After death: 5 unique and unheard funeral traditions in India that will leave you fascinated
I have always been drawn to how societies hold death — the quiet choreography that turns private loss into public ritual. Reading Kafka’s ruminations on mortality reminded me that death is as much a cultural text as a biological fact (Franz Kafka). Films and documentary work have only sharpened my curiosity about how rituals reflect a people’s deepest beliefs (a surprisingly good primer on cultural storytelling is a list of overlooked films I came across recently, which emphasises how cinema holds up a mirror to death, grief and social meaning 21st Century’s 100 Best Overlooked Movies). And when I revisited the religious basis of afterlife practices — especially in Buddhist contexts — I saw how doctrine shapes ceremonial choices (Buddhism).
India is a continent of funerary logics. Below are five traditions — some living, some historical, some adapted — that surprised me, not because they are macabre, but because they radically reframe what it means to send someone on their way.
1) Tower of Silence (Parsi Dakhma): the sky as the final altar
The Parsis in India traditionally used circular stone enclosures called Dakhmas, or Towers of Silence, where the dead are placed to be reduced by sun and scavengers (vultures). The theology behind this — avoiding contaminating fire, earth or water — is elegant: exposure returns the body to nature without polluting sacred elements.
Walking near one of the towers (now increasingly rare and contested) felt like standing at the edge of a cosmology: the community trusts nature’s cleaners to do the final work. Today the precipitous decline of vulture populations and urban pressures have forced Parsis to adapt their rites, which is a live example of how ecology intersects with ritual.
2) Sky burial (Tibetan jhator) — a Buddhist way of giving back
In Tibetan Buddhism the body is often regarded as a vessel; the compassionate act is to offer it to other living beings. Sky burial, or jhator, where a corpse is exposed on a high place to be consumed by birds and beasts, is less about spectacle and more about a teaching in impermanence and generosity.
This practice is rooted in Buddhist understandings of body, mind and karma, and it illustrates how religious philosophy (discussed in overview in works on Buddhism) translates into intimate, practical rites in remote Himalayan communities (Buddhism). Contemporary Tibetan communities in India — including exiles — have kept many traditions alive, and the sky burial is one of the most striking examples of doctrine expressed in action.
3) Varanasi cremation: a river city where dying and salvation meet
If the geography of death had a capital, Varanasi would be it for many Hindus. The ghats along the Ganges are a continuous, living funeral: families perform last rites, bodies are cremated, ashes sent downstream. For those who can afford it, dying in Varanasi is said to confer moksha (liberation).
It’s a solemn, luminous theatre of grief and release — pyres and prayers against the river’s slow current. I remember the way the light falls at dusk there: sorrow, ritual, and the sense that endings are folded into a much larger story.
4) Kodava (Coorg) burial customs: a different Hindu path
The Kodava people of Coorg (Kodagu) in Karnataka are notable among many Hindu communities because they traditionally bury, rather than cremate, their dead. Their funerary customs emphasise clan continuity and close ancestor reverence.
Burial in Kodagu is woven into kinship and landscape: the dead are interred in family cemetery plots and remembered through seasonal rites. To outsiders it feels distinctive because it bucks the general Hindu norm of cremation — a reminder that India’s “Hindu” practices contain powerful local variations.
5) Naga funeral feasts and the memory of headhunting
Much of northeastern India preserves funeral forms shaped by tribal histories. Among various Naga tribes, funerals were historically linked to status, warriorhood and communal memory — including, in pre‑colonial times, headhunting practices that have now ceased. Funerary feasts, elaborate exchanges, and communal rites still mark death as a social pivot: funerals are not only about the dead, but about maintaining social bonds and public order.
When I encountered descriptions of these rituals I was struck by how funerals can function as public theatre of identity — a point that film and literature repeatedly make when they explore death as a social text (21st Century’s 100 Best Overlooked Movies; Franz Kafka).
What these traditions taught me
Rituals are linguistic. They are a language that a community uses to answer: "What happens now? What do we owe the dead?" The forms — exposure, cremation, burial, feasting — are sentences in that language.
Ecology matters. The Tower of Silence shows how a decline in vulture populations can force theological and practical change.
Doctrine travels into the body. Tibetan sky burial makes Buddhist anthropology tangible; the Varanasi pyres make liberation corporeal.
Diversity is the point. India’s funerary universe refuses a single script: local geology, ecology, history and belief produce distinct ways to say goodbye.
I close this with a small, personal confession: rituals that used to feel exotic now feel like invitations. They ask us not merely to look but to listen — to the birds, the river, the stories told at a funeral feast. Reading about Buddhist conceptions of impermanence (Buddhism) and revisiting Kafka’s obsessions with death and meaning (Franz Kafka) helped me see these rites not as curiosities but as choices. Even cinema — the way storytellers film death and mourning — helped me frame the question: what does a goodbye say about the world a community is trying to hold on to or let go of? (21st Century’s 100 Best Overlooked Movies).
If you travel in India, watch. If you can’t, read. But always bring humility: these are not anthropology exercises — they are living, breathing responses to loss.
Regards,
Hemen Parekh
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