[Reader-list] Lessons from the graveyard

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Lessons from the graveyard

V Ramaswamy
cuckooscall.blogspot.com



I first visited the South Park Street Cemetery thirty years ago, soon after I joined St Xavier’s College in Calcutta. I had wandered in just out of curiosity. This lay on the way between the college and the bus stop. The cemetery had been opened in 1767 and was in use for the next century or so.
 
I was immediately struck by the large number of graves of infants, children and young people, all British of course. The marble tablets on the tombs and monuments of different sizes and shapes, bore the grieving lamentations of their family members. I remember coming across the sequential testimony to a whole family being wiped out - young father, younger mother and a couple of infant children, one following the other. I was moved.

It was many years later that I remembered this cemetery and its sad legacy. But, in between I was exposed to another aspect of the city - its labouring poor, and the bastis, where they resided. I had come to learn that this section had, historically, always had to struggle for survival in the city, for a place to live. The bastis were a makeshift arrangement to provide habitation to the workers and servant classes. They were also a part of a clever strategy on the part of landowners to profit through appreciation in land value as the colonial city grew. 
 
These settlements were entirely unserviced, as the question of whose responsibility this was – municipal or landowner’s – was never resolved. Nineteenth century Calcutta frequently saw demolition of the bastis, as landlords sold off bastis for construction of mansions, or city authorities intervened in the interest of public health and civic amenities.

I discovered that city improvement in the colonial Calcutta was always a response to a perceived public health panic. The nineteenth century was distinguished for the various ‘theories’ on public health - such at the ‘miasmic theory of contagion’, the ‘foul water the source of cholera’ theory, or the ‘air pollution theory of disease’. And, their inevitable consequence was the demolition of these bastis. 
 
The British officials deplored these as centres of disease, inhabited by people who apparently delighted in filth and dirt. Perhaps it did not strike them that these people were also humans like themselves, suffering the horrid living conditions in their unserviced settlements, and ultimately enabling the wealthy and luxurious lives of the Europeans and Indian elite.

That was colonial Calcutta, and obviously through schooling one had been conditioned into viewing the British as the despised colonists against whom the freedom struggle had been waged, and who had finally been ejected. 
 
But, through my work I had begun to discern only a smooth continuity between the pre- and post-Independence situation in regard to public policy in Calcutta. One began despising contemporary rulers and authorities as well.
 
Later, digging through documents on old Calcutta, I learnt that April to November were the ‘killer’ months for the English. Every year, on 15 November, they would celebrate their survival at a gathering called ‘the reunion’. Capt Alexander Hamilton wrote in 1710 that of the 1,200 Englishmen in the city in August, 462 had been buried by the end of the year. That rang a bell. 
 
I recalled that the Park Street Cemetery bore testimony to the devastation and trauma that visited the lives of the British who were in early Calcutta, with many young civil and military officers, their women-folk and children dying, even whole young families dying, and the despairing, sad elegies inscribed by their grieving family members. So many succumbed to cholera, dysentery, malaria and other fevers. The precise number of few days and months that the infants had lived were recorded on their tombs, as if every day and month of this short life were etched on the heart of a grieving soul.

That helped me to understand the frantic public health syndrome, and the ruthless way in which the authorities intervened. Calcutta represented tropical heat and smells, contaminated water, alien surroundings, people and culture, all of which appeared ominous and hateful and assailed the peace of the foreigner. The vulnerability of the foreigners to a range of tropical diseases served to harden such an attitude.

They had to be here, like it or not, as part of the grand imperial project. Perhaps this experience led to a terror of tropical nature, and ultimately, the people, and created the nature-controlling, order-bringing fetish, the sanitary approach to city improvement - and that too only for the benefit of the European town, when tens of thousands of native labourers who sustained the city lived and suffered in the bastis. 
 
It began to look as if Calcutta had been a testing and preparing ground for the colonists, instilling in them an attitude, which then coloured the entire colonial administration. It produced a hard-heartedness that is the real ‘black hole of Calcutta’. And, which persists even today, with enormous disparities in living conditions, rooted in people’s insensitivity to the plight of the less privileged sections. We still have class and ethnic prejudice writ large on the city - akin to the ‘geological fault in the human psyche’, spoken of by the American thinker Lewis Mumford.

But, surely this city also has, within its system, the seeds of that enlightened sensibility or consciousness that would seek to redress such injustice?

Having experienced fatherhood, I knew how precious a beloved infant child is to the parents. It was in the middle of a crisis situation when my son was a year old that for the first time in my life I turned to prayer. Fatherhood has also made me sensitive to the suffering of other children, especially the poor. 
 
Through my work I found that even today, just across the river from Calcutta, in the squalid, poverty-ridden and crime-infested the bastis of Howrah, large numbers of infants are dying, principally because of poverty and environmental degradation. One cannot for very long be moved and yet not move. I was also glad to discover that India was fortunate to have had a number of British, who genuinely loved this land and its people, and devoted their lives to serving us.

’Of the ways that lead to the high city, none is more fair than the road of filial devotion, but there has spread out a fog so obliterating all sight of that road as to make one suppose that it is not there; although ever it lies infallibly tracing on, whatever may cause it to be overlooked’.

Thus ran a Buddhist teaching I came across.

’In this world, those with filial devotion, such, whatever may befall, in everything remain steadfast.’ 

In Bangla, a mayor is referred to as poura pita or city father. That is most appropriate. City fathers have to protect the lives of their city’s children, all the children. And, because the mayor of Hamelin failed in this duty, the children of that ill-fated town went away with the Pied Piper. The city of civic fatherhood shall indeed be a fair city, and that eludes us today as much as it did early Calcutta.

’A visit to the Park Street Cemetery should be a part of the self-education of all Calcuttans. The city is like one vast library, of knowledge, values and sensibilities, which exists only to enable even further advances at any point of time. We should learn to read our cities. So that we can also write, through our life and work, the story of the city of tomorrow.