Not Everyone Is Cremated

Cremation's textual basis reaches back to the Rigveda itself, whose funeral hymns address Agni, fire, directly as the god who carries the deceased onward to the ancestors and the world of the fathers, framing the pyre not as disposal of remains but as a vehicle of transition, a role fire plays nowhere else in Hindu ritual quite so literally as it does here. Despite cremation's centrality, Hindu practice has never treated it as universal: infants and very young children who die before certain rites have been performed are traditionally buried rather than cremated in many communities, on the reasoning that they have not yet been fully incorporated into the samskara sequence cremation itself belongs to, and renunciate ascetics, sannyasis, who have formally relinquished ordinary social and ritual identity during life are likewise typically buried, sometimes seated in meditation posture, rather than cremated, since the rites cremation is bound up with pertain to a householder's life the renunciate has already ritually left behind. Antyeshti's completion does not end a family's ritual obligation to the deceased; a further sequence of memorial rites, the shraddha offerings made at fixed intervals afterward to sustain the departed on their continuing journey, follows directly from antyeshti as a related but distinct rite in its own right.