A fitting funeral for traditions?

My friend’s brother, a Hindu, was cremated in London last month. The ceremony was conducted in a ‘chapel of rest’ where the mourners sat in pews as in a church and, in this case, because he was a popular young man, stood behind the rear glass.

The body was confined to a coffin placed on a stage which looked like a four-poster
bed with drawn curtains on the side and front. A Hindu priest, family and friends,  read their tributes to the dead from a lectern at the side. The rituals over, the curtains were drawn by an unseen hand and the coffin was tilted through an electronically operated door behind it, into the electrical furnace to the sound of final music.

The mourners filed out and stood briefly in a garden of remembrance where wreaths and flowers had been laid in designated spots for several of that day’s dead and then went on to a funeral feast at an inn a mile away. It was a dignified way to mark an end.
Not dignified enough for one Davender Ghai a 70-year-old Hindu from Newcastle who has moved a British court for permission to be cremated, when the time comes, on a funeral pyre on the banks of a chosen river. When he applied to the ‘municipality’, he was refused. The 1902 Cremations Act specified that cremations had to take place in coffins in confined furnaces.

Ghai’s lawyers contend that this Act deprives them of their human rights to a
dignified funeral and that only the traditional method of death by fire would do. Ghai expects that if he wins his action, thousands of Hindus will follow him into the ether above the Tyne and Thames and other rivers. It is my guess that more than thousands of British people, not wanting ash from funeral pyres spread across the countryside, will protest any such outcome. There will certainly be an appeal if Ghai wins.

While the outcome of Ghai’s petition is intriguing enough, another thought has overtaken my anxiety about it. If his plea succeeds, may it not be followed by other religions demanding their ancient rites? Being a Parsi Zoroastrian myself, I can see some stalwarts of my community petitioning to set up Towers of Silence from which we could feed our dead bodies to the vultures in England’s green and pleasant land.

I may even have supported such a move, except for the fact that it has come to light that 95 per cent of the Indian vulture species have been wiped out by eating the flesh of cattle contaminated with the drug Diclofenac. This drug is a widely used anti-inflammatory medicine. I was prescribed it myself for a swollen knee. It agrees with cows and Parsis and is indeed beneficial for them, but is fatal when ingested by vultures.
Now knowing the Parsi stock and race as intimately as I do, I can vouch for the fact that a large percentage of Parsis in Britain will have been prescribed and swallowed a
prescription or two of Diclofenac — as is their right. My civic and ecological duty is to point out that this being the case, setting up Towers of Silence will be doing the vultures of Britain no favours.

However, if all British Parsis vow, perhaps at their initiation ceremonies, as an additional religious duty, never to touch Diclofenac and to resort to other remedies for inflamed body-parts, I may fall in line and support the old ways. But as it stands, I see it as my duty to appear in any British court where, inspired by Ghai, some Rustom Subprimewalla or Freni Immoralearningswalla has filed a petition to allow disposal-by-birdy, and to roundly denounce the process.

To the cynics I say that I am second to none in championing our traditions, but saving the planet comes first!  

The writer is a London based scriptwriter