For decades, Darjeeling's small, cash-strapped Indian Christian community has been fighting a lone and losing battle to save the final resting place of the city's original settlers from total ruin. If the bedraggled old boneyard on Lebong Cart Road ever had a formal name, like most of the people buried there, it's been long forgotten. Now, it is referred to only by the nationality of the vast majority of its occupants: the English Cemetery.

For India, where the remains, souls and memories of the dead command reverential treatment among all faiths, the condition of the English Cemetery seems especially shocking. Thieves, vandals and the weather have conspired to wreak such destruction that now, nothing short of a major rescue initiative could possibly save the old graveyard. On some tombs, crypt lids have been pried off by would-be grave robbers, only a tangled filling of brambles and brush separating human bones (if any still remain) from scavenging dogs and jackals. And whose graves are these? Unfortunately, the inscriptions can't cast much light on that question, since the relentless pounding stone takes through the four-month long monsoon season has rendered almost all of them entirely illegible.

The upper part of the cemetery, with graves dating back to 1840, is the oldest. Originally, most of the grand, stately tombs and monuments here were surrounded by protective railings, but these are long gone, stolen for use as weapons during the violent two-year period  in the mid-1980s when militant Nepali-speaking separatists agitated for an autonomous homeland independent from India. The lower part of the cemetery, directly across the road, still has one old railed tomb, over which neighbours hang their laundry.

Despite the cemetery's present condition, whoever chose the site chose well. From the lowest to the highest tiers, the view in all three directions is magnificent: a tea garden's rolling hills straight ahead and to either side, the town of Darjeeling and, on clear days, the snowy peaks of the Kanchenjunga mountain range rising in the distance. Some local people come here to enjoy the quiet natural beauty of the place, but the cemetery has also become notorious as a hangout for drug dealers, loiterers and couples who huddle behind tombstones for privacy during sexual trysts.

Tumbled against an embankment are a number of smaller tombstones and grave markers, these, like many of the others, chipped, broken and defaced by graffiti. At present, which plots they go with is unknown -- yet not unknowable. Somewhere in Darjeeling, records do exist and if they've been stored in a way that protects them from the all-pervasive dampness of the rainy season, it should be possible to determine from them exactly who lies in the English Cemetery, and where.

This much can be said for certain: the graveyard holds the remains of many of the people who originally settled this area for the British East India Company, carving a town of surpassing beauty into the ridges of the Himalayan foothills. Overcoming tremendous obstacles, they cleared hundreds of acres of untamed jungle to turn the land surrounding Darjeeling into one of the world's premier tea producing regions. For an entire century, right up until India's independence in 1947, Darjeeling tea pumped profits of untold millions into the British economy. One might think that Britain would be inclined to show the graves of her Raj-era pioneers more respect.

It is ironic that the people who have been doing their utmost to care for these graves are not British, but Indian. Back in the days when the English Cemetery's occupants were above ground, the ancestors of most of the members of the Darjeeling District Christian Cemetery Committee, consisting of eighteen people from six churches, would have been barred from entering the scenic upper levels of the town unless they were employed as porters or servants in British homes.

Until 1993, the English Cemetery fell under the jurisdiction of the oldest church in Darjeeling, St. Andrew's, affiliated in the Raj era with the Church of England but now with a largely non-denominational Protestant congregation. In the late 1970s, St. Andrew's asked Mr. Durga Das Pradhan, managing director of Das Studio, a photography business that has been in the Das family since 1925, to take pictures of all the cemetery's grave inscriptions in order to provide a permanent record of who was interred there. But in 1993, when St. Andrew's ceased being the only Protestant church in Darjeeling, church responsibilities – and records – underwent a three-way split, the newborn Church of North India and Union Church both assuming their shares. Today, Rev. Rupert Rai of St. Andrew's believes that the English Cemetery's records are housed in one of the other churches but Mr. Mahendra Kumar, an elder of the Church of North India, says he thinks they're still in some dusty archive at St. Andrew's. If worse came to worst and the records proved to be lost or damaged beyond repair, Mr. Das has kept his negatives and says that if necessary, he could unearth them from storage.

Mr. Kumar, retired headmaster of Turnbull High School for boys and a long-standing member of the committee, estimates that there are between 100 and 200 graves in the English Cemetery. Over the years, repeated complaints to the police  about vandalism have resulted in no improvement to the situation. Although the committee employs a caretaker to look after the graveyard, its budget is so small that his monthly wage of Rs 150 (1.74 GBP) often comes out of Mr. Kumar's own pocket. The caretaker works hard, Mr. Kumar says, but the job is far too big for one person and anyway, there's a limit to how much labour anyone has a right to expect from a man being paid Rs 5 (less than 6 p) a day.

If it weren't for the presence of two graves designated monuments of national importance and as such, maintained by the Archeological Survey of India, the English Cemetery would undoubtedly be in even worse shape than it is. The earliest belongs to an extraordinary Hungarian, Alexander Csoma de Koros, a philologist who mastered the Tibetan language, compiled a dictionary of it and went on to serve as the librarian of Calcutta's Asiatic Society. In 1842, he died in Darjeeling en route to Lhasa.

Every year, a high-ranking official of the Hungarian government travels to Darjeeling to garland Csoma de Koros's immaculately-kept monument with a ribboned wreath, the most recent dated October 5. In 1984, on his 200th birth anniversary, Hungary added one more commemorative plaque to those installed by the government of India. The British tombs in the immediate vicinity of Csoma de Koros's grave have benefited by association from the care lavished by both countries on this pretty enclosure, surrounded by a wrought iron fence and bordered with marigolds and other flowering plants. Reportedly, Hungary also pays someone locally to make sure the site always looks its best.

One tier up, a white pillar marks the final resting place of George William Aylmer Lloyd,  who died in Darjeeling in 1865 at the age of 76. It too is well kept although if anyone has come to pay their respects recently, they've left behind no indication of it. Lloyd, a Lieutenant General in the Bengal Army, is credited with “discovering” Darjeeling and securing cessation of a territory spanning 640 sq. mi. from its ruler, the Rajah of Sikkim. Although Sikkim, Nepal and Bhutan had been fighting over this patch of land for years, British records attest that when the deed turning over Darjeeling to the East India Company was executed in February 1835, only a few hundred Lepcha, a people indigenous to the region, lived here.

Four years later, the British population hit 100 and, after these pioneers had established an infrastructure consisting of thirty buildings, the East India Company's campaign to attract more settlers went into high gear. It was so successful that by 1849, the city's European population had increased to 10,000.

Today, about 100,000 people live here, making Darjeeling a small town by Indian standards yet still one of the world's great tea-producing centres -- not to mention one of the most popular of all the old British hill stations with both Indian and foreign visitors. Among faith groups here, Hindus form the majority, followed by Buddhists. According to Mr. Kumar, Christians are a minority of about ten percent.  

Arguments for and against the legacy of colonial rule notwithstanding, no one can dispute the fact that the British were responsible for many of the best things about present-day Darjeeling. From the inspired design of the upper city, with its U-shaped Mall Road offering wraparound views of the Kanchenjunga range, to the world-famous “toy train” built to transport people and tea up and down the mountain, the love the original settlers had for this place has been made manifest everywhere you look. The only mystery in the minds of many is why Britain has abandoned her Darjeeling dead.

If the Church of England or the government of the United Kingdom took a notion to chip in some cash or labour or both to help restore and preserve the English Cemetery, says Mr. Kumar, the members of the Darjeeling District Christian Cemetery Committee most assuredly would not take it amiss.
 

 

A shorter version of this story was published in the daily edition of the Church of England Newspaper on February 20, 2007. This is the full text.