Grave art

The dead, they say, tell no tales, but their graves surely must reveal something. At least the 1,600 or so graves inside Kolkata's South Park Street Cemetery do.

South Park Street Cemetery is the city's — indeed Asia's — oldest planned graveyard. It opened in 1767, years before the British had even made Calcutta (or Kolkata as it is now) their principal home in India. The East India Company (EIC) then ruled over a small part of India — (modern day) Bengal and Bihar, which it had won in its first major victory two years ago in Buxar. By 1790, when all its eight acres of South Park Street Cemetery were filled with tombs and declared closed, the EIC had effective control over the entire east coast of India as well as along the Gangetic belt into north India, right up to Delhi. The cemetery, thus, is not just any old historical site, it is the very palimpsest of the early days — social, cultural and economic as well as political and military — of the British encounter of India.

This is where lie the graves of William Jones, one of the first Europeans to learn Sanskrit and translate Sanskrit texts, Robert Kyd, a botanist who founded the Botanical Gardens, Colin Mackenzie, who made the first maps of India, Rose Aylmer, the lover on whose death poet Walter Savage Landor wrote the well-known, eponymous poem. The list continues.

It is this shadowy world, between the living and the dead, a little bit of the past, hemmed in by the tall buildings of and the loud traffic honking down Park Street, that some 50 students from 10 city schools will respond to as part of an upcoming art exhibition called Our History, Their Times.

Organised by ThinkArts, a city-based NGO that works in the area of children's education and uses art to make learning deeper and more complex, this will be the second edition of the exhibition. The event itself will be held in December. But last Saturday was the occasion of the first of many workshops to be held over the coming months in which the participants will meet at the cemetery and interact with ThinkArts' experts — historian Sudip Bhattacharya and art curator Nabina Gupta — to help crystallise their ideas. Interestingly, none of the participants last year or for this year had visited the cemetery before.

"History is a confluence of narratives, but that is not how it is presented to our students," says Ruchira Das, founder of ThinkArts, explaining the objectives of the public art project inside a cemetery, a first, probably, in India. So the students, says Das, are encouraged to use the cemetery and graves — their architecture, inscriptions, current state of dilapidation etc. — as a focal point to explore Kolkata's history at the time.

Last year's students responded enthusiastically, coming up with complicated art installations rooted in their own time and experience. Even more enthusiastic was the city itself. Around 1,300 people trooped in to see the exhibition when it was opened to the public for a week.

For instance, the La Martiniere for Boys installation, called Dig a Little, incorporated the history of their own school, set up only a little later in 1836, and the city's Armenian connections, through its founder, an Armenian called Claude Martin.

According to Ahon Gooptu, Class 12 student, the location — two round chapel-like graves, with a high four-pillar structure beside it — was picked because it resembled the school's very own Round Chapel. "The first chapel had facts about the babu culture and opium trade encompassing the visitor in threads hanging from one end to the other in a rather tangible structure. Also present were huge handmade poppy flowers and pictures of buildings made at the time," he says.

"We saw on our very first day how the cemetery was inexplicably separated from the city around it. As if inside the city of the living lay the city of the dead. The dead lie preserved in monuments built for them by their wealthy family. In the end, memories will fade and even stone will wear away, the dead cannot be preserved," adds Antara Gupta of Calcutta International School, another participant.

As of now, however, the dead and their memories remain — however badly preserved.