The City Where the Dead Are Released

Gaya exists, as a religious centre, for one purpose. Shraddha is the sequence of rites performed for the dead so that the departed becomes an ancestor rather than remaining a restless presence, and Gaya is the pre eminent place in India to perform it. Rajbali Pandey's study of the Hindu life cycle rites sets shraddha within a larger system in which the living owe the dead a debt that is discharged by offerings, and in which the offering of pinda, balls of rice, feeds and constitutes the ancestral body. What makes Gaya distinctive is scope and finality. A pilgrim performing the rites there offers not only for parents but for the whole line, for relatives whose names are not known, and in some formulations for anyone connected to the family who died without rites, and the tradition holds that the offering made at Gaya releases them permanently. That is a strong claim and it draws a very particular kind of visitor.

The Vishnupad Temple stands over a footprint in rock held to be Vishnu's, and the pilgrimage runs as a circuit of offering places, many of them along the bed of the Phalgu river, which is dry for much of the year and is worked by digging down into the sand for water. The number of places on the circuit varies between the manuals that describe it, and priestly families at Gaya have long guided pilgrims through the sequence.