The Tradition
The Book of Memory is a volume traditionally compiled by families, and sometimes friends, in commemoration of a deceased person by Ceylon (Sri Lankan) Tamil communities. It is known as Ninaivumalar in Tamil, which can be translated as Book of Memory or Bouquet of Memory. The volume is put together during the 31-day mourning and prayers rituals designed to release the soul from all its attachments to its recent worldly life following the death of a person. The rituals are intended to guide the individual soul either to merge with the wider Soul of God to enter a state of eternal bliss, or to liberate itself into its next bodily incarnation in the world. On the final 31st day of ritual prayers the book of memory is distributed to relatives and friends, and posted overseas to kith, kin and friends of the deceased in the global Ceylon Tamil diaspora.
Themes in the Books of Memory
There are many themes in the book of memory but they can largely be included under five major categories – scriptural, genealogical, personal, social and cultural. Scriptural themes can be expressed in both iconic (graphic or pictorial) forms, and textual in Tamil or other languages such as Sanskrit and English. Common iconic themes are images of dieties and saints, spiritual mudras or hand, body and eye gestures, floral or geometric designs, or other symbols seen as significant in ritual contexts. The most prevalent scriptural themes are the Tamil hymns, generally Shaivite, as befitting the religious tradition of most of those who produce such memory books. These are often those hymns sung during prayers over the 31-day ritual mourning period. Ancestral genealogical relations to the deceased are generally invoked during the ritual prayers as protectors of the soul of the deceased in the afterlife, and these become encoded, along with descendants, as another major theme in genealogical charts in the memory books or ninaivumalars. Such genealogical charts commonly include both paternal and maternal ancestors of the deceased, as well as descendants such as children, their spouses and grandchildren. Many ninaivumalars also carry biographies of the deceased person written by a Tamil scholar, known as a pandithar, or by family members as well as friends. These are often supplemented by drawings and photographs closely associated with the memory of the deceased. Surprisingly, apart from such personal and social matters surrounding the deceased, quite a number of memory books also append philosophical, ethical and scientific themes. They may also carry added information such as quotations from great scientists, poets and scholars, therapeutics from traditional and modern medical treatises, and even translations from Tamil to English and vice versa elevating moral aphorisms. These inclusions lead some people to preserve ninaivumalars as cultural reservoirs of knowledge that transcend mere religious interests or preserve the memories of the departed.
Although not explicitly intended as a goal within individual books of memory, another significant dimension of ninaivumalars is their role as vehicles of communal cultural knowledge. Taken as a body of works ninaivumalars convey the collective memory of the Ceylon Tamils not only in Sri Lanka but also in diasporic communities where they have settled across the world. These books constitute an important reservoir of the community’s social histories in the various countries where they are domiciled. Like gravestones and ancestral altars of other communities, ninaivumalars are archaeological sites for understanding the history of the Ceylon Tamil community that produces them.
The study of ninaivumalars raises three important questions that lie outside the information contained within them, although it could be inferred in part from what is found therein. First, how did this tradition so uniquely associated with Ceylon Tamils originate? There is considerable controversy concerning answers to this question but such an investigation can cast light on many important aspects of the books of memory which are otherwise obscure. Second, how did the ninaivumalar tradition become widely dispersed with the migration of Ceylon Tamils across the world, and what impact did this have on the tradition as it adapted to different linguistic, religious and cultural environments? Finally, how does the ninaivumalar tradition in its origin, dispersal and evolution reflect both continuities and breaks with the Tamil linguistic, religious and cultural heritage from which it emerged, and with which it evolved? These are questions that we will explore toward the end of this study.
The Transiency of Ninaivumalars
Surprisingly despite the immense energy and effort put in by families, relatives and friends to produce ninaivumalars there is no socially instituted process for preserving them within the Ceylon Tamil communities. They are not catalogued and stored in either well-developed communal or national archives designed to conserve the social memories of this community.
Without more systematic and careful study it is difficult to identify the reasons for such disregard. But casual observation and investigation, and even reports of personal experiences of many of those questioned, only confirms such neglect. In every case of the production of ninaivumalars family members confirmed their strong motivation in undertaking and completing such an endeavour – the sorrow and loss of a loved one, and concern to protect their memory, were acknowledged as the primary driving forces that brought them together to make the ninaivumalars. But once these books were distributed there was little effort to preserve them for posterity in the long run though families may keep such books of close relatives over generations.
Although most people see ninaivumalars as private family collections that should be passed on to their immediate descendents, no systematic effort is made to preserve them in social archives across many succeeding generations. As a result ninaivumalar collections degrade over time not only through loss of the books, but also the attrition of the quality of their printed pages in hot and humid environments. Hardly any effort is made to protect and preserve the original material although new ninaivumalars of succeeding generations continue to be produced.
We find that over time there ensues a gradual and systematic loss of carefully chronicled genealogical, personal, cultural and sociohistorical knowledge. This is not even felt as a loss because the religious rituals in funerals and prayers do not invoke the specific ancestral names of the deceased except that of parents, grandparents, and great grandparents. They invoke all earlier generations under the overarching expression “all the ancestors”. Even from a ritualistic and religious point of view no need is felt to petition for blessings and protection from specific ancestors beyond the great grandparent generation. While this may not be seen as significant from a ritualistic point of view, it tends to erase the historical memory of the Ceylon Tamils for the long duration.
Mourning Rituals and the Memory Book
The 31-day ritual mourning period is a time when the family, close relatives, and friends of the deceased gather together to freely express and share their grief instead of keeping it bottled unto themselves. Indeed the spiritual and social rituals of mourning are designed to allow the free expression of emotions to maintain the health of body, mind and spirit of those left behind. This is notwithstanding the belief that the rituals are also to give peace to the departed soul to make its journey into the life thereafter.
The ritual activities and social interactions among family members and friends of the deceased also help to generate many of the component elements that go into the memory book. This is the time when important decisions are made about religious iconography to be included in the rituals, the hymns to be sung, how the ninaivumalar genealogical chart is to be structured, and what memories of the deceased are to be included in the ninaivumalar. These decisions are often made through social interactions between relatives and friends participating in the daily rituals over the mourning period.
Many of the activities undertaken during the 31-day ritual mourning period begin at dusk shortly after sunset. The timing is designed to accommodate the participation of school children and working adults. The prayer rituals play a significant role in shaping the text of the ninaivumalar. The most important of these is the singing of the religious hymns which are drawn from the Thirumurai, a canonical text of Tamil hymns in praise of the God Shiva by saints mostly from the 7th to 12th centuries of the contemporary era. This is often facilitated by making a printed copy of the hymns for members of the family, relatives, and friends who participate. These printed copies are handed out at the start of the prayer session and collected back for reuse at the end. Many of the hymns selected are favorites of the deceased, as well as selections from earlier ninaivumalars of ancestors or relatives. In this way the most popular religious hymns of a family often get handed down through generations. It is these hymns sung over the mourning period which largely get into the memory book. In this respect the ritual singing during the mourning period shapes the content of the ninaivumalar text.
Another element in ritual mourning is the offering of rice and gram flour balls mixed with water, ghee and black sesame seeds, placed on a banana leaf, as offerings to deceased ancestors. These balls called pindams are also part of the ceremony that culminates the 31-day mourning period known as anthiyesti – literally ‘last sacrifice’. There are normally four flour balls with one much larger than the other three. They are laid out for the paternal lineage if the deceased is a man. The first ball is placed on the banana leaf by uttering the name of the father of the deceased. This indicates it is meant as an offering to the father. The next two are for the grandfather and great grandfather respectively, both being mentioned by name. When the largest ball of flour is placed the expression ‘all the ancestors’ is uttered. In this way the offerings are intended for the male lineage of ancestors. In the case of a female deceased it is the mother, grandmother, great grandmother, and all the ancestors to whom the flour ball offerings are made. This ritual is seen to solicit help for the departed soul from all its ancestors.
Such flour balls may be placed at the hands and feet of the deceased even on the first day, when the body departs for cremation so that its soul may be helped by its departed ancestors. Direct gestures of help for the departed soul are also offered by the living who place uncooked rice on the mouth and feet of the departed in the belief that the deceased soul will not lact nourishment in the hereafter. Some even place coins and gold ornaments in the coffin in a symbolic gesture that the deceased may not lack wealth in the afterlife. These are however removed before the coffin departs for the cremation grounds.
These rituals not only serve the spiritual purpose of bringing the blessings of the ancestors and the living, but also transmit the memory of ancestral names to the descendants of the deceased, such as children and grandchildren. The invocation of ancestral names and blessings also contributes to another component of the memory book – the genealogical chart that is often an indispensable part of it. Although the ritual of offering pindams, or flour balls, does not include all ancestral connections beyond great grandparents by name, it does promote those exchanges among the different generations and relatives of the deceased which contributes to generating the genealogical chart of the memory book.
The ritual mourning period also provides an occasion for friends and relatives to gather together with the family and share their recollections of the deceased with one another. Although such exchanges are not part of the mourning spiritual rituals they nevertheless constitute a social ritual that contributes to the ninaivumalar. It allows the family to invite particularly memorable reminiscences of the deceased to be included in the ninaivumalar text. Such memories could come from friends, relatives and family members of the deceased. In short, the rituals during the mourning period provide the occasion for shaping the ninaivumalar of the deceased through the hymns that get selected, the genealogies that get structured, and the memories that get included within it.
Even after the end of the 31-day period the immediate family of the deceased is considered to be in a state of mourning for a year after the demise of their loved one. In this period family members cannot undertake any life-altering decisions, such as getting married or selling the house of the deceased. This is often associated with the belief that the soul of the departed lingers around the house because of its attachment until the year is over. The mourning period only ends at the end of the year with the ceremony of singing religious hymns from the ninaivumalar, and ritual prayers with family and friends. At this point ninaivumalars would again be handed to those who had been unable to receive them earlier at the end of the 31-day mourning period.
Comparison with Other Ritual Making Texts
The ninaivumalar is often seen as a funerary text because a large part of its content is often, though not always, taken up by the religious hymns sung during the 31-day mourning period. This is seen as the time when the soul liberates itself from the cycles of birth and rebirth through reincarnation to unite with God. In this regard it is different from an obituary that merely reports the death of a person, along with a brief account of the person’s life and names of family members. In many places the obituary is usually placed in newspapers. It is also different from epitaphs inscribed on tombstones that describe a person`s life briefly in prose or a poem along with the dates of birth and death. Neither can obituaries nor epitaphs be deemed funerary texts since they are not designed to serve any specific spiritual purpose.
There is a closer affinity to the memory book and the spiritual purpose it is intended to serve in the funerary literature of many cultures. Such literature is designed to convey the safe passage of the soul from its life in this world to one in the hereafter. Secular modernists might now interpret the rites of passage in such texts as intended to purge the grief of, and bring spiritual solace to, the living left behind. But most traditionalists see the funerary rites as necessary for the future welfare of the soul of the departed. Two well-known exemplars of such texts of funerary rites are the Egyptian Book of the Dead used in rites from 1550 BCE–50 BCE, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead originating from the 8th century. Their salvational approach closely resembles the role of the hymns documented in the ninavulmalar so that it is fruitful to compare them with each other.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead is a set of funerary texts written on papyrus in the period of the New Kingdom in Egypt. It contains numerous magic spells that are intended to safely conduct a dead person on a journey through the underworld into the afterlife beyond. There are many versions of it written by Egyptian priests over more than a millennium, with numerous variations of the text on papyri without any definite canonical version. A copy of the book was often one of the items included in the coffin or burial chamber of a deceased Egyptian to guide the person into the afterlife. Sometimes the spells in the book were also inscribed on the walls of tombs and the sarcophagi. The most well-known example of the text is the Papyrus of Ani, written by an Egyptian scribe more than three thousand years ago around 1250 BCE.
Ani’s book tells us what happens to the dead. The magic spells are designed to let the dead person journey through the Duat or underworld while overcoming obstacles such as lakes of fire, crocodiles, snakes and other monsters until reaching the jackal-headed God Anubis. Anubis then weighs the heart of the dead person against a pure ostrich feather. If the heart is weighed down by the wrongdoing of the person then the latter would be annihilated by being swallowed up by the crocodile-headed Goddess Ammit. If the person is found good then the sun-God Ra would take the departed to Osiris, God of the underworld, to enjoy eternal afterlife. This new life is largely an idealised version of the good life in ancient Egypt but one without death.
Even interpreted as a funerary text, the Tamil Book of Memory contrasts sharply with the Egyptian Book of the Dead. First, it is not a book of spells to empower the person to overcome external obstacles in the journey through the afterlife. Rather the hymns are there to nurture faith and overcome internal psychological obstacles to the safe journey of the soul after death. Second, the hymns in the ninaivumalar are not intended to enable a person to enjoy an afterlife similar, albeit better, than life on earth. By contrast ninaivumalar hymns are intended to free the soul from rebirth in any world by entering into union with God. Finally, the ninaivumalar is not simply a funerary text – it contains genealogical, personal, social, and cultural content associated with the deceased that are of significance to memorialising the person to relatives and friends left behind. Since the ninaivumalar is not simply a funerary text but also a memorial book, its goals go beyond that of the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Another funerary text that can be compared illuminatingly with ninaivumalars is The Tibetan Book of the Dead, also known as the Bardo Thodol. It was composed in the eight century by Padmasambhava who brought the Buddhist religion to Tibet from India at the invitation of its king Trisong Detsen. There he founded the unique Nyingma School tradition of early Tibetan Buddhism within which he is known as Guru Rinpoche, and venerated as the ‘second Buddha’. At the request of Trisong Detsen he also built the country’s first monastery.
The Bardo Thodol is often used by Tibetan Buddhists to learn about what they will face after death. Passages from it are read to people on the verge of death to lead them on their journey beyond death. The teachings of the book are seen as guiding the person through the intermediate state between death and rebirth known as bardo. This explains why the book is known as ‘bar do thos grol’ in Tibetan, translated as Liberation Through Hearing in the Intermediate State.
According to the Bardo Thodol there are three intermediate states between death and rebirth, and the future for the departed is determined by the response made in these three states. The first Bardo occurs immediately at the moment of death. The many elements that create the illusion of a self – the so-called ‘skandhas’ made of material forms, sensations, perceptions, mental dispositions, and individual consciousness – disperse and fall away. Only awareness remains which sees that the true nature of mind as luminosity or pure light. If one embraces the light then one is liberated and achieves nirvana.
Those not developed enough to merge into the light directly enter the next bardo where they experience visions of peaceful and wrathful deities. These have to be viewed fearlessly with nonattachment by seeing them as projections of the mind. If this is achieved then the dead person will be able to move forward to seeing the nature of mind as pure light, thereby achieving nirvana.
However, if the second bardo is experienced in fear and confusion then the person’s own karma from the past will catch up and lead to rebirth into one of six different worlds. These are worlds of suffering where we have cycles of birth, life, and death governed by the law of karma. The six worlds are the deva (divine) world, the asura (demonic) world, the human world, the animal world, the preta (hungry ghost) world and the world of hells. Returning to the world of humans left behind at death will entail re-entering a human body through reincarnation.
Reading the Bardo Thodol at the point of death of a person, as well as in the days thereafter, is a reminder for the mind of the departed to either achieve liberation from rebirth by entering the luminous light of ultimate reality, or be guided toward a good birth that will allow the person to reach the same ultimate goal in a future life.
Comparing the ninaivumalar with the Bardo Thodol reminds us that both contain spiritual guidelines to achieve liberation from the cycles of birth and death associated with reincarnation. This involves the religious belief that some part of us survives the body after death and starts a new life later within another biological body. This has also been termed transmigration, rebirth, or metempsychosis. Such beliefs are held by many religionists – Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs, as well as ancient Greek philosophers such as Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato.
As a result of their shared belief in reincarnation the ninaivumalars, in general, and the Buddhist Bardo Thodol differ from the Egyptian Book of the Dead which has no conception of reincarnation. Neither is the ultimate goal of the nivaivumalar and the Bardo Thodol similar to the Egyptian text – the latter is designed to achieve eternal life in heaven, whilst both the former see a union with some kind of ultimate reality as the goal of life. Yet there continues to remain a profound distinction between the ninaivumalar and the Egyptian and Tibetan funerary texts – the former is also a memorial booklet of the deceased with many dimensions that the other two do not have, such as genealogy charts, personal biographical information, and other sundry matters.
A Declining Tradition
There is the perception today that the ninaivumalar is an outdated and declining tradition. The making of such books of memory has also become more difficult because busy modern working lives often lead families to shorten the ritual and prayer period to 16 days from the traditional 31, and sometimes even less. This makes putting together the memory book a more formidable task.
Furthermore, there is the perception that the book must carry prayers and biographies in Tamil – a language that is often not mastered at the requisite level of expertise by many in the younger generation of the Ceylon Tamil diaspora who are are mostly educated in English, or the mother tongues of the countries in which they have settled as new migrants. Although, in principle, one can produce ninaivumalars in English, say, this is rare and such exemplars exist only in cases where Tamil religious hymns are excluded. Despite such new changes and obstacles ninaivumalars continue to be a vibrant tradition within a large proportion of Ceylon Tamils both in Sri Lanka and the wider diaspora. Thus they continue to sustain individual memories, and the social memory of the community as a whole.