Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Note on Transliteration and Transcription -- Introduction: Passing On: The Social Life of Death in South Asian Religions -- Ashes to Nectar: Death and Regeneration among the Rasa Siddhas and Nåth Siddhas* -- Human Torches of Enlightenment: Autocremation and Spontaneous Combustion as Marks of Sanctity in South Asian Buddhism -- When a Wife Dies First: The -- and a Female Brahman Ritualist in Coastal Andhra -- Return to Tears: Musical Mourning, Emotion, and Religious Reform in Two South Asian Minority Communities -- Deanimating and Reanimating the Dead in Rural Sri Lanka -- The Suppression of Nuns and the Ritual Murder of Their Special Dead in Two Buddhist Monastic Texts* -- A Funeral to Part with the Living: ATamil Countersorcery Ritual1 -- Dead Healers and Living Identities: Narratives of a Hindu Ghost and a Muslim Sufi in a Shared Village* -- Contributors -- Index.