Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Nilgiri Hills Christian Memorials

I'd read this interesting article titled "Where graves tell a story" in The Hindu a few months back. It told of a couple of researchers locating graves of English and other Europeans across the Nilgiri hills. I've done a very small bit of photography of graves in Bangalore and know how intriguing this was. Way back when I used to shoot gravestone with my friend Sunil, we thought of the idea of doing some more research on the graves in Bangalore but never managed to get it up and running.

So it was all the more interesting to see that someone had already done the same thing with graves in Nilgiris and so I looked for information on how to obtain the book. I contacted Chekkutty - one of the authors and he was kind enough to provide more information and even offer to send me the book straight away. I received the book in a few days.

The book is quite a thick volume and has around 600 pages. It is full of information! Information about the graves, names on the graves, birth, death dates, age etc. It was interesting to know the names of the some of the major diseases of those times. Did you know that you could have just died of a severe cold in those days?

This book will all the more be interesting for people who are looking for their ancestor's graves. I was just a little disappointed that the maps aren't really well reproduced - a larger scale map would have been great. And yes, somehow the photographer in me rues the lack of photographs in the book. I would have loved to see some of the amazing gravestones and headstones of those days. In fact, there are some amazing ones in Bangalore.

All in all, a very interesting book. I am hoping that I can contribute in some way to John Roberts and Chekkutty's work when they do start this here in Bangalore. You can read Chekkutty's post in his blog here - http://chespeak.blogspot.in/2013/12/nilgiri-hills-new-book-on-european-and.html

The pic below was taken by me at a grave in Bangalore. Just love the art involved