FLORIN
WEBSITE
©
JULIA BOLTON
HOLLOWAY,
AUREO
ANELLO ASSOCIATION, 1997-2010: FLORENCE'S
'ENGLISH'
CEMETERY
|| BIBLIOTECA E BOTTEGA FIORETTA MAZZEI
|| ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING || FLORENCE
IN SEPIA || BRUNETTO
LATINO, DANTE ALIGHIERI AND GEOFFREY
CHAUCER
|| E-BOOKS || ANGLO-ITALIAN
STUDIES || CITY AND BOOK I,II,
III,
IV || NON-PROFIT GUIDE TO COMMERCE IN
FLORENCE
|| AUREO ANELLO,
CATALOGUE
Reflections
from India on
Rome and Florence, republished with permission from the
Editor-in-Chief,
The Tribune, Chandigarh
See also India
THE
SAD
STORY OF UNQUIET GRAVES
BY MANOHAR MALGONKAR

ANI
PALKHIVALA
is
one
of
the country’s foremost lawyers. But he is also an astute and
clear-headed economist who has the ability to demystify the
complexities of high finance. That is why his annual
dissection of the
country’s latest budget is so fully attended, so widely
discussed.
I remember how he made a point which touched the truth of
the theme of
his lecture that we had become the world’s Highest Taxed
Nation. This
was during the sixties, when, Nehru’s Big Brother shadow
fell over
everything. Palkhivala had us sitting up and listening
intently when he
said something like this:
"If what I have been saying has made you realise that, for
most of us
who earn a good living, declare our incomes, pay our taxes,
ours is a
pretty difficult country to live in. Now let me tell you
this: It is an
even more difficult country to die in."
And then Palkhivala went on to show, giving precise figures,
how if a
very rich man were to die leaving Rs 1 crore to his heirs,
his heirs
would not only have to sell all his assets, but borrow money
to satisfy
the tax man’s claims for death duties.
A crore in the sixties was wealth beyond the dreams of
avarice: worth
about Rs 20 crore today. But the country’s finance ministers
had
devised methods to make sure that no one could be rich
enough to leave
behind enough money to pay the fine for the crime of having
lived and
earned money. Anyhow, this is not an article on financial
wisdom, but
about something else Mr Palkhivala told us that day, that
the dead
often create a lot of problems for other people.
When a famous man dies, there are always people who want to
claim him
as their own. In ancient Greece, when the poet Homer died,
several
small towns in Greece claimed to have been his birthplace
and caused
riots and killings. In the same manner, in recent memory,
when the
Burmese statesman, U Thant, who had been the Secretary
General of the
United Nations in the 1960s died, and his body was flown
back to Burma,
there were bloody riots in Rangoon among U Thant’s admirers
over the
right place for his grave.
At that, U. Thant obviously belonged to a religion which
believes in
burying its dead and Burma — like ourselves is a secular
land which
permits both cremation or burial to say nothing of disposal
by other
methods such as the one favoured by the Parsis, of being fed
to
vultures. Because there are countries which hold that their
soil would
be rendered impure by the interment of a dead body of a
person who
belonged to a religion different from their own.
The classic example was Saudi Arabia. Up until the 1970s,
the Arabian
American Oil Company, Aramco, held the virtual monopoly for
extracting
and selling the country’s petroleum products. Aramco always
had around
1300 American citizens working in Saudi Arabia. These
Americans lived
as a pampered community. They were given padded salaries,
extra leave
and everything that an American citizen was used to:
Coca-cola,
hamburgers, corn flakes. They had social centres, dance
halls,
libraries, even facilities for prayers except that their
churches did
not bear crosses and their priests, no priestly robes. They
even had a
little cemetery in which bodies placed in coffins could not
be buried.
Instead, they had to be encased in concrete blocks, as
though they were
some kind of a nuclear waste, leakproof. It was these
rectangular
concrete blocks that formed the graves in the Aramco
cemetery.
One wonders if there are similar prohibitions in other
Islamic lands,
too. What happens, say, to the victims of a car crash in
Peshawar or
Kandahar, in which a Hindu or Christian dies, and the body
is so
severely mangled as to make body-bag repatriation
impractical? Would a
cremation be allowed? — a burial? And even if it can be
done, just
think of the procedural runround that those responsible for
the body
would be put through?
But it is not only Islamic countries that look upon the dead
of other
faiths as soil-pollutants. Until quite recently, things were
just as
difficult in parts of Europe. Why, in Italy in the 19th
century Roman
Catholics, too, were strict about not permitting cremations
on their
soil or even the burial of Protestant Christians.
In 1822, the British poet, Shelly, was drowned in the sea
near Leghorn
in Italy, after the small boat in which he was travelling
capsized in a
storm. Shelly’s companion, a sailor named Edward Trelawny,
rescued the
poet’s body and dragged it to the beach. Trelawny scrounged
around for
flotsam and cremated Shelley’s body, seemingly without
realising that
he was violating a papal taboo. Then Trelawny collected the
poet’s
ashes and took them to Rome, where he delivered them to the
British
Consul, Joseph Severn.
As it happened, Joseph Severn — the same man who had looked
after the
poet John Keats in his last illness — had known Shelly, too,
quite
well. Only a few weeks earlier Severn had had to send a
soothing letter
to his own family in England, making it plain that, just
because he was
friendly with men such as Shelly and Byron who had so
scandalized
Britain’s society by their poetry as well as by their
decadent
behaviour, it did not mean that he, Severn, had actually
become a
member of their fast set. Now Severn found himself
responsible for
burying Shelley’s ashes.
From England, Shelley’s widow, Mary, wrote to say what she
wanted done.
Mary was Shelley’s second wife. The first one had committed
suicide,
after bearing Shelley a son who had died in infancy, and
been buried in
the Protestant cemetery in Rome. Now Mary Shelley wanted her
husband’s
ashes buried alongside his son’s grave.
This, Severn discovered, was not possible. A year or so
earlier, the
Papal Government had closed down that cemetery because of
overcrowding,
and opened up a new area for a Protestant graveyard. That
was where
Shelley’s ashes were buried.
Then Severn, intent on carrying out Mary Shelley’s behest
faithfully,
decided to exhume Shelley’s son’s grave, remove the body and
bury it in
a grave alongside that of Shelley. When he had the child’s
grave
opened, however, he discovered to his horror that it
contained the
skeleton of a fully grown man. It seemed that the pressure
on space in
the old cemetery had become so acute that its keepers had
taken to
recycling grave-sites — digging up old graves and throwing
away the
bodies so as to make room for new graves.
Well, if 19th century Italy looked upon Protestant-Christian
graves as
a desecration of their soil, imagine the horror with which
it must have
reacted to a request for a ritualistic Hindu cremation!
It happened in 1870, in Florence, where an Indian Maharaja
had died. He
was Rajaram, of Kolhapur; barely 20, brought up by carefully
chosen
British tutors. The Raj’s keepers, keen to give Rajaram’s
upbringing
its finishing touches, were giving him a guided tour of
Europe. Before
they had set out,Kolhapur’s own priests had made known their
apprehensions about this brazen defiance of a Hindu taboo
against the
crossing of ‘The Black water’. But Rajaram himself, a
willing pupil of
his English tutors had paid no heed. So far, the tour had
been a raging
success. Rajaram had had his audience with Queen Victoria,
gone
fox-hunting in England, shot grouse in Scotland, seen a
military
tattoo, attended horse-races, sat through an opera and even
polished
his ballroom dancing. Florence came at the tail end of the
grand tour.
There on November 30, he died.
The city authorities were horrified at being asked to permit
a
cremation. They passed the request to the Council of
Ministers in Rome.
Luckily for Rajaram’s harried attendants, the British Consul
in
Florence, Sir Augustus Paget, came to their rescue. He must
have had to
do some heroic wire-pulling and arm-twisting among the
Pope’s advisors.
But that very night, the Council of Ministers gave their OK.
The next
morning, the body of Maharaja Rajaram was cremated on the
banks of the
Arno.
Surely,
the very first Hindu cremation on Italian soil!

The tomb is now very much in need of restoration,one of
its columns collapsing, the delicate iron work rusting away, and we
have a young restorer, Daniel-Claudiu Dumitrescu, his people coming
from India a thousand years ago, who would be excellent in carrying it
out. Please contact us if you would like to petition and/or fund this project.
FLORIN
WEBSITE
©
JULIA BOLTON
HOLLOWAY,
AUREO
ANELLO ASSOCIATION, 1997-2010: FLORENCE'S
'ENGLISH'
CEMETERY
|| BIBLIOTECA E BOTTEGA FIORETTA MAZZEI
|| ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING || FLORENCE
IN SEPIA || BRUNETTO
LATINO, DANTE ALIGHIERI AND GEOFFREY
CHAUCER
|| E-BOOKS || ANGLO-ITALIAN
STUDIES || CITY AND BOOK I,II,
III,
IV || NON-PROFIT GUIDE TO COMMERCE IN
FLORENCE
|| AUREO ANELLO,
CATALOGUE
Reflections from
India on
Rome and Florence, republished with permission from the
Editor-in-Chief,
The Tribune, Chandigarh