Inside Varanasi's Burning Ghats During the Darkest Days of COVID

What was the story of the rest of India beyond the pyres burning in the cities? This question led me towards a new chapter in my assignment.

IT cell trolls had launched a scathing campaign against those of us who reported from the ground, holding us responsible for ‘spreading negativity’. They branded us as ‘vultures’ (drawing parallels between the iconic 1993 Kevin Carter photograph of a collapsed child lying vulnerably close to a vulture during the famine in Sudan).

With every report that went live, the IT cell flooded the comment sections of the handles of journalists like Danish Siddiqui, me and many others reporting from the frontlines.

The Uttar Pradesh government had also grown increasingly antagonistic following the reports on undercounting of deaths. In Varanasi, the stakes were even higher. As the constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, any news coming from the ground was subjected to intense scrutiny.

The evening I reached Varanasi was marked by the haunting images of the Ganga ghats. The visuals had gone viral, sending shockwaves across social media platforms. I visited the Manikarnika and Raja Harishchandra ghats that very evening. Countless dead bodies were there. Long queues of corpses awaited their last rites. Those who had spent their entire lives at these ghats—the shopkeepers, labourers, Doms (cremators) and priests—all said they had never witnessed anything of this magnitude.

The state wanted to divert the media’s gaze from the ghats. The Varanasi district administration, in a strategic move, established a makeshift tin crematorium overnight, and called it Ramana Ghat. This new ghat was located on the opposite bank of the Ganga river. The counterparts of Varanasi’s local administration in Lucknow had blocked the burning pyres from sight by installing tin sheds. Since I had already reported on the undercounting of deaths from Lucknow, I decided not to pursue the same line in another city.

Instead, I returned to my hotel and sent emails and messages to the Collector, CMO and other key officials, seeking appointments to have a word with them. The next morning, I started visiting their offices in person, but in vain.

Disappointed, I returned to Harishchandra Ghat that evening. As I entered the narrow alleys, a group of Doms was carrying a body to its final destination. I trailed after it. The Doms had severely tanned bodies, and their eyes were red. Their gamchhas were soaked in sweat. They paid no heed to my camera.

Unlike the doctors, the nurses and the bureaucrats, who had taken centre stage as frontline soldiers, the Doms remained in the shadows. They wore no gloves, masks or PPE kits. No relief packages were announced for them.

They toiled silently in the crematoriums along the Ganga. They carried the dead who had been abandoned on their last journey by their families. Their contribution during the second wave went unnoticed by a large section of the media and the administration. What does this oversight tell us?

That the first draft of history systemically excluded a particular community?

As the group of Doms vanished into the smoke rising from the burning pyres, I spotted the person in charge of Harishchandra Ghat at a distance. He was busy making phone calls as his role involved coordination between the Nagar Nigam and the Doms at the cremation ground. We sat down nearby to talk about the situation.

He started with an incident when his team of young men had cremated the corpse of an elderly lady whose family hadn’t turned up for the last rites. Then he pointed towards a group of Doms: ‘Some of them went to her home and carried her here.’

This wasn’t their duty to perform as they weren’t formally employed by the Nagar Nigam. But since the Nagar Nigam across the country was struggling with human resources, they outsourced some of the work to these Doms.

I later verified the incident with an official in the local administration. He had been tasked with the duty of getting the abandoned corpses cremated.

‘There are families that simply refuse to come forward for the last rites. At BHU, this is an everyday occurrence. We wait for some time and then call the Doms,’ he said. But the Doms weren’t paid a penny for the extra mile they went to provide people dignity in death. They were overworked, underpaid and exhausted.

Hundreds of families hesitated to go to crematoriums during the second wave, fearing the viral load in hospitals or worrying for their family members who were still uninfected. However, the kind of apathy some families displayed towards their elderly members is indescribable. In a viral video recorded by a Noida-based hospital’s staff member, one family denied entry to their recovered grandmother. The hospital team stood outside their home, waiting for access. Eventually, one of them had to scale the gate to open it from the inside.

I closely followed the Doms while in Varanasi. They worked in gruelling twelve to fifteen-hour shifts every day without breaking to eat. The break only came at night when they sat down after cremating the last corpse in the queue. Getting a conversation with them during the day proved nearly impossible. Even if some of them did speak to me, the exchanges lacked depth. So, I kept following them through narrow alleys right up to the entrance of the burning ghats, interjecting with questions along the way. At night, they would gather on the steps by the riverbank, and consume locally-made liquor to cope with physical and emotional exhaustion.

When I briefed him about my story, Arunesh had unequivocally declared that he would not drive me to the ghats after dark.

His reluctance came from a genuine concern for me. ‘If you were a man, I wouldn’t hesitate to drive you around at midnight. But it’s not safe for you.’ One of my daytime trips to the Ganga acquainted me with Akash Chaudhary (name changed to protect identity), a thin and sharp-faced Dom in his late twenties. I requested him to sit with me for a bit. Though initially hesitant, he joined me near a pyre assigned to him, as it demanded his undivided attention. He had to finish the cremation as quickly as he could because the next corpse, shrouded in white and with a marigold garland over it, awaited him.

‘What can we do? We are not even getting time to have a proper meal. If it weren’t for the liquor, how would we light so many pyres?’ He continued, ‘Since the priests have fled, the Doms have to perform their duty as well.’

‘How many bodies have you cremated in a single day?’ I asked.

‘Thirty-five,’ he counted on his fingertips.

‘Since when have you been at this ghat?’

‘Since childhood. I don’t even remember when I began cremating bodies.’

I prodded further, ‘Have you ever seen these many bodies before?’

‘Never. It takes hours to cremate one body. Burning pyres non-stop over the years in scorching sun has burnt my body.’ He wiped off sweat from his forehead. The corpse’s head still needed more heat. Akash waited for the head to turn into ashes as his team climbed the stairs to bring in another COVID body abandoned by its family.

The surroundings of the ghat buzzed with people, some wearing double masks, others with face shields and a few in full PPE suits. The usual legacy Banarasi sari shops stood shuttered. Only vendors selling shrouds, garlands and wood for pyres and a handful of tea stalls remained open.

Close to where Akash and I sat, a tea vendor was resting. A mother and her daughter were mourning their dead silently, standing on one side; the daughter adjusted her mask and gloves while the mother stared into the void. Families had no time to come to terms with the sudden demise of their loved ones. And then they jostled at the ghats to find space for cremation.

During the first wave, the Indian government had permitted the participation of twenty relatives in the funeral of a non-COVID deceased; only five people could attend the cremation in case of a COVID-related death. The second wave changed the rules. Now, some bodies arrived with a few attendants, while some came with none. In Delhi, where the crematoriums ran out of space, people had to cremate their relatives in parking lots and along the sides of roads. The pandemic challenged the practices that had gone on for generations. For instance, women aren’t traditionally allowed to light funeral pyres. But at Harishchandra Ghat, I witnessed a mother-daughter duo standing side by side in front of a pyre. With trembling hands, they lit the pyre of their loved one. The Doms, who had carried the corpse on the deceased’s final journey, stepped forward to assume the role of a priest, guiding the pair. For me, as a woman, witnessing this scene where both women and Doms defied centuries-old norms was surreal.

Edited excerpt from Faith and Fury: COVID Dispatches from India’s Hinterland by Jyoti Yadav, Westland Books. Reproduced with permissions.