“Mrs Anne Hayes, the wife of Thomas Hayes ESQ, of the Honourable East India Company Service.” Photo courtesy of Fabindia/Wikimedia Commons Derozio took great pride in his interactions with students, writing in his notes, “Expanding like the petals of young flowers, I watch the gentle opening of your minds…” He encouraged his students to read Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and rejected superstition as well as some Hindu customs, including the shunning of widows, which he considered regressive. His brilliant lectures inspired students he was renowned for presenting closely reasoned arguments based on extensive reading. In 1826, Derozio was appointed as an English professor at at the tender age of 17. He is best known as the pioneer of the “Young Bengal” movement, a group of radical Bengali thinkers based in the Hindu College in Calcutta. Though considered an Anglo-Indian due to his mixed Portuguese descent, Derozio considered himself an Indian and was filled with patriotic enthusiasm for his native Bengal. Curiously, the seeds of a Bengal cultural awakening were sown by a young man by the name of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, who is buried nearby. There is an oft-quoted phrase in Bengal that “What Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow,” characteristic of the cultural and intellectual one-upmanship in which Bengal once engaged. Photo by: Giridhar Appaji Nag Y/Wikimedia Commons, used under CC BY 2.0 He writes in his book The Vindication of the Hindoo that, “Wherever I look around me, in the vast ocean of Hindu mythology, I discover Piety… Morality… and as far as I can rely on my judgment, it appears the most complete and ample system of Moral Allegory the world has ever produced.” His tomb is shaped in the form of a Hindu temple, and the lotus motifs are an interesting touch to what is an overwhelmingly Gothic cemetery. Many colonists found Hinduism disconcerting and strange not so Hindoo Stuart. He was determined to understand the vagaries of Hinduism, a faith that seemed to advocate both asceticism and scandalous physical pleasure he sought to reconcile why the Christian God endured unbearable suffering, whereas the Hindu deities seemed to rejoice in love. “The Sari,” Stuart wrote, is “the most alluring dress in the world and the women of Hindustan are enchanting in their beauty.” In 1778, he wrote an article that urged the military to start wearing Indian attire, and tried to persuade the “memsahibs”-upper class white women-of Calcutta to throw off their heavy corsets and wear the sari. He was considered an eccentric by the mores of the time was said to have “gone native” after he constructed a temple and acquired an Indian wife. Colonel Charles “Hindoo” Stuart started off as a cadet in the Bengal Army in 1777, eventually rising to the rank of colonel despite lacking any significant battle experience. Photo by: Jayantath/Wikimedia Commons, used under CC BY 3.0Ī few decades before William Jones, another Englishman buried here sought to understand the mysteries of Hinduism. It is the final resting place of the soldiers, sailors, civil servants, traders, women, and children who succumbed to the hardships of an unfamiliar and disease-ridden life in the Indian tropics. This modern-day necropolis is filled with crumbling colonnades, mossy mausoleums, obelisks, sarcophagi, and stone cupolas. What is this place, you ask? The South Park Street Cemetery, built in 1767 for the earliest British pioneers of the East India Company. The foliage was thick, filtering out most of the sunlight from this city of souls huddled together. I slowed as I walked through the shadows and memories of ages past. It was darker there, the air damp and oddly cool for Kolkata. As I slipped through a mossy stone wall enclosure, the relentless hum of Indian traffic stopped and the breeze calmed. During a meandering walkabout one monsoon morning on Kolkata’s famed Park Street, while admiring the contrast of colonial and modern architecture at the heart of this wonderful city, I stumbled upon a hidden treasure.
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