Graveyard of the EMPIRE
For decades it descended into ruin, a tangled mass of vegetation and a haven for gangsters. Now, the last resting place of expat Scots in India has again become a haven of peace
IN the baking heat of Kolkata, and amidst its smells and beggars and palm-trees and poverty, sprawls a six-acre graveyard. It would seem strangely familiar to you – the paths laid out in a grid, the monuments of granite and sandstone – and the names more familiar still.
Camerons and Campbells, Duffs and Wheatleys, Andersons and Rosses… here lie some 6,000 Scots, men and women and children, far from home and in the former giddying capital of the chaos that is India.
We like to boast of the ‘Scots Diaspora’. As a people, we shaped the new nations of Canada and New Zealand. Tens of thousands of Americans annually attend the Highland Games on Grandfather Mountain, North Carolina, and even in Jamaica and the West Indies you will come across many Scottish surnames.
But folk today forget how Scots were generally the engineers of the empire – its troops and policemen, its planters and middle-managers, its clergy and educationists and administrators – and how, a hundred years ago, bright young men from Glasgow, Edinburgh and so on still made their way to India.
And, by 1820, so great was this expat community that they opened this Scottish Cemetery in what most of us still call Calcutta.
Kolkata sits on the east bank of the Hooghly river. It is India’s oldest port. It boasted the headquarters of the East India Company and successive Viceroys lived here at the height of the Raj – as, until after the Second World War, did very many Scots.
But they left, and what had been the centre of India’s education, science, culture and politics went into decades of decline – and the casualties included the Scottish Cemetery.
By 2006 it was a hopelessly overgrown jungle. Trees enveloped tombs and uprooted gravestones. The homeless – and there are many homeless in Kolkata – hid themselves within. Gangsters took shots at each other from its walls. Everywhere slithered snakes. The cemetery’s dead, and the past Scottish community, were all but forgotten.
WHAT was originally the ‘Scots and Dissenters Cemetery’ was by 1820 urgently required, as so many Scots now lived in or near Calcutta and, given its sweltering heat and its then scant grasp of infectious disease, many of these lives were brief. And, of course, the mass of them were Presbyterian – which meant they were not that welcome at the principal, Anglican cemetery where, in any event, few could afford its steep rates.
So the elders of St Andrew’s Church in Dalhousie Square petitioned the East India Company – and duly won this swathe of land in what is still a rather posh part of this teeming city.
In 1826, Mrs Margaret Boyd was first to be buried here, and after a few teething-troubles – the Kirk seems to have wanted to keep the cemetery all to itself – deals were done between assorted clergy, and Baptists, Methodists and others were also soon laid to rest here.
The sheer scale of Scottish involvement in India does surprise you. By 1792, a third of all army officers stationed here were Scots. Missionaries, businessmen and – especially – jute-traders from the auld country pretty well built West Bengal and, given the importance of jute in its economy, it is no surprise to find a high proportion of those buried here are from Dundee and its surrounding area.
And, if the headstones seem oddly familiar, they should – most were expressly made in Scotland and shipped out, as required, to this Caledonian necropolis. Its
dead include Charles Sabiston, a factory mechanic of Victoria Road, Dundee, who died in Calcutta aged 33 from delirium tremens on March 3, 1900.
Another, James Cameron, of Cleghorn Street, Dundee, a jute mill overseer with Samnaggur Jute Co Ltd, died in November 1897 aged 38 from a hepatic abscess. A stone also lies in memory of a Mr James Wheatley, police constable, who was murdered while carrying out his duty on March 26, 1844, aged 28 years, one month and ten days.
But Christian Bengalis were buried here, too – surnames such as Banearjee and Muckerjee can be sighted – and that attests to the amity that for the most part prevailed between the local populace and pale-faced new arrivals from the likes of Fife, Monifieth and Broughty Ferry.
The last interments, though, were in the 1940s, and by the mid-Fifties the Scots had gone. By the millennium, you would only have ventured into this gangland jungle if you were tired of life.
Mausoleums were lost to sight amidst curly, thick-packed, 30ft trees and the desperate, for a few rupees at a time, had unpicked the lead lettering – or other metal adornments – from most of the memorials. But one man – Lord Charles Bruce, in direct line from two Earls of Elgin who put in stints as Viceroy in the late 19th century – was delighted when, in 2008, the Indian Government launched an initiative to do something about this disintegrating hecatomb.
Today Lord Charles chairs the Kolkata Scottish Heritage Trust, which is now well advanced in its restoration of the Scottish Cemetery, spending about £24,000 a year and employing 30 people. (Money goes a very long way in this economy.)
A team from the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historic Monuments of Scotland has done an exhaustive survey. Trees are being cleared, paths relaid, work begun on restoring headstones. The manuscript records, still held at St Andrew’s Church, have been studied and will be digitised.
‘The cemetery became completely hidden,’ says Lord Charles, ‘and to some extent it saved it from being developed, but the memorials became terribly damaged by the roots of the trees.
‘For the past five years we have been painstakingly carrying out ground engineering works and excavating parts of the cemetery. We are starting to restore some of the tombs. What we want to do is restore the cemetery as a green living space and to give the cemetery a purpose into the future.’
THIS is no vanity project. In close co-operation with the Indian authorities, the Trust is determined to restore the Scottish Cemetery as a pleasant parkland for the local community, while honouring all who sleep there.
They rope in the folk of Kolkata as much as possible, offering training in gardening and stonemasonry, recruiting locals as guides. Assorted Scottish businesses have given of their expertise and talent and ‘we have employed more than 30 people at the site under the direction of a leading conservation architect, Dr Neeta Das,’ Lord Charles declares. ‘The project team is highly skilled and incorporates ground engineering, landscape design, horticulture, stone carving, plastering and brick-laying, and community outreach.’
The Trust has even opened a ‘Saturday School’, where for one day a week children are liberated from the local sweatshops – or worse – and eagerly learn to read, write and count.
As the Scottish Cemetery grows progressively neater and more beautiful, residents round about increasingly prize it – and Lord Charles was tickled when, in 2017, they chose it as the best spot for celebration of the 70th anniversary of independence.
What was a decade back an abandoned mess, serving no useful purpose to city or state, is now a green and pleasant space in a metropolis with very little of it.
Yet it is an extraordinary record of the lives of generations of Scots, a part of Scotland’s heritage overseas, a site for which present-day Scots feel some responsibility – and now, daily, the centre of quiet endeavours for good.