The South Park Street Cemetery isn’t just a space for burying the dead. It is also a repository for Kolkata’s stories, spanning more than 200 years. Many of these stories have been lost with the ravages of time. However, a citizen-led movement is steadily reviving them, one tombstone at a time.
The seed of this movement was planted in August, when Mudar Patherya, a columnist with My Kolkata, received a text on his Urdu WhatsApp group. “Someone told me about this tombstone in South Park Street Cemetery with an epitaph in Urdu that was barely legible,” he shares.
Gripped by the desire to clean it, he reached out to the Christian Burial Board for permission. “On second thoughts, I wondered why should I clean only one tombstone with Urdu text? I decided to clean the entire place,” Mudar said. The cemetery has close to 1,600 graves.
When Ivan Satyavrata, the chair of the Christian Burial Board, heard Mudar’s plan, he was delighted. “Despite being a heritage site, many graves in the South Park Street Cemetery had been untouched for years. There are graves of so many famous personalities here which required restoration but it was very difficult to do so with limited resources. Mudar’s project promised to do this restoration on an unprecedented scale,” he said.
A team of 15 people has been spending three hours on each grave every day to achieve this transformation
The permissions were granted seamlessly, and the project was soon underway. Mudar confesses that he hadn’t accounted for the financial part, trusting his ability to raise funds. “We’ve managed to raise Rs 7 lakh so far, which is roughly 70 per cent of what we need for the entire project. I also have verbal commitments from industrialists to back us in case we fall short,” he said.
But funding was only one aspect of the project. Most of the graves hadn’t been cleaned in over a century, with an opaque layer of sooty grey shadowing what was once opulent black marble.
This is when he approached marble contractor Khurshid Alam. “I had noticed the way heritage graves are preserved when I travelled to London a few years ago. Since then, I have wanted to work in the conservation of heritage,” Khurshid said.
His paths crossed with Mudar, and the restoration of South Park Street Cemetery became his biggest project yet. On August 26, Khurshid assembled a team of 15 people, who began cleaning and polishing the tombstones. “It takes almost three hours to clean just one tombstone. We’re currently restoring at a speed of 25, per day,” he said. As of last week, the team had crossed the halfway mark, restoring over 750 graves.
Parts of the cemetery will be illuminated upon completion to drive visibility
This effort has completely transformed the place, and visitors now find it almost unrecognisable. “You can now see the stunning calligraphy, which lets history play out in front of your eyes. We found so many important people here, like the wife of Edoardo Tiretta, who founded Tiretta Bazaar. She was initially buried in the French cemetery, and it’s fascinating to imagine how her grave found its way here two centuries ago,” Mudar said.
Other prominent names buried here include William Jones, who founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal; Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, who founded Young Bengal; and Robert Kyd, who founded the Botanical Gardens.
“This cemetery was founded in 1767. Those were the days before air travel, and it was very difficult to take people’s bodies back to their home country. That’s why so many English officers, intellectuals and statesmen are buried here,” Ivan said.
Mudar shared another ingenious insight he found: “Multiple people died before reaching their teenage years here, and this can be a fascinating medium to study the malaria outbreak.”
This project has ignited fresh interest around the cemetery. Ivan believes that its restoration could have a larger impact on how the world perceives Kolkata, too. “Every modern society takes care of its heritage. Unfortunately, because of our existential struggles, we haven’t been able to do so very well in India. When the world sees how Bengal continues to cherish its history even after colonisation, it will transform our perception. Moreover, when second and third generation relatives of those buried here visit the cemetery, they leave with a more positive impression of the city,” he said.
South Park Street Cemetery is seeing light after dusk for the first ever time
This is exactly Mudar’s vision: “This is one of the greatest cemeteries outside Europe. When someone drives past it, they should stop in awe.” With the entire cemetery slated to be gleaming and restored before the end of the year, he hopes to illuminate it, much like many other heritage structures under the Calcutta Illumination Project. Once the entire compound is in perfect condition, there are also plans to curate heritage walks around, incorporating research on the cleaned tombstones. “So many people have never been to this cemetery. I intend to dramatically change this in the coming winter,” Mudar said.
The larger movement is only getting started though. After the completion of South Park Street Cemetery, Mudar intends to move to its sister on Lower Circular Road, with plans to restore 40 heritage graves. “I’ve adopted Kolkata. If I am to live and die here, I have to transform it,” he signed off.
