Death and Literature:A Visit to the Cemeteries of Yore

“Can storied urn or animated bust

      Back to its mansion call the feeling breath?

Can honour’s voice provoke the silent dust,

     Or flatt’ry soothe the dull cold ear of Death?”
                               [Thomas Grey’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’] 

As novices in the world of literature, we had our first seminar at our college on “Love and Literature”. In the final year our department organized an excursion to two important cemeteries of Kolkata, as a befitting sequel - 'Death and Literature'. So, on a pleasant November morning we headed to the South Park Street Cemetery- a lush green oasis in the corner of Park Street. Love and Death, being two of the most fundamental themes of literature, marked the beginning and end of our three years long journey.

The South Park Street Cemetery was established in 1767, replacing the yard of St. John’s Church. It hosts 1600 graves or tombs.

In the peaceful paradise of soaring tombs shaded by tropical trees we found ornamental cenotaphs, tablets and epitaphs, surrounded by a picturesque landscape of tall shady trees, bushes and plants of many varieties. The tombs, raised on a brick plinth, are mostly of a square, rectangular or circular structure capped by a domical roof and fronted by Corinthian or Ionian columns that support an entablature contained within the pediment. Besides these, there are other types of monuments, including obelisks, cairns, carved stone urns resting on fluted columns, and the most beautiful sarcophagi. The tombs are a mixture of Gothic architecture with a rich flavour of Indo-Saracenic  style. We admired the contrast of colonial and modern architecture of the tombs. 

There were composite brick structures built in the ‘Panchyatana’ manner, with a central dome flanked by miniature replicas of Orissan ‘Rekha Deul’ on four sides.

The heavily inscribed decaying headstones, rotundas, pyramids and urns have been restored. 

The love of classicism which dominated Britain at that time was carried in the hearts of the youthful adventurers to a distant and exotic land, and lived on in the monuments which they chose to commemorate their friends. Graceful Roman cupolas and elegant Grecian Urns were raised to glorify the memory of people like Colonel Charles Russel Deare, whilst a proportional stone column marks the last resting place of the 26 years old Captain Cooke.  

India was filled with myriad dangers for its settlers and would-be invaders. Without medical knowledge and no immunity to tropical diseases and fevers, they lived at the mercy of the severe and unrelenting climate and were all too often cut down in their youth. 

Child birth or childbed as it was more usually called was almost certainly the principle cause of adult female deaths. Infant mortality was appallingly high. One tomb contains the remains of four infant children of the Twisden family, who died between 1820 and 1827, none living for more than one year and ten months. The actuality or probability of such infant deaths must have been a main motive for exposure of British women, as also of Indian women of the time, to repeated pregnancies with recurrent risk. The inscriptions on many of these infant memorials cry out with the anguish of the bereaved.
“Tropical diseases were a great killer in the early days; soldiers died in small battles; and many ancient mariners were lost in ship wrecks. The long journey by ship would have been a great hardship, and when they alighted themselves they were greeted by an inhospitable and unknown terrain. This is not an apologia for colonialism, but for all their arrogance and jingoism.”

“Nor you, ye Proud, impute to these the fault,

If Memory o'er their tomb no trophies raise,

Where through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault

The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.”                              
                                 [Thomas Grey’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’]

Death has always been portrayed in literature as an equalizer of all ranks. But the graveyard showcases the class distinction among the hierarchy of the society. The relics of elites are huge, highly ornate and bear innovative epitaphs. The tombs of the poverty-stricken, on the other hand, are unadorned and unpretentious.

Still, “The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,

 And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,

Awaits alike the inevitable hour.

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”

                                 [Thomas Grey’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’] 

The seeds of the Bengal culture awakening were sown by a young man named Henry Louis Vivian Derozio. He also holds a significant position in the field of poetry.  His ‘To My Native Land’, ‘Going into Darkness’ inspired the natives of colonized Bengal. Though considered an Anglo-Indian due to his mixed Portuguese descent, Derozio considered himself an Indian and was filled with patriotic enthusiasm as for his native Bengal. 
He is best known as the pioneer of the “Young Bengal” movement, a group of radical Bengali thinkers based in Hindu College in Kolkata.
In 1831, he contracted cholera, a terminal illness at that time. He died shortly after that at only 22 years of age.

 
One of the most interesting and picturesque monuments was that of Major-General Charles Stuart; popularly known as ‘Hindu Stuart’. His love of Indian customs  earned him the name “Hindu” Stuart. He was here for 50 years, used to go down to the Ganges everyday, wore Indian clothes off duty and worshipped Hindu Gods. In his book ‘The Vindication of the Hindoos’, Stuart speaks of the greatness of Indian civilization and the need for the British to understand it. His tomb is surrounded by an elaborate edifice with stone carvings of deities.

Intermingling of culture and religion as a positive aspect of colonization can be traced vividly in the cemetery. Unlike the European cemeteries, where the tombs are shaped only in English- more precisely Christian- tradition; the South Park Street Cemetery showcases several graves built in the manner of Islamic or Hindu architecture. Therefore, the graveyard contains several mosque-shaped, temple-shaped and church-shaped tombs.

“life is but a dream for dead.”

Little signs of life amidst all the death , decay and melancholia of the graveyard amazed us.

                                                                                  -Third Year English Honours (Batch: 2016-17)