Helen's Round-the-World Travels: Cremation

Religious ceremonies play an enormous part in Balinese life and Made, who I was with yesterday, told me that a cremation can be the most expensive of all ceremonies, along with a wedding. A family can spend up to 15 million rupiah (about£1200) on an elaborate cremation ceremony. Many people cannot afford an individual ceremony and the body can be buried for up to three years and later cremated in a mass ceremony. The Balinese have a complicated calendar, which lays out the auspicious days for everything from starting to build a house, to a wedding or cremation. When I arrive in Ubud the guest house owner tells me that there will be a big cremation in two days time. It is quite acceptable for tourist to watch and follow the procession.

On Tuesday morning when I go out onto the street the preparations for the cremation are laid out in the road in front of the temple. There are two structures, which look rather like carnival floats. One is an elaborately decorated tower on top of a raft of bamboo poles. This is where the body will be placed to be carried to the cremation site. There is a photograph attached of the old lady in her younger years.

Funeral tower

In front of this there is an enormous model of a red mythical beast with the head of a dragon and the body of a bull (complete with balls!). This also sits on bamboo poles and will be the funeral pyre. Various people are gathering in the street as the preparations are made. There are the family members and local people, as well as tourists. The women of the family are colour-coded in orange. The atmosphere is convivial and light-hearted and people are chatting and laughing together.

The women of the family and the funeral pyre structure

I don’t understand the significance of most of what I see, so I will just describe the events. In front of the red dragon is another small structure in which a holy man is sitting making various complicated preparations with flowers, incense, beads, bells and water.

Priest

The men who are helping with the ceremony are all wearing white team T shirts with ‘6 December 2011’ printed on the left breast. They rows on palm mats on the road, waiting. They chat and laugh and gently josh with each other. Then the women of the family start anointing them, by going between the rows and applying different things to their hands and fingers and then splashing them with water.When this is complete they all pray silently and solemnly. Then they get up, like it's all over and go into the temple for something to eat and drink

Annointing the men

Men praying

Many photographs are being taken, by tourists and locals and what look like professional photographers. There is even what looks like a television or big video camera getting in amongst it all.

Photographer

There is obviously not disrespectful to touch the prepared structures, as one local man lifts two small boys up onto the beast to take their picture and children are clambering and jumping around the bamboo poles. Two small children lean against the hearse structure and play a game of‘scissors, paper, stone’.

Children playing ‘scissors, paper, stone'

Boys being photographed on the funeral beast

Men climb up onto the tower structure and prepare the place for the coffin with material with they attach and then the white wooden box is lifted up and put in place.

Preparing the tower for the coffin

This whole process has taken about an hour and a half. All along the street a large crowd has gathered and people have stopped work to stand at the front of their shops and restaurants and it is time for the procession. First comes the red dragon; then a very loud percussion band; then the women of the family carrying things on their heads; then the tower with the body.

Accompanied by the percussion music, the men in the white T shirts take their places on the bamboo poles and the structures are lifted up – not in the slow and dignified funeral crawl we are used to, but with much shouting and shaking of the structures. They run forwards, then lurch sideways and turn it round in circles, while people with hose pipes splash them with water. Every so often they stop and put the structures down and the man laugh and take a rest. My guide book tells me that the body is considered as little more than a shell for the soul and the spirit in the corpse has to be confused, so that it cannot find its way back to the world and can be liberated by the cremation for its evolution and reincarnation.

Preparing to start the procession

Percussion

Women of the family

The procession carries on down the road like this for about half a mile until we reach the cremation site within the Sacred Monkey Forest.

Arriving at the cremation site

In the forest there are some rough graves with small head stones and small offerings are scattered around. These are interred bodies awaiting a cheap mass cremation at a later date.

As the area becomes full with people the graves are walked all over and no one seems bothered by this.

Once inside the forest, the funeral prye red dragon is placed within an awaiting structure of poles with a canopy. The coffin is removed from the tower and walked 3 times round the pyre. Men use knives to cut the back off the beast and the women of the family climb up and drap their hair into this space that is awaiting the body. The body is removed from the coffin and placed into the back of the beast in its shroud. Then family members climb up and carefully cover the body with different pieces of material and maybe some of her clothes, flowers and the offerings that the women have been carrying on their heads.

Everything is ready

While this is going on a second similarly grand funeral procession arrives, but this time the coffin is small and pink. When I ask the women at my guest house about this later she says it is a small child who climbed and fell. Her English is not good enough to explain any more. nce again the people attending this cremation do not appear to be sad in any way.

Small pink coffin

The family light bunches of reeds and put them under the beast and it starts to burn immediatley.

Then a man pulls up a metal tank and squirts petrol into the bottom of the fire. Another man has a hose pipe and spays water where necessary to stop the trees catching fire.

Adding fuel to the fire