It opened in 1767 and closed to new burials around 1830. In between, it filled with roughly 1,600 monuments built at a scale the dead would have found embarrassing: pyramids, obelisks, domed cenotaphs, an entire vocabulary of Roman mourning transplanted into Bengal.
Read the dates. The average age at death here is somewhere in the low thirties, and a great many stones record people of twenty-two, twenty-five, twenty-eight. Cholera, malaria, typhoid, and the simple fact that nobody understood what the monsoon did to drinking water.
Sir William Jones is here, the judge and philologist who first argued in public that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin descend from a common source. So is Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, the poet and Hindu College teacher who died at twenty-two and shaped a generation of Bengali radicals.
It is thick with banyan and green light. The noise of Park Street stops about ten metres inside the gate.
What the guidebook leaves out
Rose Aylmer died at twenty from cholera after eating too much pineapple. Walter Savage Landor wrote her one of the better short elegies in English, and it is on the stone.
