ABSTRACT
Hindu India never developed a rich mortuary art like that of the ancient cultures of China and Egypt. The most famous mausoleum in the subcontinent, the Taj Mahal, is a Muslim monument; and if Indians were asked to single out any group for the intrinsic interest of their funerary rites, they would probably choose the Zoroastrian Parsis who exposed their dead in the famous ‘Towers of Silence’. Yet the funeral services and rites for ancestors of the orthodox Hindus embody beliefs central to their whole philosophy and provide a dramatic display of the essential features of the still-tenacious caste system. The rites themselves are also remarkably ancient. They were recorded as early as the Laws of Manu in the second or third century B.C. 1 They appear in elaborate and often gruesome exegesis in the later books called the Purānas, especially the Markandeya Purāna (circa A.D. 400–800); 2 and the practice of the orthodox remains outwardly similar today, even though attitudes to the rituals and their institutional context have changed over recent generations. 3
