There are no of eminent graves here and one must pay a visit with due respect to those great personalities. Photography and loitering not allowed inside. No parking facility.

Just down the road from St James’s Church on Lower Circular Road (now AJC Bose Road) is the Lower Circular Road Cemetery, also known as the Mullick Bazaar Cemetery. While this isn’t as well-known as some of Kolkata’s other cemeteries, it’s still an interesting one. I visited this because it’s our family cemetery on the distaff side, with my maternal grandparents and several other ancestors buried in the family plot. Established in 1840, the Lower Circular Road Cemetery is a sprawling one, with graves and tombs from across the decades. There are lots of very recent graves, many of them obviously still well-tended and carefully looked after, with flowering plants around them. There are also (and these tend to be the more interesting for me) lots of very old graves, some dating back to almost when the cemetery was established. These include the graves of some of Kolkata’s most illustrious names, including John Elliott Drinkwater Bethune (the promoter of women’s education in India), poet and dramatist Michael Madhusudan Dutt, nationalist and politician Harendra Coomar Mookerjee, and missionary/social reformer Charles Freer ‘Deenbandhu’ Andrews. The most interesting grave, though, is of William Hay MacNaghten, a baronet who was the British envoy in Kabul and who was assassinated brutally in 1841, his body reputedly being chopped to bits. MacNaghten’s wife brought the dismembered body of her husband together and had it buried here, just inside the gate of the cemetery. The tomb she erected over the grave has a symbol of death, an urn with a draped cloth over it, and a plaque dedicated to MacNaghten. Interestingly enough, there’s a popular belief that this place is haunted, and that if anyone recounts the story of MacNaghten’s death in the vicinity of his grave, the tree above his tomb starts to shake. Well, my sister (who’s a historian) did happen to tell me about MacNaghten right next to his grave, and the tree was perfectly still. But yes, whether or not you’re interested in paranormal activities, this cemetery is worth visiting. Even if only to wander around under the huge mango trees, look at the older graves, and admire the evidence of the coming together of Kolkata’s ethnic communities: there are typically Bengali names among the graves, and very English ones, too, besides the proof of what is probably India’s best-known China Town. A couple of the gateways along the main path have a distinctly Chinese look to them, not to mention some just as distinctly Chinese names painted on them. The cemetery is open to visitors from 10AM to 5PM.