Indian documentary explores religious cannibals

[emad]

Indian documentary explores religious cannibals

Ramola Talwar Badam
Associated Press Writer
Oct. 28, 2005 12:00 AM

BOMBAY, India (AP) - A new Indian documentary seeks to shed light on a secretive sect of Hindu ascetics who eat corpses in the belief that ingesting dead flesh will make them ageless and give them supernatural powers.

"Feeding on the Dead," a 10-minute documentary, delves into the closed, little-known world of the 1,000-year-old Aghori sect, whose sadhus, or holy men, pluck dead bodies from the Ganges river.

While the sect has been written about, they've rarely been filmed performing rituals. Director Sandeep Singh, who shut down his transport business to pursue filmmaking, said it took him more than three months to gain the trust of an Aghori sadhu and convince him to be filmed while performing a cannibalistic ritual.

There are about 70 Aghori sadhus at a given time, and they remain with the sect for 12 years before returning to their families. Unlike other Hindu holy men, most of whom are vegetarian teetotalers, the Aghoris consume alcohol and meat.

http://www.azcentral.com/ent/movies/articles/1028cannibals1028.html

[rocktivity]

1. They pluck the bodies from a river?

I suppose that's better than killing people themselves--but how do the bodies get in the river to begin with?

:scared:
rocknation

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Tradition

A silent change is taking place at the burning ghats on the banks of the Ganges in Kanpur. Cremators working at these ghats are discouraging people from floating bodies in the river and persuading them to instead bury them — a practice unheard of among Hindus, reports Grassroots Features. In addition to untreated sewage and industrial effluents, the Ganges has been facing pollution of a different kind — corpses and carcasses. Although no religious text speaks of consigning unburnt or partly burnt bodies to the river, the practice is rampant. Religious texts allow only the ashes to be scattered in sacred rivers. As per superstitious practice, bodies of those who die due to certain diseases or unnatural causes (asthma, tuberculosis, leprosy, snake bite, poisoning) and those of newborn babies, unmarried people and holy men are consigned to the rivers.

But now members of the Dhanuk community involved in cremation are discouraging this practice, as reflected in a recent survey. Earlier, 100 bodies could be seen floating in a 10-km stretch in Kanpur at any given time, according to a survey done by NGO Eco-Friends Society. Since 1997, the group has physically fished out 1,000 bodies during its awareness campaigns. Dhanuks have played a key role in checking body pollution. Eco-Friends Society started working with this community by creating awareness. Campaigns that involved physically fishing out bodies and burying them, helped a great deal in bringing the problem to public attention.

http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/apr242005/spotlight851542005423.asp

[Village Idiot]

3. Soylent Green IS PEOPLE!!!

[xchrom]

4. hmmm?

"He sat on the corpse, prayed to a goddess of crematoriums and offered some flesh to the goddess before eating it."
Singh said the sadhu ate part of the corpse's elbow, believing the flesh would stop him from aging and give him special powers, like the ability to levitate or control the weather.
Singh did not see any of those powers on display.''

i wonder what singh would have done if he had?

generally my reaction is: EWWWWW!