FUNERALS OF THE BADAGAS IN SOUTHERN INDIA: Fingerprints of recent history

The Badagas are peasants living in the Nilgiris Hills District, south India. Their funeral ritual is their most important rite of passage, as it marks cultural boundaries from their neighbours. The extensive documentation of their funerals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries focuses on the symbolic forms at the centre of the event. However, from the point of view of the great number of visitors who come to pay their respects to the deceased and ‘his (or her) village’ as a social unit, another side of the coin emerges. Such visitors are less concerned about the threat of pollution and ritual conduct and focus instead on local co-operation, micro-politics and inter-village relationships. Nonetheless the ‘inside view’ and the ‘outside view’ of funerals are dialectically connected, and both contribute to the ritual totality. Badaga funerals are more than what Robert Hertz called a ‘triumph over death’ or a re-confirmation of the cosmic order as Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry have it – to cite Peter Geschiere, they are also an ‘ultimate test of belonging’. In this article, I shall focus on the social dimensions and the making of group boundaries and deal with the symbolic aspects of Badaga funerals only in passing. I argue that funerals – like fingerprints – can be identified as such by their form, despite each one being different.