How can
ceremonies and rituals around the death of someone we love help us to
cope? Does reading this article about
funeral rituals in India make you wonder, as it did me, whether our funeral
rituals have become too staid in the West to be of any use? Would the career of a mourner or a funeral
musician interest you?
I have always been fascinated by how people’s customs, traditions or values change according to their culture, the society they live in and their perception of life as such. How does the human mindset work? What does man have to survive to be the way he is? There were a few moments while I was reading the article, when I had to stop and just think about the information I had just absorbed. I’m really interested in what went through the PhD student’s mind when he hung himself since “his life lost meaning after being exposed to marana siddha.” What philosophy can be so strong that you literally commit suicide because of its influence?
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, I can imagine that not everybody can handle an exposure to such radical "meaning of life" theories, especially, if they were not confronted with difficult situations yet. For comparison, Krishnaveni, who “lost her 15 year-old son to suicide, her heartbroken husband soon followed suit and whose daughter died at 18”, cannot simply be broken by some philosophy since she already went through her personal hell and that made her stronger. Moreover, she could utilize this experience and transform it into an activity that helps women in a similar position like hers.
Even though it’s a very hard job emotionally, I would definitely consider a career in this field. Not exactly a professional mourner in India, but some kind of musician also participating on funerals. I can determine this from my own experience - when I was 13, I played a couple of pieces on my grandpa’s funeral and everyone was speculating how I could play it so professionally - without tears and with a stoic face. The trick was that I focused on playing those compositions not on the background of the occasion, the true reason why I was actually playing. This helped me close myself off and confine my efforts to the only activity that mattered.
However, even with this ability, I can’t conclude with certainty that it wouldn’t destroy my mental and in addition, physical health. I know a woman, who has been in this business since she was 8 – she used to recite poems on funerals. Now she is 40, she is a mortician and despite the fact that she is my mother’s peer, she looks much older and strained. She has already been hospitalized after collapsing from an antidepressant overdose and she was in a really critical condition. I think every human being has their boundaries and no matter how strong they are, sooner or later doing this particular activity would break them, if they hadn't been broken before.
@Viki
DeleteI can truly relate to you stopping to read the article for a while. Marana gana genre itself is very dark and horrific. Besides, when you add the life stories of the people interviewed, it’s truly heart-touching and makes you think about the atrocious destinies of all these persons. They’ve lost so much in their lives, however, they didn’t give up and found something which helps them, as well as to other people, to overcome their grief. I’m again fascinated how can this philosophy have such a different impact on people, as you mentioned the comparison of the PhD student and Krishnaveni. The story of Viji, self-proclaimed premier marana gana musician, is spellbinding too. He has never been to any school and can’t read very well, however, he is educated. He claims to gain all his knowledge from reincarnation. Marana gana is a unique but still dangerous way of dealing with death. I agree with @Viki that certainly, it’s not for everyone.
Viki,
DeleteI completely agree with the most of your comment, especially one of your last thoughts, that “every human being has their boundaries”, made me wonder. In my opinion, taking this kind of job could be extremely harmful for one’s mental health. I’ve never been to a funeral but I can imagine that it is not something easy to deal with, especially for the people like me, who know and believe that they won’t see their beloved one ever again and that they are completely gone. Surely, it does not have to be such a big deal for people in India (or, as far as I know, some tribes of Native Americans also have their own traditional death ceremonies, which are very different from the one that we do), who believe in reincarnation and many other types of afterlife. I can imagine that they take it as a part of a normal, everyday life and for some of them it can be something like their life mission. Also, maybe it is more common to see death in their country than it is here, so they are kind of used to it. Despite that, I can’t imagine myself or you, Viki, doing this for the rest of our lives, just for the fact that when you’re an artist, you tend to be more sensitive and I think it’s not healthy to feel a grief so often and so deeply.
In my opnion, funerals are a essential part of life. They are usually something very hard to go through, but I think they are very important in helping a person get through their loss and say goodbye to their loved one. Some of the things they do in India during the ceremonies are quite atypical. They are very open about death. It is mentioned, that the corpse is sometimes mad to sit upright during the ceremonies. They also mention how the mourning can go on for days after the official funeral which I think is quite logical and useful when saying goodbye to a loved one. I also find it interesting that in the ceremonies performed for fisherman, an important part is the transition of the widow into widowhood. I find it interesting that they focus on the living in a way, and not only on the dead. I think that is the way it should be. Funerals are meant for the living and should be performed in a way which should help them get through their loss.
ReplyDeleteThe funerals we tend to have are very different from the ones held in India. They are much more closed off and quite formal. We have very little, if any, traditions which we perform during funerals. The funerals here are in a way very quiet. When I think of a typical funeral in Europe, I don’t think of singing and celebrating the life of a loved one, but of something tragic, sad, formal and maybe mandatory. Mandatory, at last in Slovakia, we have to attend the funeral because what will everybody else think if you don’t come to pay your respects? So maybe in the funerals we have and the ones held in India, there is one aspect similar. Funerals are held for the living.
Barbora,
DeleteYou make a great point by saying that funerals are for the living. It provides closure to the family of the deceased and an opportunity to give their final goodbyes. But are our funeral ceremonies that much different than the ones mentioned in the article? I don't see much differrence between filling a corpse with preservatives and displaying it in a coffin and having it sit on a throne. To me, they are both equally weird, for the lack of a better term. In our culture, singing and dancing at a funeral is considered unconventional, but there certainly are cultures (just like the one in the article) that would consider mourning in silence, priests and prayers strange. Moreover, you yourself mentioned that funerals are for the living to cope with their loss, and this would apply to both our European funerals and the Indian ones from the article, so fundamentally, the two ceremonies are really not that different.