Commonwealth Inter-Religious Graves: Rethinking the Epistemology of the Dead in India

Abstract

This research paper is part of the research project on “Burying the Dead” of the Centre for the Study of Religion and Politics (CSRP) of the University of St. Andrews. It outlines the theoretical and historical basis for this project while outlining sites of burial and memory in India. The paper outlines sites of burial and remembrance in the Indian Commonwealth Cemeteries and includes Indians from British India who joined the British Armed Forces during World War I (WWI) and World War II (WWII) before the Partition of India in 1947. Eleven epistemes are described in this paper that point to a system of topological significance related to variety, hierarchy and historiographical immersion within a wider Indian universe. Thus, Commonwealth sites and those buried in them provide a different landscape and symbolic existence within a colonial and post-colonial India. Within such landscapes, the dead are Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Jains with their signs and symbols on their graves. Thus, they challenge the ethnic and religious divisions of Partition, and remain apart and sometimes forgotten by current unified discourses and epistemologies of nationalism. This paper argues that cemeteries provide diverse epistemologies rather than unified discourses.