A Walk Through The City Of The Dead: The South Park Street Cemetery

It is surprising how, at the same time, a place can be so full and yet so empty. With crumbling graves and cracked tombstones that has faded with time, accompanied by falling leaves and yellow moss, this place, in some ways is surviving in a strange silence.

The South Park Street Cemetery in Kolkata is where many eminent personalities of British Raj found their final resting place. Surrounded by a twenty foot high stone wall on one of the busiest streets in Kolkata, the cemetery is contrastingly dark, peaceful, detached from the hustle and bustle of the city outside the walls and unexpectedly cool for Kolkata.

The South Park Street Cemetery was initially made for the East India Company pioneers in 1767. Today it stands as an old and mysterious, colonial structure. The dates of the graves span from 1768 to 1895. The colonial graves are all built in the shape of massive pyramids, urns, obeliks and pavilions, each one of the graves are a myriad of real history. Famous personalities like Colonel Vansittart, Sir William Jones (founder of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal), Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, Richmond Thackery,Col. Akilis, Michael Madhusudhan Dutta, and few others have been resting in peace here for eternity.

The grave of Major General ‘Hindoo’ Stuart is one of the most elaborate structures in the cemetery. He was in the East India Company Army and his actual name was Charles Stuart. Major General embraced the Hindu culture and advocated for it. A small mausoleum, in the shape of an Hindu temple was built on his grave.

Today the cemetery is an open history book for one to read and touch. The cemetery stands in an exhausted state and there have been several attempts to restore it's long lost stature but nothing much has been done so far. One would find a list of the persons buried here and the tombs too are numbered but it is difficult to find a grave as they are not placed in a numerical order.

Rudyard Kipling had once wrote about this cemetery saying, "the tombs are small houses. It is as though we walked down the streets of a town, so tall are they and so closely do they stand—a town shriveled by fire, and scarred by frost and siege. Men must have been afraid of their friends rising up before the due time that they weighted them with such cruel mounds of masonry."

Another interesting fact that the Cemetery is known for is its ghostly atmosphere within the long and enclosed walls of the monument. Sandip Roy in his film ‘Gorosthane Sabdhan’ potrayed this side of the cemetery, which is taken from a short novel of the same name by Satyajit Ray.

Today, the cemetery hardly witnesses any visits and it stands there almost forgotten. As you would walk amidst the broken and crumbling tombs and structures of the cemetery, you would notice an old and unknown feel to them.

When walking out of the cemetery on its bricked laden paths, before leaving, you would find a tombstone, on which it is written “In the midst of life, we are in death.”