Scottish Cemetery in Calcutta, West Bengal

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Get directions Calcutta, West Bengal, India

Coordinates: 22.54490, 88.36262
Cemetery ID:

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About these numbers These percentages indicate the number of Find a Grave memorials that have a grave photo or GPS coordinates. We don't know the total number of burials in a cemetery, so we cannot calculate a percentage of those with memorials, photos or GPS coordinates.

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Kolkata, or Calcutta as it used to be, was the headquarters of the East India Company in the 18thC and the capital of India until 1911-12. Scots played a prominent part in the work of the Company and in the administration of British India . The development of the tea trade and jute trade with Dundee brought many Scots to Kolkata in particular.

The Scottish church in Kolkata, now part of the Church of North India, was St Andrews in Dalhousie Square, on which the Scottish Cemetery was – and is – dependent. In the Session Room of St Andrews hangs a large photograph of St Giles cathedral in Edinburgh! The cemetery has over 1600 headstones and monuments, some of Aberdeen granite, but many of brick and lime with marble tablets. The Register of Interments in the Scottish cemetery records the names of the many hundreds of Scots who died far from home and are buried there. Well over 90% of the names are recognisably Scots – names like Anderson, McGregor, Campbell and Ross – most of the others are Bengali, like Banerjea and Mukerjee.

It is an extraordinary record of the lives of generations of Scots, a part of Scotland's heritage overseas and a site well loved and cared for by the present day Scots.

Although its use continued after Indian Independence (1947), the Scottish Cemetery fell into disrepair in the 1970s. In 2008 the Kolkata Scottish Heritage Trust (KSHT), Scotland, was established to restore the cemetery. The project is run by a Board of Trustees operating from Edinburgh as a registered Scottish Charity No SC039907 via a MoU with the site owner, St. Andrew's Church, Kolkata. KSHT raises funds from private donors, charitable trusts and foundations.

It is an extraordinary record of the lives of generations of Scots, a part of Scotland's heritage overseas and a site well loved and cared for by the present day Scots.