Cemetery: A Colonial Time Portal

by | Jul 24, 2024

All India is full of neglected graves that date from the beginning of the eighteenth century—tombs of forgotten colonels of corps long since disbanded; mates of East India men who went on shooting expeditions and never came back; factors, agents, writers, and ensigns of the Honourable the East India Company by hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands.

—Rudyard Kipling, “The Tomb of His Ancestors” (1897)

plaque displaying the south park street cemetery opening and closing dates

South Park Street Cemetery 1767-1790. Courtesy of the author.

The moment you step inside the South Park Street Cemetery, you enter a green enclosure far away from the hustle-bustle of Kolkata’s roads. The petroleum fumes of the busy metropolis give way to a damp, mossy smell typical of graveyards. Colonnades of trees interspersed with mausoleums, obelisks, cenotaphs, domes, and pyramids surround you. Some are as tall as one-story buildings. I look up and see amaltas, fig, moringa, mango, peepul, and arjun trees. It is the first time I have visited the cemetery after living 17 years in the city. The sage-colored canopy provides comfort amidst 1,600 graves. My canvas shoes are squelching on wet, dead leaves after an August drizzle. The paths are overrun with tall grass. I can hear the crows among the dense bougainvillea. As I venture farther inside, the distant traffic from Park Street vanishes. Grecian urns appear out of long shadows when sunlight, streaming through dense Ashoka leaves, dazzles on them. I want to touch the epitaphs—run my fingers across the engraved letters—but I don’t. Am I trespassing? Are they awake? What was that sound? I look back and see a man with a backpack standing in front of an obelisk and squinting at the writing on the stone. How quickly the agonist-realist in me crosses the border and enters a realm of the inexplicable, the thin line between a beating heart and the dirt under my feet.

Photograph of an alley in the South Park Street Cemetery

An alley in the South Park Street Cemetery. Courtesy of the author.

Cemeteries remind us of a time that now resides only in museums and books. The first thing I notice is that most of these men and women were my age and died in 18th-century Calcutta. Young officers or civil servants employed by the East India Company and their wives fell prey to diseases like cholera, malaria, rabies, and tropical fevers. I notice many infants here. A plaque reads: “Frances Sophia, died 4th June 1820, Aged 7 months and 22 days.” The climate of Bengal was something the cavalry didn’t expect. Stepping around mossy pebbles, I find the oldest grave of the cemetery: Mrs. Sarah Pearson, who died on September 8, 1768, at the age of 19 years old. A newlywed? I wonder. A dizzying melancholy sweeps through these rows of tombs, people who crossed the ocean to make this simple trading post their home.

Photograph of the tombstone of Frances Sophia

Tombstone of Frances Sophia who died aged 7 months and 22 days. Courtesy of the author.

Most cities preferred to bury their dead away from human settlements, sometimes in suburbs, barricaded with high walls, or simply outside city limits. Venice has its own island for its dead. Only Rome seems to be an exception, with catacombs and tombs strewn across the city. The Park Street Cemetery opened in 1767, away from the town square, and was surrounded by jungles and swamps. The only way to enter the cemetery was by a narrow lane called Burial Ground Road. Later, it was renamed Park Street after a deer park designed by Sir Elijah Impey, the first chief justice of British India’s highest court, who learned Bengali and Urdu en route to India. The area outside the cemetery’s borders was once a bamboo forest where Warren Hastings came to hunt tigers.

Cemeteries remind us of a time that now resides only in museums and books.

The first time I learned about this place as a kid was in a spooky detective tale called Gorosthaney Sabdhan (Careful in the Graveyard) (1998) by Satyajit Ray. It featured the lithe, ambidextrous, Charminar-huffing, cryptology-enthusiast: the Bengali detective, Prodosh Chandra Mitra, or Feluda. That summer, I was devouring the Famous Five books, so entering a graveyard on a moonlit night was a lucrative adventure. Pondering my childhood dreams, I enter another brick-layered lane and glance at the headstones. The once-white marbles are pewter at the corners and turning beige. I see a bright orange bracket fungus growing out of a dead log near my feet. I take a photograph. It seems almost blasphemous to take pictures here. Perhaps I have read too many books on Victorian funerary practices and grief protocols. I take out the list of prominent graves I made and cross the names off one by one. There’s the eminent botanist and founder of the botanical garden of Calcutta, Robert Kyd. William Jones, the first president of the Asiatic Society who learned Greek, Latin, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, and the basics of Chinese writing at a very young age. It is Jones who proposed the relationships between various Indo-European languages. Indology was spearheaded under his tenure at the Asiatic Society. I find the grave of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, who was a radical thinker and friend of the Bengal Renaissance movement and whose name is engraved on the lecture halls of my alma mater, Presidency College. He was 22 when he died of cholera. Am I on a pilgrimage? I ask myself.

composite column

Tomb architecture showing Composite columns. Courtesy of the author.

indo-western tomb

A tomb with Indo-Western architectural elements. Courtesy of the author.

Doric columns

Tomb showing Doric columns inspired from Roman architecture. Courtesy of the author.

A crow flaps down on a gravestone. The florid art nouveau designs adorning tombs testify to the affluence of many English families that settled here. Suddenly, I remember pictures of Père Lachaise. The gloom, the architecture, and the particular shade of green associated with faeries in woods and Tolkien’s forests. Marcel Proust and Oscar Wilde are buried in the cemetery in Paris. Only a few people achieve the gift of immortality like the poets do. The rest of us are bound to return to the dust without the chance of a century-long afterthought. Some of the stones are earthy, dark, and treacly, their names completely eroded. This trip is turning out to be a lesson in humility. It’s been more than two hours since I started walking. I notice more people entering the premises. The damp August morning is quickly turning into a stifling hot afternoon. I spot a kettle of vultures upon a tree on the southern side. I notice some mosquito welts on my elbows and ankles. The thought of a warm bowl of ramen wafts into my mind as I walk back toward the main entrance. Stepping out on Park Street, I am thrown into the bustling life outside again.

Sayani Sarkar

Sayani Sarkar

Publab Fellow 2024

Sayani Sarkar (Instagram, Substack) holds a PhD in Biochemistry and Structural Biology from the University of Calcutta, India. Her works have been published in Littera Magazine, The Coil Magazine, The Alluvian, and The Curious Reader. She blogs on The Omnivore Scientist about books, art, climate change, and culture. She is currently writing a book, combining memoir with exploration of natural sciences. She lives in Kolkata, India.