Dear Reader, This week we dug into the graves of colonial India, quite literally, to find a history that is most often left out of textbooks. Our starting point was the much romanticised South Park Street cemetery, which carries the grave of East India Company officer Charles Stuart, popularly known as Hindoo Stuart for his obsession with Indian culture and traditions. Stuart’s grave carrying an amalgamation of Hindu, Islamic and Graeco-Roman architectural details, stands out remarkably among the many European tombs lying there. So enamoured was Stuart with everything Indian that he had specified in his will that his grave was to be decorated with Hindu motifs. European cemeteries dotted across the Indian subcontinent are a reminder of the aspirations, hardships and cultural exchange that went into building the pluralistic India of the past. Most importantly, the European cemeteries tell the stories of the ordinary people, the clerks, school masters, merchants, bankers etc. who brick by brick, built the ambitious colonial establishments in India. Last month, a Dutch organisation in collaboration with the government of Netherlands, opened a digital archive, ‘Shared Cemeteries’ to collect information of Dutch cemeteries located across all its former colonies like Suriname, Indonesia, and India. We spoke to the researchers of ‘Shared Cemeteries’ to learn about their findings, and then reached out to the many local researchers and historians of other European cemeteries in India. We also toured across some of the fascinating cemeteries lying in the erstwhile British capital of India, Kolkata, to understand the politics and cultural transformation that went into creating spaces for the colonial dead. Why were cemeteries built in India, many decades before they appeared in Europe? What were the kinds of land and religious negotiations carried out between the English, Scottish, Dutch, Portuguese, French and other competing colonial regimes, when it came to marking out a space for their dead? How did they incorporate Indian art and cultural traditions in their cemeteries, and were they willing to make space for the Indian dead among their own? Finally, despite the historical and emotional value of these cemeteries, why did they remain neglected for many years after the Europeans left? This story tries to answer the questions. This week, the Shiv Sena has once again raked up its decades-old demand to rename Aurangabad as Shambhajinagar. Though later named after the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, Aurangabad was infact founded by an African slave named Malik Ambar. This piece written by Sahil Beg, last year, provides a detailed profile of who Malik Ambar was, and how he rose up the social ladder in India, got an army and vast estates, and eventually built Khirki, which later got renamed as Aurangabad. Wishing you all a happy weekend. Sincerely, Adrija Roychowdhury | 
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