You've Been Protesting on a Graveyard

Behind the Collector's office in Pune stands a 200 year old domed monument in a walled burial ground that nobody can name. The maps call it French tombs. The newspapers have called it German, and Jewish. The government called it missing. Here is what it actually is, and who lies in it.

These are, as far as anyone can trace, the oldest surviving British colonial monuments in Pune, six years older than St. Mary's Church, usually called the city's oldest British landmark. No older British structure appears to survive in the city today. Until this article, this walled plot had no story anyone could tell. It belongs on every heritage walk of Pune.

If you have taken the lane beside the State Bank of India branch off Church Road, behind the Collector's office in Pune Camp, you have passed it: a small walled enclosure, set back under old trees. Inside, a domed canopy on six stone pillars rises over a heap of dumped debris and a discarded mattress. Grey hatchback cars sit abandoned among the graves, and autorickshaws are parked tight against the box tombs by the wall, one of them a moss covered slab a tree has cracked open as it grew. Most people who pass have no idea it is a graveyard at all.

Nor can anyone say what it is. Search for it on Google Maps and you are told these are French tombs. For fifteen years the Pune press has been just as certain and just as wrong: German tombs in one report, French in another, an old Jewish cemetery in a third.^[1,2,3,4] None of it is right. The people under this ground were British, officers and families of the East India Company who died in Poona in the years after it took the city from the Marathas.

Here is what it is. In 1909 the old European tombs of Poona were declared a Protected National Monument under the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act, the same legal status held by the Aga Khan Palace and Shaniwar Wada.^[5] And here is what happened to it. When the Comptroller and Auditor General audited India's monuments, the Pune tombs turned up on the list of those the country had lost. Untraceable. Missing.^[6,7]

It was never missing. It has stood in plain sight the whole time, behind a government office, in the middle of Pune. That alone should have been enough to look after it.

What the plot is used for now is easier to answer. The Collector's office has designated it one of the city's protest grounds. On the days a crowd gathers, the placards go up over the graves. There is an irony in that which nobody involved could have known: the land was never the Collector's to give. It is a Protected National Monument and has been for over a century.

The Archaeological Survey of India could not claim it either. The ASI knew there was an old cemetery here. What nobody had was a document tying this particular ground to the "Old European Tombs" on the list of monuments the government had lost. Without that link, the protection sat on a name with no address attached.

That document exists. It has been sitting in print since 1897, and I found it while chasing this cemetery's larger, vanished cousin, the East Street Cemetery, now buried under Fashion Street. This is what it says, and this is who it turns out to be protecting.

What It Was

Start with what to call it. Every name this ground carries is borrowed. Burials ended around 1822 and St. Paul's Church was not built until some fifty years later, so nobody buried here ever heard the name the place now goes by. Garpir, the name the older records use, belongs to the Muslim shrine next door, the grave of a saint remembered as the Gar Pir, the stone saint, from gar, stone, and pir, saint. The whole quarter took its name from him.

Garpir was a British military camp, not a graveyard. General Wellesley made it the cantonment for the force guarding Poona in 1803, and it stayed the camp until the final break with Baji Rao Peshwa in 1817. The graves came after. The earliest legible inscription is dated 1819 and the latest 1822, the years immediately following the Company's defeat of the last Peshwa in 1818. Having taken the city, the British turned their disused cantonment ground into a place to bury their dead.^[8]

It was never large. The Gazetteer of 1885 describes it twice, a few pages apart and under two different names, and between the two entries you get the whole place: a rectangle of 9,890 square feet behind a masonry wall and a neat iron gate, holding seventeen graves, four of them still carrying inscriptions dated 1819, 1820, 1821 and 1822. One tomb is singled out, a cut-stone canopy on pillars.^[8]

Around 1819, as Mountstuart Elphinstone, Commissioner of the Deccan and the man after whom Elphinstone College is named, prepared to leave Poona, he enclosed this small graveyard with the wall we still see and ordered a larger burial ground opened.^[9] That wall has very likely helped it survive.

The Dome Nobody Could Name

Your eye goes straight to it. Every other grave here is a plain box tomb. This one is a monument: a cut-stone dome resting on six pillars, raised on a platform. And it carries no name, no date, no inscription of any kind.

For more than 150 years people have guessed. An 1863 account of strolls around Poona gives it to a Mrs Virges, wife of the Deputy Paymaster of the Poona Division, whose husband built the canopy, left for Calcutta to fetch a statue to stand beneath it, and never came back.^[9] The rival story, repeated ever since, is that the dome covers a French officer of the Peshwa's army, or his wife, a Madame Dudrenec. The Gazetteer disposed of that one in 1885: the last Peshwa had no French officers at all, and Poona's actual French graves lie elsewhere, at Ghorpadi and on the old Parvati Hill road, today's Shankarsheth Road.

So the grandest thing in the cemetery is the one thing nobody can put a name to. Seventeen people were buried here. Walk in today and you will find barely half. Not one name is still legible on the stone. Everything we now know about these people has come off paper rather than stone: old gazetteers and monumental inscription rolls, a newspaper column from 1860, and death records and copies of their wills held in the India Office Records at the British Library. A column in that 1860 newspaper is the last record of anyone standing here and reading the graves aloud. It lists six names.^[10]

Five of them we can follow.

Who Were Buried Here?

How It Was Lost

A national monument does not disappear through malice. It disappears through the slow withdrawal of the attention that kept it alive, and in this case through one clerical decision taken in 1897.

That year the Archaeological Survey recorded all five of Poona's European burial sites under a single heading: "Old European Tombs."^[5] In 1909 that one entry became a Protected National Monument. But five separate grounds, scattered across the city, had been bundled into a single line, and not one of them was ever separately mapped. When the records thinned, the protection was left attached to a name with no address. That is why the Comptroller and Auditor General's auditors, looking for the Pune tombs, could not find them, and why the Pune Municipal Corporation's own heritage list names the "European Tombs" of the Camp to this day without anyone being able to say where they stand.^[17]

On the ground, the forgetting took longer. For a while after Independence the system held: the graves passed to the care of the British High Commission, a local body called the Poona Cemetery Committee looked after them, and the Chaplain of Poona still made his rounds. Then money ran short and interest faded with the generation that remembered the names. The upkeep stopped. And the living community began to ask whether the land might not serve the Christians of Poona instead.

So it was wanted. Between roughly 1958 and 1967 three parties tried for this ground, and each was turned back by the same rule: the graves could not be disturbed. The Catholic Bishop of Poona wanted it for a chapel and houses for poor families. A newly formed Indian Christian society wanted a community hall. And the Dean of B.J. Medical College next door, which surrounds the plot on three sides, wanted hostel quarters.^[18]

That last bid came to a head in March 1967, when the Maharashtra Government asked the Central Government to hand the plot to the College, describing a fully abandoned ground without a single marking stone on it. The Centre sent its own engineer to look. He found one dome in good condition and twelve graves.

The correspondence went back and forth for years. To the government it was simply "the disused Church Road Cemetery." Nowhere in it does anyone note that the ground had been a Protected National Monument since 1909, and the blindness ran through both governments, not one: for a decade the Indian and British authorities wrote to each other about what to do with this plot, and both sides kept a file on it.^[18] In neither file does the word "monument" appear.

In March 1972 the Central Government refused, for one reason only. In 1949 India had promised the United Kingdom that these cemeteries would be safeguarded from destruction and desecration like any government property. A diplomatic assurance given a generation earlier, and forgotten by everyone since, is why there is anything here to see at all.^[19]

Not every site was so lucky. One set of these tombs, near the College of Engineering by the Mula river, where the dead of the Battle of Kirkee were buried, is gone. Residents recall the graves razed in a single night to clear the plot for building. Around a hundred tombs.^[20]

Here, the wall held and the dome held. The names went. Some weathered away, but many did not go so gently: by 1860 a visitor already found the tombs "robbed of their iron railings and slabs."^[10] Over the last century the plot has been eyed for building land, used as a parking lot, a dump, a hawkers' spot, and finally a protest ground outside the Collector's office.^[4]

July 2026: Walking the Ground with the ASI

The 1897 list is the one edition in which the Old European Tombs are not merely named but described: five sites, each located, including an "old grave-yard near St. Paul's Church." That description appears nowhere else. It is the single document tying this ground to the entry on the missing list.

In June 2026 I took it to the officials at the Archaeological Survey of India's Pune office. They heard the whole thing out and told me to put it in writing so the ASI could act on it formally. So I did. They were glad of it, and they had something to show me in return: the property card for the plot, CTS 8/1 on Church Road, an area of 928.9 square metres, its use recorded in the municipal record as Burial Ground (Cemetery). Nearly the same measurement the Gazetteer had set down in 1885.

In July a team from Mumbai came to Pune and walked all five locations in a single search. Three are gone. The Kirkee battle graves by the river, the tombs on the old Parvati Hill road, now Shankarsheth Road, and the East Street ground under Fashion Street have all been destroyed or built over, and nothing survives on them to protect. Two are still standing: the French burial ground at Ghorpadi, and this one, behind the Collector's office, where the dome has stood the whole time. At this site the team counted eight tombs.

The visit came at a fortunate moment. The Collector's office had been preparing to put up a toilet block on the burial ground, and the ASI stopped the work. A monument protected by law since 1909 was days away from being built over, because for a century nobody could say where it was.

The rest follows. The ASI had earlier asked for these sites to be de-notified altogether, since nobody could find them; that request is now being revisited. Both surviving European Tomb sites are to be cleaned up and given signboards setting out what the ground is and whose graves lie in it, so that anyone walking past can read its history instead of guessing at it. A monument the government had written off as untraceable has been found.

One thing only, then, when the boards go up: let them carry the names. The captain whose fellow officers built him a monument. The corporal's small son killed by a rocket. The girl of nineteen months whose family had been handed a silver cup at the races two years before. A board with names on it is far harder to walk past than a board with a category.

And there is more we cannot reach. Much of this cemetery's story survives only in old government files, faded newspaper columns, and the memories of older Punekars who walked past this dome when its tombs still stood. If you know something about this place, or remember it from years ago, please leave a comment below. The boards are being planned now, and what we establish here may end up on them.

Three of the five sites are already gone, and nobody noticed them going. We restore forts and we photograph palaces, but a graveyard is the one kind of monument that asks nothing of us and offers nothing back, and so it is the first thing a city puts down and forgets it was holding. This one survived by accident: a wall an Englishman built in 1819, and a promise made in 1949 that everybody forgot. It deserved better than luck, and so do the eight tombs still standing there this morning.