A Jewish Cemetery in Mumbai

You already know I like cemeteries--they are peaceful public spaces, often in the middle of urban areas, they grant a glimpse into the history of a place in a particularly personal manner, often with religious information, and say a lot about how a place perceives its history.

One of my favorite moments in India was when I stumbled upon the Jewish Cemetery in Mumbai, during a visit in June 2007. The entrance was on a wide street in a non-descript neighborhood with a typical hodge-podge of pigeonhole shops and tiny dwellings, but none of them with names that were in common with prominent Jewish families of Mumbai's past, such as Sassoon, or noticeably Jewish in general. There were a few caretakers resting in a whitewash shelter near the entrance. The cemetery itself was fairly well-maintained: tight rows of stones and sarcophagus-style graves, with low green vines along the walls and grass between the rows--and missing the piles of trash thrown over walls of other similar final resting places I've visited.

As with any cemetery, the stones themselves tell the story of the community best: stones listed places of birth as far flung as Baghdad and Czechoslovakia, and similar to the 19th-Century Jewish gravestones I had seen in Berlin, the stones displayed information in Hebrew on the east side of the stone and in a local language on the back (west) side. It is interesting to note that in Mumbai the west side was written in English, not Hindi. Family names such as Haskell and Sassoon were often coupled with more familiar Indian given names, such as Priya or Akbar.

For the hour I was there, I was the only visitor. And when my departure was delayed by the afternoon's downpour, the caretakers let me sit it out under the whitewashed shelter. (Pictures here.)