Annihilation of Dignity

From Varanasi's funeral pyres to Delhi's sewers, India's caste system creates hazardous working conditions for the country's most marginalised communities, leaving them with psychological and physical scars

- Avantika Mehta

A human corpse burns at 1,000 degrees Celsius. A living human exposed to such heat can watch their sweat vanish before it can drip, their skin singe, and their hair curl and sear at the edges. Burnt to a deep brown, with hairless arms and chest, Shalok Chaudhry lights funeral pyres for about “30 to 100 bodies a day” on a slow day. Visible burn marks stain his fingertips.

Chaudhry laughed at the sores on his hands. “I get burnt here and there because I have to move through the pyres and arrange the wood to make sure all the bodies are burning properly. It happens,” he said, scoffing at his injuries.

One of roughly 200 Dom workers who stoke the Hindu funeral pyres at the Manikarnika Ghat in Varanasi, Chaudhry works under Dom Raja Om Chaudhry and his nephew Shalu Chaudhry. The 32-year-old once used to work as a government clerk. “I knew I had to come back eventually and do this work. I would think about it often, and I think people sensed it too, so I gave it all up and moved back to fulfil our caste’s duty. Every one of us has to do this, no matter what else we do,” he said.

As the sun sank into the Ganges, Manikarnika Ghat was awash with activity and desperate people. It is the day’s final hour in which a Hindu funeral pyre can be lit. Bodies wrapped in saffron cloth are laid out on bamboo rafters. At any given moment, five or six bodies crackle in the fire, consigned to flames that rage as hot as between 5,000 and 6,000 degrees Celsius.