cemeteries, public memory and raj nostalgia in postcolonial britain and india

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Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia in Postcolonial Britain and IndiaAuthor(s): Elizabeth BuettnerSource: History and Memory, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2006), pp. 5-42Published by: Indiana University Press

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Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia

5

Cemeteries, Public Memory andRaj Nostalgia in PostcolonialBritain and India

ELIZABETHBUETTNER

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-first century have a wealth of literature at their fingertips providing

information deemed likely to interest foreigners. Thumbing through the

Lonely Planetsentries on Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), the reader finds the

following sandwiched between Victoria Memorial and Meditation:South Park Street Cemetery. This atmospheric cemetery ... is an evoca-

tive reminder of Kolkatas colonial past and is definitely worth a visit. Well

maintained and set under shady trees, it has some incredible tombs with

poignant epitaphs (especially the childrens).1Another 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 head-stones, obelisks, pyramids and urns have been somewhat restored.

A good booklet is available. Allow about 30 minutes.

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Elizabeth Buettner

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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.3Yet 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 dat-

ing 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 posedthat pertain not only to local manifestations of the colonial past in Kolkata

but also to their meanings inand just as importantly, outsidepostco-



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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 specific to a historical moment. Afterall, 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 occur-

ring 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 sig-nificance 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 estab-

lishment 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 condi-

tion 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 significantminority live overseas.



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Elizabeth Buettner

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BACSAs origins and range of activities illuminate diverse manifesta-

tions 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 Britainand 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.5Academics across

a range of disciplines now routinely explore how empire was integral

to changing configurations of national identity and culture at home as

well as overseas.6What is more, they now convincingly position Britainshistorical status as an imperial nation as crucial to its self-definition long

after widescale decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s.7Britain can be

counted among the postcolonial nations just like its former colonies and

dependencies, having been defined 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 organiza-

tions 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.9Indeed, BACSAs

active engagement with the project of uniting Britains histories at home

and away effectively pre-dates the surge in academic work inspired bypostcolonial theory by at least a decade. As Raphael Samuel, Patrick Wright

and others have delineated, public forms of knowledge about the past



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are often generated outside universities, and BACSA provides a key illus-

tration of this phenomenon.10When 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 havebeen more widely influential than academic discussions in determining

how the history of empire is understood. BACSA exemplifies 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.11At 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 cemeteriesthousands of miles away, BACSA has been equally successfuland argu-

ably 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 post-

colonial period, but at a point that remains within living memory of the

colonial.12Although nations of the Indian subcontinent became indepen-

dent 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 firsthand 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 iden-tified as worthy of historical interest? Writers on the modern history of

Christian burial and funerary architecture in Western Europe stress that



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Elizabeth Buettner

10

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 necropo-

lises then and nowopened in 1804, and, aside from a small handful that

date from the 1700s, cemeteries in Britain mainly emerged during the

first half of the nineteenth century.

13

Such developments would not havebeen 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 figure 1).14South Asia thus effectively played a pio-

neering role in what ultimately became predominant trends in European

burial practices and commemoration of the dead alike.15Neoclassical and

Egyptian motifs such as obelisks, urns, columns and pyramids commonlyadorned European mausolea and tombstones in South Asia just as they

did elsewhere, but funerary architecture in India also occasionally revealed

Fig. 1. English cemetery at Surat, Western View. Photograph by Cecil L. Burns, 1920s.

Reproduced by permission of the British Library. Oriental and India Office Collections,Photo 195 (18).



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Fig. 3. Dutch tombs, Surat, 1871. Photograph by Edmund David Lyon. Reproduced bypermission of the British Library. Oriental and India Office Collections, Photo 1000/31

(3208).

Fig. 2. South Park Street Cemetery, Calcutta, 1948. Photograph by J. Lowell Groves. Heldby the British Library, Oriental and India Office 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 the1870s pictured in figure 3.



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Elizabeth Buettner

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borrowings from indigenous sources (see figure 2). Until the early nine-

teenth century, a small number of hybrid monuments incorporated Hindu

architectural features but more often took inspiration from Islamic tombs.

Syncretic influences help to render Indias early European graveyardsdistinct from those later established at home (see figure 3).16

The notoriously high mortality rates from disease among Europeans

in India undoubtedly account at least in part for their graveyards promi-

nent place in the history of modern burial. Over two million Europeans

died there, according to BACSAs estimates.17Many, if not most, Europe-

ans who embarked for India prior to the nineteenth century never returned

to their lands of origin, often having perished in the course of their first

two monsoonsa period that became a standard means of describingtheir commonly abbreviated life expectancy. Those not struck down by the

climate or other causes often opted to leave the subcontinent once they

had accumulated sufficient wealth to enable a comfortable (and in a few

cases infamously affluent) lifestyle back in Britain or their other respec-

tive homelands.18Survivors 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 metro-

pole. 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 thosesucceeding. Once close relations of the deceased had gone from the

parish, hopes for faraway memorials to their nearest and dearest were



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slim.20H. E. A. Cottons Calcutta Old and Newtold 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.21A few graveyards and monuments wererestored thanks to Lord Curzons interest while he was viceroy at the fin

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.22An 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.23This situation persisted until India and

Pakistan became independent in 1947, and it was to take several decadesmore 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 back-

grounds, 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 officers 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 Europe-ans. So frequently divided both in life and death during the colonial era,

their interest in recording facets of Britains history in the subcontinent



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Elizabeth Buettner

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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 opportunityfor members to reunite with old acquaintances and also forge new con-

nections 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 reflected 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 dotour 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.26Yet at

second glance this belated and firmly postcolonial concern for cemeteries

appears far more comprehensible, fitting 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.27Within the

postcolonial context, Hsu-Ming Teos analysis of British narratives that

chronicle wandering in the wake of empire aptly emphasizes how nos-

talgic and melancholy tour[s] to former colonies ... enabled the traveller

to relive the glory days of empire while simultaneously mourning their

demise.28Yet Antoinette Burtons discussion of Raj nostalgia in late-

twentieth-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 andoverlove at last sight, as she summarizes.29BACSAs raison dtre has

consistently stressed the need to record and commemorate the Raj before



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it becomes too latea mantra repeated time and again throughout its

literature.

Indeed, for BACSA the act of writing about the Raj has been insepara-

ble from the act of preserving its monuments from its inception. A succinctsummary 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 Europeansin 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 centu-

ries, 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 finds elabo-

ration 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 specific projects in the Indian subcontinent has been accomplished

in large part through the Chowkidar, its semi-annual newsletter. From itsinception in the late 1970s, the Chowkidar(which translates as watchman)

has provided a chance for members to tell us something about their own



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Elizabeth Buettner

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lives abroad, and to help build up a record of the rich social fabric that

existed not so very long ago.32While the accretion of personal, family

and tombstone-inscription anecdotes printed in the Chowkidarare read

mainly by others in BACSA, these messages receive wider circulation inthe 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 andpopular histories about the Raj published since the 1970s, BACSA con-

tributors have loomed large, reflecting 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 significant. 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 Rajdate from the late 1970s, and M. M. Kaye, whose 1978 novel

The Far Pavilionsbecame a highly successful television miniseries in the

mid-1980s and was followed by three volumes of her own autobiography

in the 1990s.33Allens 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.34Coordinators of museum exhibi-

tions, radio programs and television documentaries consistently have been

regular guests at BACSA meetings, finding within the organization an

easily identifiable group of enthusiastic reminiscers for their productions

and eager contributors of their colonial memorabilia for display.35As 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



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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 Office Collections, the School ofOriental 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

affiliates. 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 presencein the nations archives, libraries, museums and public culture.37Although

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 reiter-

ate, 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, asgiving their lives on its behalf. Crucially, members interests do not simply

revolve around tombs Cotton described a century ago as belonging to



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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 confidence in theface of horrifying living conditions and perpetual tragedy that touched

everyone.41Most 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. Chil-

drens 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.42One account describes two

members discovery of an isolated, simple stone along a seldom-traveledroad 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 fam-

ily 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.43Devoid 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 sac-rifices 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



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19

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.44Tombstonesand 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.45Moreover, individuals who died in India are often

described in connection with their contributions that have outlived them,

as two examples from the Chowkidardemonstrate. Seeing the grave of

an Indian Forest Service officer allows visitors to carry away with them

lasting memories of a remarkable man, who diligently carried out hisresponsibilities of planting 1,790 acres with teak, nearly all of which

flourished and grewalthough he himself perished in the process. Simi-

larly, 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 profitable exports.46Clearly, this interpretation implies,

these were not selfish exploiters, but rather Britons whose activities still

benefit 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.47Photographing 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 Office Collections in London.48Once such

documentation has been rescued for foreign useprimarily by gene-

alogists researching British ancestors with ties to South AsiaBACSAs

efforts turn to what lies aboveground 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.49While the Raj might well be dead and buried, its

memory need not be consigned to oblivion as well.



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20

INDIAN APPROPRIATIONS

To a large degree, BACSAs efforts to restore colonial cemeteries are

meant to remind Indians encountering them of the achievements andsacrifices the British made on their behalf. The ongoing decay that led

them to be targeted for restoration in the first 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, thereremains a lack of consensus among Indians themselves about the mean-

ings, 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 architec-

ture 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 hun-

dred 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.50Even more readily than stone, brick and plaster suffered from

the rapid disintegration so rued by late-Victorian and fin-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 monu-ments, little was done after independence by Indian authorities to protect

them either. As BACSA proclaimed in self-congratulatory mode, despite



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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.51In 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 fierce competition for urban space, falling victim

to property developers attempts to convert dilapidated sites long out of

use into office buildings, apartment blocks or car parks. BACSAs pres-

ervation efforts are deemed more likely to succeed in smaller locations,

where real estate is not an issue than in rapidly expanding cities.52Totake 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.54What 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 figure 4).55The 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 beingused by the cemeterys chowkidar to scrub clothes. This proved a familiar

refrain heard in BACSA descriptions of other cemeteries. How many early



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22

inscriptions have been lost by Indias sturdy dhobis? another observer

wondered.56Kacheri 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 commemo-

rating British involvement in the subcontinent have been appropriated

in the postcolonial period are anathema to those seeking to promote anawareness of, and respect for, the Rajs historical significance. 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 areasof old cities were demolished in accordance with colonial concerns about

defence, sanitation, order, and above all the display of the new imperial

Fig. 4. South Park Street Cemetery, undated but ca. 1970s, photographer unknown.Reproduced by permission of Eye Ubiquitous/Hutchison.



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23

power.59Removals 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 madefrom stones taken from Hindu temples such as Gaur instead of fabricated

from brick and plaster.60If 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 colo-

nial 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 exten-

sions 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 postcolo-

nial 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 con-cerns rather than the political and cultural ramifications of colonial heritage

and its material remains. As Tapati Guha-Thakurta writes of the Victoria



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24

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.63Writing in the mid-1980s, the BACSA member cited

above who described Kanpurs Kacheri Cemetery provided a convincingassessment of the reasons for its neglect: it is ... difficult to persuade

busy people living in Kanpur today that what happened many years ago

is also part of their heritage.64With 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 communitiesfunerary 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 conflicts reflect

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 grave-

yards connected with Indias Christian communities todaynot those

historically associated with Europeans.66As Ann Laura Stoler and Karen

Strassler have argued in a different context, that the colonial is ever-

present in postcolonial lives; that postcolonial subjectivity by definition

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 mixeddegree of success. In the absence of any formal jurisdiction, its member-

ship is fully aware that the organizations goals will only succeed with



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25

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 manyoccasions BACSA members have attributed Indian Christians reluctance

to commit themselves to their goals to local churches lack of money

for repair work,68but 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 sacrifices in the subcontinent, but rather becausea given site is interpreted not as a relic of the British connection ... but

as a living centre of Christian devotion.69A 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 flowers,

candles, and sometimes food for the deceased.70For Indian participants,

the Victorian officials 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 partner-

ship 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.71A contributor to the APHCIs

newsletter in the early 1980s, for instance, related a conversation witha 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



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26

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 flagged asthe 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 tounite BACSA members and Indians who have demonstrated an interest

in colonial heritage. In this sense, efforts to preserve European cemeter-

ies 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.74In 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 evenwhen the Archeological Survey of India served as their nominal (and

seemingly inadequate) protector. While such pieces said relatively little



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27

about the state of European-built structures, their authors saw dangers

emanating from many of the same quarters BACSA members identified

as threats to colonial cemeteries. Like European graveyards and to a far

more extensive degree, ancient monuments suffered the depredationsnot 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 firewood, 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 firmly 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.76A visitor to Surats English and Dutch graveyards in 1969

described them as sad memorials to the early mortality among the Brit-

ish 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. TheGujarat governments tourist department seems to be extraordinarily slow



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Elizabeth Buettner

28

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 thesubcontinent. 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.78But Indian

interest in protecting British buildings, monuments and cemeteries exceeds

the strictly functional, and several commentators convincingly suggest that

it has grown significantly since the late 1970s. Indicatively, Wilkinsons

Two Monsoonsreceived a supportive response in the Indian press uponpublication, with reviewers praising the book as a unique and fascinat-

ing contribution to Anglo-Indiana, commending the aim of cemetery

restoration, and condemning neglect and desecration of the graveyards as

intolerable.79Narayani Gupta argues that when confronting specimens

of the British-built urban landscape, Indian popular response to them

is a mixture of gratification that such splendid edifices 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 Brit-

ish. 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, exemplified at the amateur level by

BACSAs publications. Indians now look set to play increasingly predomi-

nant roles within a revision of the essentially Eurocentric historiography

of Indian cities, as Datta phrased it.

82

Indian reassessments of the physicalremains of empire and their meanings for the postcolonial era in all prob-

ability will, as was the case with Western studies, involve a combination



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29

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 Heri-tage (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 sacrifices in the region

have, in short, proven infinitely malleable as they pass into different hands

over time.83Jay Winters assessment of memorials to European soldiers

killed in the First World War provides apt insights applicable to the condi-

tion of colonial cemeteries in India:

[War memorials] would have had no fixed 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 wellas Anglicize colonial subjects have invited interpretations that the British

never intended since the colonial period itself.85Following decoloniza-



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Elizabeth Buettner

30

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 andmonuments, but without sovereignty it is impossible to stop these sites

of memory from being reclaimed by former subject peoples.

Igor Kopytoff s 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.86From their

origins as commemorative sites for European dead, they were subsequently

converted into makeshift accommodation for the homeless, settings forleisure activities, public toilets, or used as implements for cooking or

washing; finally, they have witnessed more recent efforts to restore some

of their original meanings and reassess the value of the Raj, and reflect the

divergent interests of elite and plebeian Indian social sectors.87As 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 narra-

tives provides perhaps the most apt means of concluding a story still very

much in progress.

Nearly thirty years after its inception, BACSA may justifiably pro-

claim 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



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31

when otherwise funds and initiative may well have been absent; it has

told its members stories to wider audiences and filled the Oriental and

India Office Collections with a substantial body of personal renditions

of Raj involvement as well as historical records providing a history ofthe 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 homein the accumulation of photographs, inscriptions and monographs on

specific 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 firmly planted on British soil

suggests a final 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-specific matters.

Indeed, the organizations website appeals directly to genealogists, promis-

ing 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,90and, as out-

lined 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, photograph-

ing monuments and coordinating selective conservation efforts overseas

was done in large part by persons who had far more immediate links withIndia. Most had experienced the Raj personally before 1947, whether

over the course of decades or during childhood alone. Close relationships



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32

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 contemplatesearching 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 overwhelm-

ingly nostalgic experienceemotions distinct from those normally

generated by contemplating graves of those not known, whether or not

they belong to ancestors.91Now, 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 suffice. 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 afield 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.



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NOTES

This article has benefited 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 His-

tory 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 Indiais 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 field 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(Manches-

ter, 1986); C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World,

17801830(London, 1989); Linda Colley, Britishness and Otherness: An Argu-

ment,Journal of British Studies31, 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



31/39

Elizabeth Buettner

34

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 Class38, 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 field [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]

film 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 Contem-

porary 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 Ditchfield, eds., History and Heritage: Consuming the Past inContemporary 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 Co

cemeteries, public memory and raj nostalgia in postcolonial britain and india

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