Tales the dead tell

The book under review goes beyond headstones; it is an invaluable source of historical information accessible to scholars.

DENMARK has got interested in preserving the evidence connected with its colonial days in India and has been looking at documents and monuments connected to that. Dutch papers in the archives in India have been microfilmed and indexed. As a part of this initiative, architect Lisbeth Gasparski and art historian Karin Kryger, both from Denmark, set out to study the Dutch graves and cenotaphs in Tranquebar. The result is this impressive new book, Tranquebar: Cemeteries and grave-monuments.

The authors were inspired by a manuscript left by Danish missionary Knud Heiberg, who was in Tranquebar in 1935 to study the gravestones. Extracts from his report have been included in this book. In 1985, the Tranquebar Committee was formed and it conducted surveys in the town and its neighbourhood. It covered six graveyards and two churches, including the Dutch churchyard in the nearby town of Porayar. The book is based on that survey.The authors have photographed the epitaphs, taken enstampages, copied down the inscriptions and, where necessary, translated them into English. In the process, they have created an invaluable source of historical information accessible to scholars. In addition to recording the inscriptions, they describe the graves in terms of style and design. The tombs covered date back to 1620 and bear some familiar names from Indian history such as B. Zeigenbalg, H. Plutschau and J.M.N. Schwarz. The coverage includes Danish officials, Norwegian tradesmen, German missionaries and British officers who found their last resting place in these cemeteries.

The book , produced with meticulous care by the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, goes beyond headstones and provides biographical sketches of early Dutch settlers. Church registers were examined to gather material on those buried in these churchyards. They have also included inscriptions recorded in earlier monuments but now lost. The authors pay attention to the material and techniques used in building graves in South India and to the symbols (such as hourglass and death head) found in Dutch tombs. There is even a section on brick-making in Tamil Nadu. They have also provided a list of the monument-makers of colonial India.

The book has more than 268 illustrations, most of which are photographs, colour as well as black and white. There are also some maps from the 17th and 18th centuries, impeccably reproduced, and some elegant wash-and-ink drawings. The authors have scoured museums, archives and private collections all over the world for the illustrations. It opens a window to one aspect of the colonial period and sets a model of similar works on British, French and Portuguese cemeteries in India. The book would delight historians and art historians alike.

Epitaphs are a valuable source of historical information, just like any other inscription, and can provide significant insights. Unfortunately in India, they have not received the serious attention that they deserve. To study and take care of the graves and related monuments in the subcontinent during the British period, Theon Wilkinson formed the British Association for the Cemeteries for South Asia (BACSA) in 1976. Wilkinson's study of cemeteries in India was brought out as a book, Two Monsoons: Life and Death of Europeans in India. Earlier, J.J. Cotton surveyed the cemeteries in Chennai (formerly Madras) and brought out List of Inscriptions on Tombs and Monuments in Madras (1905). A copy of the book is available with the Tamil Nadu Archives. In the book under review, there is a reference that in 1935 Percy McQueen, curator of the Madras Record Office (the present Tamil Nadu Archives), was updating Cotton's work.

The cemeteries and cenotaphs that came up later during the British Raj need to be documented, such as the cenotaph in Chennai of Collector Ashe of Tirunelveli. It has been estimated that nearly two million British people lie buried in India. But most of these cemeteries are in an appalling condition. The head stones of many of the graves seem to have been removed while some small cemeteries have been bulldozed to make way for new residential colonies. There is no index of these. I recall my efforts in 1991 to locate the grave of Mary Taylor, the wife of Anglo-Indian administrator Meadows Taylor, and finding it, along with a few others, in the middle of a maize field in Lingsagur in Karnataka. I am not sure if it is still there.