Radhika Iyengar interview: How Doms scrape a living among the dead in Banaras

Radhika saw several pyres burning at the same time. A few brown-skinned men were lighting other pyres. They were, of course, the Doms. Smoke billowed into the air. On the ground, she noticed a lot of ash. At one side, a barber was shaving the face of a mourner. On another side, there was a tea stall. Some men, with bent backs, carried logs into the area. Every few minutes, pall-bearers brought bodies on bamboo biers. Stray dogs roamed about the premises. Several men sat on their haunches, watching the proceedings. Out on the surface of the Ganges, Radhika could see marigold garlands floating.

“It was a spell-binding experience,” says Radhika, who had come to Banaras in 2015 to do a report on the Dom community for her thesis project. At the time, she was doing her Masters in Journalism at Columbia University. Little did she know then that she would return many times, as the idea crystallised into a book on the Doms, a sub-caste of the Dalit community who are often regarded by the society as untouchable. For centuries, their primary occupation has been the cremation of bodies. There is a belief that Doms must perform the cremation of upper-caste Hindus in order for them to attain moksha (relief from the cycle of rebirth).

The stories of their lives

“A Dom’s work is highly skilled,” says Radhika. “It is also dangerous and underpaid. Since it is a profession that is anchored in the caste system, the work is passed down from father to son. For many Dom families, there are no alternative work opportunities.” What pained Radhika was the humiliating way the upper castes treated them.

A few children from the community sometimes accompanied Radhika to the ghat. They would avoid a route that had a small temple. Instead, they would request Radhika to take another way. Later, she realised the children avoided that alley because the priest would shoo them away. They could not be near the temple premises. “It was unsettling to learn that,” she recollects, adding that it had a huge psychological effect on the children. “They had no means to cope and no language to express their angst,” she says. The children also saw dead bodies from an early age. One boy told her that he was only five years old when he saw a corpse. After that, for weeks, the dead man’s face would haunt him in his dreams.

Even the adult Doms went through trying times. The labour was very hard. On summer days, the heat from the pyre, coupled with the climatic temperature, took a toll on their health. Radhika says they could not afford proper medical care. Their burns and wounds went untreated. To see a doctor, they sometimes borrowed money to pay the bills. This led them into debt. To cope, they consumed large amounts of alcohol, gutkha and ganja (cannabis). “They do it to forget the stark reality of the work they do, and the lives they lead,” says Radhika.

It took courage and determination by Radhika to befriend the members of the community. She found it easier to talk to the women. “My frequent visits made me a familiar face,” she says. “The more time I spent with them, the more they realised I was serious about my work.” The men were not forthcoming initially. “I was a stranger from a different city. They were also not used to having a woman asking questions about their work or their lives.”

But Radhika persisted. She began writing the book in 2019 and completed it early this year. Interacting with the Doms affected her. “Some stories they shared with me were raw and emotional,” she says. “It’s impossible not to be affected. But I tried to ensure that my opinions did not seep into the process of storytelling.”

Fire on the Ganges delves into the struggles, the sufferings, and the agonies of the Dom community: the intense politics between family members, the jealousies, the anger, and the hate. Radhika describes the financial hardships they face and their problems with addiction; The book focuses on the lives of not only the Dom men (who have been featured in mainstream narratives in the past, solely in relation to their crematory work at the masaan), but also tries to throw light on the everyday realities of the Dom women, as well as the opportunities the children from the community have in the 21^st century, interweaving their personal experiences against the backdrop of Banaras.

The legend of the ‘sacred fire’

Radhika dwells on the difficulties of the new generation in moving away from this strenuous life and trying something new. We meet a youngster called Bhola. He had a great desire to study but was forced to stop in 2001 when he was seven years old because of poverty. In 2006, filmmaker Vikram Mathur made a documentary on the Manikarnika Ghat centred on the boys who ran around collecting the shrouds from the dead bodies. In 2009, an American named George Grey saw the premiere in New York. He felt he had to do something.

George and Vikram came to Banaras and offered to fund the education of the boys. The parents demurred saying they preferred their children work to earn some money. In the end, George agreed to pay Rs 1500 a month to the parents to make up for the loss of income the boys would have earned. And the boys, including Bhola, were enrolled in a school in Cholapur. It was a few hours away from Banaras. Later, Bhola graduated from a college in Ludhiana, and managed to get a job in Chennai. To his relief, nobody knows he belongs to the Dom community. There is a story of Komal, a Brahmin girl, who fell in love with Lakshaya, a youngster of the Dom community. Lakshaya was studying in a school. Soon, neighbours came to know. Expectedly, there was fierce opposition from both families. But they ran through the gauntlet of fire for a few years before they got married.

We also meet Dolly, who lost her husband, Sekond Lal, a few years ago. There was a suspicion that the couple’s two neighbours, Gopi and Bunty, had murdered him. But the family members said the police told them it was an accident. In 2019, even though some years had passed since his death, a strange disquiet continued to linger in Dolly’s body, writes Radhika: “It makes its presence known whenever she speaks of Sekond Lal’s death or of those who she believes are his murderers. The disquiet manifests in the form of dry grunts, a widening of her eyes, and incessant name calling. Tired and alone, Dolly is consumed by feelings of anger, sadness, betrayal, and vengeance. She slings accusations at Gopi and Bunty routinely, and at times, she issues roaring threats. “I say this: those who have murdered my husband — the way they have stolen my youth, the same way their youth will be ruined.”

One of the oldest cities in the world, Banaras holds a deep religious significance for Hindus. “It’s a city of temples, galis and extravagant Ganga aartis, but it is also a city where it is believed that a deceased’s soul will receive moksha if they are cremated at either Manikarnika Ghat or Harishchandra Ghat. Receiving moksha is inextricably linked to the physical act of a Dom cremating the deceased by using the community’s ‘sacred fire’, which has been supposedly burning for hundreds of years. This sacred fire, it is believed, was a compensatory boon granted by Shiva to the members of the Dom community, and this is a belief that has been upheld for centuries,” says Radhika.