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The British cemetery in Kathmandu may be less well known than others, but it has a history as long as our
diplomatic relations with Nepal and our unbroken friendship with
that country. As an independent country to the north of India, Nepal
was long an irritant to the East India Company, involving niggling
hostilities. But these ended with the Treaty of Sugauli of 1816 which
also established a (for decades solitary) official British presence in
Kathmandu.
Following Independence, and after a tussle with Pakistan over
ownership, the new Indian Government inherited most of the British
legation premises in Kathmandu. But, when they built their new
Embassy, the British retained the nearby cemetery. This has now
found two able chroniclers in Mark Watson, a distinguished botanist,
and Andrew Hall, a former ambassador to Nepal.
Quite how the three-quarter acre cemetery was acquired is obscure,
but unchallenged. The first burial there in 1820, under a monument
and inscription typical of the time, was that of Robert Stuart, the
Assistant Resident, who died of pneumonia. There was then a trickle
of burials during the nineteenth century, most of them dependents of
the small British official community, but very few in the first half
of the twentieth. It was after 1950, with the opening of Nepal to aid
agencies, tourism and mountaineering, that the cemetery began to fill
- to the point where some terracing has been needed to keep space for
future burials.
Among earlier burials there are some unexpected characters, including
Henry Gaye, one of a succession of bandmasters brought to Nepal by
Prime Minister Jung Bahadur after his visit to the United Kingdom
in 1850. Jung Bahadur, whose portrait by a Nepalese artist long
graced the Foreign Secretary's office in Whitehall, also got a taste for
bagpipes - a tradition inherited by the Gurkhas. Another burial is that
of Gilbert Deatker, surgeon to the resident Minister, an able doctor
from the Indian Army who could not rise above warrant officer status
because he was of mixed race.
Coming forward in time there are several graves of people well
remembered by lovers of Nepal: Boris Lissanevitch ('Boris' to
everyone), who pioneered the hotel trade (when he was not out of
favour or even in gaol); Jim Edwards, who developed Tiger Tops and
did so much for tourism in Nepal; and Amar Rana, whose marriage led
to ostracism from the royal family for years. But there are monuments
and graves for many others, including residents, missionaries,
mountaineers and, sadly, victims of air disasters.
Aside from the Kathmandu cemetery the authors do well to detail
other relevant burial places in Nepal, including the several Gurkha
cemeteries and the resting place of the Jesuits who founded St
Xavier's School - among them Marshall Moran, known to ham radio
operators world-wide by his call-sign Micky Mouse.
The maintenance of the cemetery was for many years sporadic,
involving bureaucratic tussles with Whitehall which must have cost
far more than the pittances wrung from them. But in recent years, thanks to more enlightened official attitudes and private generosity,
the situation has been much improved. There is a permanent
caretaker who takes much interest in the trees and plants, which
Mark Watson catalogues in great detail. The net result is the pleasant
and well-maintained 'comer of a foreign field ' of the book's subtitle.
The story of the early years is not very eventful, and the authors
rightly link it to the history of British relations with Nepal. Indeed
the book might have made more of this. One would have welcomed a
fuller description of the fluctuating tension between the royal family
and the prime minister. lt occupied a lot of the Residents' time -
when they were not, like the most famous of them, Brian Hodgson,
doing so much to advance our knowledge of the fauna and flora of
the country as well as its beliefs . And in discussing the arrival, post
Hodgson, of wives and families, they sadly consign to a footnote
Hodgson himself and his long-standing relations hip with a Muslim
lady which produced two children whom he fully acknowledged.
Indeed his son has a handsome tomb in Darjeeling.
The book contains biographical notes on all those buried and their
parentage where this is available and detailed descriptions of all the
graves. These are valuable, but the arrangement involves a good
deal of overlap with the narrative, so that the reader has rather to
jink to and fro to get the full story. A stronger editorial hand might
have been helpful in getting more cohesion in the narrative. But
the story is a fascinating one, and a visitor to Kathmandu might
well find time to follow the road between the British and Indian
Embassies to visit the cemetery. lt is a detour well worth making.
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