The recent last rites of Zarine Khan (nee Katrak), the wife of Bollywood actor Sanjay Khan, generated a lot of controversy among netizens. Pictures showing her son, Zayed, performing what looked like Hindu funerary rituals created confusion given that Zarine was married to a Muslim.
A day following the funeral, Zarine’s daughter Farah cleared the air. “Born a Parsi, married as a Muslim, and cremated according to Hindu rites — she epitomised humanity. She was the bond that held our family together, and her legacy is something we hope to live by,” she wrote in tribute to her mother.
Social media discourse also pointed out that while Parsi funerary customs are different, involving excarnation and sky burial, the environmental catastrophe that took place in the Indian subcontinent in the 1990s, when most vultures vanished from the region due to the drug diclofenac, has led to Parsis in India exploring other options like cremation. Netizens cited the instance of Ratan Tata, a stalwart of the Parsi community, who was also cremated.
That said, why do the Parsi-Zoroastrian community believe in excarnation, the practice of leaving corpses exposed to the elements, where birds or other animals may scavenge the flesh?
The answer lies in the Vendidad, one of the most important and valuable Zoroastrian scriptures. It has information about the laws, customs and traditions of ancient Zoroastrians.
The Vendidad places great importance on purity. “The first object of man is purity, yaozdau: 'purity is for man, next to life, the greatest good,” it notes.
In his 1928 paper, The Funeral Ceremonies of the Parsees: Their origin and explanation, Jivanji Jamshedji Modi points out that: “At the bottom of their (Parsis’) custom of disposing of the dead, and at the bottom of all the strict religious ceremonies enjoined therewith, lies the one main principle, viz., that preserving all possible respect for the dead, the body, after its separation from the immortal soul, should be disposed of in a way the least harmful and the least injurious to the living.”
In an article published in 1993, British scholar of Iranian languages and authority on Zoroastrianism, Mary Boyce notes that, “In Zoroastrianism the corpse (Av. nasu-, Pahl. nasā) of a righteous believer was held to be the greatest source of pollution in the world, as the death of such a one represented a triumph for evil, whose forces were thought to be gathered there in strength. In particular the corpse demon (Av. Nasu-, Pahl. Nasuš, Nasrušt) was believed to rush into the body and contaminate all that came in contact with it.”
The ancient Iranians were part of the Indo-European peoples that also included Greeks, Romans, Vikings, Celts and Vedic Indians.
However, contrary to these other peoples who either practiced burial or cremation, Zoroastrianism strictly eschewed both. And for good reason.
The French author, orientalist, and antiquarian James Darmesteter explains this in his translation of the Avesta for Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East series.
“The Indo-Europeans either burnt the corpse or buried it: both customs are held to be sacrilegious in the Avesta,” writes Darmesteter.
“This view originated from the notion of the holiness of the elements being pushed to an extreme. The elements, fire, earth, and water are holy, and during the Indo-Iranian period they were already considered so, and in the Vedas they are worshipped as godlike beings. Yet this did not prevent the Indian from burning his dead; death did not appear to him so decidedly a work of the demon, and the dead man was a traveller to the other world, whom the fire kindly carried to his heavenly abode ‘on his undecaying, flying pinions, wherewith he killed the demons.’ The fire was in that, as in the sacrifice, the god that goes from earth to heaven, from man to god, the mediator, the god most friendly to man,” he adds.
But west of India, in Persia, fire “remains more distant from him; being an earthly form of the eternal, infinite, godly light, no death, no uncleanness can be allowed to enter it, as it is here below the purest offspring of the good spirit, the purest part of his pure creation. Its only function is to repel the fiends with its bright blazing.”
Burning the dead is a sin for which there is no atonement, according to the Avesta.
Other elements like water and earth were looked upon similarly.
“Water was looked upon in the same light. Bringing dead matter to it is as bad as bringing it to the fire… Not less holy was the earth, or, at least, it became so. There was a goddess who lived in her, Spenta Ârmaiti; no corpse ought to defile her sacred breast: burying the dead is, like burning the dead, a deed for which there is no atonement,” writes Darmesteter.
Given this theological basis, ancient Iranians built special buildings on the periphery of cities and towns, where the dead could be laid, exposed to the elements.
“The Towers of Silence are generally built on tops of hills or on an elevated ground,” notes Modi.
He then cites lines from the Vendidad, where Zarathustra, the founder of Zoroastrianism, asks this question to Ahura Mazda, its creator god:
“O Holy Creator of the material world! where are we to carry the bodies of the dead? O Ahura Mazda! where are we to place them?' Ahura Mazda replied 'O Spitama Zarathushtra, on the most elevated place.'” (Vend. 7.44-45)”
“The vultures (nature’s scavengers) do their work much more expeditiously than millions of insects would do, if dead bodies were buried in the ground. By this rapid process, putrefaction with all its concomitant evils, is most effectually prevented,” observes Modi.
But today, given the decline of India’s vulture population, Parsis have been forced to look at alternatives. Given that earth, water or fire cannot be used for disposal of the dead, the use of cremation or burial has generated a lot of controversy within the Parsi community, with traditionalist conservatives supporting excarnation and moderates throwing in their lot with the alternatives.