My father passed away in 2024.
He was 69 — young enough that retirement had only just arrived, young enough that we had not yet run out of time together. He was the most active person I knew. Always moving, always working, always optimistic no matter what life placed in front of him.
When he died, I wanted to do everything right by him. I wanted to be present for every ritual, every prayer, every step of the journey the tradition says the soul takes after the body is gone. I wanted to light the fire. Instead, I watched.
What Happened
In the hours and days after my father’s death the family gathered. Calls were made. Relatives arrived. And somewhere in the middle of grief — while we were still absorbing the fact that he was gone — a discussion began among his siblings about who would perform the last rites.
It was neither about who loved him most nor who had been present through his illness or who had sat with him through the years of Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, watching him drift slowly into a darkness we could not reach. But who — in the technical, ritual, patriarchal sense — was qualified to do it.
There was also, beneath the discussion, something unspoken — a quiet calculation about responsibility. If you perform the rites, do you inherit the obligation? The grief? The duty of being the one who carries it forward?
Myself, mother and my sis all were there distraught yet trying to accept the situation. I was interested to be that person who performs the rituals for my dad. I wanted to send him with all love and letting him know he did and tried his best in this life. And none of us were allowed because of the gender.
The Pandit and His Son
The Pandit who conducted the rituals said something that has stayed with me.
He spoke about his own son — who had apparently performed rites at a remarkably young age, for the pandit’s own grandfather — and said this with a particular kind of pride. The implication was clear: this is what gives moksha. A son. A male relative. Someone of the right gender performing the right actions in the right sequence.
I did not like it then and like it less now. I believed and trusted the Puranas wouldn’t have said so, which also made me curious to find the truth but not to debate at that point.
Mahapuranas and Hinduism
The Garuda Purana and Markandeya Purana are both among the eighteen Mahapuranas, the collection of eighteen major ancient Sanskrit texts in Hinduism.
The Garuda Purana — one of the primary Hindu texts on death, the soul’s journey and the rituals of mourning — does not exclude women from performing last rites. Read carefully, without the overlay of centuries of social restriction, it permits daughters and wives to perform the same rites as sons.
The quote goes as:
उभाभ्यां च कुलाभ्यां च पुरुषाणां न चेद्भवेत् ।
स्त्रीभिः कार्यं प्रकर्तव्यं पत्न्या च दुहित्रा तथा ॥
(Ubhābhyāṃ ca kulābhyāṃ ca puruṣāṇāṃ na cedbhavet |
Strībhiḥ kāryaṃ prakartavyaṃ patnyā ca duhitrā tathā ||)
Meaning: “If there are no male heirs in either of the two families (the husband’s or the father’s side), then women must take charge of the obsequies; specifically, the wife or the daughter.” [1]
The Markandeya Purana goes further. It places a heavy emphasis on keeping the duty within the immediate household. It explicitly states that wife/daughters hold the same ritual authority as sons. And also the priority over external male relatives. The Sanskrit is clear. The permission is there.
At the heart of Sanatana Dharma, it’s never been about gender. It’s about intention, faith, and love.
The belief that only sons can perform these rituals is a social restriction, not a scriptural one.
Smritis & Dharmashastras — The essence is that the karta (performer) should act with devotion and shraddha, regardless of gender.
At the end of the day it’s your direct family that mourns and misses deeply for the loss.
What is also there — in the same texts, in the same tradition — is the principle that the sincerity and devotion of the person performing the rite matter more than their gender or their blood relationship. The ritual is a vehicle for love. Love directed toward the departing soul. The soul — if souls have any awareness at all — would surely recognise sincerity over biology.
The exclusion of women from last rites is not scriptural. It is both social and cultural. It is centuries of patriarchal interpretation layered so thickly over the original texts that most people — including most pandits — have stopped distinguishing between what was written and what was decided.
There is a difference. And it matters.
The One Pandit Who Knew
Among all the people present in those days — the relatives who told us not to go, the Pandit with his pride in his son’s performance, the extended family who managed the proceedings according to custom — there was one pandit.
He was knowledgeable. He was calm. And quietly, without making a scene, without entering into the argument that was happening around him, he told me and my sister that we could go to the cremation ground.
Despite what the so-called relatives were saying. Despite the cultural pressure to keep women away from the cremation ground. He knew what the tradition actually permitted. And he permitted it.
I am grateful for him in a way I find difficult to articulate. In the middle of a day of grief and exclusion — he gave us our father back for a few more hours. He gave us the chance to be present. To witness. To say goodbye properly.
That is what I mean when I say the tradition is not the problem. The interpretation is.
The Improvised Package
I want to say something about how death is sold now.
When my father passed on, we were offered packages. Economy. Standard. Premium. Each one with an improvised set of rituals, a different number of priests, a different level of ceremony — all priced accordingly. The logistics of sending a soul forward had been itemised and tiered.
I kept asking myself — which Purana authorised this? Which scripture said that the quality of a person’s departure depends on what their family can afford? Which ancient text created the Economy package?
The answer is none of them.
What has happened is that death — like so much else — has been commercialised. The rituals that were once performed by community, by family, by people who loved the person and knew the tradition, have become a service industry. And like all service industries it has found ways to up-sell grief.
My father deserved better than a package. Every person who has ever died deserves better than a package.
What I kept coming back to is this: the tradition says the ritual is love expressed in form. It says nothing about tiers. Nothing about Economy versus Premium. If families are now quietly choosing to skip the packages and simply do something good in their person’s name instead — feed someone, plant something, give something — I think the Puranas would recognise that more readily than a sped-up ceremony performed by a pandit who has somewhere else to be.
There is one detail that has stayed with me. The Garuda Purana is meant to be read on the thirteenth day — not as formality, but because it genuinely helps the family move through grief and understand the soul’s journey forward. In both deaths I have witnessed in my family, no pandit read it. Instead they constructed a narrative of the deceased person’s life — a story assembled from whatever fragments the family offered that morning, read aloud by a man who had never met my father, who did not know how he laughed or what he feared or what he spent his whole life working toward. A stranger’s summary of a life he never witnessed. That is what the thirteenth day had become.
What Death Reveals
A death reveals everything.
Who shows up, calculates before coming, arrives with genuine grief, and who arrives with an eye on what happens next. There will be someone who remembers your person as they actually were and constructs a version of them convenient for the occasion. Who extends themselves for your mother and who considers their duty discharged by their presence.
I will not name what I saw in those days. But I saw clearly. Grief strips away the performance that daily life maintains and shows you, without filter, who the people around you actually are.
Some surprised me with their grace.
Some confirmed what I had quietly suspected.
A few broke my heart in ways that had nothing to do with my father.
Death does not lie. And it does not forgive those who use it as a performance.
What I Believe About Moksha
I do not believe moksha is granted by gender.
I do not believe that the soul of a good man — a man who spent his life working hard, remaining optimistic, telling his daughters to be brave and never fear anyone — is somehow dependent on whether a son rather than a daughter lights the fire.
Moksha, if it exists, comes from what a person does while they are alive. From the quality of the life lived. From the love given and the harm avoided and the courage maintained through difficulty.
And the ritual — the fire, the prayers, the thirteen days of ceremony — is not a transaction. It is not a payment that secures a result but love, expressed in the form the tradition makes available. It is the living saying to the departing: we are here. We are sending you with everything we have. We are not letting you go alone.
That intention — the love behind the act — is what matters. Not the gender of the hands that hold the flame.
And we were there. At the cremation ground, because one honest pandit said we could be. Standing at the edge of the fire. Saying goodbye, the only way left to us.
We were there, Dad. We were brave.