A modern graveyard: not for me

The revolution in Punjab has come full circle. It is now time to modernise graveyards in the length and breadth of the land of five rivers. A new state-of-the-art graveyard has become functional in Lahore. Khadam-e-Punjab visited Sheher-e-Khamoshan (the silent city) last week and stated that with the increasing population, establishing modern graveyards is the need of the hour.

After Lahore, the dead in Multan, Faisalabad and Sargodha are also going to get their own Silent Cities and then all of us are promised a peaceful, quiet – and modern – patch of earth to rest forever.

Unfortunately, construction of modern graveyards is a bad, impractical, socially divisive and environmentally harmful idea and the chief minister must be requested, with folded hands, to divert his energies to guard the people of Punjab from shifting to graveyards prematurely – and leave us alone with our traditional graveyards.

Modern graveyards (traditional in the Western context) are based on the fantasy of permanent physical ground for human remains. They require proper development of a large plot of land where every grave has an address and is built to stay forever. Except for periods of plagues, most Western countries have followed this model for many centuries.

The Silent City in Lahore has been built at a cost of Rs155 million; the initiative encompasses 89 kanals of land providing space for approximately 8,000 graves.  The development of the graveyard, before digging the first grave, has cost Rs19,375 per grave. That does not include the cost of constructing modern graves, maintaining them, providing various services and the cost to the environment.

If this dream becomes a reality, every million dead Punjabis will need six square kilometres of land, and no less than 1200 square kilometres will be needed to provide every dead citizen in Punjab with a permanent grave of his or her own in a modern graveyard in the next century. Khadam-e-Punjab, his son, grandson and great grandson will need to employ so many people that not a single government officer will be left to do anything else. Perhaps there will be no budget to do anything else and not much land to grow anything.

Punjab’s current population is more than 100 million and all of them will be dead in the next one hundred years. Almost an equal number of children, men and women may die or be born in the meanwhile. Think of 200 million modern graves with state-of-the-art facilities. Let’s not forget that even graves are meant for (the emotional needs of) the living and not for the dead.

Even in Western countries, with their small populations, it has become a challenge to maintain such graveyards. According to a BBC news report, ‘The world is running out of burial space’: “There is a looming problem in many parts of the world over what to do with dead bodies, as pressure on burial space intensifies.”

Here is a glimpse of what is happening in Greece, borrowed from another report. “Cemeteries in Greece are overcrowded. With nowhere to expand, new plots are not readily available to buy with costs skyrocketing to exorbitant rates. For instance, a 2×1.5m plot with a central entrance costs more than 40,000 euros at the 1st Cemetery of Athens and can even go as high as 65,000-80,000 euros depending on the size and location of the plot in the cemetery. For this reason, funeral plots are leased out on a rotational system where families of the deceased pay to keep a body underground for three years before bodies are exhumed so that bones can be stored at an ossuary.”         No wonder, donating bodies to medical colleges has become a popular alternative to burial in Greece.

Different societies are experimenting with different solutions to deal with the graveyard crisis. Cremation is now a popular form of last rituals in many Western countries. However, cremation is an energy-intensive solution and our famous poet N M Rashid is the only Muslim I know who preferred cremation over burial.

Another solution is to recycle plots by removing remains from older graves, burying them deeper in the same grave and then reusing the space on top for a new body. Some countries simply reuse the same grave space after several years. More recently, a new form of graveyards, specialising in ‘natural burials’ have become popular. In these graveyards, the dead are placed in eco-friendly wicker coffins in a natural forest setting. This is exactly what we do in our traditional graveyards.

Traditional Muslim (South Asian) graveyards are chaotic in pattern, made completely of biodegradable materials and meant to be recyclable automatically and naturally. A permanent grave here is a privilege, not a right, usually reserved for saintly persons or high achievers. Though these graveyards present a picture of permanence, they are constantly changing. Their capacity to receive new residents is never exhausted. For example, Miani Sahab, the centuries-old historic graveyard in the heart of Lahore still receives hundreds of new occupants every day.

There is a wise trick to this system. Graves are sacred to the memory of the living. Once this crucial links is severed, the decayed bones lose all meaning and significance. In our graveyards this link is asserted by occasional visits and re-plastering of the grave with mud. If no one visits a grave for many years, it decays and gets assimilated in the graveyard and the same space gets reused without anyone noticing it or feeling disturbed.

Our graveyards are rich in spiritual symbolism. A constant interaction takes place between the world of the living and the world of the dead. People visit graveyards to offer fateha, recite sacred text, pray or express their love for the deceased. On the day of Ashura (10th Muharram), Sunni Muslims visit the graves of their near and dear ones, plaster graves, sprinkle water and put fresh leaves, flowers and grains on the graves. These objects and rituals are symbols of re-birth that express our desire for the wellbeing of the deceased. (Shia Muslims mourn the martyrs of Karbala on Ashura and undertake similar rituals on other occasions.)

Interestingly, the symbolism of a common graveyard gets reversed at the shrines of the saints where the boundary between life and death gets more blurred and the living seek blessing and support from the other world. Almost every large graveyard contains some shrine of a saint. These shrines are considered a source of blessing for the dead who are interred there, and also for the living. In our insane world, these places provide much-needed spiritual and psychological support to visitors.

Our graveyards are also sanctuaries of biodiversity. Zabita Khan Shinwari, a former scientist at the National Herbarium, once told me that endangered species of plants still thrive amidst graves – something not possible in the manicured lawns of a modern graveyard.

We do not need to develop, but ban modern graveyards. Use of cement and concrete should be discouraged. Rather than promoting a new division between the rich and the poor through such five-star graveyards, the government of Punjab should focus on healthcare and leave the dead to communities and local government. However, it should take action against land mafias who are taking over graveyards in the province.

Dear readers, do you still want a plot in Sheher-e-Khamoshan? Frankly, I don’t.

The writer is an anthropologist and development professional.

Email: zaighamkhan@yahoo.com

Twitter: @zaighamkhan