French statesman Charles De Gaulle once remarked that ?the graveyards are full of indispensable men?. When a human being dies, she will be remembered by someone or the other as an irreplaceable loss. If this person achieved great fame and adulation, the sense of missing her badly is shared by vast multitudes with a general consensus that an era has ended.
The marquee event of the funeral of pop icon Michael Jackson was one such moment of loss, graced by thousands in Los Angeles and watched by many multiples more worldwide. The funeral?s mood of ?celebration? of his extraordinary musical achievement was meant to leave a taste in public mind of his best times and compositions, sans the shenanigans.
In all societies, burials and cremations have deep meaning. From ancient times, civilisations have devoted considerable time and energy to designing specific rituals to inter and commemorate the dead. Archaeologists track funerals and pottery as the two most recognisable characteristics of any community from which a great deal can be inferred about cultural values and habits of that group.
A funeral is not only an occasion for nostalgia based on attachment to the deceased but also a social practice that reinforces widely held norms surrounding human existence. The psychological wish of every single person that she should get a ?decent burial? is at once a social desire to reproduce and preserve oneself through cycles of death and birth.
Depending on the individual and her category of accomplishment, funerals vary in form and substance. When heads of state or cherished political figures pass away, we have ?state funerals? organised by governments and marked by some routines that remind attendees and watchers of the gratitude in which the body politic holds the person who ended her earthly sojourn. Hearse processions with massive crowds, full gun salutes, march- and fly-pasts, valedictory speeches, and emotional scenes of outpouring grief are staples in state funerals.
If the individual being sent off is not only revered by state elites but also by the masses, state funerals turn into unforgettable ?I-had-been-there? events. When Mahatma Gandhi received a state funeral in 1948, more than one million people spontaneously gathered near the site of his pyre on the Yamuna river in Delhi and the United Nations ordered its flag flown at half-mast. That funeral was especially hurtful for the people of India owing to guilt that they had not listened to his sage advice of eschewing religious bloodletting and that he was assassinated by the same forces of fanaticism from which he had tried to wean Indians away. It was a funeral in which the entire country felt ashamed for letting itself down.
A somewhat similar sentiment accompanied the heart-rending funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, in London in 1997. Although short of a state funeral, she had won the hearts of the British people. It was an extraordinary occasion for them to rethink where they, as a media-saturated society, had gone wrong in driving her to untimely demise. An estimated 2.5 billion viewers (nearly half of the world?s population) watched her final rites on television, teary-eyed at the loss of the last popular royal in British history.
Religious figures have funerals that exceed every other category in piety and elaborateness of traditional ceremonies. The funeral of Pope John Paul II in 2005 witnessed the largest ever gathering of heads-of-state as well as more than four million common mourners in Rome. So enormous were the security risks of managing this pageant that the Italian government issued a no-fly zone within a five-mile radius of Rome on that day.
There is speculation about whether the Pope?s funeral or Diana?s was the ?most watched event in history?, but it is possible that the Michael Jackson funeral may end all disputes and be crowned number one. Entertainers, after all, have greater mass appeal than any other type of personality. The chart-busting King of Pop may just have notched one final record for his fans and vindicated the truism that music is universal and barrier-transcending.
The author is associate professor of world politics at the Jindal Global Law School