The Hindu Business Line : Under an alien sky

Cemeteries have always fascinated me. As much as any edifice, they symbolise the grandeur and the fragility of power. They are also repositories of ordinary and extraordinary stories, of the social history of the times. And no one cemetery does this with greater import than the South Park Cemetery on Chowringhee road in Kolkota or Calcutta, as it was then known, the most important imperial city of two centuries ago.

Opened in 1767, this cemetery replaced the yard of St John’s Church in the old fort. However, the “new” cemetery was at some distance from Dalhousie Square, and was situated amid marshes and patches of jungle, approached by a narrow raised bund first known as Burial Ground Road. Later on it was called Park Street from the private deer park built by Sir Elijah Impey. Often burials took place in the late evenings or after dark with lighted torches — it must have been an eerie sight.

It still is an eerie sight, even in the morning, for it’s a thicket of columns, urns, obelisks, pagodas and grandiose mausoleums — dark grey and grim — whose crumbling stones and obliterated tombstones gently mock at the pretensions of some of those that lie below.

Who are all the people who lie here under an alien sky, who came from so far away, who suffered the hot skies and the deadly diseases, who bartered their existence and those of their loved ones for the glory of empire and self? They were indeed a motley lot.

Here are buried men, women and children of all ages and designations. Like the pages of a history book, the inscriptions on the monuments make compelling reading. Famous figures rest cheek by jowl with great beauties or infants, whose lives have been snuffed out by disease. Many were military personnel who were stationed in Calcutta, or ship’s crew and marine establishment staff in Bengal, Company servants including administrators, merchants, painters, visitors, law enforcement officials, breeders of cattle, shipwrights, keeper of jail, school teachers, architects, translators, keepers of livery stables, printers, coopers, postmaster, undertaker and surgeon.

But it was not only the British who are interred here. There are several American nationals from Philadelphia and some eastern seaboard cities for example, a Doctor Carrol Humphrey from New York who was attached to a ship, and some independent merchants and lawyers. Also a plaque at the entrance is that of a prominent Armenian called Marcar Arrathoon, ancestor perhaps of the Arrathoon family which owned the Grand Hotel. The Armenians were invited by Job Charnock, the founder of Calcutta, to come and settle here. A Frenchman lies here who was the owner of the Harmonic Tavern, near Dalhousie Square, where coffee was served as the staple drink and where newspapers of six months ago were displayed for those who wanted to keep in touch with their motherland.

Sir William Jones, founder of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, has crossed spades on his memorial in tribute to his archaeological prowess. Although a judge of the Supreme Court, he was an eminent orientalist, writing on the land he lived in on a variety of subjects including local habits, literature, botany, geography and music. Fluent in Sanskrit, before his early death at the age of 47 he had translated many works, including the Gita Govinda.

An interesting tomb manifests the dead owner’s interest in Hinduism. Nicknamed “Hindoo Stuart”, he was an eccentric Irishman called Major General Charles Stuart who took to Hindu customs a year after his arrival. He bathed in the Ganges every morning, wore Indian clothes and chewed paan. When he died in 1828 he was buried with his collection of Hindu idols in his coffin. His tomb is in the form of a temple with stone carvings of the Goddess Ganga.

Undying romance

When I asked the caretaker for the tomb of Rose Aylmer, he nodded vigorously and took me straight to it. Obviously it was of interest to many for it was one which had romantic connotations. The slab over her grave says, “In Memory of the Honourable Rose Whitworth Aylmer, who departed this life March 2nd, A.D. 1800 aged 20 years.” Who was she?

She was the young girl who had been befriended by the poet Walter Savage Landour and they used to go for long strolls together on the mountains and shores of Wales. But she was sent off to her aunt Lady Russel in India, probably because her father married again. Within a year of her arrival, she died of cholera. When Landour heard of this, he wrote this exquisite elegy which was later added to the tomb:

Ah, what avails the sceptred face?

Ah, what the form divine?

What every virtue, every grace?

Rose Aylmer, all were thine,

Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes

May weep, but never see,

A night of memories and of sighs

I consecrate to thee.

It is poignant to see the inscription on the graves of infants for infant mortality was high. One tomb contains the graves of four infant children who died between 1820 and 1827, the oldest having lived for one year and ten months.

For some time the cemetery was vandalised by thieves and drug addicts but now the Association for Preservation of Historical Cemeteries in India (APHCI) with the help of the British Association of Cemeteries in South Asia are doing yeoman work in restoring and preserving the final resting place of those that lived here. As Aurelius Khan, founding member of the APHCI says in his note in the little booklet about the cemetery, some came “for gain, some for glory or in service of their country, a few for their faith, others to keep the King’s peace or enrich an ancient culture with offerings of their own,” Whatever it was, they deserve to lie in peace, with their memories kept alive in this historic and nostalgic cemetery.