The personal and political in making body donations

For all the polarisation in Indian politics, this is one issue on which both the Left and the Right seem to converge. The issue concerned could not have been more unlikely, though, as it is steeped in sensitivities that are cultural and even religious. It’s the issue of body donation that hit the headlines recently following the demise of Sitaram Yechury, the general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
Body donation has come to be accepted in principle as a reform that can serve to drive out archaic or high-cost rituals and enhance the quality of medical education and research. The mainstream consensus has, however, been more administrative than political. Therefore, body donation has hardly caught on as compared to organ donation, which makes a more direct and tangible difference, and without coming in the way of cremation. The paucity of the cadavers that are needed for the teaching of anatomy and surgery in medical colleges is despite the promotional efforts of NGOs and the example set by public figures.
Consider the confluence of political and personal circumstances in which, two days after his death on September 12 at All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Yechury’s body was taken back in a procession to the same teaching hospital. Given the precedents in his party alone, body donation would seem to have been preordained for him. Jyoti Basu and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, who between themselves had ruled West Bengal for over 35 years as CPM chief ministers, were among those whose bodies were donated. The donation of Basu’s body in 2010 was the fulfilment of a pledge he had made at a public event organised by an NGO seven years prior to his death. Since Bhattacharjee had separately made a similar pledge, his family honoured it when he died in August this year. Among all the body donors, the one who held the highest position at the Centre was former Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee. After spending most of his political life in CPM, Chatterjee died in Kolkata in 2018. Another notable in this roll of honour was Lakshmi Sahgal, the revolutionary who had famously led the women’s regiment of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army. Besides engaging in Left politics, she served the poor in Kanpur as a medical doctor. Her body was donated to a medical college there when Sahgal died in 2012 at the age of 97.
Apart from the standard set by his comrades, Yechury’s resolve to donate his body might have been influenced by the unusual record of his Telugu Brahmin family — both his uncle, KSR Murthy, an engineer by profession, who died in 2018, and his own mother, Kalpakam Yechury, who passed away in 2021, had donated their bodies. Thus, Sitaram Yechury’s body donation this month marked a rare example of two generations making this radical gesture.
The earliest political leader associated with body donation was a socialist who, besides being a physics professor, was the Union railway minister in the Janata government in 1977 and finance minister in the VP Singh government in 1989. The body of Madhu Dandavate, a Brahmin from Maharashtra, was donated on his death in 2005.
Maharashtra has another first to its credit. The first prominent person anywhere in the country to have got his body donated was the legendary industrialist Shantanurao Kirloskar. He was among the earliest Indians to have graduated from the globally renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology. On his death in 1994 at the age of 90, the donation of Kirloskar’s body fit in with his reputation that he was ahead of his times. Even so, this social reform by a business tycoon in the early years of India’s economic liberalisation failed to garner the attention it deserved.
In the chequered history of body donation, the real surprise has been from the Hindu Right, or rather those who would generally be expected to be ill-disposed to the idea of body donation on account of their reverence for tradition. The inflection point was the enactment of the organ donation law in 1994. It inspired Alok Kumar, a Delhi-based lawyer who is now the international president of Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), to make a pledge going beyond organs. Along with some friends, Kumar registered a will with a sub-registrar stating that he wanted his body to be donated for medical research.
This, in turn, prompted his mentor in the Sangh Parivar, Nanaji Deshmukh, to entrust Kumar with the responsibility of registering a similar pledge and donating his body. From this interaction was born an NGO, Dadhichi Deh Dan Samiti, that could ensure body donation irrespective of where donors like Deshmukh died. Dadhichi Deh Dan Samiti is named after a mythological sage who is said to have sacrificed his body to help the devas defeat the asuras. Legend has it that Lord Indira fashioned his deadliest weapon, a thunderbolt called Vajra, from Dadhichi’s spine. A posthumous recipient of the Bharat Ratna, Deshmukh became the first body donor of this NGO when he died in 2010. In keeping with his wishes, the Samiti brought Deshmukh’s body to Delhi from Chitrakoot and donated it to AIIMS.
The next big donor was the VHP leader Giriraj Kishore, who was active in the movement that led to the demolition of the Babri Masjid. When he succumbed to cancer at 94 in 2014, the Samiti, in deference to his pledge, donated Kishore’s body to the Army College of Medical Sciences in the national capital.
Since Dadhichi Deh Dan Samiti has emerged as the most active promoter of body donation in the north, it is not altogether surprising that even Noida-based Leila Seth, India’s first high court chief justice and mother of author Vikram Seth, registered with it. On her death in 2017, the Samiti donated Seth’s body as instructed to the Army College of Medical Sciences. Four years later, the Samiti donated the body of her husband too.
In an article written by Alok Kumar in 2014 in Organiser, he mentioned three Sangh Parivar leaders who were registered at the time with the Samiti for body donation. As it happened, out of those three, the body of only one — Giriraj Kishore — was donated. The pledges that were unfulfilled at the time of death were of Ashok Singhal, who led the VHP in the run-up to the Babri Masjid demolition, and Sushil Modi, who was not only deputy chief minister of Bihar but also a long-time campaigner of body donation as head of the Samiti in the state.
In order to counter the pressure from priests at the ground level, the Samiti has put out video messages from religious leaders to impress upon Hindus that deh daan (body donation) would not disrupt the journey of the atma (soul), citing examples of ancient deviations from agni sanskar (cremation). While Sanatana Dharma could do with such reinterpretation or reforms, there is clearly a need for more non-partisan espousal of body donation from civil society.
Manoj Mitta is the author of Caste Pride:Battles for Equality in Hindu India.The views expressed are personal