Kolkata eyes graveyard tourism

By Sujoy Dhar

KOLKATA (Reuters Life!) - The dead are an unlikely tourist attraction, but authorities in Kolkata are promoting the graveyards of India's former colonial capital to woo foreigners trying to trace their roots.

At one end of Park Street, lined on either sides with bars, night clubs and chic eateries, lies a walled cemetery with rows of mossy graves shaped like pyramids, pagodas and obelisks. Many of its occupants were interred during the British Raj.

A rising number of tourists, especially from Britain, who are looking for ancestors in this cemetery and a bigger one in the same neighbourhood have spurred the "tourism of the dead" drive.

"Graveyard tourism sounds gross but we want the graveyards to be part of the city's heritage tourism circuit," said Manab Mukherjee, tourism minister of West Bengal.

He said authorities were keen to promote the graveyards as a tourist draw similar to Highgate Cemetery in London or Pere-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

And to make it easier for tourists, the Christian Burial Board (CBB), which runs four major cemeteries, has begun transferring the burial records of graveyards where many Britons were interred, some nearly 200 years ago, into a computer.

"An arduous process to digitise records of more than 100,000 burials and 20,000 graves has been undertaken so that the foreigners visiting the city to trace their ancestral roots can locate them at the click of a mouse," said Ranojoy Bose of CBB.