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Paper short abstract

Examining deaths displaced from Lakshadweep islands to the Indian mainland, this paper analyses the separation of graves and grief which reorganises ethics of care, mourning and memory. It traces how necropolitical arrangements of health infrastructure reshapes grief across oceanic death circuits.

Paper long abstract

Within the mobile maritime worlds of the Indian Ocean, death and the dead circulate continuously. Graves, bodies, and memories shift across shores, making simultaneous claims to sea and land, and placing grief and memory within mobile geographies. Drawing on the anthropology of death and island studies, this paper follows the everyday politics of healthcare, death, and burial as they unfold for patients medically referred from the Lakshadweep Islands, a fragile maritime border of the Indian subcontinent, to the mainland in search of advanced care. For the Muslim-majority islanders, embalming and post-mortem procedures are religiously discouraged, and the imperative for swift burial often prevents the return of the deceased to their homeland. This produces a critical rupture: bodies are interred in distant lands, while grief remains anchored in the islands. How do islanders reckon with loss when the material remnants of the dead are permanently distanced? How are care and ethical acts enacted across these shifting terrains of life, death, memory and mourning? How does the uneven presence and absence of health infrastructure in the peripheries shape the circuits through which death is produced and managed? Through oral narratives, ethnographic fieldwork, and archival analysis of burial and medical records, the paper traces how this separation of graves and grief generates discursive, historical, and political proximities. In doing so, it shows how necropolitical arrangements embedded in everyday infrastructures of care and neglect disrupt claims to belonging, autochthony, and identity, while reshaping the conditions of mourning and healing in the aftermath of death.