A Visit To South Park Street Cemetery

The Second-Year students of the Department of English, Loreto College conducted a study trip to the South Park Street Cemetery on February 26, 2022 under the supervision of Dr Ghosh Basu and Ms Chattopadhyay. The visit was organised in order to enhance the students’ understanding of Kolkata’s colonial past as well as to supplement their classroom discussions on Graveyard Poetry. The students had the opportunity to examine the many graves and epitaphs that had been carefully preserved in the cemetery since the eighteenth century. The Doric and Ionic columns, domes, urns, and anchors that ornamented the tombs marked a strong Greco-Roman architectural influence, amidst which stood the strikingly exceptional tomb of Major General Charles “Hindoo” Stuart with its Hindu motifs. Special attention was paid to the graves of Sir William Jones, Walter Dickens, and Henry Vivian Louis Derozio.
The students later participated in an immersive exercise within the premises of the cemetery, reading out poems and attempting to record their impressions on paper in the form of poems, stories, sketches, and essays. Their creative pieces not only engaged with the themes of mortality and remembrance but also displayed a new awareness of the myriad, often undocumented ways in which India’s colonial history shaped the experiences of both the colonisers and the colonised.