Jain nuns in a temple in Pune. A judge’s ruling barring the religion’s practice of santhara is expected to be appealed to the Supreme Court. Credit Serena De Sanctis for The New York Times

Source: New York Times

PUNE, India — All week, people streamed in and out of the handsome bungalow where the Lodha family lives, eager to witness for themselves the amazing event that was occurring there.

On a bed in a corner of a large sitting room, surrounded by a crowd of reverent visitors, the family’s 92-year-old patriarch, Manikchand Lodha, was fasting to death. It was the culmination of an act of santhara, a voluntary, systematic starvation ritual undertaken every year by several hundred members of the austere, ancient Jain religion.

Mr. Lodha had begun the process some three years earlier, after a fall left him bedridden. First he renounced pleasures like tea and tobacco. Then things he loved, like television. He gave up medicine, even refusing an air mattress to ease his bedsores. On Aug. 10, he took the ancient vow and gave up food and water.

When he died Aug. 16, the house was festooned with orange-and-white bunting. Visitors were offered bowls of sweets bathed in syrup.

“Look at us — do we look like we are in mourning?” said Sunita, Mr. Lodha’s daughter-in-law. “We are celebrating, because one of our family members has achieved something great. We were able to know him. That was our good fortune.”

A portrait of Manikchand Lodha, a member of the Jain religion in Pune, India, who took a vow of santhara and fasted until he died on Aug. 16. CreditSerena De Sanctis for The New York Times

Mr. Lodha’s fast was significant for another reason: He took the vow on the same day that a high court judge in the state of Rajasthan declared the fast unto death to be a form of suicide, which is illegal under Indian law. When the case is appealed to the Supreme Court, as expected, it will rank among a handful of instances defining when the state should interfere with religious practice — most memorably, the 1987 act that banned glorification of suttee, an outlawed ritual in which widows climbed onto their husbands’ funeral pyres and were burned to death.

This is a thorny constitutional question for India, which enshrines the right to both life and religious practice. Religious rituals are interwoven with everyday life in India, where in certain seasons downtown traffic halts behind convoys of flatbed trucks loaded with papier-mâché goddesses headed for Hindu festivals. Indian leaders, from Gandhi to Narendra Modi, have observed strict fasts, and the Indian government subsidizes a range of spiritual pilgrimages.

After the ruling, some blamed the Indian Penal Code, drafted under the British colonial administration, for its inability to accommodate India’s variety of spiritual thought.

“Here, the narrowness of English and incommensurable ideas of death run into a head-on collision,” wrote Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a policy analyst and a Jain, in the daily Indian Express. “Just as English often flattens translations from Sanskrit by describing all nine varieties of love as ‘love,’ so it is with death.”

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