ON THE ATTITUDES TO AGEING AND DEATH FOUND AMONG HINDUS by Dr.Maxim Voroshilov

               My contribution to the knowledge box today will include a discussion of a paper called The making and unmaking of persons: notes on ageing and gender in North India. The paper written by Sarah Lamb focuses on the attitudes towards death as found among the Hindus of a particular village in the state of West Bengal.

               A broader focus of the paper is the attitudes towards ageing shared by older people living in a small village in North Bengal, India. The researcher acknowledges that the villagers’ take on the issue was something she would not have expected because the studies she has been familiar with, by large ignored some important dimensions of the issue. The studies would normally reiterate the traditional views on how a proper Hindu is supposed to behave when they age and prepare to pass into a better world, but they were not based on studying the actual beliefs prevalent among the Hindu believers.

               Contrary to the scholars’ opinions, the villagers would emphasize that the attachments and ties, related to both material possessions or relatives, friends, food and activities — the attachments they call maya — actually, become stronger. The villagers would give three reasons, why the ties get stronger: first, it is the increased number of descendants, second, the nature of desire-fire that wants to consume more fuel when given some fuel, and third, the realization of the finiteness of life and the reality of impending death that makes the ties stronger and more difficult to overcome.

               One phenomenon Sarah Lamb witnesses in the village is that villagers, though they all agree that maya, or attachments and ties, are stronger in the end of life, they apparently discourage those who seem to remain attached to their life, activities and possessions. Indeed, the scholar describes in vivid colors how such a villager gets blamed for her attachments and failure to let them go in the end of life.

               The reason for laying the blame on those who crave life or keep their ties with the world intact, is often the fear that when deceased, that person, who failed to properly cut the ties with the world of living, will stay back to bother the living in a form of a hungry ghost unable to move on to a new birth.