Fresh lease of life for St. Mary’s cemetery, a place of the dead in Madras

Whenever Sir Mark Havelock-Allan visits Chennai, he makes it a point to call or message, and we meet at the same, and rather unlikely, place – the St. Mary’s Cemetery on the Island. Mark is the President of the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia (BACSA), which explains it all. And to him, this is hallowed ground.

The cemetery is attached to the Church of St. Mary’s in the Fort, constructed between 1678 and 1680 and qualifying as the oldest Anglican place of worship east of the Suez Canal. But English burials predate the church, for the colonials began dying almost as soon as they started settling in. The old burial ground was the Guava Garden, north of Fort St. George. When St. Mary’s came to be built, the cemetery came under its control. However, with burials those days requiring giant monuments (you need to just see the Hynmer Obelisk at the High Court to get an idea), the Guava Garden was soon considered a security threat. It was closed in the 1750s and subsequent burials came to be held at the new cemetery, on the Island. The surviving stones at Guava Garden (later the Law College campus) were moved to the yard around St. Mary’s Church.