South Park Street Cemetery (Kolkata)

India / Bangla / Calcutta / Kolkata / Park Street
 monument, christianity, cemetery
South Park Street Cemetery also known as the Great Cemetery of Asia was one of the earliest non-church cemeteries in the world, and probably the largest Christian cemetery outside Europe and America in the 19th century.It still houses the remains of the colonial elite-bureaucrats, military officials, the mercantile big wheels and their families in the glory days of the Raj. It was Established in 1767 and was closed till 1790. It has approximately 1600 colonial tombs.
Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Park_Street_Cemetery
Nearby cities:
Coordinates:   22°32'46"N   88°21'36"E

Comments

  • The actual name of this cemetery is not Park Street Cemetery, but Scottish Church Cemetery. It is also the place where the great poet, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio is buried.
  • Among its occupants, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, 1824-73. Dutt is credited with creating modern literary Bengali, in part by infusing it with European forms and themes. He introduced blank verse, for example, and, in his masterpiece Meghnadbadh Karya, which is an adaptation of the Ramayana, he takes an idea from Milton and inverts the demon-villain into the hero. At the old Park Street Cemetery, with its forest of monuments, you will find the final resting place of notables, long dead and forgotten. One such monument is this spiral-fluted one--from 1800 but renovated about 1900--is probably the best known.At its base, the famous poem that Walter Savage Landor wrote in memory of Rose Aylmer. Nearby, there's a monument to a scholar of lasting influence. William Jones was the man who established the linkages between Sanskrit and most European languages and, in this way recognizing the Indo-European language family, set historical linguists on a course that continues still.
  • No, Michael Madhusudan Dutta does not lie here. He lies in the cemetory of Lower Circular Road (Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Road).
  • Jes you are incorrect. This is not the Scottish Cemetery which lies east of this point. The correct name for this cemetery is the South Park Street Cemetery (see inset stone name plate set in the bounday wall next to the entrance gate)
  • Since the year 2010, the place is attracting more people, as Sandeep Roy's Bengali film "Gorosthane Saabdhan" (meaning 'Be careful in the Graveyard'), based on Satyajit Roy's detective story with the same name, was shot here. The fiction characters Pheluda, Topse and Lalmohan were acted by renowned Bengali actors.
  • Can anyone tell me where a Baptist missionary is likely to be buried in the year 1810? Park St was closed and Circular Rd not open yet.
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This article was last modified 7 years ago