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David Arnold Photography+
Park Street Cemetery, Kolkata, India

British Cemeteries in the Ganges Valley, India

Posted on December 1, 2019November 1, 2020
Column, Obelisks, South Park Street Cemetery, Kolkata, India

The British East India Company was formed by royal charter in 1600 for the profitable exploitation of trade with India and Asia. Acting as an agent for the British government and through monopolies on the importation of cotton, tea, silk, and other fabrics from India into Britain, the company became a catalyst for British expansion throughout Asia and in turn became one of most powerful corporations in the history of the world. 

  • Column, the Tomb of Lord Cornwallis, Ghazipur, India
    Column, the Tomb of Lord Cornwallis, Ghazipur, India
  • Three Columns, the Tomb of Lord Cornwallis, Ghazipur, India.
    Three Columns, the Tomb of Lord Cornwallis, Ghazipur, India.
  • Walkway, the Tomb of Lord Cornwallis, Ghazipur, India
    Walkway, the Tomb of Lord Cornwallis, Ghazipur, India

The British first landed in Surat on the Indian Ocean near present-day Mumbai in 1608 where they established the first East India Company trading station.[1] Working with the cooperation and through the bribery of local rulers and presences a large standing army lead by ambitious officers, the British East India Company slowly consolidated control of all of India. After the Mutiny of 1857, the Raj or the British colonial government through a small group of military and civil servants numbering only about 20,000 British, took full control of the East India Company’s empire.[2]

  • Doric Columns, Tomb, Walkway, South Park Street Cemetery, Kolkata, India
    Doric Columns, Tomb, Walkway, South Park Street Cemetery, Kolkata, India
  • Domed Tomb, South Park Street Cemetery, Kolkata, India
    Domed Tomb, South Park Street Cemetery, Kolkata, India
  • Obelisks, Walkway, South Park Street Cemetery, Kolkata, India.
    Obelisks, Walkway, South Park Street Cemetery, Kolkata, India.
  • Pyramid Tombs, South Park Street Cemetery, Kolkata, India.
    Pyramid Tombs, South Park Street Cemetery, Kolkata, India.
  • Tombs, Overgrown Walkway, South Park Street Cemetery, Kolkata, India.
    Tombs, Overgrown Walkway, South Park Street Cemetery, Kolkata, India.
  • Tomb, Pyramids, South Park Street Cemetery, Kolkata, India.
    Tomb, Pyramids, South Park Street Cemetery, Kolkata, India.

The first British cemetery in Calcutta, the principal trading center for the East India Company, was established inside of Fort William in present-day Kolkata. The small cemetery quickly became inadequate and a new 8-acre cemetery located on South Park Street was established in 1769 in an area called Mulick Bazaar [3] By 1800, Calcutta was one of the largest and wealthiest cities in Asia and the world and the South Park Street Cemetery, the oldest non-church cemetery in the world,[4] was crowded with massive neoclassical tombs, tall obelisks, columns, urns.

  • Goats resting on grave stones
    Goats, Cows, Tombs, British Cemetery, Munger, India
  • Three goats resting on a cemetery tomb.
    Three Goats, Tomb, British Cemetery, Munger, India
  • Young Man Grassing His Cow, British Cemetery, Munger, India
    Young Man Grassing His Cow, British Cemetery, Munger, India
  • Cow beside a cemetery tomb.
    Cow Grazing in Tombs, British Cemetery, Munger, India.
  • Small cross making a grave.
    Small Cross, Burials, British Cemetery, Munger, India.
  • Oblelisks and Goats, British Cemetery, Munger, India.
    Oblelisks and Goats, British Cemetery, Munger, India

Following the example of the South Park Street Cemetery, hundreds of British cemeteries and monuments followed the British expansion into India. When the British left India 1947, they left behind an estimated 700 to 1,000 cemeteries across the Indian Subcontinent.[5]  These monuments to the dead became “important tools for projecting British power in India.”[6] The British burial practices were markedly different from the Indian Hindu population who do not bury their dead in the ground and “regarded cemeteries as antithetical to their beliefs.” [7]The massive cemetery tombs borrow styles from Europe and from the Mughal rulers and became a projection of wealth and confidence in their rising status, proclaimed their cultural dominance and linked the British with Indian Muslim elites and at the same time sharply separated the British death rituals from dominant Hindu culture.[8]

  • Pagodas Tomb, British Cemetery, Buxar, India
    Pagodas Tomb, British Cemetery, Buxar, India
  • Overgrown tombs in British Cemetery, Buxar, India
    Overgrown tombs in British Cemetery, Buxar, India
  • Grave Stones Fragments, British Cemetery, Buxar, India
    Grave Stones Fragments, British Cemetery, Buxar, India

Many British cemeteries suffer from exposure to flooding, foliage growth and other natural encroachments which is a common problem for cemeteries in India. With the few exceptional cemeteries of historical importance such as the South Park Cemetery in Kolkata and the Tomb of Lord Cornwallis in Ghazipur, British cemeteries are plagued by lack of funds, overgrown vegetation, vandalism, theft of stones, neglect and many have fallen into ruin. [9]

  • Columns, British Cemetery, Chunar, India
    Columns, British Cemetery, Chunar, India
  • Horses Grazing, British Cemetery, Chunar, India
    Horses Grazing, British Cemetery, Chunar, India
  • Cows Grazing, British Cemetery, Chunar, India
    Cows Grazing, British Cemetery, Chunar, India
  • Columns, Cows Grazing, British Cemetery, Chunar, India.
    Columns, Cows Grazing, British Cemetery, Chunar, India.
  • Tombs, Cows Grazing, British Cemetery, Chunar, India
    Tombs, Cows Grazing, British Cemetery, Chunar, India
  • Crumbling Tomb, British Cemetery, Chunar, India.
    Crumbling Tomb, British Cemetery, Chunar, India.

In August 2019, traveling from Kolkata to Varanasi by riverboat, I visited 4 British cemeteries in addition to the Tomb of Lord Cornwallis in the Ganges River Valley. Today, these British cemeteries are meeting places for friends and lovers and are used for grazing goats and cows. And the edge of abandonment and infrequently visited by tourists, each cemetery features great stone slabs, pyramids, mausoleums covered in moss and foliage, and have largely fallen into disrepair. The cemeteries upriver are smaller than the South Park Street Cemetery, still, they present the same Enlightenment styles and motifs, the pyramids, obelisks, and even pagodas but in a less grandiose manner.

 The series of photographs presented here were created with the Lumix GX-9 mirrorless camera converted to record infrared light. Two lenses were used for this series of photographs: a Nikon 20mm wide angle lense mounted with a Lensbaby Tilt Transformer adapter for focus experiments seen in the South Park Street examples as well as a Lumix 12-60mm zoom lens.

Lumix GX-9 with Nikon 20mm and Lensbaby Tilt Transformer
Lumix GX-9 with Nikon 20mm lens mounted using a Lensbaby Tilt Transformer

The choice to create photographs using unseen infrared light as opposed to visible light within this series speaks to the evocative and abandoned atmosphere of the British cemeteries in India. Like the past, infrared light is invisible to human sight.

Infrared light extends from the red edge of the visible light spectrum. The colors assigned to infrared recordings are referred to as false color images, meaning the colors do not conform to a natural color rendition of the subjects and are derived from a grayscale mapping of the intensity of the infrared radiation present in the scene. Inspired by the early 18th century landscape paintings of India, each photograph is a composite of at least three overlapped exposures that were was colorized using Abobe Photoshop.

Please view the short video below “Colorizing Digital Infrared Photographs,” — colorization method used to create “British Cemeteries In the Ganges Valley, India”

David Arnold, December, 2019.

Notes:

[1] India Today, “When and why did the British first choose to invade India?” August 24, 2019.

[2] National Archives, “British Empire: British Rule-the Raj”.

[3]Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, “City of the Dead: South Park Street Cemetery.” Overview,  03 February 2017

[4] Peter Travers, “Death and the Nabob: Imperialism and Commemoration in Eighteenth-Century India, Past and Present, p. 88, August 2007.

[5] Susan Hosking, “The Great Burial Ground at Chowringhee: Reflections on the South Park Street Cemetery at Kolkata.” Transnational Literature Vol. 9 no. 1, December 2016.

[6] Peter Foster, “Historic colonial graves left to rot in India,” The Telegraph, 06 Nov 2004.

[7] Susan Hosking, “The Great Burial Ground at Chowringhee: Reflections on the South Park Street Cemetery at Kolkata.” Transnational Literature Vol. 9 no. 1, December 2016.

[7] Peter Travers, “Death and the Nabob: Imperialism and Commemoration in Eighteenth-Century India, Past and Present, p. 86, August 2007.

[8] Peter Travers, “Death and the Nabob: Imperialism and Commemoration in Eighteenth-Century India, Past and Present, p. 86, August 2007.

[9] Angus MacSwan, “Graves of empire tell of India’s troubled past,” Reuters, FEBRUARY 13, 2014.

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