Even though cremation of the dead is prescribed for orthodox Hindus, the practice was illegal in Trinidad until the 1930s. Records show that a clandestine cremation occurred at Frederick Estate, Caroni, in the 1880s wherein the jahajis, or brethren, of a deceased Indian labourer burnt his remains on a pyre on the banks of a wooded stream and were promptly arrested and jailed.
In 1936, the Health Ordinance was modified to permit cremations, but these had to be stringently monitored by a sanitary inspector (who was often corrupt), and required so many permits, the largely illiterate Indians rarely availed themselves of the privilege and buried their dead instead.
Around 1895 the Rev John Morton, founder of the Presbyterian Church's Canadian Mission to the Indians (CMI), prevailed on the San Fernando Borough Council to allow a piece of Paradise Cemetery on its southern side for the exclusive use of Indians of the Hindu, Muslim and Presbyterian faiths.
Most sugar plantations had estate cemeteries, some of them later becoming public graveyards, and others being forgotten and lost. One such graveyard was destroyed by Udecott in 2004 to make way for a stillborn housing project near San Fernando.
A Hindu burial of yesteryear was something worth witnessing. With the approach of death, the dying person was anointed with water and tulsi leaves put in the mouth. Once the individual had passed on, the body would be washed and laid out in a dark room with a single deya burning while in the yard, a noisy wake with coffee, biscuits, rum and bhajan�singing would be occurring. The wake would have been a cultural infusion from the contact of the Indians with the Afro-Trinis of the island.
There would be no coffin, but the dressed cadaver would be shrouded in a clean piece of white cotton or muslin and placed in a framework of bamboo, decorated with white crepe or tissue. This contraption, complete with the body, would be taken to the cemetery and left overnight on the gravesite. A single jhandi or prayer-flag would be planted next to the body and its bier.
The next morning, the mourners would proceed to the cemetery. There would be no women in the procession, and then later, they only went as far as the cemetery gates, where an arti or fire-ceremony would be performed. Ideally, the grave would be dug and the open pit sprinkled with water and bits of tulsi leaf by the officiating pundit. The orientation of the pit would be such that the head of the corpse would face the Himalaya Mountains. The remains would be committed to the soil amid deep wailing and much exhibitionism.
These eventful funerals became rare in the 1950s and 1960s when regulations governing cremations were relaxed and they became the preferred medium for Hindus to dispose of the dead. Also, funeral homes, realising that they were losing out on a lucrative market, began catering to Indians, undertaking the entire process of caring for the corpse and arranging the funeral pyre.