The annual shraddha season, a festival to celebrate the fortnight-long annual visit of the souls of our ancients, is upon us. From September 18th to be precise. Our ancestors were in the habit of packing time in precise blocks in almanacks, to mark both mournings and celebration periods for the departed members of families. There is above all a great emphasis on memory and reverence, (root word for shraddha is shriddha or veneration) as memories are rekindled and offerings made. The definitions of the actual rituals have mutated over centuries and various versions have been adopted by families including the convenience of virtually performing shraddha in cyberspace.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
The fixed canonical tradition in traditional farming communities like ours, I found as a child, had survived like a thread on which women of the family had strung their own family versions, crafted and handed to them by successive generations of their mothers-in-law. I suspected they rather loved the rituals of shraddha. It was a rare occasion when they were indispensable to the male world that called the shots most of the time. When it came to naming the dead or cooking their favourite dishes, they could fearlessly interrupt and correct even the ancient family priest, as they were the only authentic repositories of the correct genealogical data of the clan – including names of the various ancestors and the Gotra, Pravar and Shakha of Vedas the clan had studied once upon a time. They also meticulously remembered the dates of all births and deaths according to the lunar calendar of all members of the diaspora clans in India or the world over. They would also take care to include in the commemorative chanting all males who may have died childless or at a very young age, in war or upon a foreign soil, even old Gurus and family pets.
For us, the night before the shraddha tithi was marked by fathers sitting havik as potential performers of the shraddha for their fathers and forefathers. This meant they fasted to cleanse their souls before facing the ancestors. Of course the genealogical tables were all male. Among women, the ritual named only the performers’ mothers and grandmothers. During the rituals, it was the women however, who kept the memorial bridge intact so the living and dead could merge for a while and all the departed ones were rehydrated. Family children hung around the venue, usually the vast stone courtyard of ancient family houses, with unconcealed greed in their eyes.
On the morning of the shraddha, the women of the family who were early risers, woke even earlier and cleaned the stone courtyard, washing it ritualistically and purifying it. After this they busied themselves cooking a ritual meal. This meal avoided some of the usual ingredients like turmeric, tomatoes, onions, garlic, black gram dal – ingredients associated with meals prepared for happy occasions – and had a proliferation of root vegetables, greens and various varieties of gourds. The blandness was toned down a bit by addition of puffy Puris, aromatic Kheer rich with dry fruits and Vadas and delicacies that the Departed Ones were said to have fancied: bitter gourd fritters, Badam Halwa or stuffed Kachoris.
At the set time, our lean and ever so emaciated looking family priest, Lachhi kaka, arrived with his almanack, other reference books and a bunch of Kusha grasses out of which he fashioned rings for the fasting men. He threw an indulgent glance at us, enquiring – of our brothers – if they were doing well in school and then said “good-good” in English.
The men looking subdued and vulnerable took their place on Kusha mats, or on sand, wearing their Darbha rings. Darbha was a grass that symbolised undying links between roots to the new sprouts. A hush fell as the Kartas sat cross legged and Lachhi kaka helped them make balls of cooked rice mixed with ghee and black sesame seeds. The balls were pinda (literally, the body), and offering these to the venerable deceased was pind daan. An offering and an affirmation of the eternal chain of birth and continuation of life in the body of one’s descendants. The rice balls under Lachhi kaka’s eagle eyes became elaborate pieces in a game of chess. The rice balls were kneaded together to signify merger of families and genes and then subdivided into three parts, signalling how everyone came from a mixed heritage. The doer then sniffed them to denote imbibing of the total essence and passing the olfactory memories on to the souls of the ancestors within him. The leaf plates and the rice were finally offered to crows, usually the lowest in the ornithological chain, but deemed divine intermediaries between the ancestors’ souls and their successors. We sat down happily at this point to the feast for our ancestors. It was not called not a meal (khana or bhojan) but prasad, platters of which were also shared with all neighbours as holy offerings.
How many of us now want to return and resurrect the dead each year? How much do the young do or wish to remember? Our family almanacks and tables belong to the Gutenberg era, my daughters to Zukerberg’s, a generation almost entirely networked into virtual spaces, saving memories only on clouds? Their new virtual world has no matching inter-generational public space in the real world. Perhaps there is no need for it. Everything is hurtling so fast into the future that even old Google maps are now a maze in the changing geography of our congested towns.
“Oh, Google map brought you here?” an amused shopkeeper in Dehradun asked us. “This has been a dead end for cars for a year. Only scooters can pass through the alley. Go back to the main road,” he told us.
Where do we locate a cloud that saves memories of old roads, less fast but well travelled ?
The post pandemic generation, secure in their knowledge bubbles and connections in cyber space, know almost nothing about the hierarchies of death and the whole methodology of remembrance rituals that tell us how lucky we are to be living humans and also how vulnerable. Family memories have long evaporated in a diasporan civilisation as each migrant family struggles to remember its recently dead and dismisses others. At most they sigh and say we are all headed for mass extinction. But looking at the masses that come out like monsoon ants when our prime minister visits the US or any part of the globe, it does not seem like cyber knowledge has mitigated human greed, lust or a pathetic hanging on to dead cultures.
Is it possible to go out while there is still time and develop a new ritual for a public sharing of feelings and fears and love or to find the lost main road to memories once again?
Saakhi is a Sunday column from Mrinal Pande, in which she writes of what she sees and also participates in. That has been her burden to bear ever since she embarked on a life as a journalist, writer, editor, author and as chairperson of Prasar Bharti. Her journey of being a witness-participant continues.
Mrinal Pande is a writer and veteran journalist.
