Imagined Neighborhoods of the Far-Away Dead: Park Street Cemetery, Calcutta

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 257

I wonder what this cemetery looks like now, this colonial funiery landscape, all these British occupiers buried in their imagined death community? (Lord Curzon, for one, found it to be "the most pathetic site in Calcutta", which in 1900 was saying allot According to the piece below from the Telegraph, Calcutta, things haven't gotten much better.)  Is there any melancholy left for a place like this, filled with the British working class in the heart of Calcutta?  Perhaps they could never have imagined their Further India slip away on its own, and that they'd be buried in a so-incredibly foreign land?

Seems like this would be ripe terrain for post modernists, having a go at the real and imaginary architecture of dead colonials in a post-colonial world, using a language that only the initiated can understand. (Constructing self-referential vocabularies with slippery exterior-to-the-argument reference points isn't exactly the best way to get to a general discussion...nor doers it seem to be additive when the vocabulary has a life of its own.)

(I had a little go at the post-modernists and constructed a little language generator here.)

From The Telegraph, Calcutta,  16 September, 2007:

South Park Street Cemetery

"First stop: a grim place. But a haunting, beautiful place.
Maintained by the Christian Burial Board, the South Park Steet Cemetery was founded on August 25, 1767. Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, William Jones, founder of Asiatic Society, John Hyde, a judge famous for his papers, are buried here, as is Rose Aylmer, the woman who inspired the poem of the same name by Walter Savage Landor. The tombs are in various stages of decay. The sight of the mossy tombstones, mostly imposing, some addressed to persons never known to history, as the headstone that says “here repose the earthly remains of James Miller”, in various stages of decay, but exuding serenity along the network of lichen-covered paths, brings soothing thoughts. If this is the end, it is not so bad. The caretaker is not very cooperative, though, and the place also invites criminal elements after the dark.

But then visitors are not allowed."

Comments

[jasper]

I have to wonder what some of the people whose names are listed in the 'inventory' are doing in a 'working class' graveyard.

It is a fascinating post -- there must be similar graveyards throughout the Commonwealth.

What struck me was the fact that there are Canadian (I imagine American) military wives and children buried in cemeteries in Germany and France. Their graves -- so far away from home -- are sad reminders of the Cold War era.