As Video Goes Viral, Dalits in Vellore Get New Cremation Ground

A video grab shows the body being dropped from atop the bridge

(Photo: The News Minute)

Less than 24 hours after a video showing a group of men lowering the corpse from atop a bridge emerged online, the Vellore district administration on Thursday, 22 August, allotted half-an-acre of land to the Dalits in the area to be used as a resting place for their community’s dead.

Tirupattur Sub-Collector Priyanka told The News Minute on Thursday that the district administration has allotted half-an-acre of common land as a burial and a cremation ground to the Dalit community.

“We conducted an inquiry with people from the Dalit community and the land owners who had allegedly blocked the path to the riverbed. On Saturday, there was no issue or any sort of confrontation between the owners of the land and the men who were carrying the body,” Priyanka reportedly said.

In the heart-wrenching video which has gone viral, a group of men from Tamil Nadu’s Vellore district can be seen lowering a dead body from a bridge in the state. The body, placed on a stretcher, is lowered precariously to the ground from atop the bridge.

Garlands that were draped on the body fall to the ground as the bier is slowly lowered. While a dozen men work the ropes from the 20-foot high bridge, a handful of them receive the body, standing amid the bushy undergrowth in Narayanapuram village. The men are then forced to carry the dead body to a funeral pyre in a crematorium some distance away.

As the men prepare to cremate the body, the man who is purportedly shooting the video says that this was unfolding in Vaniyambadi taluk in Vellore where the Dalit colony in the village does not have a crematorium of its own. "This is our crematorium. We lower the body like this each time. We don't have a crematorium,” he is heard saying.

The awful scene, denying dignity to the dead, is the story of Dalits in the village denied access to a public road and a crematorium by caste Hindus in the area, the News Minute reported. According to one police official speaking to the Hindustan Times, the caste Hindus, mainly Vellala Gounders and Vanniyars, reportedly prevented Kuppan's body from being taken through their land.

The incident took place on Saturday, 17 August but the video went viral on Wednesday. Fifty-five-year-old Kuppan had passed away in an accident the previous day, the TNM report said.

“For over 20 years now, we have had trouble accessing the grounds we traditionally used as a crematorium. Members of the dominant caste own the land now and don’t let us enter the area with corpses. Caste Hindus have a separate ground that we can’t use for cremations. Before the bridge came into existence 15 years ago, we used to just leave the body in the water. But now we lower it down the bridge to cremate it. We have appealed to various district authorities for years now to help us, but to no avail.”

Vijay, nephew of Kuppan, as quoted by TNM

According to one report in the Times of India, cremating their dead by lowering them from the bridge has become a common practice for the Dalits who have been denied their right of way for over four years. The newspaper reported that soon after the bridge over the Palar river was built, caste Hindus took over the path to the river where Dalits cremate their dead. They have prohibited Dalits from using the path.

“Due to lack of space in the village crematorium, we have been cremating our dead on the banks of the Palar river for the last four years,” a Dalit villager told the newspaper.

“Though it was common pathway and we used it since our ancestors’ days, they fenced it recently. When we requested them to open the fence, they were not ready. So, we were forced to carry the body around and lower it from the bridge,” a relative named Kumar told HT.

(With inputs from The News Minute)