INDIA BEATS
Denial of dignity
ANTARA DAS
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Two historical cemeteries in Kolkata are in a state of utter neglect and indiscriminately vandalised.
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Photo: Sushanta Patronobish
No peace: Graves vandalised by the miscreants at the cemetery in the Lower Circular Road.
In a bustling part of South Kolkata, tucked in between monstrously designed offices and apartment buildings, lie a few acres of history. They exist as two separate grounds, almost ashamed of their antiquity, cowering within themselves so that the wei
ght of the past that they invoke does not trouble those leading the fast life outside.
An observant pair of eyes will not miss the odd, weather-beaten steeple or the graceful but damaged lines of the funerary urns that dot the South Park Street cemetery, the solemn abode of the dead. It contains around 1,600 graves that were erected over a period of 150 years, the oldest monument dated September 8, 1768, dedicated to the memory of one Mrs. Sarah Pearson. A little further up is the bigger and still functional Lower Circular Road (LCR) cemetery, a rambling wilderness that surprisingly houses 12,000 graves.
Not resting in peace
It would be quite erroneous to assume, however, that characters part of this vast historical gallery — ranging from British to Americans and Greek to Armenians — lie in peace in their final resting place, free from the restless clamour of life. A peek into the LCR cemetery shows the sweeping decay that the place has come to symbolise, with graves being hollowed out, tombstones ripped apart from the graves to be either stolen or recklessly discarded and piled into a heap. While the ravages of weather have ensured that most of the inscriptions have turned illegible, those inflicted by humans have violated the dignity due to the dead.
Acknowledging the ruinous state of the LCR cemetery, Ronojoy Bose, an executive member of the Christian Burial Board that is in charge of both these cemeteries apart from three others in the city, blames petty criminals as well as more organised criminal networks operating from the adjacent slums for the widespread vandalism. These mischief makers regularly scale the boundary wall, at times even dismantling parts of it, attacking the graves to pilfer whatever might have any antique or archaeological value. “They have even stolen the railing around the tomb of the Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt, one of the shining figures of the Bengal Renaissance; only exemplary punishment meted out by the police can tackle this menace,” Mr. Bose said.
Already, the West Bengal Minority Commission has suggested certain measures to rein in the theft of railings, concrete and marble slabs, widespread dumping of garbage from the adjacent apartment blocks and the trespassing that has become the order of the day. “The Minority Commission had exercised its right to visit the cemeteries and as a recommending body, suggested certain measures to the police to check encroachment and restore the serenity and tranquility of the place,” said Syed Adnan, Chairman of the Commission. “The last resting place is a sacred site that also has religious sentiments attached to it; in the event, it is very disconcerting for people to arrive at the graves of their ancestors and find human faeces or pigs’ entrails strewn all over it,” he added.
One might indeed be bemused at the apparent lack of concern for its colonial heritage in the city that was once the darling of the colonialists. The South Park Street cemetery, in fact, has been claimed to be one of the earliest non-church cemeteries in the world, which housed colonial administrators and soldiers of the invading army as well as the men, women and children who played only bit parts in the larger drama of the time, their lives and deaths determined by their resilience to withstand smallpox, rabies, cholera and “Arracan fever”.
A reflection of lives
While the South Park Street cemetery is better preserved than the one at LCR, owing to the conservation efforts of the Association for the Preservation of Historical Cemeteries in India, the one at LCR needs more attention. As the official brochure aptly reminds us, a walk down the lanes among the decaying, moss-covered, weather-beaten structures is as much a lesson in the neo-classical architectural fashions of the times as it is a reflection of the lives that the ordinary and not so ordinary led. So while John Drinkwater Bethune — whose epitaph describes his achievement as having “paved through the dark world of Indian women and rejuvenated it with the benevolent light of education” through the foundation of the Hindu Female School — rests at the LCR cemetery, the towering steeple over the grave of the pioneering Indologist William Jones dominates the one at Park Street.
That is not to forget the tomb dedicated to the memory of Rose Whitworth Aylmer, a sprightly girl all of 17 — a companion and source of inspiration to the poet William Savage Landor — who lost the battle to cholera almost as soon as she landed in Calcutta. While Landor’s ode to Rose is inscribed on the epitaph (“Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes, / May weep, but never see, / A night of memories and sighs, / I consecrate to thee”), it is the eccentric religious inclinations of Major General Charles Stuart, also known as “Hindoo” Stuart on account of his devotion to the Hindu pantheon of gods and his daily dip in the Hooghly river, that are reflected in the Hindu religious motifs on his grave.
Already, a large number of graves in the LCR cemetery have been uprooted on account of the entangling roots of the around 250 ancient trees that dot the grounds in this area. The Christian Burial Board, Mr. Bose said, is considering sending out an international notice, stating that unless the descendants assume responsibility for the upkeep of the graves of their ancestors or depute representatives to do the same, the graves might not be preserved at all. It is said that in the olden days, burials would take place here with the help of lanterns, in the gathering dark of the evening. Perhaps now, more than ever, that darkness is gathering strength.
India Beats features stories of the unusual, the exotic and the extraordinary.
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