Every reunion, it is said, has a hint of the resurrection. The scores of tourists, Indian and foreign, visiting the silent tombs and cemeteries of Kolkata are doing just this. They are resurrecting the memory of people left behind by time. The state’s tourism industry is now seeing an opportunity in these grave visits.
While pilgrims visit Mother Teresa’s tomb every day, regular tourists have added to their itinerary historic graveyards like the South Park Street Cemetery, the Bhowanipore War Cemetery and the grave of Job Charnock, the founder of Calcutta, at St John’s Church near Dalhousie.
“From this Puja [Durgapuja] season, we are planning to come up with a special package for tourists. The tourism department will arrange buses to take them to the tomb of Mother Teresa and to other graveyards of historical importance,” says Rajpal Singh, the state’s minister for tourism. “This will help boost the industry because a lot of foreign tourists come here to trace their roots.”
Walking through the graveyards, it is not uncommon to come across a visitor searching eagerly for a specific tomb. One such visitor is Rohit Gautam, a student of National Institute of Technology in Durgapur. He is at the Park Street Cemetery with his friends “to see the epitaph with the name of Walter Landor Dickens, the son of Charles Dickens”. He explains, “There were a lot of articles written about the soldier son of Dickens, who landed in India during the Mutiny of 1857, and died in 1864. It is out of curiosity and the love of Dickens’s writing that we are here.” Though Dickens Jr was buried in Bhowanipore cemetery, the epitaph was later relocated to South Park Street.
The cemetery has about 900 tombs of historical value. According to the Association for the Preservation of Historical Cemeteries in India (APHI), the cemetery is the resting place of British scholar-administrators, like William Jones (founder of the Asiatic Society), and poets, like Henry Louis Vivian Derozio. Records show that the first burial here was in 1767 and the last in 1830. “Every day, about 150 visitors come to the Park Street Cemetery,” says Ashwani Kapur, president of APHI.
The state and the Kolkata Municipal Corporation have plans to boost graveyard tourism. APHI is planning to launch a campaign in hotels across the city to invite tourists to visit the graves. Kapur says, “We have an ‘Adopt a Tomb’ scheme through which associations and individuals can sponsor the restoration of a particular tomb.” And the tourism department hopes to come up with an audio-visual aid for tourists.
Another cemetery, the Bhowanipore War Cemetery, which has graves of soldiers of the First and Second World Wars, also gets a lot of visitors from the United Kingdom, Australia and Ireland. Many of them come in search of their roots. “Top British officials also come to the graves,” says Minendra Joarder, manager of graves for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC), which maintains part of this cemetery.
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Bhowanipur has 95 graves of soldiers from the First World War and 617 from the Second. The CWGC takes care of another 187 non-military graves here. The rest of Bhowanipore cemetery, too, has graves dating to the Colonial era. “We regularly get queries from foreigners asking if their ancestors are buried here. We reply to all those queries,” says C B Murray, secretary of the East India Charitable Trust through which the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia (BACSA) manages the remaining part of the graveyard. “We have records from 1807 in place. This is a running cemetery,” Murray adds. BACSA, which manages 78 cemeteries in the country, allots funds annually to maintain this part of the cemetery.
Another tourist stop is St John’s Church, where Job Charnock and several other employees of East India Company are buried. “Though the tourism department and the Archaeological Survey of India have declared this a preserved spot, we have not received any aid from them for maintaining Charnock’s tomb and the nearby graves, including the one of Lady Canning [a prolific artist and wife of Charles Canning, the Governor-General of India during the revolt of 1857],” says church officer Rangan Datta.
The government now plans to bring out special booklets explaining the significance of each graveyard. This will help visitors, many of whom come from other continents — and sometimes leave their traces behind. In a register at the CWGC war graveyard, one visitor from the UK has written: “We will remember them.”
