Dead in Banaras : ethnography of funeral travelling RAVI NANDAN SINGH.

"Ethnographies fatefully rely on chance encounters, and mysteriously so such encounters come true. 'Dead in Banaras' is an instance of just such a fateful chance encounter. In its inception, it sets out to follow the 'dead' across multiple social locations of crematoria, hospital, morgue, and the aghorashram in order to assemble a contemporary moment in the funerary iconicity of the well-known North Indian city of Banaras. The crematoria in plural because the open-air manual pyres and close-door electric furnaces sit side by side within the symbolic 'inside' of the city. Hospital and morgue became chosen destinations because in the 'local moral world' the city is a medical metropolis anchored by a famed university hospital and storied through real-life dramatic narratives of medical emergency, saving, and untimely death. Aghorashram on the other hand as an urban Shaivite clinic and hermitage for sexual and reproductive cures works with funerary substances as pharmacopeia. Then, early on in fieldwork, these funerary journeys of the 'dead' had a chance encounter with my father's death in the city. The same set of places henceforth spoke through a sensory logic of my father's death. Dead in Banaras is then both an ethnography of being in the dead centre of a city and an autobiographical funeral travelling (Shav Yatra) that narrates the city through a mourner's logic of using the pyre to illuminate the dead as a multiplicity"--