Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia in Postcolonial Britain and India

Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia in Postcolonial Britain and India
Author(s): Elizabeth Buettner

Source: History and Memory, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2006), pp. 5-42
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/his.2006.18.1.5
Accessed: 28-06-2015 13:09 UTC
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Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia
Cemeteries, Public Memory and

Raj Nostalgia in Postcolonial
Britain and India
ELIZABETH BUETTNER
This article examines how, and why, decaying colonial-era European graveyards
in India became targeted for conservation starting in the 1970s by the British
Association for Cemeteries in South Asia (BACSA). Cemeteries serve as a barometer
signaling how both ex-colonizers and the ex-colonized have assessed colonial
spaces, artifacts, and empire more generally after decolonization. Alongside
working to preserve graveyards and record tombstone inscriptions in the Indian
subcontinent, BACSA membersmany of whom count as old India handsalso
helped make Raj nostalgia a recurring feature of British public culture in the late
twentieth century.
English-speaking tourists contemplating a visit to India at the start of the

twenty-rst century have a wealth of literature at their ngertips providing
information deemed likely to interest foreigners. Thumbing through the
Lonely Planets entries on Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), the reader nds the
following sandwiched between Victoria Memorial and Meditation:
South Park Street Cemetery. This atmospheric cemetery ... is an evocative reminder of Kolkatas colonial past and is denitely worth a visit. Well
maintained and set under shady trees, it has some incredible tombs with
poignant epitaphs (especially the childrens).1 Another contemporary
guidebook provides a similar rendition of the site,
opened in 1767 to accommodate the large number of British who
died serving their country. The heavily inscribed, decaying headstones, obelisks, pyramids and urns have been somewhat restored.
A good booklet is available. Allow about 30 minutes.
5
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

lonial India. They act as a barometer that signals how the ex-colonized
and ex-colonizers alike not only approach the physical relics and spaces of
empire but also reassess the colonial era more generally, imparting them
with a diverse range of meanings specic to a historical moment. After
all, what spatial settings offer more apt postcolonial vantage points from
which to contemplate a dead Raj than colonizers graveyards?
As the guidebooks descriptions of South Park Street Cemetery
imply, visitors today witness processes of deterioration and salvage occurring simultaneously. Decaying graves and physical decrepitude jostle with
symptoms of partial restoration, and busy gardeners work to control nature
and enhance the cemeterys atmospheric and well-maintained image.
Booklets available for purchase, meanwhile, proclaim the historical signicance of both the place and those buried beneath it. Not immediately
apparent, however, are the key players behind efforts to renovate and
record. As will be argued below, Indian involvement is crucial to either
the success or failure of any attempt to preserve European graveyards, but
British initiatives lay behind much of the rescue work. Saving cemeteries
emerges largely as a postcolonial phenomenon that dates from the establishment of the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia (BACSA)
in London in 1976.
Founded by individuals who had spent a considerable part of their
lives in India prior to its independence in 1947, BACSA aims to preserve
knowledge of colonial India in several interconnected respects. As its name
implies, its primary goal concerns the many European graveyards scattered
throughout the subcontinent. First and foremost, the group has worked
to record inscriptions on tombstones and photograph them for posterity,
an endeavor made all the more important because of the decrepit condition of many cemeteries. Second, BACSA seeks to preserve and restore
some of the more important graveyardsKolkatas South Park Street
Cemetery prominent among theseand thereby arrest their physical
decline. These converge in its broader aim of spreading messages about
Britains past in India, not only through caring for its material remains
overseas but also through telling new stories of the colonial era to Britons
and Indians alike, largely through publications. BACSA now has close to
2,000 members, most of whom are based in Britain, although a signicant
minority live overseas.
7
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

are often generated outside universities, and BACSA provides a key illustration of this phenomenon.10 When the manifold ways its members have
connected with wider audiences and shaped British public discourses about
the Raj are taken on board, it becomes clear that collectively they have
been more widely inuential than academic discussions in determining
how the history of empire is understood. BACSA exemplies the politics
of public history on an international scalepolitics behind efforts to
preserve and commemorate selected historical narratives and artifacts that
scholars need to take into account.11 At the same time, it provides valuable
insights into the unpredictable roads down which public history can travel,
meandering easily through terrain its practitioners never explicitly set out
to chart. Albeit founded for the explicit purpose of preserving cemeteries
thousands of miles away, BACSA has been equally successfuland arguably more soin keeping memories of a departed Raj alive among those
in the ex-colonizing nation as among the ex-colonized. Its powerful role
in augmenting a narrative of empire imbued with nostalgic overtones in
Britain, however, was incidental to its original aims.
Central to thinking through these issues is the extended historical
moment when those in academia, BACSA members and others aiming to
document, analyze and thereby somehow preserve both awareness and
evidence of the colonial past are living and working: namely, the postcolonial period, but at a point that remains within living memory of the
colonial.12 Although nations of the Indian subcontinent became independent nearly sixty years ago, we are still confronted with countless living
reminders of this history, including both aging Britons and South Asians
who experienced it rsthand as well as enduring but often diminishing
material remains. These survivors have a strong impact on the ways our
analyses will be distinct from those of subsequent generations who revisit
imperial history, in part because the wider process of decolonization
will have reached a different stage.
BRITISH NEGLECT AND REVALUATION

Why have European cemeteries in the Indian subcontinent become identied as worthy of historical interest? Writers on the modern history of
Christian burial and funerary architecture in Western Europe stress that
9
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
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
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

slim.20 H. E. A. Cottons Calcutta Old and New told a similar story of
cemeteries containing little cared for monuments to forgotten sahibs,
where tombs of men of real distinction were allowed to decay till they
dropped in the early 1900s.21 A few graveyards and monuments were
restored thanks to Lord Curzons interest while he was viceroy at the n
de sicle, yet despite sporadic and piecemeal attempts at conservation the
attitude of most Britons was said to remain largely apathetic through the
last decades of the Raj.22 An observer in 1935 dismissed Calcuttas South
Park Street Cemetery as little visited now, most of the old Bengal civilian
families who consigned so many of their members to Calcutta graves having
died out or settled in England.23 This situation persisted until India and
Pakistan became independent in 1947, and it was to take several decades
more before European graves received systematic attention.24
Ironically, postcolonial interest in monuments to the dead came
from exactly the same quarters long accused of neglecting them: Britons
once personally connected with colonial South Asia who had long since
gone home, along with descendants of earlier generations of colonizers.
BACSA counts museum curators, professional and amateur historians,
genealogists and many others among its membership, but its founders
and core participants have consistently been those with lengthy family
traditions of involvement in South Asia. Not only did many spend time
there themselves prior to 1947the organizations literature refers to
the predominance of old India hands in establishing and building the
group, thereby perpetuating the use of colonial-era nomenclaturebut
BACSA members often claim ancestral connections with India spanning
centuries, families having returned generation after generation.25
What is more, the group has attracted a wide variety of individuals
who, in terms of their professional, socioeconomic and racial backgrounds, were much less likely to have opted for meaningful interaction
with one another in the racially and socially riven society of pre-1947 India.
Its founder, Theon Wilkinson, is the son of a Cawnpore businessman;
army ofcers and Indian Civil Service families are also well represented,
as well as those connected with the Indian Police and tea planting, to
name but a few. BACSAs constituency also includes many Anglo-Indians
along with some Indians, who often had been buried apart from Europeans. So frequently divided both in life and death during the colonial era,
their interest in recording facets of Britains history in the subcontinent
13
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

it becomes too latea mantra repeated time and again throughout its
literature.
Indeed, for BACSA the act of writing about the Raj has been inseparable from the act of preserving its monuments from its inception. A succinct
summary of the organizations objectives and agenda for carrying them
out appeared in the tenth-anniversary edition of its newsletter in 1986: a)
to preserve a few of the historically important cemeteries as part of South
Asias heritage; b) to turn decaying and abandoned cemeteries in cities
to social uses; c) to record all sources of information on cemeteries and
inscriptions for historical and genealogical purposes, and most importantly
d) to publish a book to draw attention to the urgent need for action.30
The last aim crystallized in Two Monsoons: The Life and Death of Europeans
in India, the book Wilkinson published in 1976 that effectively marked
BACSAs beginnings. Wilkinsons text highlighted what were to become
the organizations purpose and mission statement for the coming decades.
During a return visit in the early 1970s to the places where his family had
lived before independence, he was struck by the appalling condition of
many of the European cemeteries and began to formulate plans and a
deeper rationale for maintaining the colonizers memory:
It is my hope that these fragments from the past will give an insight
into the life and death of Europeans in India in the last three centuries, and show the attempts that were made by some to bridge the
cultural gap between East and Westattempts often visible in the
architectural style of the monuments themselves. Much was taken by
Europeans out of India ... but much more than is commonly realised
was put back in its placemorally, culturally, materiallyas can be
seen from the epitaphs.31
What the Europeans put back into the subcontinent nds elaboration throughout Wilkinsons book, and subsequently throughout the
vast array of literature disseminated by BACSA in the course of its nearly
thirty-year history. Spreading the word about the groups aims, intentions
and specic projects in the Indian subcontinent has been accomplished
in large part through the Chowkidar, its semi-annual newsletter. From its
inception in the late 1970s, the Chowkidar (which translates as watchman)
has provided a chance for members to tell us something about their own
15
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

academic bodies who have learnt of our members expertise in bringing
the past to life.36
Archives in Britain that document the imperial pastparticularly
the British Librarys Oriental and India Ofce Collections, the School of
Oriental and African Studies (both of which house copies of interviews
done for Plain Tales from the Raj), the Cambridge South Asian Archive
and the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristolalso have
accumulated substantial collections of personal narratives on tape and on
paper by Britons once in India, a notable number of whom are BACSA
afliates. Through these various channels, members attitudes are available
to academic and other researchers along with more casual readers and
listeners alike, building a legacy that has carved out a substantial presence
in the nations archives, libraries, museums and public culture.37 Although
these diverse forms of Raj recollection cannot receive full attention here,
they highlight the key roles former participants and their descendants have
played in shaping how British India is understood among wider British (as
well as other English-speaking) audiences through textual, oral and other
media contributions that complement conservation efforts overseas.38
BACSA has performed a valuable service for historical scholarship by
preserving materials and memories, providing rich insights into how the
British felt about imperial India in the wake of independence. How they
felt, however, was far from disinterested. As members consistently reiterate, their object has been to give a true picture of life as it was rather
than modern travesties of the Rajwith truth (or setting the record
straight, as many writers put it) in this case meaning the hardships of
service and the unfailing vitality, devotion, and courage of Britons
abroad, whatever the risks.39
This wider aim of defending the Raj and its participants found so
pervasively in BACSA members writings renders the reasons why the
group has singled out graveyards and funerary architecture as particularly
worthy of recording and preserving for posterity more comprehensible.40
BACSAs choice illustrates very clearly the ideological agendas that
inform all efforts to narrate history with reference to places and objects.
In the most direct sense, cemeteries materially attest to the Rajs human
contributions: Britons who died in India and can be depicted, literally, as
giving their lives on its behalf. Crucially, members interests do not simply
revolve around tombs Cotton described a century ago as belonging to
17
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

of the cemeteries today, with their details both of mundane life, but also
with their moving and poignant records of loss and bravery, endurance in
the face of adversity, and loveemotions and virtues, all experienced in
a strange and sometimes hostile territory, far from home.44 Tombstones
and graveyards provide ample means to rehabilitate tarnished images
of the British and, through recounting the high price of service in the
East, allow persons who might be depicted as colonial oppressors to
be recast as victims.45 Moreover, individuals who died in India are often
described in connection with their contributions that have outlived them,
as two examples from the Chowkidar demonstrate. Seeing the grave of
an Indian Forest Service ofcer allows visitors to carry away with them
lasting memories of a remarkable man, who diligently carried out his
responsibilities of planting 1,790 acres with teak, nearly all of which
ourished and grewalthough he himself perished in the process. Similarly, the tombstone of a tea planter suggests that his was a solitary life,
but not untypical of the dedicated planters who gave the sub-continent
one of its most protable exports.46 Clearly, this interpretation implies,
these were not selsh exploiters, but rather Britons whose activities still
benet Indians to this day. Cemeteries and their memorials provide ample
proof, carved in stone, of Britains historical importance to the nations
of the subcontinent.
Indicatively, BACSA has never attempted to preserve either funerary
architecture or the human remains of the dead by repatriating them to
Britain.47 Photographing the memorials and recording inscriptions have
been high-priority tasks, and it is these materials that have been brought
home to form BACSAs extensive collections housed at the British
Librarys Oriental and India Ofce Collections in London.48 Once such
documentation has been rescued for foreign useprimarily by genealogists researching British ancestors with ties to South AsiaBACSAs
efforts turn to what lies above ground rather than below it and which,
crucially, should remain visible to locals. Repatriating the memorials
would, in fact, act in opposition to the organizations insistence on the
ongoing relevance and presence of Britains imperial history and legacy
on South Asian soil.49 While the Raj might well be dead and buried, its
memory need not be consigned to oblivion as well.
19
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

several of the older European graveyards formally falling under the aegis
of the Archeological Survey of India (ASI), overall they became friendless
for thirty years, until there was an awakening of responsibility among some
of the old India hands, leading to the formation of BACSA.51
In the interim decades and continuing after BACSAs intervention,
human action proved as serious a threat to cemeteries survival as the
climate and passage of time. Cemeteries in increasingly populous cities
often have lost out in the erce competition for urban space, falling victim
to property developers attempts to convert dilapidated sites long out of
use into ofce buildings, apartment blocks or car parks. BACSAs preservation efforts are deemed more likely to succeed in smaller locations,
where real estate is not an issue than in rapidly expanding cities.52 To
take but one example, in Bangalore the familiar but disturbing story of
vanishing memorials of the Raj reminds the organization of its frequent
powerlessness to save cemeteries or even to transplant their memorials to
other sites prior to demolition, upon which gravestones typically become
re-used in new constructions.53
Equally serious a threat to the cemeteries maintenance and survival
are the less formal actions taken by local individuals. Acts of vandalism
in cemeteries are commonly recounted in BACSAs newsletter, while in
other instances members report on the more purposeful alternative uses
to which slabs of marble or other types of tombstone material are put.
Stories of headstones or tablets being pillaged or looted for building
material or grinding curry, or found converted into table-tops in nearby
tea shops, appear repeatedly in the Chowkidar.54 What is more, just as
the shortage of city space made some cemeteries attractive to developers,
others became inhabited by the Indian living as well as the European dead
for whom they were established. Prior to restoration in the mid-1970s,
Kolkatas South Park Street Cemetery was occupied by stray dogs as well
as the homeless so-called vagrants who had moved into the mausolea to
take advantage of the shelter they provided (see gure 4).55 The state of
Kanpurs Kacheri Cemetery in the 1970s highlighted the varied mundane
purposes to which places BACSA deemed worthy of more reverence were
put, with the member who visited reporting that a marble slab from the
tomb of a prominent nineteenth-century British businessman was being
used by the cemeterys chowkidar to scrub clothes. This proved a familiar
refrain heard in BACSA descriptions of other cemeteries. How many early
21
Elizabeth Buettner
Fig. 4. South Park Street Cemetery, undated but ca. 1970s, photographer unknown.
Reproduced by permission of Eye Ubiquitous/Hutchison.
inscriptions have been lost by Indias sturdy dhobis? another observer

wondered.56 Kacheri Cemeterys overall conditionphysical as well as
socialwas recounted in grim detail: The boundary wall broken, trees
fallen, a paan shop at the western end attracting undesirable customers
who entered the cemetery for calls of nature or to gamble. The chowkidar
himself ... grazed his buffaloes and goats, chaining them to tomb pillars
and drying cakes of dung on the tomb stones.57
Needless to say, the diverse ways that places and objects commemorating British involvement in the subcontinent have been appropriated
in the postcolonial period are anathema to those seeking to promote an
awareness of, and respect for, the Rajs historical signicance. Yet just as
long-term neglect of cemeteries was not an exclusively postcolonial Indian
tendency but also describes British behavior prior to independence,58
so too do these alterations of space and historical artifacts bear some
resemblance to how the British once treated Indian cities and structures.
As Sunil Khilnani underscores, during the Raj the city became a stage
where the regalia of British sovereignty was displayed, where the Indian
was ruled, [and] where space was most explicitly governed; vast areas
of old cities were demolished in accordance with colonial concerns about
defence, sanitation, order, and above all the display of the new imperial
22

power.59 Removals of tombstones for other purposes, moreover, recall
how British authorities had once plundered many Indian architectural
wonders during their occupation. Indeed, in areas such as Bengal where
stone was scarce, British memorials to their dead were on occasion made
from stones taken from Hindu temples such as Gaur instead of fabricated
from brick and plaster.60 If BACSA seeks to uphold the Rajs memory in
its efforts to preserve European cemeteries, those they deem to be acting
counter to these interests within graveyards in fact arguably follow colonial precedents. Colonial cultural traces apparent within contemporary
patterns of reappropriation extended to the use of Kolkatas South Park
Street Cemetery as a place to play cricket, at least prior to BACSAs work
to heighten its walls to keep out such intruders.61
What, then, can be inferred about common Indian attitudes to
colonial cemeteries in recent decades? Does the fact that many have fallen
into disrepair, had tombstones vandalized or removed, or become extensions of many aspects of local social life imply widespread hostility to their
original purposenamely, to commemorate European colonizers who
died in the subcontinent? Although it is tempting to read the postcolonial treatment accorded to these cemeteries as transgressive subaltern
acts against symbols of colonialism, the condition of these sites suggests
apathy or indifference to the colonial heritage more strongly than focused
resentment. Rather than being targeted for destruction, for ideological
reasons, by either the state or the people living in the vicinity, European
cemeteries faced neglect, became part of everyday social life rather than
death, or were demolished in the process of economically inspired urban
redevelopment. In this sense, the postcolonial history of South Asias
cemeteries resembles that of other material remnants of British rule. Since
1947, relatively few statues of British viceroys, monarchs and military
commanders have been destroyed. Some have remained in their original
prominent public settings while most simply have been pushed out of sight,
relocated to more obscure outdoor places (in the case of Kolkata, many
British statues have been moved to Barrackpur or alternatively clustered
together in concentration at the Victoria Memorial) or quietly deposited
in museums or warehouses.62
Instead, public attention focused primarily on contemporary concerns rather than the political and cultural ramications of colonial heritage
and its material remains. As Tapati Guha-Thakurta writes of the Victoria
23
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

Indian assistance and accordingly has worked to cultivate support among
parties deemed most likely to share the groups aims. Indian Christians
appeared the most ready candidates, yet congregations willingness and
ability to play an active role in cemetery preservation has varied. On many
occasions BACSA members have attributed Indian Christians reluctance
to commit themselves to their goals to local churches lack of money
for repair work,68 but even when BACSA pays for restoration, interest
in administering the funds depends in part on whether the cemetery in
question has long been closed or remains open for new burials. When
they do act in accordance with BACSAs cemetery restoration aims it is
not simply because they similarly view them as testaments to the value of
the European legacy and sacrices in the subcontinent, but rather because
a given site is interpreted not as a relic of the British connection ... but
as a living centre of Christian devotion.69 A BACSA report describing
Mumbais Sewri Cemetery in 2002 underscored its ongoing role in the
Christian communitys annual commemorations of All Souls Day, when
relatives of the departed gather to pray at the graves, to bring owers,
candles, and sometimes food for the deceased.70 For Indian participants,
the Victorian ofcials buried nearby under decaying or partly restored
monuments may mean little or nothing, while upholding the memory of
family members buried there more recently is clearly paramount.
How Indians view European-era graveyards, then, can diverge sharply
from the reasons why BACSA believes they should be valued, even when
they broadly support the same conservation projects. BACSA members
recognize that only a handful of the more architecturally distinctive
graveyards feasibly can become candidates for extensive restoration with
the hope of longer-term survival, and its most successful projects owe
their results to active Indian involvement. South Park Street Cemetery in
Kolkata is BACSAs indisputable triumph, achieved by working in partnership with its local sister organization, the Association for the Preservation
of Historical Cemeteries in India (APHCI). Some Indians clearly have
become convinced that European cemeteries are spaces worth preserving,
but the reasons why they are valued clearly surpass BACSAs arguments
even when they intersect with them.71 A contributor to the APHCIs
newsletter in the early 1980s, for instance, related a conversation with
a visitor to South Park Street thus: the other day I was walking round
the cemetery and passed a man sitting on a bench. He said how peaceful
25
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

about the state of European-built structures, their authors saw dangers
emanating from many of the same quarters BACSA members identied
as threats to colonial cemeteries. Like European graveyards and to a far
more extensive degree, ancient monuments suffered the depredations
not only of time and climate but especially of locals, variously accused
of pillaging artifacts, vandalism, fornication, gambling, drinking alcohol,
grazing cattle, storing dung-cakes and rewood, playing, or even fully
inhabiting the structures by moving in.75
Increasingly, however, Indian commentators also allude to British
monuments when discussing the need to protect the nations historic
structures from neglect, misuse or demolition. Deploying rhetoric
already rmly entrenched for the purposes of conservationist arguments,
some writers argued that more assiduous protection of Indias European
heritage would help attract foreign tourists and, more importantly, their
currencies.76 A visitor to Surats English and Dutch graveyards in 1969
described them as sad memorials to the early mortality among the British in those days, adding that the hazards of empire-building were
enormous. His rendition of the cemetery pre-dated BACSAs accounts
yet was almost identical to them:
Today these unique relics lie neglected and in disrepair. Some of the
railings around the tombs have been patiently cut and taken away;
tombstones have been removed presumably to ground masala in some
Gujarati kitchen. There was no gate at the entrance ... the chowkidars
presence is token.... At night the mausoleums become a convenient
spot for gambling and illicit sex. Broken bottles tell tales of drinking
orgies. The smell of excreta proved the chowkidars point that the
place was used as an open-air lavatory. Today scant attention is paid
to them, except for the occasional foreign tourist.
Yet this visitor did not merely lodge a plea for protecting Surats cemeteries
as a means of respecting and glorifying Indias European past, as BACSAs
literature later emphasized, or policing disreputable behavior. Ending on
a note more pragmatic than sentimental, he concluded that European
cemeteries should be refurbished to practical, and presentist, ends. The
Gujarat governments tourist department seems to be extraordinarily slow
27
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

of overlapping scholarly and antiquarian contributions. The growth of
societies concerned with local and national heritageincluding the Society
for the Preservation of Archival Materials and Monuments of Calcutta,
established in 1981; the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH), dating from 1984; and the Delhi Conservation Society,
among otherssuggests that British rereadings of the colonizers impact
on India as manifested in buildings and monuments will further decline in
relevance. What is certain, however, is that the players will change, as will
the evolving postcolonial conditions that determine how colonial artifacts
are made sense of, by both ex-colonizers and ex-colonized.
IMPERIAL TWILIGHT AND BEYOND

Sites of memory created as reminders of British sacrices in the region
have, in short, proven innitely malleable as they pass into different hands
over time.83 Jay Winters assessment of memorials to European soldiers
killed in the First World War provides apt insights applicable to the condition of colonial cemeteries in India:
[War memorials] would have had no xed meanings, immutable over
time. Like many other public objects, they manifest what physicists,
in an entirely different context, call a half-life, a trajectory of
decomposition, a passage from the active to the inert. Their initial
charge was related to the needs of a huge population of bereaved
people ... but in time, for the majority, the wounds began to close,
and life went on. When that happened, after years or decades, then
the objects invested with meaning related to the loss of life in wartime
became something else. Other meanings derived from other needs
or events may be attached to them, or no meaning at all.84
Stone artifacts and their settings, although created to endure, are thus
vulnerable to both decay and reinvention by distinct actors. As Ian Baucom
explores in his book Out of Place, designated overseas locations that were
meant to maintain Englishness among Britains colonial rulers as well
as Anglicize colonial subjects have invited interpretations that the British
never intended since the colonial period itself.85 Following decoloniza29
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

when otherwise funds and initiative may well have been absent; it has
told its members stories to wider audiences and lled the Oriental and
India Ofce Collections with a substantial body of personal renditions
of Raj involvement as well as historical records providing a history of
the cemeteries and their inhabitants to those who visit London to seek
them out. While many of the cemeteries with which BACSA has dealt
in South Asia probably will not survive the combined encroachments of
time, climate and human intervention, some at least have seen their life
expectancy prolonged, at least for the short term, and await the further
attentionsor lack thereof, as the case may beby present and future
Indian authorities. Materially, however, BACSA members have been
instrumental in bringing records of what Britain lost in India home
in the accumulation of photographs, inscriptions and monographs on
specic graves and graveyards for the postcolonial British archive.88 In
the staging of the empires public history, BACSA has achieved successes
internationallyalbeit playing very different roles within Britains archives
and media than it has within South Asian cemeteries.
BACSAs repatriated archival legacy now rmly planted on British soil
suggests a nal means by which European cemeteries in the subcontinent
are, and will undoubtedly continue to be, borrowed for uses exceeding
those originally intended. Although BACSAs founders did not initially
envision the group as functioning on behalf of genealogists, over time this
constituency has grown in importance such that issues of the Chowkidar
repeatedly devote as much attention to tracking down information about
elusive British ancestors traced to India as to cemetery-specic matters.
Indeed, the organizations website appeals directly to genealogists, promising that queries on any matter relating to family history, the whereabouts
or condition of a relatives grave, etc. ... nearly always [bring] an answer. 89
BACSAs origins in the 1970s were indeed contemporaneous with the
wider surge of public interest in family history in Britain,90 and, as outlined above, the groups core membership always was interested in South
Asian cemeteries because of their own familial ties with the subcontinent.
But the physical footwork involved in recording evidence, photographing monuments and coordinating selective conservation efforts overseas
was done in large part by persons who had far more immediate links with
India. Most had experienced the Raj personally before 1947, whether
over the course of decades or during childhood alone. Close relationships
31
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

NOTES
This article has beneted immensely from comments by friends and colleagues
who read or heard earlier versions. Alongside anonymous reviewers for History &
Memory, I would like to thank Colin Jones, Peter Mandler, Peter Marshall (with
whom I cordially have agreed to disagree on the subject of imperial nostalgia in
Britain!), Erika Rappaport, Bernhard Rieger, Julie Rugg, Bill Schwarz, Miles Taylor,
Chris Wickham and Ben Zachariah, along with audiences at presentations given
at the North American Conference on British Studies Annual Meeting; the History Departmental Seminar at the University of Birmingham; the British Island
Stories Conference at the University of York; the Imperial History Seminar at
the Institute of Historical Research, London; and the Post-Imperial Britain
Conference at the Institute of Contemporary British History, London.
1. Lonely Planet: India, 10th ed. (Melbourne, 2003), 447.
2. Robert and Roma Bradnock, Footprint India Handbook, 12th ed. (Bath,
2002), 53233. Other guidebooks entries on this cemetery include Kirsten Ellis
and Chris Taylor, Travelers India Companion (Zollikofen, Switzerland, 1999),
259; Louise Nicholson, National Geographic Traveller India (Washington, DC,
2001), 292.
3. Tim Edensor, Tourists at the Taj: Performance and Meaning at a Symbolic Site
(London, 1998). An excellent analysis of tourism to historic sites of princely India
is Barbara N. Ramusack, The Indian Princes as Fantasy: Palace Hotels, Palace
Museums, and Palace on Wheels, in Carol A. Breckenridge, ed., Consuming
Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World (Minneapolis, 1995), 6689.
4. John Hutnyk, The Rumour of Calcutta: Tourism, Charity and the Poverty of
Representation (London, 1996), persuasively stresses the ways most travel guides
today remain overly generous to the British Raj (92) playing up its glories and
eccentricities and the romance of empire. See esp. 9295, 128.
5. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Postcoloniality and the Artiface of History: Who Speaks
for Indian Pasts? Representations, no. 37 (winter 1992): 2, 20.
6. Within a burgeoning interdisciplinary eld of scholarship, several of many
key contributions include Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York,
1993); John M. MacKenzie, ed., Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester, 1986); C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World,
17801830 (London, 1989); Linda Colley, Britishness and Otherness: An Argument, Journal of British Studies 31, no. 4 (1992): 30929; Frederick Cooper
and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois
World (Berkeley, 1997), 156; Catherine Hall, ed., Cultures of Empire: A Reader:
Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
(Manchester, 2000); idem, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English
33
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

14. Having spent several years in India during the 1680s, Vanbrugh later took
inspiration from Surats European graveyards and their tombs Islamic inuences
when advocating out-of-town cemeteries and park mausolea in England. See Robert Williams, Vanbrughs India and His Mausolea for England, in Christopher
Ridgway and Robert Williams, eds., Sir John Vanbrugh and Landscape Architecture
in Baroque England, 16901730 (Stroud, 2000), 11430.
15. James Stevens Curl, A Celebration of Death: An Introduction to Some of
the Buildings, Monuments, and Settings of Funerary Architecture in the Western
European Tradition (London, 1980), 13554, 35859; Thomas W. Laqueur, The
Places of the Dead in Modernity, in Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman, eds., The
Age of Cultural Revolutions: Britain and France, 17501820 (Berkeley, 2002), 18;
Harold Mytum, Death and Remembrance in the Colonial Context, in Susan
Lawrence, ed., Archaeologies of the British: Explorations of Identity in Great Britain
and Its Colonies, 16001945 (London, 2003), 15657, 167.
16. Philip Davies, Splendours of the Raj: British Architecture in India, 1660 to
1947 (London, 1985), 19, 6062, 247; Jan Morris, Stones of Empire: The Buildings
of the Raj (Oxford, 1983), 18082; Sten Nilsson, European Architecture in India,
17501850 (London, 1968), 13237. On neoclassical architecture in India more
generally, see Thomas R. Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and
Britains Raj (London, 1989), especially chap. 1; Norma Evenson, The Indian
Metropolis: A View towards the West (New Haven, 1989), chap. 2; G. H. R. Tillotson, The Tradition of Indian Architecture: Continuity, Controversy and Change
since 1850 (New Haven, 1989), chap. 1.
17. Mail Box, Chowkidar 7, no. 3 (1995): 52.
18. P. J. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth
Century (Oxford, 1976); Philip Lawson and Jim Phillips, Our Execrable Banditti: Perceptions of Nabobs in Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain, Albion 16, no.
3 (1984): 22541; J. M. Holzman, The Nabobs in England, 17601785: A Study of
the Returned Anglo-Indian (New York, 1926); E. M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies:
The Physical Experience of the Raj, c. 18001947 (Cambridge, 2001), 3536.
19. Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India
(Oxford, 2004).
20. H. E. Busteed, Echoes from Old Calcutta, 4th ed. (London, 1908), 36667;
see also 102, 154, 174.
21. H. E. A. Cotton, Calcutta Old and New: A Historical and Descriptive Handbook to the City [1909], rev. ed., ed. N. R. Ray (Calcutta, 1980), 472, 474. See
also The Park Street Cemeteries, Bengal: Past & Present 1 (1907): 8081.
22. On Curzons preservation projects, see Busteed, Echoes, xvii, 5256, 38284;
Lord Curzon of Kedleston, Lord Curzon in India, ed. T. Raleigh (London, 1906),
esp. 44748; Thomas R. Metcalf, Monuments and Memorials: Lord Curzons
35
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

33. Plain Tales from the Raj was rst broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1974;
for the book stemming from the series, see Charles Allen (in association with
Michael Mason), Plain Tales from the Raj (London, 1975). See also Charles Allen,
Resuscitating the Raj, in Dr. Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, ed., Chowkidar 19771997
(London, 1997), 47. M. M. Kayes considerable body of ctional work includes
The Far Pavilions (London, 1978) which, alongside having been televised in the
1980s, opened as a musical in Londons West End in 2004. Her personal recollections were published as The Sun in the Morning: My Early Years in India and
England (London, 1990); Golden Afternoon (London, 1997); Enchanted Evening
(London, 1999).
34. Pat Barr, The Memsahibs: In Praise of the Women of Victorian India (London,
1976); idem, The Dust in the Balance: British Women in India, 19051945 (London,
1989). Raleigh Trevelyan assessed his own and his familys long history of involvement in India in The Golden Oriole: A 200-Year History of an English Family in
India (New York, 1987). He also coordinated the television documentary Echoes
of the Raj, rst aired on BBC2 on 21 May 2001 and subsequently rebroadcast in
following years. On BACSA authors, see BACSA Books, Chowkidar 1, no. 4
(1978): 39; BACSA Authors, Tenth Anniversary Souvenir Chowkidar, 3944.
35. Several requests for assistance include The Festival of India, 1982,
Chowkidar 2, no. 3 (1981): 37; Can You Help? ibid., 3, no. 1 (1982): 8; Mail
Box and Can You Help? ibid., 4, nos. 16 (198587): 8485, 104; Events
and Notices, ibid., 5, no. 6 (1990): 130.
36. Can You Help? ibid., 4, nos. 16 (198587): 104.
37. On archival politics, see Burton, Dwelling in the Archive, 2026.
38. For more extensive discussions of postcolonial nostalgia among Britons long
linked with South Asia, see Buettner, Empire Families, 25270; Bose, Organizing
Empire, 169221. More generally, see Salman Rushdie, Outside the Whale,
Granta 11 (1984): 12538; Burton, India, Inc.?; John McBratney, The Raj
Is All the Rage: Paul Scotts The Raj Quartet and Colonial Nostalgia, North
Dakota Quarterly 55, no. 3 (1987): 2049; Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire:
The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis, 1993), 14244; Tara
Wollen, Over Our Shoulders: Nostalgic Screen Fictions for the 1980s, in John
Corner and Sylvia Harvey, eds., Enterprise and Heritage: Crosscurrents of National
Culture (London, 1991), 17893; Andrew Higson, Re-presenting the National
Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film, in Lester Friedman, ed., British
Cinema and Thatcherism: Fires Were Started (London, 1993), 10929; Richard
Dyer, White (London, 1997), 184206.
39. The Mail Box, Chowkidar 1, no. 3 (1978): 24.
40. For the purposes of this article, I will focus primarily on sites and artifacts
37
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

52. S. K. Pande, BACSA and India, ibid., 9, no. 5 (2002): 11213. See also
Good and Bad News from India, ibid., 4, nos. 16 (198587): 86, 89.
53. Mail Box, ibid., 9, no. 6 (2002): 124. Burial grounds were also condemned as a waste of scarce urban space in Singapore. See Brenda S. A. Yeoh
and Tan Boon Hui, The Politics of Space: Changing Discourses on Chinese
Burial Grounds in Post-War Singapore, Journal of Historical Geography 21, no.
2 (1995): 18890.
54. See for example BACSA Activities, Chowkidar 1, no. 2 (1978): 11; Mail
Box, ibid., 1, no. 4 (1979): 33; Prue Stokes, Can You Help? Tenth Anniversary
Souvenir Chowkidar, 62.
55. Maurice Shellim, South Park Street Cemetery, Calcutta, Tenth Anniversary
Souvenir Chowkidar, 45.
56. The Earliest Europeans, Chowkidar 3, no. 1 (1982): 4.
57. Zo Yalland, Kacheri Cemetery, Kanpur, Tenth Anniversary Souvenir
Chowkidar, 78.
58. British cemeteries at home as well as in South Asia commonly faced neglect.
See http://highgate-cemetery.org for a brief account of Highgate Cemeterys
condition in the 1970s and the Friends of Highgate Cemeterys conservation
activities thereafter. What is more, for centuries churchyards in Britain similarly
had served as sites for recreation and commerce and not simply as hallowed places
of tranquil solemnity, although these secular practices largely had been eliminated
by the mid-1800s. See David Dymond, Gods Disputed Acre, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 50, no. 3 (1999): 46497. Assessments of French behavior in
graveyards suggest a similar history of diverse uses which were gradually curbed.
See John McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France, vol. 1,
The Clerical Establishment and Its Social Ramications (Oxford, 1998), 27475;
Aris, Hour of Our Death, 6271, and Western Attitudes towards Death, 2325.
59. Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (London, 1997), 118, 116. Veena Talwar
Oldenburgs study of Lucknow in the wake of the 185758 revolt, The Making of
Colonial Lucknow, 18561877 (Princeton, 1984), counts among the best analyses
of the ideologies informing British urban replanning.
60. Evenson, Indian Metropolis, 82; Wilkinson, Two Monsoons, 16; Curzon,
Lord Curzon in India, 200; Pearson, A Calcutta Cemetery, 80.
61. Minutes of Annual General Meeting of BACSA, 26 March 2002.
62. Mary Ann Steggles, The Myth of the Monuments: Public Commemorative Statues, Marg 46, no. 1 (199495): 6784; Mary Ann Steggles, Statues
of the Raj (London: BACSA, 2000); Davies, Splendours of the Raj, 83. On the
Victoria Memorial, see the special issue of Marg 49, no. 2 (1997), especially the
contribution by Narayani Gupta, India and the European Cultural Inheritance:
39
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

77. Bhaichand Patel, Ghosts of the Raj Still Haunt Surat, Times of India,
11 Oct. 1969, 11.
78. See http://www.webindia123.com/city/westbengal/calcutta/kolkata/
kolkata.htm (last accessed 1 Dec. 2005).
79. R. P. Gupta, Ghosts from the British Raj, Times of India (Magazine), 1
Jan. 1978, 1; N. J. N., Old Tombstones, Times of India, 8 Oct. 1978, 8; Koneti,
Link with Maugham, Times of India, 12 Nov. 1978, 8.
80. Narayani Gupta, Kingsway to Rajpath: The Democratization of Lutyens
Central Vista, in Thomas R. Metcalf and Catherine B. Asher, eds., Perceptions of
South Asia's Visual Past (New Delhi, 1994), 257.
81. Partho Datta, Review Essay: Celebrating Calcutta, Urban History 19,
no. 1 (1992): 94; Evenson, Indian Metropolis, 25658; R. P. Gupta, Calcutta:
Save Its Past to Save Its Future, Amrita Bazar Patrika, 30 March 1984, 89.
Interestingly, a recent discussion about the threats to, and merits of, the Bungalow
Zone in New Delhi (designed as part of British Indias new capital city between
1911 and 1931 to house government ofcials) neither praised nor condemned the
structures through recourse to celebratory or anticolonial rhetoric. Having been
included among the 100 most endangered sites in the World Monuments Watch
2002 as more and more of the bungalows risked being demolished to make way
for hotels, ofce blocks, and other commercial centres, those in favor of saving
them called the Zone a part of the city we can really be proud of ... the lungs
of Delhi, while others dismissed such symbols of Lutyens Delhi as elitist.
See Bungalows on Heritage Alert List, and Call to Preserve Lutyens Delhi,
Times of India, 3 Nov. 2001, 1, 4.
82. Datta, Review Essay, 97; Thomas R. Metcalf, Architecture in the British Empire, in Robin W. Winks, ed., Oxford History of the British Empire, v:
Historiography (Oxford, 1999), 59495; Gupta, Kingsway to Rajpath, 26465;
Evenson, Indian Metropolis, 25666.
83. The concept of lieu de mmoire derives from Pierre Nora, Between Memory
and History: Les Lieux de Mmoire, trans. Marc Roudebush, Representations, no.
26 (spring 1989): 725.
84. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European
Cultural History (Cambridge, 1995), 98. See also Catherine Moriarty, The
Absent Dead and Figurative First World War Memorials, Transactions of the
Ancient Monuments Society 39 (1995): 740.
85. Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity
(Princeton, NJ, 1999), 5, 20, 3839, 222. Some of the locations Baucom discusses
are cricket pitches, the Victoria Terminus in Bombay and the commemoration of
the Mutiny at the Residency in Lucknow.
41
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

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Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia in Postcolonial Britain and India

Author(s): Elizabeth Buettner

Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia

Cemeteries, Public Memory and

English-speaking tourists contemplating a visit to India at the start of the

Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia

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BRITISH NEGLECT AND REVALUATION

Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia

Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia

Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia

Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia

Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia

Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia

inscriptions have been lost by Indias sturdy dhobis? another observer

Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia

Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia

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IMPERIAL TWILIGHT AND BEYOND

Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia

Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia

Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia

Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia

Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia

Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia

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