At first glance, it looks like the perfect location for a horror film. Look again, and you will see that this graveyard is peaceful and full of plant life — a good place to rest in peace. But all is not well.
Rehmatabad Cemetery in Narialwadi area of Mazgaon houses thousands of graves. Like most other graveyards in downtown Mumbai it has a grave problem: lack of space. This means that a body buried today is likely to be dug up after three or four years to make space for someone else.
Rehmatabad is managed by the Iranian Shia Trust. The Trust is negotiating with the Brihan-mumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) for additional space. Manager Hussain Shirazi says they have been allocated space in the central suburbs of Govandi and Mumbra.
Shias from across Mumbai are buried here, and their families pay for maintenance. There are celebrity graves, including those of Bollywood actresses Meena Kumari and Purnima, and Shirin Mohammed Ali, the mother of director Mahesh Bhatt. In November 2011, Meena Kumari’s grave was restored after her stepdaughter intervened. The broken marble structure was repaired. This memorial, although it holds a famous body, is much like the other graves here, except it is taller.
Each grave has a shelf-life of three years, says Shirazi, except those of celebrities. Officials at the site say that even well-built marble memorials have to be broken down to make way for new ones. Old remains are covered with a fresh layer of earth to house the next set of graves. “I know it is not proper, but what do we do?” asks one official.
Many tourists used to come to see Meena Kumari’s tomb, says a worker. Nowadays she is forgotten, and her grave is visited hardly once a year.
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Not far from Rehmatabad is the Khoja Shia Isna’Ashari Cemetery. More than 100 years old, this is one of Mumbai’s oldest cemeteries. It has some 20,000 graves, including that of Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s second wife, Maryam. Here the buried are allowed to rest for six years. If no one comes to claim the remains after that, eventually the grave is reused.
Cemetery authorities are on the lookout for more land, but they have few options. One is to take over the unused graveyard land of other religious communities — with their permission, of course. Because this is a sensitive issue, cemetery officials will not say which communities are ready to part with land.
At the Burhani cemetery in Marine Lines, of the Bohra Muslim community, the graves are packed so tightly that one can almost imagine the souls fighting for space. The Burhani trust, however, holds several tracts of cemetery land in Marine Lines and the central suburbs. “We are more or less comfortable with the space that the trust has,” claims one employee. “Unlike other places where new graves are built in four to eight years, here new graves are built on top of old ones only after 20 years.”
The Christian Cemetery in Sewri, the largest in Mumbai, is one of the few not fighting for space. It has 40,000 graves already, of people belonging to different Christian sects. Mere minutes from downtown Dockyard Road, it was established as a burial ground for Europeans. One section still houses Raj-era graves, subdivided by sect.
Here, authorities exhume the bodies after just 18 months. The remains are then placed compactly in niches along the cemetery walkway. This is one reason why there is no lack of space. The grave maintenance fee is a few hundred rupees a year, and goes to BMC.
In the graveyards of some Mumbai churches where space is very tight, human remains are stored in community wells.
It is only Mumbai’s minorities for whom burial is a tradition, but even so, after the next quarter-century the pressure of population may precipitate a major space crunch. One cemetery manager remarks, “Like one now books land to construct a house, one may then need to pre-book space for one’s grave. That is how the future looks.”
