death is still to the most Christian and resigned heart a very terrible fact, a shock to all who live, and its surroundings, do what we will, are painful.
His wife sprang at the bonnet, but he barred her off with an arm like a fence-rail, removed a lid from the stove, put the unbecoming article in on the red-hot coals, and replaced the lid. "There!" he said, "that helps the scenery, don't it? Now let's have supper." Captain Dan laughed again. For an instant Azuba stared, white-faced, at the cremation of the bonnet. Then she darted to the door.
I would keep up reading in the dim light of our school room all alone; the distant church clock would chime every quarter as if each passing hour was being put up to auction; and the loud Haribols of the bearers of the dead, passing along Chitpore Road on their way to the Nimtollah cremation ground, would now and then resound.
On seeing the story put to such uses, one feels sometimes like using the ad hominem argument, and quoting the wholesale destruction of pagan libraries under Valens, the burning of books by the Latin stormers of Constantinople, the alleged annihilation of 100,000 volumes by Genoese crusaders at Tripoli, the book-burning exploits of Torquemada, the bonfire of 80,000 valuable Arabic manuscripts, lighted up in the square of Granada by order of Cardinal Ximenes, and the irreparable cremation of Aztec writings by the first Christian bishops of Mexico.
Most of the skeletons were in a poor state of preservation, but several could have been saved had we the proper means at our disposal to care for them. No evidence of cremation of the dead was found, either at Awatobi or Sikyatki, nor have I yet detected any reference to this custom among the modern Hopi Indians.
Trelawney did all he could to accomplish the burning with efficiency and decency: though the whole story makes one feel the great physical difficulties that stand in the way of carrying out cremation successfully. The advocate of urn-sepulture, however, is quite aware of this, and he proposes to use an apparatus by which they would be entirely overcome.
While the fire was blazing, every one, with a reverent heart, pulled off his upper garment, and threw it, with his feather-fan and umbrella, from a distance into the midst of the flames, to assist the burning. When the cremation was over, they collected and preserved the bones, and proceeded to erect a tope.
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