'My inspiration was a particular Hindu ceremony (shraddh), which took place on the beach of an Indian island which has for centuries been a place of pilgrimage. The poem seeks to convey my powerful, and abiding, sense that this ceremony expressed human harmony with not only birds and animals but with the whole cosmos in space and time.

The setting is Rameshvaram, a small island connected to the South East coast of India by a road and a rail bridge.



The island's sanctity results partly from its association with the great god Shiva and partly from its place in the Ramayana. This is the story of Rama's rescue of his abducted wife, Sita. Hindus believe that it was from this island that Rama set out to Sri Lanka, thanks to a causeway of rocks which Hanuman and his monkey army had laid across the sea. After rescuing Sita, Rama returned to Rameshvaram to worship Shiva in order to purify himself of the crime of killing Sita's abductor, the demon king Ravana.

A huge temple to Shiva towers over the island. In fact the 'towers' are two gopurams thirty metres high.



A gopuram is a stylised gateway, built of stone in such a way that its shape is like the base of a pylon (i.e. it tapers upwards from a broader base), and it is covered with elaborate carvings. These gopurams date from the 17th century. Inside, the temple (the 'pillared avenues') is 213 metres long.

Over 1000 years ago Rameshvaram was visited by Shankaracharya (788-820 CE). In the poem he is referred to as 'the ancient sage'. His name, Shankara, is also one of Shiva's names and 'acharya' is a title for a religious teacher. Shankaracharya is revered as one of the greatest of Hindu philosophers. His key insight is summed up as advaita - non-dualism. This means that everything - no matter how diverse the world seems - is essentially one. We humans are distracted from realising that brahman (the single ultimate reality) is more real than anything else. Even the separateness of God and creation is actually, Shankara would say, an illusion - a mistaken perception of how things are, rather like (he suggested) someone mistaking a rope for a snake. Ourselves (atman) and brahman are in reality one and the same.

View from the temple that marks the spot where Rama last set foot before crossing the sea to Sri Lanka to rescue his wife Sita.

Rameshvaram continues to attract thousands of visitors every year. Today some come as tourists, but many are pilgrims - they have a religious motivation. A major reason for Hindus to travel here from other parts of India and elsewhere in the world is Rameshvaram's importance as a place to perform the rituals known as shraddh. Shraddh refers to ceremonies that are carried out after the death of a parent or other relative. One form of shraddh is performed during the days following the cremation and relatives may also perform a shraddh in subsequent years. These rites are believed to benefit the person who has died, by making it possible for the soul (atman) to be freed from the treadmill of having to be born on earth over and over again.

Helping pilgrims to perform shraddh correctly is the professional duty of some of the brahmins (hereditary priests) who live in Rameshvaram.

My husband, Ram Krishan, is a Hindu who lives in England but whose family belong to the north Indian state of Punjab. We arrived in Rameshvaram in November, on the day of the full moon of the Hindu lunar month of Kartik. (As it happens this is the day that Sikhs celebrate the birth of Guru Nanak.) Hindus generally accept that human affairs are influenced by the planets - hence the need to consult an astrologer when planning e.g. a marriage. Some days, such as the full moon are regarded as intrinsically auspicious (i.e. what happens on them will be blessed with a good outcome.)

In Rameshvaram, as in other major pilgrimage venues, such as the city of Banaras on the river Ganges, pandas (priests - the pa is pronounced like the English word 'pa' for 'dad', not as in the Chinese bear) meet travellers on their arrival to discover what their religious requirements are and to fix them up with a priest - preferably one who speaks their language, as Indians have many different mother tongues depending on where their families live.



Like many other Hindu rituals, the shraddh at Rameshvaram involves performing a puja i.e. an act of worship in which offerings are literally made to God. The poem lists the items that are used, and these are all natural products available in South India. You can see these in the pictures, as well as the 'eager attentive goat', the 'mild watchful cow' and the 'raucous crows' crowding in.

     

(Imagine the noise of their cawing above the sound of the waves.) These and the sea beside us consumed the offerings. Nothing was wasted. Or was everything 'wasted'?

The priest's task is to guide the pilgrim through the rituals (which are in the ancient language of Sanskrit) and our priest's instructions included telling my husband how to put on his janeu in different ways (round his neck or over first one shoulder and then the other).



The janeu is a stranded thread which a brahmin man is entitled to wear. These days many don't keep this thread on all the time - only for ceremonies such as shraddh. In a book entitled Dying, Death and Bereavement in a British Hindu Community (1991, Leuven, Peeters), Shirley Firth explains the significance of the ways that the thread is worn during shraddh. She also writes about what the poem refers to as 'doughy balls'. These are pindas, made of flour and milk, and you will see them if ever you attend the rites ten or so days after a Hindu's cremation.



Once the appropriate ritual had been completed on the seashore we walked to the temple nearby. Here the panda made sure that my husband was well and truly drenched by buckets full of water from the wells in the temple precincts.



According to traditional belief, each of these ablutions washes away a particular type of sin.

Inside the temple another priest carried out yet more rituals for us. The interior was dark - you can see a star made of little lights on the floor.



Outside too darkness had fallen and people gathered to celebrate an annual festival as sparks flew from a very high fire stacked outside the temple.'

1. Are we more or less likely to treat the environment with respect if (like Shankaracharya) we sense that there is no divide between 'God' and 'creation' and that, deep down, we are all one and the same?
   
2. If fruit and flowers are offered to God in an act of worship, is this a way of respecting or wasting resources?
   
3. In especially beautiful places the peaceful atmosphere and inspiring scenery may make it easy to feel God's presence or to feel thankful for the wonderful richness of the world around us. How can we remember this when we are in more busy, built up, polluted places?
   
4. 'Karma is the law of cause and effect - a Hindu concept that makes sense to a lot of non-Hindus too. It often seems that some individuals are unfairly lucky or unlucky. Once you accept, as Hindus do, that we are reborn many times, you can understand people's circumstances as being the result of how they behaved in a previous life. Some Hindus would include the killing of animals as a cause for punishment in someone's next life'.
   Think about each of the sentences in this paragraph carefully and jot down your thoughts on it.