A new selection of picture is on my website. However, I want to show some pictures here as well to explain a couple of things, mainly about the process of how people are sending their relatives to Nirvana in Varanasi. Its not allowed not to take pictures at all, since the family wants to spend the last minutes with their relatives alone. I could manage somehow though.
The family carries the dead body through the city, shouting out loud the name of the dead and blessings.
The members of the family need to buy special wood at the burning ghat to burn their beloved ones. This wood is expensive. First of all because its holy and second of all because the wood doesn’t smell bad when it gets burned and doesn’t cause black smoke.
The dead bodies get covered with special spices and get a last blessing, before they get burned.
people who work around this area make sure that the whole body gets burned and push the burning body with iron sticks back into the fire when it be out of the flames
the family stays with the fire until the body is burned down.
Along the Ganges is floating a child’s body. Children, under the age of 12, pregnant women, people who got bitten by a cobra and the holy men (Sadu) don’t get burned. Especially the cobra bite is interesting: People who “died” from a cobra bite are actually not dead. Their bodies will be send on a boat down the river and will float all the way down to the jungle. The people who are living in the jungle take the floating body out of the river and bring them back to life.
