Top British court rejects Hindu request for open-air pyre

LONDON (RNS) A Hindu man has lost his legal fight to be cremated on a traditional open-air pyre in Britain’s countryside to ensure himself “a good death.” The High Court in London on Friday (May 8) told Davender Ghai that the open-air pyre violates a 107-year-old British law governing cremation. Ghai, 70, conceded that “my […]

LONDON (RNS) A Hindu man has lost his legal fight to be cremated on a traditional open-air pyre in Britain’s countryside to ensure himself “a good death.”

The High Court in London on Friday (May 8) told Davender Ghai that the open-air pyre violates a 107-year-old British law governing cremation.

Ghai, 70, conceded that “my claim is provocative…in a nation as notoriously squeamish toward death as our own,” but he argued that open-air “natural cremation grounds” would not “offend public decency — as long as they were discreet, designated sites far from urban and residential areas.”


However, High Court Justice Ross Cranston ruled that Britain’s Cremation Act of 1902 and other laws “are clear in their effect: the burning of human remains, other than in a crematorium, is a criminal offense.”

This, he insisted, “effectively prohibits open-air funeral pyres” in this country.

Britain is home to more than 600,000 Hindus, and many families pay thousands of dollars to fly the remains of their relatives back to India for traditional funeral pyres.

The court ruling backed the opinion of the government’s justice secretary, Jack Straw, who fought Ghai’s challenge on grounds that others in the community would be “upset and offended” by pyres.

Many Britons “find it abhorrent that human remains were being burned in this way,” Straw said.

This case had been running for more than three years, after a local government council in Newcastle, in northeast England, rejected Ghai’s application for a permit for an open-air cremation in a remote site in the area.

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