Colonial Cemeteries at the End of Empire

Abstract Chapter 1 looks at the colonial government’s original system of cemetery management, upkeep, and funding, and the collapse of that system after Indian independence. During colonial rule, the British Ecclesiastical Establishment oversaw most colonial cemeteries. Its retirement as an official government department in 1947 led to many Britons who had served and lived in India becoming outspokenly frustrated about the future status of cemeteries. In response, the British home government asked the British High Commission to create a special cemetery office, the Monuments and Graves Section, to devise a new strategy for cemetery upkeep in the absence of government revenues and resources. A long history of generally poor cemetery record-keeping, an overbuilt cemetery bureaucracy, and obduracy emanating from the highest level of India’s Christian establishment—the Metropolitan—led to deep frustration as the section attempted to understand and to navigate the multidimensional world of colonial cemeteries.