Years before zombies became a trope for scaremongering, we relied on ghosts to curdle our blood. Kolkata, like any city with part of its history steeped in blood and gore, has its share of ghosts and fascinating urban legends. Whenever we would go looking for excitement in places reputed to be haunted, we would end up at the South Park Street cemetery. Back in our ghost-hunting days, it used to be a dilapidated, unkempt place, quite unlike how it looks today, now that it has been partially restored, with glass and concrete towers peering down on it.
I find the recent tourism venture of cemetery walks in Kolkata, restricted to the Christian ones,
silly and perhaps intrusive. As a minority community, I suppose they are tolerant of such curiosity since a significant chunk of Kolkata’s history is interred in such places.
Walk in the park: South Park Street cemetery
If you consult a map, you will notice that all of them, regardless of community, are all located on one side of the erstwhile Circular Road, once the outer reaches of the city, which has expanded since to cover these areas.
The Upper and Lower Circular Roads have a history going back to the 18th century. The Mahratta Ditch, which was a little less than five km long, was an incomplete moat built by the British in the mid 18th century to keep marauding Bargis, or Maratha warriors, at bay. The raiders never came and the moat was eventually filled up and extended to become the Upper and Lower Circular Roads.
Now named after two eminent Bengali scientists, Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray and Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose respectively, the road is far longer today than it used to be. The Circular Road was once considered the outer boundary of Calcutta; the burial grounds were located beyond it.
The exception to this rule is the oldest graveyard in the central business district, located within the confines of the Armenian Holy Church of Nazareth and containing the first grave from 1630.
Armenians have another graveyard, next to the third oldest Christian cemetery in Kolkata, established in 1840 and still in use.
Derozio & co.
The Christian cemetery in South Park Street, a short walk away from A.J.C. Bose Road, is the second oldest, in existence since 1767. Known as the Great Cemetery of Asia, it is no longer in use and has around 1,600 colonial-era tombs. It is at present in the third phase of renovation.
Opposite it was the North Park Street Cemetery, now replaced by a school, a hospital and a church. In fact, some 250 years ago, the posh Park Street was known as the Road to Burial Grounds.
In the South Park cemetery lies buried the Anglo-Indian Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, the first nationalist poet of modern India, who inspired an entire generation of free-thinking patriots, and died in 1831 aged just 22.
Two smaller cemeteries, one French and one Italian, also came up a little further west on Park Street. They can no longer be found today, long replaced by offices and schools. Edward Tiretta, an Italian adventurer, was buried in one of these. He is supposed to have been a companion of Casanova who fled Italy for some political offence.
He became the Superintendent of Streets and Buildings in Calcutta during the governor-generalship of Warren Hastings. The post must have been lucrative — he became so rich that he bought a bazaar in central Kolkata, which is still known by his name. The city’s first China town is located here, now famous as the place to go for an early breakfast of Chinese delicacies.
The Scottish Church cemetery, established in 1820 but no longer in use, is also on the other side of A.J.C. Bose Road. A conservation project by the Kolkata Scottish Heritage Trust is currently in progress here along with a local community outreach programme.
War graves
Far west of these places, adjoining the Kidderpore dockyards, is the extant St. Stephen’s Cemetery, once called the Sailors’ Cemetery, which was established in 1820. Between these two extremes of the city is the Bhowanipore Cemetery, best known for its Commonwealth War graves dating back to the World War I.
North Kolkata has the rather decrepit Manicktala Christian Cemetery where Tarulata Dutt, better known as Toru Dutt, is buried. Known for her poetry in English and French, she translated and compiled Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan from the Sanskrit. She died in 1877.
There are interesting stories about the Lower Circular Road cemetery. The land for it was acquired from Tipu Sultan. At the back, separated by a narrow street, is a gas crematorium and a tiny graveyard. Considered to be the first such crematorium in the world, it was built in the 19th century especially to cremate those who died from various contagious diseases. It fell into disuse because of erratic gas supply and objections from people in the neighbourhood. Members of Brahmo Samaj once used it for cremations; Jagadish Chandra Bose, was cremated here.
Buried here is Bengal’s first dramatist and 19th century poet, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, besides many other people of eminence. There’s Dr Austin Ghosh, the founder-director of ONGC; Harendra Coomar Mookerjee, the first Bengali governor of West Bengal; Leslie Claudius, India’s first Olympic hockey medallist; Reverend Lal Bihari Shah, who set up Calcutta Blind School, the first of its kind in India; John Elliot Drinkwater Bethune, who established India’s first secular educational institution for women in Calcutta in 1849 which is named after him.
On the city’s fringes are found the Muslim cemeteries. The oldest of these, more than two and a quarter centuries old, is the Gore Gariban Burial Ground, also known as Gobra and Tiljala burial ground. Eminent surbahar player and sitarist, Ustad Enayat Khan, and his son, Ustad Vilayat Khan, were buried here.
Buried for 16 annas
In Ekbalpore, not far from the Sailors’ Cemetery, is the Sola Ana Burial Ground. In 1829, a European lady who converted to Islam purchased this land and laid the foundations of a mosque. Later, two local gentlemen convinced the British to build a burial ground for Muslims here. The charges for burial were 12 annas for adults and 4 annas for children: hence the name. It is almost two centuries old. There is another kabristan for children in South Kolkata’s Topsia area, right next to a Hindu burial ground. Another Hindu burial ground is in Taratala, in the west of the city.
The first recorded death of a Jew in Calcutta was in 1812. The Jews have their cemetery in North Kolkata, in Narkeldanga, and it houses the grave of Elias Moses Duek Cohen, a Commissioner of Calcutta Corporation and a minister in two of the city’s synagogues, who helped found the Jewish Girls’ School. The grave of David Nahoum, the proprietor of the eponymous and probably the country’s only Jewish bakery in Kolkata’s New Market, is here too.
If one travels a little to the west, the Parsi Dakhma, the Tower of Silence, in Beleghata stands in a wooded area. Further west and a bit to the south are the Chinese cemeteries — six of them scattered in the general area of Tangra, famous for the Chinese tanneries and now the destination for crowds looking for ‘authentic’ Chinese food. They are more than a century old and still in use.
A journalist once unkindly remarked that there was nothing to Kolkata other than its heritage and its glorious past. In the burial grounds of the city, this past lives on. A marker of the cosmopolitan entity in the truest sense of the term that the city was and still is. Inclusive, secular, pluralistic, it makes space for any and all, regardless of creed and community. Generations of Muslims and Hindus have been the main caretakers of burial places that belong to other faiths. If heritage must signify something, let it signify this rich tradition of harmonious living in these fractious times.
The author, who lives in Kolkata, keeps rediscovering it, often with wonder.
