Antyeshti

Antyeshti, the last sacrifice, is the Hindu funeral, counted as the final samskara or life-cycle rite, of which cremation is the central act. The body is washed, wrapped and carried to the cremation ground, and the pyre is lit by the chief mourner, usually the eldest son, who in the older rite performs the act of kapala-kriya, breaking the skull so that the vital breath may be released. The fire is addressed as it is in the Vedic sacrifice, as the carrier of the offering, so that the cremation is understood as a last self-offering into the fire that first received the person's household rites.

The rite does not end at the pyre. In the classical scheme the deceased is at first a hovering, incomplete being (preta), and the sequence of shraddha offerings over the following days and the ritual balls of rice (pinda) build for the dead a new subtle body and carry them across to join the ancestors (pitrs). Much of this is set out in the Garuda Purana, recited for the dying and the dead. The whole complex expresses a distinctive view: that the living are actively responsible for completing the passage of the dead.

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.