Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/
info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content
in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to History and Memory.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Sun, 28 Jun 2015 13:09:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Elizabeth Buettner
The cemetery is a quiet space on the south side of one of Kolkatas
busiest streets. Gardeners are actively trying to beautify the grounds.
Several of the inscriptions make interesting reading. Death, often
untimely, came from tropical diseases or other hazards such as battles,
childbirth and even melancholia. More uncommonly, it was an excess
of alcohol, or ... through an inordinate use of the hokkah [sic].
Rose Aylmer died after eating too many pineapples! Tombs include
those of Colonel Kyd, founder of the Botanical Gardens, and the
great oriental scholar Sir William Jones.2
Many visitors to India undoubtedly do not feel compelled to include
South Park Street Cemetery, or indeed Kolkata at all, on their itineraries,
having planned their trips with other destinations in mind. Visiting an
ashram, perhaps, or seeing the Himalayas, the Ajanta caves, Goa, Varanasi
(Benares) or the princely palaces of Rajasthan might well be their main
goals; New Delhi and Agras Taj Mahal are even more likely to dominate
their agendas.3 Yet some clearly are attracted to places well knownif
not best knownfor their colonial heritage. Hill stations such as Shimla,
Darjeeling and Ootacamund provide scenic mountain backdrops along
with Raj-era buildings aplenty; Kolkata, meanwhile, might beckon those
as much attracted as repelled by stories of its poverty as well as those
interested in the material remnants of empire in the city that was, until
the early twentieth century, the capital of British India.4
South Park Street Cemetery is just one of many Kolkata sites dating from the time of British rule, sharing this status with others that are
often more familiar to casual visitors, residents and the more historically
minded alike. BBD Bagh (once Dalhousie Square), with its Writers
Building; St. Johns Church, with the Black Hole Memorial located just
outside it; Shahid Minar (formerly the Ochterlony Monument) on the
Maidan: these and other settings all pale in comparison with the imposing
Victoria Memorial conceptualized during Lord Curzons time as viceroy
at the turn of the century. Yet this article takes the cemetery as its point
of departure, exploring its status and diverse messages alongside those of
other European graveyards scattered throughout the Indian subcontinent.
Considered collectively, cemeteries enable important questions to be posed
that pertain not only to local manifestations of the colonial past in Kolkata
but also to their meanings inand just as importantly, outsidepostco6
This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Sun, 28 Jun 2015 13:09:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
7
This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Sun, 28 Jun 2015 13:09:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Elizabeth Buettner
BACSAs origins and range of activities illuminate diverse manifestations of the imperial aftermath in both Britain and the subcontinent. Since
the late 1980s, an increasing number of scholars in British and colonial
studies have stressed the need to bring together the histories of Britain
and the territories it formerly controlled overseas. While those studying
regions which were once colonies and dominions have always needed to
pay attention to the ways British involvement shaped their development,
it took far longer for those focused on the metropole to acknowledge the
centrality of imperial history to their subject matter.5 Academics across
a range of disciplines now routinely explore how empire was integral
to changing congurations of national identity and culture at home as
well as overseas.6 What is more, they now convincingly position Britains
historical status as an imperial nation as crucial to its self-denition long
after widescale decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s.7 Britain can be
counted among the postcolonial nations just like its former colonies and
dependencies, having been dened in the postwar era as much by the loss
of nearly all of its empire as it once was characterized as its possessor. As
Stuart Hall suggests, the post-colonial concerns a general process of
decolonisation which, like colonisation itself, has marked the colonising
societies as powerfully as it has the colonisedalbeit in vastly different
ways.8 Political, economic and cultural adjustment to the concurrent
decline of its world-power status and the marked increase in immigration
from what are now former colonies are interconnected strands of Britains
postcoloniality, yet the ongoing task of revising and debating the imperial
past is an equally salient dimension that demands much closer scrutiny.
BACSAs historyeccentric and improbable though the organizations interests may appearshows that individuals and groups working
outside academia have been just as central to navigating through this
process of decolonisation as those within it. Condescending dismissals
of the organizations interests as antiquarian and marginal overlook
how they correspond with academic trends; the ways its core outlooks
clash with scholarly critiques yet also suggest points of convergence require
explanation rather than trivialization or indifference.9 Indeed, BACSAs
active engagement with the project of uniting Britains histories at home
and away effectively pre-dates the surge in academic work inspired by
postcolonial theory by at least a decade. As Raphael Samuel, Patrick Wright
and others have delineated, public forms of knowledge about the past
8
This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Sun, 28 Jun 2015 13:09:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Elizabeth Buettner
Fig. 1. English cemetery at Surat, Western View. Photograph by Cecil L. Burns, 1920s.
Reproduced by permission of the British Library. Oriental and India Ofce Collections,
Photo 195 (18).
the shift toward establishing cemeteries that were separate from churches
was a relatively belated development. Urban expansion in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries led to overcrowded churchyards where bones
ultimately needed to be disinterred to clear space for new arrivals. New
burial grounds not contiguous with churches gradually emerged that were
deemed more hygienic and aesthetically appealing, and which provided
spatial scope for building the elaborate monuments the better-off classes
demanded. Pre-Lachaise in Paristhe best known of the new necropolises then and nowopened in 1804, and, aside from a small handful that
date from the 1700s, cemeteries in Britain mainly emerged during the
rst half of the nineteenth century.13 Such developments would not have
been considered novel by those personally acquainted with India, since
European cemeteries in the subcontinent pre-dated most of those at home
by decades in the case of the South Park Street Cemetery (established in
1767) and even longer still in the case of those outside Surat that existed
in the mid-1600s (see gure 1).14 South Asia thus effectively played a pioneering role in what ultimately became predominant trends in European
burial practices and commemoration of the dead alike.15 Neoclassical and
Egyptian motifs such as obelisks, urns, columns and pyramids commonly
adorned European mausolea and tombstones in South Asia just as they
did elsewhere, but funerary architecture in India also occasionally revealed
10
This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Sun, 28 Jun 2015 13:09:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Fig. 2. South Park Street Cemetery, Calcutta, 1948. Photograph by J. Lowell Groves. Held
by the British Library, Oriental and India Ofce Collections, Photo 841 (3) (copyright
holder unknown). Just one year after independence, the cemetery showed clear signs of
longer-term neglect by the British during their rule, as did the Dutch tombs at Surat in the
1870s pictured in gure 3.
Fig. 3. Dutch tombs, Surat, 1871. Photograph by Edmund David Lyon. Reproduced by
permission of the British Library. Oriental and India Ofce Collections, Photo 1000/31
(3208).
11
This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Sun, 28 Jun 2015 13:09:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Elizabeth Buettner
borrowings from indigenous sources (see gure 2). Until the early nineteenth century, a small number of hybrid monuments incorporated Hindu
architectural features but more often took inspiration from Islamic tombs.
Syncretic inuences help to render Indias early European graveyards
distinct from those later established at home (see gure 3).16
The notoriously high mortality rates from disease among Europeans
in India undoubtedly account at least in part for their graveyards prominent place in the history of modern burial. Over two million Europeans
died there, according to BACSAs estimates.17 Many, if not most, Europeans who embarked for India prior to the nineteenth century never returned
to their lands of origin, often having perished in the course of their rst
two monsoonsa period that became a standard means of describing
their commonly abbreviated life expectancy. Those not struck down by the
climate or other causes often opted to leave the subcontinent once they
had accumulated sufcient wealth to enable a comfortable (and in a few
cases infamously afuent) lifestyle back in Britain or their other respective homelands.18 Survivors departure remained the prevailing tendency
long past the early era of involvement by Britons, French, Dutch and
Portuguese; indeed, sojourning as distinct from settling grew even more
likely over time with the improvement of transport facilities to Europe.
The opening of the Suez Canal not long after the shift from East India
Company to British Crown Rule in 1858 only enhanced Europeans likely
transience still further. While British families could remain active in India
for generations, they commonly refused to abandon their ties to the metropole. Parents preferred to educate their children at home and returned
themselves on periodic furloughs and ultimately in retirement.19
Peripatetic impermanence among the living does much to account
for the condition of many resting places for the dead by the later colonial
era, when many cemeteries suffered from neglect and dilapidation. In the
1908 edition of his Echoes from Old Calcutta, H. E. Busteed described the
citys graveyards as hastening to ruin. In a country where the European
from his very arrival, looks and pines for the day when he may be favoured
enough and fortunate enough to be able to leave it again, Busteed
found it regrettable yet unsurprising that the memorials of the dead of a
previous generation have but little chance of being looked after by those
succeeding. Once close relations of the deceased had gone from the
parish, hopes for faraway memorials to their nearest and dearest were
12
This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Sun, 28 Jun 2015 13:09:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Elizabeth Buettner
unites them in its aftermath. BACSAs semi-annual London meetings
provide those in attendance with updates about overseas documentation
and refurbishment projects, include talks on India-related subjects more
generally, and also serve as social gatherings. They offer an opportunity
for members to reunite with old acquaintances and also forge new connections with others who share personal ties to the subcontinent prior to
1947 and continue to enjoy reliving their experiences decades later. Many
members appear attracted as much by BACSAs clubbability as by the
zeal to preserve British Indias heritage. When I asked one woman why
she had become a member, she reected that I knew other people who
had already joined, and who said well, Come and join it, there are a lot
of us there, and youll hear very interesting talks ... that was one reason.
The other is that if you do tour around India, you do come across these
old cemeteries. And you suddenly feel there is a lot of history there that
is suddenly being destroyed.
Yet sustained concern for South Asias cemeteries emerged at what
was a highly impractical and unpropitious historical moment, when Britons
had long ceased to claim any jurisdiction over the lands their forebears lay
beneath. The further the British Raj recedes, the stronger appears the
incentive to keep its memorials alive, mused one BACSA member.26 Yet at
second glance this belated and rmly postcolonial concern for cemeteries
appears far more comprehensible, tting securely within a wider paradigm
of nostalgia and interest in heritage. As Fredric Jameson, Renato Rosaldo
and Raphael Samuel all suggest, in deracinated postmodern circumstances
the allure of disappearing worlds, environments at risk, and nostalgia
for what has been destroyed can readily become enhanced.27 Within the
postcolonial context, Hsu-Ming Teos analysis of British narratives that
chronicle wandering in the wake of empire aptly emphasizes how nostalgic and melancholy tour[s] to former colonies ... enabled the traveller
to relive the glory days of empire while simultaneously mourning their
demise.28 Yet Antoinette Burtons discussion of Raj nostalgia in latetwentieth-century Britain also advances that empires disappearance
rarely means erasure, and indeed often entails a pathology of presence
which permits that which is gone to be reincarnated in new historical or
cultural forms. This enables empire to be seen one last time, over and
overlove at last sight, as she summarizes.29 BACSAs raison dtre has
consistently stressed the need to record and commemorate the Raj before
14
This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Sun, 28 Jun 2015 13:09:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Elizabeth Buettner
lives abroad, and to help build up a record of the rich social fabric that
existed not so very long ago.32 While the accretion of personal, family
and tombstone-inscription anecdotes printed in the Chowkidar are read
mainly by others in BACSA, these messages receive wider circulation in
the form of members books issued either by the organization as part of
its fundraising efforts for cemetery work or independently of it by small
publishing houses. Some, however, are taken up by larger publishers and
reach a far wider readership. These accounts reveal how members concern
for cemeteries is but one facet of a wider agenda to place colonizers lives
and works in a positive light for postcolonial audiences deemed prone to
critiquing what the Raj and Britons involved in it represented.
Within the profusion of memoirs, family biographies, novels and
popular histories about the Raj published since the 1970s, BACSA contributors have loomed large, reecting and enhancing broader efforts to
document personal stories of British India in the closing decades of empire.
For the most part such output has reached a fairly circumscribed set of
fellow travelersparticularly the volumes published by BASCA itselfyet
the notable exceptions are signicant. Two highly prominent BACSA
authors whose work has crossed over into other media include Charles
Allen, whose radio documentaries and best-selling book Plain Tales from
the Raj date from the late 1970s, and M. M. Kaye, whose 1978 novel
The Far Pavilions became a highly successful television miniseries in the
mid-1980s and was followed by three volumes of her own autobiography
in the 1990s.33 Allens and Kayes popularity and renown among a wider
audience exceed that of most BACSA members who have contributed to
these genres, but others (Raleigh Trevelyan and Pat Barr among them)
have also produced histories of Britons in India that succeeded in reaching
a sizable reading or viewing public.34 Coordinators of museum exhibitions, radio programs and television documentaries consistently have been
regular guests at BACSA meetings, nding within the organization an
easily identiable group of enthusiastic reminiscers for their productions
and eager contributors of their colonial memorabilia for display.35 As the
Chowkidars editor underscored in the mid-1980s, it is safe to say that
BACSA today is the best repository of Anglo-Indian lore. That is why
it is so important to record as much as we can while it is still possible.
The Association is now being approached fairly regularly by learned and
16
This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Sun, 28 Jun 2015 13:09:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Elizabeth Buettner
men of real distinctionthe great and the goodbut systematically
extend to those of unknown Europeans from across the social spectrum.
Stories tombstones tell about the lives and deaths of ordinary, diverse
men and women provide a testimony of extraordinary condence in the
face of horrifying living conditions and perpetual tragedy that touched
everyone.41 Most people buried in the subcontinent were under the age
of forty when they died; many succumbed to diseases or died in battle;
many were women who died in childbirth, or very young children. Childrens gravesbelonging to the most innocent members of colonial
societyare commonly singled out as among the most poignant and
tragic examples of the cost of empire.42 One account describes two
members discovery of an isolated, simple stone along a seldom-traveled
road in northeast India whose inscription read:
To a
Child
Fondly Called
Camilla
Soft Silken
Primrose
Fading Timelessly
1843.
Speculating that the grave belonged to the daughter of an English family traveling through the region on what must have been a hazardous
journey who died suddenly en route, the writer suggested that through
its isolated situation and haunting words it has become one of the most
interesting tombs from that remote area of India now recorded in the
BACSA archives.43 Devoid of architectural distinction and marking a
short life little known then, forgotten today, and lacking even the girls
surname or date of birth, the grave attained meaning not despite but
rather because of its near anonymity, which enabled it to signify a far more
general, unsung loss.
BACSAs newsletter makes continual reference to premature deaths
from illness, battle or other causes as illustrative of everyday Britons sacrices while in India and their devotion to their work. One contributor
elaborated, as a human being, I cannot be other than affected by the fate
18
This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Sun, 28 Jun 2015 13:09:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
19
This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Sun, 28 Jun 2015 13:09:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Elizabeth Buettner
INDIAN APPROPRIATIONS
To a large degree, BACSAs efforts to restore colonial cemeteries are
meant to remind Indians encountering them of the achievements and
sacrices the British made on their behalf. The ongoing decay that led
them to be targeted for restoration in the rst place, however, suggests
both that they are threatened with extinction and that the ideological
messages they might send to locals often remain unheard or unheeded.
The cemeteries postcolonial condition and divergent Indian responses
to these sites illustrate competing modes of interpreting Raj history and
its material remains available within a formerly colonized nation. While
BACSAs agenda has often proven at odds with Indian priorities, there
remains a lack of consensus among Indians themselves about the meanings, and future, of colonial spaces and monuments.
BACSA faces a range of obstacles to efforts to rescue cemeteries from
physical dangers before it becomes too late. In part, funerary architecture located in India has suffered from lengthy exposure to monsoons,
the growth of foliage on the stones, and other encroachments by nature.
Any built environment requires upkeep to ensure its preservation from
the elements over time, but in many respects the architectural remains of
the British were unpromising candidates for long-term survival from their
inception. In many urban areas designed by the British in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, the shortage of stone available locally meant that
many structures were made of brick covered by plaster. This was the case
with respect to Kolkatas public buildings as well as its funerary monuments
in churchyards and cemeteries. As Sir Bartle Frere warned in 1870, a hundred years hence, possibly, the English people would not look with great
pride on the City of Palaces because the materials employed are not such
as any architect would use for architecture of a high order or intended for
posterity.50 Even more readily than stone, brick and plaster suffered from
the rapid disintegration so rued by late-Victorian and n-de-sicle writers
such as Busteed, Cotton, and indeed Lord Curzon himself. Their innate
fragility made periodic restoration all the more necessary if tombstones or
other open-air structures were to stand any chance of survival, but, acting
partly in the spirit of Britains often haphazard response to its own monuments, little was done after independence by Indian authorities to protect
them either. As BACSA proclaimed in self-congratulatory mode, despite
20
This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Sun, 28 Jun 2015 13:09:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Elizabeth Buettner
Fig. 4. South Park Street Cemetery, undated but ca. 1970s, photographer unknown.
Reproduced by permission of Eye Ubiquitous/Hutchison.
Elizabeth Buettner
Memorial, for the Calcuttan, it has prevailed for many years now as a
memorial to a dead Raj, whose memories like its representations have long
lost their edge.63 Writing in the mid-1980s, the BACSA member cited
above who described Kanpurs Kacheri Cemetery provided a convincing
assessment of the reasons for its neglect: it is ... difcult to persuade
busy people living in Kanpur today that what happened many years ago
is also part of their heritage.64 With respect to cemeteries founded by
and for colonizers that make few if any references to the colonized, it is
unsurprising that most Indians would fail to consider such spaces relevant
to their own past or present. Moreover, the necropolis as an aesthetic
construct is not native to India, Purnima Bose has concluded. Although
Muslims bury their dead, the majority Hindu and other communities
funerary practices largely involve cremation and share little in common
with European Christian modes of burial and commemoration.65
European cemeteries have not become ideologically charged spaces
in contemporary South Asia, where the most fraught conicts reect
struggles within society that have little to do with reassessing Raj history.
In India, for instance, the most obvious example of a contested heritage
site in recent years is that of the Babri Masjid, the mosque in Ayodhya
destroyed in 1992 by supporters of communalist Hindu political parties.
Moreover, the marked rise of politically motivated cemetery vandalism
by right-wing Hindu nationalists since the late 1990s has targeted graveyards connected with Indias Christian communities todaynot those
historically associated with Europeans.66 As Ann Laura Stoler and Karen
Strassler have argued in a different context, that the colonial is everpresent in postcolonial lives; that postcolonial subjectivity by denition
pivots on the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial; that there
are subaltern circuits in which colonial critiques are lodged; that there is
resistance in the smallest of gestures and the very lack of gesture at all
are all cherished assumptions that scholars would do well to put to
the test. For many, the colonial past might rather become that which is
assiduously forgotten.67
At a time when neither hostility to nor reverence for Britains legacy
in the subcontinent predominates on public agendas, BACSAs efforts to
generate interest in preserving European cemeteries have had a mixed
degree of success. In the absence of any formal jurisdiction, its membership is fully aware that the organizations goals will only succeed with
24
This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Sun, 28 Jun 2015 13:09:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Elizabeth Buettner
it was to be able to sit in a quiet place and enjoy his lunch (an apple).72
For this man, the historic relevance of the graveyard that led a range of
people to do battle with the weeds, long grass and general air of neglect
which characterised the cemetery a few years before was not agged as
the source of his appreciation for it; rather, he treasured it as a tranquil
public space for relaxation away from the noisy surrounding streets.
But while eating an apple was praised as an appropriate local use of the
site, making cricket-playing a thing of the past and raising the cemeterys
walls to bar access to a range of social undesirables including vagrants,
drug dealers and their customers, gamblers and defecators remained
paramount aims, both at South Park Street and many other graveyards.73
An exclusionary agenda (regardless of its degree of success) has served to
unite BACSA members and Indians who have demonstrated an interest
in colonial heritage. In this sense, efforts to preserve European cemeteries bear resemblance to the contests among Indian social actors over the
meanings and uses of public space in Bangalore discussed in Janaki Nairs
work. Focusing on the monumental buildings that surround Cubbon
Park, Nair assesses how a vigilant, [middle-class] citizenry has fought
to protect politically salient spaces from incursions by plebeian users who
violate notions of order, quiet, and good taste, as well as by builders
who place the areas grace and charm at risk.74 In the process, collective
and democratic appropriations of these public arenas become constrained
through recourse to fences, barricades and statutes, while individualized
leisure uses by the respectable classes are upheld.
Although much more work must be done to produce an in-depth
assessment of the extent of interest in colonial-era buildings and memorials
among Indias better-off classes as well as to postulate the precise reasons
behind it, some observers suggest this to be a fairly recent phenomenon,
albeit one for which traces can be found over the past several decades.
In the late 1960s and 1970s and continuing later, for example, Indian
commentary about the physical state of Raj-era artifacts was muted in
comparison with outcry about the condition of ancient Indian monuments.
Newspaper articles bearing titles such as Rape of Indian Monuments
or Monumental Folly articulated educated Indians concern about the
neglect of ancient temples, tombs, mosques and other structures even
when the Archeological Survey of India served as their nominal (and
seemingly inadequate) protector. While such pieces said relatively little
26
This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Sun, 28 Jun 2015 13:09:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
27
This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Sun, 28 Jun 2015 13:09:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Elizabeth Buettner
off the mark, he stated. One would think that these monuments would
be exploited for all they are worth.77
Several decades on, it is clear that tourist authorities have tapped
into British heritage as an added means of attracting foreign visitors to the
subcontinent. In Kolkata in particular, English-language websites outlining
the citys various attractions highlight its colonial-era sites, including the
Victoria Memorial, the Writers Building, Dalhousie Square/BBD Bagh,
Fort William and, not least, South Park Street Cemetery.78 But Indian
interest in protecting British buildings, monuments and cemeteries exceeds
the strictly functional, and several commentators convincingly suggest that
it has grown signicantly since the late 1970s. Indicatively, Wilkinsons
Two Monsoons received a supportive response in the Indian press upon
publication, with reviewers praising the book as a unique and fascinating contribution to Anglo-Indiana, commending the aim of cemetery
restoration, and condemning neglect and desecration of the graveyards as
intolerable.79 Narayani Gupta argues that when confronting specimens
of the British-built urban landscape, Indian popular response to them
is a mixture of gratication that such splendid edices exist in India, and
of pique that the British built them for themselves, and not for us.80
While disagreements clearly remain, scholars including Gupta, Partho
Datta and Thomas Metcalf detect a much greater willingness by Indias
English-speaking elites to take imperial architecture seriously as part of
Indias national past, just as BACSA authors have long hoped would be the
case. As Datta writes, the outpouring of historical writing upon Calcuttas
tercentenary in 1990 provided evidence of an increasing appropriation
of Calcutta by the bhadralok [the genteel middle classes], and ... a frank
appreciation of the achievements, both civic and otherwise, of the British. Earlier, in the heyday of nationalist historiography, he concludes,
this might well have been impossible.81
In the past and culminating in the wave of Raj nostalgia of the 1980s,
most studies of Indias colonial urban landscape emanated from Britain
and often took on a celebratory tone, exemplied at the amateur level by
BACSAs publications. Indians now look set to play increasingly predominant roles within a revision of the essentially Eurocentric historiography
of Indian cities, as Datta phrased it.82 Indian reassessments of the physical
remains of empire and their meanings for the postcolonial era in all probability will, as was the case with Western studies, involve a combination
28
This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Sun, 28 Jun 2015 13:09:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Elizabeth Buettner
tion, the likelihood that colonial artifacts, sites and their messages would
undergo further adaptation in accordance with changed local needs and
values increased exponentially. Efforts might be made by Britons to
reassert the value of Britains colonial endeavors by preserving sites and
monuments, but without sovereignty it is impossible to stop these sites
of memory from being reclaimed by former subject peoples.
Igor Kopytoffs and Richard Daviss analyses of how objects can be
viewed as social beings, which, like people, have biographies charting
shifting identities over time, provide a suggestive framework through
which to consider a tombstones or a graveyards life cycle.86 From their
origins as commemorative sites for European dead, they were subsequently
converted into makeshift accommodation for the homeless, settings for
leisure activities, public toilets, or used as implements for cooking or
washing; nally, they have witnessed more recent efforts to restore some
of their original meanings and reassess the value of the Raj, and reect the
divergent interests of elite and plebeian Indian social sectors.87 As such,
European funerary architecture and cemeteries demand to be viewed as
sites of struggle over which the meanings and value of South Asias colonial
legacy for different parties are contemplated or contestedor, alternatively,
forgotten altogether, retaining no meaning at all.
The degree to which colonizers cemeteries and other built structures
will attract interest in the future is, of course, unknown; Indian attitudes
toward Raj heritage will, undoubtedly, remain divided and continue to
evolve according to contemporary social and political agendas. Equally,
it is impossible to predict future British forms of engagement with the
nations history as an imperial power, although to date the battlesboth
among scholars, as well as among wider publicscontinue to rage between
imperial apologists and critics. Yet given the subject matter examined
here, emphasizing the mortality of many of the Britons who, to date,
have been most closely involved in preserving Raj memorials and narratives provides perhaps the most apt means of concluding a story still very
much in progress.
Nearly thirty years after its inception, BACSA may justiably proclaim itself a thriving organization that has accomplished many of the
tasks its founders set in the late 1970s. Its membershipnearly 2,000,
and increasing at a rate of about 100 annuallyhas never been higher; it
has done much to restore selected cemeteries in the Indian subcontinent
30
This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Sun, 28 Jun 2015 13:09:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Elizabeth Buettner
to those buried in India have been a decisive factor for many members:
stories of returning after decades away to relocate a fathers, mothers or
baby brothers or sisters grave, or of similar requests for information on
the state of a particular tombstone from those too elderly to contemplate
searching themselves, are recurrent features in the Chowkidar. One brother
and sister who returned to their fathers grave forty years after he died
described how to actually visit a family tomb is a warm and overwhelmingly nostalgic experienceemotions distinct from those normally
generated by contemplating graves of those not known, whether or not
they belong to ancestors.91 Now, however, old India hands for whom
the Raj was so personally meaningful rather than a more distant (and not
actively remembered) facet of family heritage are aging and dying out.
Most with direct ties to the Raj are now well over retirement age, and the
groups social composition inevitably will shift away from those for whom
British India was so intimate.
With the records compiled by BACSA now deposited at the British
Library for use by historians, genealogists and whoever else might take an
interest, it remains to be seen whether the level of engagement, zeal and
sense of urgency for preserving artifacts and spaces thousands of miles away
will remain as strong as beforeor whether a trip to Euston Road might
usually sufce. Without the active involvement of Raj survivorsafter the
postcolonial has evolved from the point when the sun decisively had set
on empire, but when participants hovered as retirees in its twilightwill
future British generations feel any concern about the condition of Raj
relics far away, or value the stories they might tell? Or will, over time,
Britons cease to consider their national and familial roles in a dead empire
as worthy of nostalgic celebration or emotional investment and instead
largely either condemn or forget this history, consigning it to darkness?
Whatever the case, future generations of historians and more casual
observers in Britain, South Asia and further aeld can look back upon the
decades when a recently lost empire remained a living memoryprivate
as well as publicas a decisive time of inventory, attempted preservation,
and reevaluation, of objects and meanings alike.
32
This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Sun, 28 Jun 2015 13:09:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
33
This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Sun, 28 Jun 2015 13:09:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Elizabeth Buettner
Imagination, 18301867 (Cambridge, 2002); Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of
the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain (Berkeley,
1998); idem, ed., After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation
(Durham, NC, 2003).
7. Stuart Ward, ed., British Culture and the End of Empire (Manchester, 2001);
Wendy Webster, Englishness and Empire, 19391965 (Oxford, 2005); Bill Schwarz,
The Only White Man in There: The Re-racialisation of England, 19561968,
Race and Class 38, no. 1 (1996): 6578.
8. Stuart Hall, When Was the Post-Colonial? Thinking at the Limit, in
Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti, eds., The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies,
Divided Horizons (London, 1996), 246.
9. Ann Laura Stoler and Karen Strassler indeed suggest that one could argue
that the entire eld [of colonial studies] has positioned itself as a counterweight
to the waves of colonial nostalgia that have emerged in the postWorld War II
period in personal memoirs, coffee table books, tropical chic couture, and [the]
lm industry. See Castings for the Colonial: Memory Work in New Order
Java, Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, no. 1 (2000): 4.
10. Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, vol. 1, Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London, 1994); Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country:
The National Past in Contemporary Britain (London, 1985); J. Arnold, Kate
Davies, and Simon Ditcheld, eds., History and Heritage: Consuming the Past in
Contemporary Culture (Donhead St Mary, 1998); Robert Hewison, The Heritage
Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London, 1987); Robert Lumley, ed.,
The Museum Time-Machine: Putting Culture on Display (London, 1988).
11. The only academic assessment of BACSA appears to be Purnima Bose,
Organizing Empire: Individualism, Collective Agency and India (Durham, 2003),
195204. While many of her arguments are persuasive, I aim to situate the groups
projects within a wider historical framework that draws upon considerably more
source material.
12. Anne McClintocks suggestions concerning periodization are apt here. See
Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York,
1995), 915.
13. Howard Colvin, Architecture and the After-Life (New Haven, 1991),
36774; Julie Rugg, Dening the Place of Burial: What Makes a Cemetery a
Cemetery? Mortality 5, no. 1 (2000): 26062; Philippe Aris, The Hour of Our
Death, trans. Helen Weaver (Harmondsworth, 1981), chap. 11; idem, Western
Attitudes towards Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Patricia M.
Ranum (London, 1976), 6973; Richard A. Etlin, The Architecture of Death: The
Transformation of the Cemetery in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, MA,
1984).
34
This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Sun, 28 Jun 2015 13:09:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
35
This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Sun, 28 Jun 2015 13:09:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Elizabeth Buettner
Creation of a Past for the Raj, in Maria Antonella Pelizzari, ed., Traces of India:
Photography, Architecture, and the Politics of Representation, 18501900 (New
Haven, 2003), 24059; B. K. Thapar, India, in Henry Cleere, ed., Approaches
to the Archaeological Heritage (Cambridge, 1984), 65.
23. Penelope Chetwode, Monuments to Empire Builders: The Graveyard of
Eighteenth Century India, Architectural Review (Aug. 1935): 55.
24. The late 1950s witnessed one appeal for funds to refurbish the South Park
Street Cemetery, but its efforts and effects appear to have remained fairly limited. See R. Pearson, A Calcutta Cemetery, Architectural Review (July 1957):
7980.
25. How I Became Involved with BACSA, Chowkidar 9, no. 5 (2002): 107;
Generation after Generation, ibid., 9, no. 6 (2002): 135; Dr. Rosie LlewellynJones, ed., Tenth Anniversary Souvenir Chowkidar: BACSA, 19761986 (London,
1986), 47.
26. Caretakers of the Exile Band, Chowkidar 2, no. 2 (1980): 16. Some
BACSA members freely admit that during their time in India before independence
they had shown no interest whatsoever in the state of European cemeteries. See
for example How I Became Involved with BACSA and BACSAs Treasury,
ibid., 9, no. 5 (2002): 107, 11011.
27. Fredric Jameson, Nostalgia for the Present, in idem, Postmodernism, or,
The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London, 1991), 27996; Samuel, Theatres
of Memory, 30, 221; Renato Rosaldo, Imperialist Nostalgia, in idem, Culture
and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston, 1989), 6887. See also Derek
Gregory, The Colonial Present (Oxford, 2004).
28. Hsu-Ming Teo, Wandering in the Wake of Empire: British Travel and
Tourism in the Post-Imperial World, in Ward, ed., British Culture, 169.
29. Antoinette Burton, India, Inc.? Nostalgia, Memory and the Empire of
Things, in Ward, ed., British Culture, 217; see also Burton, Dwelling in the
Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (New
York, 2003), 16.
30. Theon Wilkinson, The Beginning of BACSA, Tenth Anniversary Souvenir
Chowkidar, 1.
31. Theon Wilkinson, Two Monsoons: The Life and Death of Europeans in India
(1976; London, 1987), x. See also idem, British Cemeteries in South Asia:
An Aspect of Social History, Asian Affairs 15, no. 1 (1984): 4654. Colonial
cemeteries attracted Ruth Prawer Jhabvalas attention at roughly the same time
as Wilkinsons. They gure suggestively in her Booker Prize-winning novel Heat
and Dust (London, 2003) rst published in 1975. See especially 2425, 1067,
141, 174.
32. The Mail Box, Chowkidar 1, no. 3 (1978): 24.
36
This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Sun, 28 Jun 2015 13:09:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
37
This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Sun, 28 Jun 2015 13:09:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Elizabeth Buettner
on Indian soil rather than in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma or Sri Lanka, since most
of the cemeteries receiving BACSAs attention are located there.
41. BACSA Activities, Chowkidar 1, no. 5 (1979): 42. More generally, see
Wilkinson, Two Monsoons and British Cemeteries in South Asia.
42. A Relic of Old Simla, Chowkidar 4, nos. 16 (198587): 70; Mail Box,
ibid., 5, no. 1 (1988): 4; Mail Box, ibid., 5, no. 2 (1988): 23; The Kakathope
Cemetery of Madurai, ibid., 7, no. 4 (1995): 74.
43. A Wayside Grave, ibid., 3, no. 4 (1984): 43.
44. Richard Blurton, Field Work in India, Tenth Anniversary Souvenir Chowkidar, 74. See also Mail Box, Chowkidar 1, no. 1 (1977): 3; A Maugham Grave
in Cuttack, ibid., 1, no. 4 (1978): 39; BACSA Activities, ibid., 1, no. 5 (1979):
4243; Motoring in India, ibid., 2, no. 2 (1980): 24; Mail Box, ibid., 4, nos.
16 (198587): 80; Family Stories, ibid., 6, no. 1 (1991): 12.
45. Can You Help? ibid., 3, no. 1 (1982): 7.
46. Mail Box, ibid., 7, no. 2 (1994): 2930; A Nice Cup of Tea, ibid., 7,
no. 3 (1995): 4950.
47. This marks a sharp contrast with the highly fraught issues of reburial struggles
in contemporary eastern Europe explored by Katherine Verdery, The Political
Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York, 1999), esp.
122, 4749.
48. Oriental and India Ofce Collections, British Library, MSS Eur F370.
49. BACSAs practices are indeed consistent with nineteenth-century British
traditions of heritage preservation in the region. Maria Antonella Pelizzari notes
that colonial authorities believed it was crucial not to remove Indias ancient
monuments to Britain. The cultural ownership presumed by the British protection of ancient Indian monuments rendered the subcontinent a kind of museum
in which ruins were left intact, on site, while replicas (photographs, drawings, and
plaster casts) were removed to collections and archives in England, she asserts.
Although the British repeatedly brought home ancient Greek and Egyptian monuments, Greece and Egypt were considered foreign countries, [while] India was
a British possession and thus its ancient monuments had to be preserved with
the same respect that was accorded to British national heritage ... [and] had to
remain in their original context. See her From Stone to Paper: Photographs
of Architecture and the Traces of History, in idem, ed., Traces of India, 3739,
as well as Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The Museumised Relic: Archaeology and the
First Museum of Colonial India, Indian Economic and Social History Review 34,
no. 1 (1997): 2151.
50. Cited in Evenson, Indian Metropolis, 51.
51. How I Became Involved with BACSA, Chowkidar 9, no. 5 (2002):
107.
38
This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Sun, 28 Jun 2015 13:09:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
39
This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Sun, 28 Jun 2015 13:09:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Elizabeth Buettner
The Victoria Memorial Hall, 3747; Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Traversing Past and
Present in the Victoria Memorial (Calcutta, 1995), 12, 1819.
63, Guha-Thakurta, Traversing Past and Present, 18.
64. Yalland, Kacheri Cemetery, 9.
65. Bose, Organizing Empire, 202.
66. Christians form less than 3% of Indias population but count among the
minorities who, alongside Muslims, have been targeted by supporters of rightwing Hindu nationalist parties. Attacks on Christians and Christian institutions
(including churches, schools and cemeteries) have spread since the Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 1998. See for example Politics by Other
Means: Attacks against Christians in India, report by the Human Rights Watch,
vol. 11, no. 6 (C) (Oct. 1999), http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/ indiachr
(last accessed 1 Dec. 2005).
67. Stoler and Strassler, Castings for the Colonial, 3839. As Adrian Forty
stresses, we cannot take it for granted that artefacts act as the agents of collective
memory, nor can they be relied upon to prolong it. See his Introduction in
idem and Susanne Kchler, eds., The Art of Forgetting (Oxford, 1999), 7.
68. Vincent Davies, The Bihar Report, Tenth Anniversary Souvenir Chowkidar, 13; S. K. Pande, BACSA and India, Chowkidar 9, no. 5 (2002): 112.
69. Maurice Rossington, The Cantonment Cemetery, Rangoon, Tenth
Anniversary Souvenir Chowkidar, 29.
70. Mail Box, Chowkidar 9, no. 5 (2002): 99101.
71. For suggestive thoughts about competing meanings of graves for local people
who care for them in a different context, see Alf Ldtke, Histories of Mourning: Flowers and Stones for the War Dead, Confusion for the LivingVignettes
from East and West Germany, in Gerald Sider and Gavin Smith, eds., Between
History and Histories: The Making of Silences and Commemorations (Toronto,
1997), 14979.
72. APHCI, The Watchman, no. 3 (1982): 2.
73. Minutes of Annual General Meeting of BACSA, 26 March 2002; Theon
Wilkinson, Nicholsons Cemetery, Delhi, Tenth Anniversary Souvenir Chowkidar, 5.
74. Janaki Nair, Past Perfect: Architecture and Public Life in Bangalore,
Journal of Asian Studies 61, no. 4 (2002): 1234, 1229, 122022.
75. K. Bharatha Iyer, The Rape of Indian Monuments, Times of India (Magazine), 7 Dec. 1969, 1; Protecting the Past, Hindustan Times Weekly, 13 Feb.
1972, 7; Slumming It out in Monuments, Hindustan Times, 7 Jan. 1983, 3;
Monumental Folly, Sunday Tribune, 25 Dec. 1983, 4.
76. What to See in Calcutta and Places of Christian Interest in and around
Calcutta, Amrita Bazar Patrika (Supplement), 10 March 1973, 912.
40
This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Sun, 28 Jun 2015 13:09:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
41
This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Sun, 28 Jun 2015 13:09:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Elizabeth Buettner
86. Igor Kopytoff, The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as
Process, in Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1986), 6491; Richard H. Davis, Lives of Indian
Images (Princeton, 1997).
87. Anthony D. King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power and
Environment (London, 1976), 288. Scholars of postcolonial and postapartheid
Africa have produced excellent studies on the changing meanings attributed to
monuments by white settler and African authorities. See especially Henrika Kuklick, Contested Monuments: The Politics of Archaeology in Southern Africa, in
George W. Stocking, Jr., ed., Colonial Situations (Madison, WI, 1991), 13569;
Annie E. Coombes, Translating the Past: Apartheid Monuments in Postapartheid
South Africa, in idem, History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory
in a Democratic South Africa (Durham, NC, 2003), 1953. On Vietnam, see also
Eric T. Jennings, From Indochine to Indochic: The Lang Bian/Dalat Palace
Hotel and French Colonial Leisure, Power, and Culture, Modern Asian Studies
37, no. 1 (2003): 15994.
88. Theon Wilkinson, BACSAs Record Archive, Tenth Anniversary Souvenir
Chowkidar, 6465.
89. http://www.bacsa.org.uk; http://members.ozemail.com.au/~clday/bacsa.
htm; see also http://www.indian-cemeteries.org (last accessed 1 Dec. 2005). A
sampling of some of the many genealogical queries includes Can You Help?
Chowkidar 3, no. 2 (1983): 19; Tenth Anniversary Souvenir Chowkidar, 63; Can
You Help? Chowkidar 9, no. 2 (2002): 32.
90. Simon Titley-Bayes, Perspectives on the Family History Phenomenon,
19252003: Identity, Cultural Capital and the Cultural Reproduction of Kinship
(M.A. thesis, University of York, 2003), 8.
91. Mail Box, Chowkidar 3, no. 1 (1982): 2; among other examples, see
Can You Help? ibid., 2, no. 1 (1980): 11.
42
This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Sun, 28 Jun 2015 13:09:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions