Antyeshti & Shraddha — the last rites

As the pyre burns down, the karta performs kapal-kriya — the skull is pierced with a bamboo stave so that it cracks, ritually opening the cranium to release the trapped life-breath. Ghee and mango-wood feed the fire to completion, then water quenches the embers.

The asthi (bones and ash) are gathered for immersion in a holy river — on the third day in villages, but often at once where the cremation is at a river-ghat. On the way home the mourners offer til-tanjan (sesame and water) to the departed, then purify themselves at the threshold by touching iron, stone and fire.

From death the direct heirs enter asaucha — ritual impurity — for ten nights (three for collateral kin). The household withdraws from worship and social life, eats plain restricted food, and the karta lives austerely.

Each day a pinda — a rice-ball with sesame, ghee, honey and water — is offered to the preta, the disembodied departed; a small holed clay pot (ghatdan) is hung with kusha and drips water and milk over a sand altar to “nourish” it. Day by day the pindas build a new subtle body — by tradition the head on the first day, the senses on the second, on to completion on the tenth.

On the tenth day (dasgatra) the final pinda completes the preta-body and the karta and male heirs are shorn, ending the worst impurity. The eleventh brings the great gifts — a bed, a golden figure, a cow, an umbrella and footwear — to equip the soul’s onward journey.

Then comes the pivotal sapindikaran: the single preta-pinda is divided and merged with three ancestral pindas (father, grandfather, great-grandfather), so the departed leaves ghost-status and joins the pitr, the collective ancestors. The cycle closes on the twelfth or thirteenth day with the shanti rite and the Brahma-bhoj feast — and only now is the karta released to grieve.

Thereafter the departed is honoured by the annual shraddha on the death-tithi and, collectively, through the sixteen days of Pitri-Paksha, when pinda and water are offered to all the ancestors.

The culminating pilgrimage is to Gaya, on the Phalgu river — the foremost pind-daan tirtha, where offering at the Vishnupad temple is believed to liberate up to seven generations and grant the soul moksha. The scriptural model is Sita, who offered King Dasharatha’s pind on the Phalgu with sand when the men delayed — still the precedent cited for a woman performing the rite.

Antyeshti, the “last sacrifice”, is the final saṃskāra. Hindu belief holds that at death the soul has no settled body for its onward passage, so the mourners’ daily offerings of pind — rice-balls with sesame, ghee and water — build a new subtle body for the departed, and the sapindikaran rite then unites the deceased with the ancestors. Maithil practice keeps its own accents: cremation traditionally delayed to saava-pahar, a ten-night impurity, and the karta restrained from weeping until the closing day. The bond is renewed each year through Shraddha and the fortnight of Pitri Paksha, above all at Gaya on the Phalgu, where pind-daan is believed to grant the ancestors moksha — and where a woman too, in the absence of a son, may make the offering, as Sita once did for Dasharatha on the Phalgu.