In the cemetery of Calcutta, a culture lover brings the names of the dead to life

A tombstone after cleaning by Mudar Patherya, who has cleaned over 300 tombstones so far. | Photo credit: Special arrangement

Mudar Patherya is bringing the dead back to life at one of India's oldest colonial burial grounds. This well-known heritage activist from Kolkata is single-handedly cleaning gravestones at South Park Street Cemetery that have become indecipherable over time, restoring a part of the city's past.

The cemetery, now operated by the Christian Burial Board, was opened in 1767 and, after a brief closure in 1790, remained in use until the 1850s. Several individuals prominent in Indian history are buried here, including Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, Sir William Jones, Col. Robert Kyd, Lt. Col. Colin Mackenzie and Maj. Gen. Charles Stuart.

“This is possibly the richest collection of funerary architecture outside Europe. So far I have been able to get 392 tombstones cleaned, there are 300 to 400 more to be cleaned, for which I need to raise more funds,” said Patherya. The Hindu.

It all started a month ago when someone from an Urdu WhatsApp group he is a part of told him about a particular gravestone – gravestone number 1331 – that had an inscription in Urdu. Wondering why a British person's gravestone would have an inscription in Urdu, he went to the cemetery to check. It turned out that the grave was that of British politician Samuel Smith.

“When I looked closely at the tombstone, I saw inscriptions in English and Bengali as well. I thought I have to clean this. I wrote to the Christian Burial Board and asked for permission. They invited me to a meeting and asked me if I could clean other tombstones as well,” said Mr Patherya.

The board, he says, has been “extremely open-minded and cooperative,” which is why things have progressed very quickly: only last month he asked them for permission and has already cleaned 392 tombstones after quickly raising Rs 400,000 through donations from well-wishers.

When he set to work, he found there was no documentation and cleaning may not have been done for decades, and that the structures over the graves were in danger. “But what was amazing was the beauty – the beauty of the structures, the beauty of the calligraphy and the emotionality. There are the graves of two-year-olds there. If you put together the stories written on the gravestones, you get a slice of life from 1767 to the 1850s, when the cemetery started to fill up,” Mr Patherya said.

One of the nearly 1,600 graves in South Park Street Cemetery is that of Rose Whitworth Aylmer, whose family sent her to India because she became too close to the poet and writer Walter Savage Landor. She died in Calcutta at the age of 20, almost immediately after her arrival, and Mr. Landor wrote a poem in her memory that became one of his best known works and was later engraved on her tombstone.

Mr. Landor never achieved the fame he deserved, but he had admirers who later achieved immortality. One of them was Robert Browning; another was Charles Dickens, who named his second son after Mr. Landor. By a strange coincidence, the remains of this son of Mr. Dickens – Walter Landor Dickens – lie buried in the same cemetery.