[Mr. Lodha’s fast was
significant for another reason: He took the vow on the same day that a high
court judge in the state of Rajasthan declared the fast unto
death to be a form of suicide, which is illegal under Indian law.
When the case is appealed to the Supreme Court, as expected, it will rank among
a handful of instances defining when the state should interfere with religious
practice — most memorably, the
1987 act that banned
glorification of suttee, an outlawed ritual in which widows climbed onto their
husbands’ funeral pyres and were burned to death.]
a
 |
Jain nuns in a temple in Pune.
A judge's ruling barring the religion's practice of
santhara is expected to be appealed to the Supreme
Court. Credit Serena De Sanctis
for The New York Times
|
PUNE, India
On a bed in a corner of a large sitting room, surrounded by a
crowd of reverent visitors, the family’s 92-year-old patriarch, Manikchand
Lodha, was fasting to death. It was the culmination of an act of santhara, a
voluntary, systematic starvation ritual undertaken every year by several
hundred members of the austere, ancient Jain religion.
Mr. Lodha had begun the process some three years earlier, after
a fall left him bedridden. First he renounced pleasures like tea and tobacco.
Then things he loved, like television. He gave up medicine, even refusing an
air mattress to ease his bedsores. On Aug. 10, he took the ancient vow and gave
up food and water.
When he died Aug. 16, the house was festooned with
orange-and-white bunting. Visitors were offered bowls of sweets bathed in syrup.
“Look
at us — do we look like we are in mourning?” said Sunita, Mr. Lodha’s
daughter-in-law. “We are celebrating, because one of our family members has
achieved something great. We were able to know him. That was our good fortune.”
Mr. Lodha’s fast was
significant for another reason: He took the vow on the same day that a high
court judge in the state of Rajasthan declared the fast unto
death to be a form of suicide, which is illegal under Indian law.
When the case is appealed to the Supreme Court, as expected, it will rank among
a handful of instances defining when the state should interfere with religious
practice — most memorably, the
1987 act that banned
glorification of suttee, an outlawed ritual in which widows climbed onto their
husbands’ funeral pyres and were burned to death.
This is a thorny constitutional question for India,
which enshrines the right to both life and religious practice. Religious
rituals are interwoven with everyday life in India,
where in certain seasons downtown traffic halts behind convoys of flatbed
trucks loaded with papier-mâché goddesses headed for Hindu festivals. Indian
leaders, from Gandhi to Narendra Modi, have observed strict fasts, and the
Indian government subsidizes a range of spiritual pilgrimages.
After the ruling, some blamed
the Indian Penal Code, drafted under the British colonial administration, for
its inability to accommodate India
“Here, the narrowness of English and incommensurable ideas of
death run into a head-on collision,” wrote Pratap
Bhanu Mehta, a policy analyst and a Jain, in the daily Indian
Express. “Just as English often flattens translations from Sanskrit by
describing all nine varieties of love as ‘love,’ so it is with death.”
Acts of renunciation are central to many of India
No practice is more demanding than santhara, which was first
mentioned in texts written more than 1,500 years ago and derives from a word in
the ancient Prakrit language meaning “bed of grass.” According to Jain
doctrine, the ordeal, which generally must be approved by a guru and the
individual’s family members, burns up the film of karma that clogs the soul,
allowing the spirit to break free from the cycle of rebirth and death.
In 2006, an activist based in Rajasthan named Nikhil Soni filed
a court petition arguing that the practice violated the Indian prohibition of
suicide. He contended that people were being encouraged to take the vow when
they could no longer properly give consent and that the practice, like suttee,
was used to free families of the economic burden of caring for the elderly.
“Why is it that only those people who are ill and on the verge
of death are opting for santhara?” he told the documentary filmmaker Shekhar Hattangadi.
“Is it that it’s being imposed on them?”
In cases where the individual
does clearly wish to die, supporting the fast amounts to abetting suicide,
which is also a crime in India
“A person who is at the stage where he wishes personal death —
that is the case when he needs more care, more medicines, more nourishing
food,” Mr. Mitra said. “On the contrary, you stop his food, stop his water,
stop medicating him in that situation. Anybody can presume how painful it is.”
Jain leaders, who argue that the practice is constitutionally
protected, are mobilizing to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, and they
led protest marches across the country on Monday. In the meantime, families are
no longer publicizing their relatives’ fasts the way they once did, with
advertisements in newspapers and posters guiding pilgrims to their homes.
Babulal Jain Ujjwal, who publishes an annual newsletter on Jain
affairs from Mumbai, has counted an average of 450 santharas a year over the
last six years, but he said that reports had dropped off sharply this spring,
perhaps because families were keeping them secret.
“Santharas are happening, there is no doubt about that, but they
are happening quietly,” he said.
One of those was Prekshabai Mahasatiji’s. A nun since the age of
18, she had been asking her guru for permission to fast to death for months,
but he had refused, saying that at 52 she was too young. But he changed his
mind in June, when after three sessions of chemotherapy her doctors said they
could no longer treat her cancer.
She
spent 47 days on a hospital bed inside a monastery, with 23 nuns turning her
body to alleviate bedsores and craning her neck to feed her water from a
tablespoon. During the last stages, her brother said, she could no longer
control her bodily functions, and the nuns mopped her body in the bed.
Crowds amassed around her, spreading stories about a divine
glow.
“She had a joy on her face that is
indescribable,” said her guru, Muni Shri Prakashsundarji Swami. “I would look
at her and ask, ‘Would you like to eat?’ and she would smile and say, ‘No.’”
When she died, her body was bound to a plank and propped upright
in the posture of prayer, her palms tied together inside a white muslin cloth,
and placed in a palanquin, which was carried across town in a swarming parade.
Her
brother, Praveen Waghji Gala, said the family had hired a professional
photographer to document the progress of her fast, starting the day she left
the hospital.
“Thousands and thousands of people came to see her,” he said.
“We worked through the day and night to make sure that our relatives were able
to get access to her. It is a very big honor in our community.”
Some 90 miles to the north, Manikchand Lodha was also approaching
the end.
Born into a prominent family that runs a group of electronics
and technology companies, he had hardly lived as an ascetic. He loved sweet tea
and Hindi family melodramas, and as he approached his 90th birthday, he asked
his grandson’s new wife, Disha, to paint his portrait. Around the same time, a
fractured bone left him bedridden, and he wrote a letter to his family with
instructions on how to dispose of his body.
With that, slowly, at intervals of two to three months, he
abandoned one thing after another: tea, newspapers, telephone conversations,
then religious recordings, said his son, Sumitlal Manikchand Lodha. Once eager
to recount his physical ailments, he now seemed not to notice his body at all.
Then, his son said, “a time came when he detached from relations,” and his
communications, even with those dearest to him, shrank to a flicker of a smile.
“He was leaving,” his son said. “I was observing it very
minutely because I was the caretaker, how he was making his circle smaller and
smaller.”
By early August, he was unable to swallow food, and the family,
which had discouraged him from undertaking santhara when he had suggested it
before, called in a holy man. Disha, who in recent weeks had been dripping
water into his mouth with a spoon, was brokenhearted.
“There was some difference of opinion,” his son said. “There was
a basic attachment, just like a doctor cannot operate on his own family.”
Within a day, the house was filled with people, first a stream
of relatives, by word of mouth, and then throngs of strangers, all invited to
eat from a banquet table. An invitation bounced around WhatsApp.
“His face was shining like the
sun,” said Bikramchand Solanki, a distant relative of Mr. Lodha’s wife, who
said this was the 40th santhara he had witnessed.
After Mr. Lodha died, the house suddenly emptied, but for a few
neighbors and well-wishers who lingered, comparing notes on what had happened.
The strangest thing, his son said, was that toward the end, when he touched his
father, he felt a small shock — he could not explain it — as if his father’s
body carried an electric charge.
“Santhara is
something that came to him,” said Sunita, his daughter-in-law. “It does not
come to everyone. He must have done something good that he got such a death.”
