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Against the crematorium: Materializing Hindu space in colonial Calcutta, 1920s–1940s
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 February 2026
Abstract
This article considers the material practices of forging ‘Hindu’ spaces in colonial India, through an examination of a cremation charity’s movement against a mechanical crematorium in interwar Calcutta. Established around 1926, the mechanical crematorium was advertised by the municipality as a cost-effective alternative to traditional Hindu pyres, disposing of unclaimed corpses and dissected parts by employing stigmatized Dalit labour, in a region of the city marked for ‘offensive’ trades. However, by 1932, a cremation charity led by municipal councillors and Indian capitalists contested the existence of the crematorium, arguing that its technological process, labour practices, and location were an affront to Hindu sensibilities. This article examines the rise of the charity and the decline of the crematorium within the context of electoral politics, the politics of the location, and the broader impact on interwar labour crises and famines in Calcutta. By analysing the anti-crematorium movement, this article offers a colonial material history of the construction of the emotional resonance in ‘Hindu spaces’ in India, outlining how it emerged at the interstices of communal and caste boundaries.
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References
1 Hindu Satkar Samity Annual Report (Calcutta: Sachindra Chandra, Murlidhar Sen Lane, Hindu Satkar Samity, 1932), p. 3.
2 By crematorium, I mean the mechanical apparatus, powered by gas, coke, or electricity, that incinerates bodies in an hour. The Hindu traditional cremation, however, is distinct: it is a funeral on firewood. I have written more about the mechanical crematorium in India here: Sohini Chattopadhyay, ‘What Researching Cremations of the Dead in Colonial India Taught Me About Life in Our Cities Today’, Scroll.in, 23 August 2020, available at: https://scroll.in/article/971096/what-researching-cremations-of-the-dead-in-colonial-india-taught-me-about-life-in-our-cities-today, [accessed 9 January 2025].
3 1931 data from the CMC’s Public Health Sub-Committee Report, 16 February 1932, p. 211. In 1932, the most used crematoria were in Germany. Fifteen coke-powered crematoria cremated 45,000 bodies. See Lewis H. Mates (ed)., Encyclopedia of Cremation (Abingdon: Taylor and Francis, 2016), p. 442. The only other crematorium in India was also located in Calcutta; funded by the Bengal Cremation Society with generous grants from the Government of Bengal, it only cremated one or two bodies per year. It was an expensive and elite project, reserved for those who wrote in their wills that they wished to be cremated. Government of India (henceforth GOI), Home, Municipalities, B, Nos. 15–16, January 1905, National Archive of India (henceforth NAI).
4 CMC Health Committee Report, 16 July 1934, p. 14.
5 Works that address the Hindu Sabha include Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
6 Colonial censuses use the term ‘Scheduled’ Caste. I use the term ‘Dalit’ to identify communities in Topsia based on present-day demands to identify erased histories in the region. These are evident in markers of Dalit-Bahujan claims to their histories in Topsia and the Tangra region of Kolkata: streets named after B. R. Ambedkar (Ambedkar Sarani), Pulin Khatick (who was a Scheduled Caste representative of the Congress), and B. R. Ambedkar High School, to name a few. The region’s diverse caste history is also perhaps the reason, as Ravikant Kisana notes, why the region remains ignored in dominant narratives of the city. Ravikant Kisana, Meet the Savarnas (London: Penguin, 2025), p. 4.
7 Romola Sanyal, ‘Hindu Space: Urban Dislocations in Post-Partition Calcutta’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 39, no. 1, 2014, pp. 38–49.
8 Nabaparna Ghosh, A Hygienic City-Nation: Space, Community, and Everyday Life in Colonial Calcutta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
9 See Jesús Francisco Cháirez-Garza, ‘Touching Space: Ambedkar on the Spatial Features of Untouchability’, Contemporary South Asia, vol. 22, no. 1, 2014, pp. 37–50, https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2013.870978; Geeta Thatra, ‘Dalit Chembur: Spatializing the Caste Question in Bombay, c. 1920s–1970s’, Journal of Urban History, vol. 48, no. 1, 2022, pp. 63–97, https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144220923631.
10 For discussion on Topsia and neighbouring areas related to water infrastructure, see Jenia Mukherjee, Blue Infrastructures: Natural History, Political Ecology and Urban Development in Kolkata (Germany: Springer Nature, 2020).
11 Asok Mitra, Calcutta on the Eve of Her Tercentenary (Calcutta: Abhinav Publications, 1990), p. 110.
12 John R. Logan and Harvey L. Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (London: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 1–3. For a study on the practice of caste, see Aniket Jaaware, Practicing Caste: On Touching and Not Touching (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018).
13 Tanika Sarkar, ‘Dirty Work, Filthy Caste: Calcutta Scavengers in the 1920s’, in Working Lives and Worker Militancy. The Politics of Labour in Colonial India, (ed.) Ravi Ahuja (Delhi: Tulika, 2013).
14 Chatterji has raised this problem of seeing communalism only through riots and sacred symbols. See Chatterji, Bengal Divided, pp. 153–154.
15 Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). A recent study of contemporary Hindu nationalism and technologies include Ravi Vasudevan, ‘Hindu Nationalism’s Crisis Machine’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, vol. 10, no. 3, Winter 2020, https://doi.org/10.1086/712222
16 Sanat Kumar Roy Chowdhury, Hinduism and Eternal Verities (Calcutta: Bengal Development Society, 1950).
17 HSS Annual Report, 1932, p. 3
18 A. E. Porter, Census of India, 1931. Vol. VI: Calcutta. Part I (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Press, 1932), pp. 66, 100.
19 Ibid.
20 Kashi Mitra Ghat was a site for the disposal of poor and dissected bodies, many of which often floated in the river, a practice the Bengal Government had banned in the early 1900s. Radharaman Mitra, Kolikata Darpan (Calcutta: Subarnarekha, 1980), p. 54
21 See Government of Bengal (henceforth GOB), Judicial, Judicial, A, No. 70, 19 April 1855, West Bengal State Archive (henceforth WBSA); Section 218 of Act VI of Bengal Council of 1863, see GOB, Judicial Proceedings, A, 21–23 June 1864, WBSA; Annual Report on the Administration of the Bengal Presidency for 1863–1864 (Calcutta: Military Orphan Press, 1865), p. 88.
22 Appendix B: Questions and Answers Regarding Disposal of Unclaimed Dead Bodies of Hindus Dying in Calcutta Hospitals, Session of the Bengal Legislative Assembly on 28 September 1937, quoted in HSS Annual Report, 1938, pp. 10–13.
23 HSS Annual Report, 1932, p. 3.
24 Shivani Kapoor, ‘The Violence of Odors: Sensory Politics of Caste in a Leather Tannery’, The Senses and Society, vol. 16, no, 2, 2021, pp. 164–176, https://doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2021.1876365. Also see Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai, ‘Sensing the Social’, in their Experience, Caste, and the Everyday Social (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 46–85.
25 HSS Annual Report, 1932, p. 4.
26 The ritual purity of Hindu women was often raised in political slogans during communal violence in Bengal. See Anwesha Roy, Making Peace, Making Riots: Communalism and Communal Violence, Bengal 1940–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 224.
27 ‘Questions and Answers’, quoted in HSS Annual Report, 1938, pp. 10–13.
28 For instance, the total number of enrolments in in medical schools in Bengal in 1938–1939 was 730, including 81 Muslims. Government of Bengal, Annual Report of the Medical Schools in Bengal for 1938–1939 (Alipore: Bengal Government Press, 1930), p. 4.
29 GOI, ‘Bengal Mohammedan Burial Board Act’, Legislative, Nos. 1–19, September 1889, NAI.
30 Oral History interview, Najmul Hasan, secretary, Anjuman Mufidul Islam, July 2016.
31 Ibid.
32 GOI, ‘Bengal Mohammedan Burial Board Act’, Legislative, Nos. 1–19, September 1889, NAI.
33 For an outline of caste histories in Bengal, see Sarbani Bandyopadhyay, ‘The Invisibility of Caste in Bengal’, in The Oxford Handbook of Caste, (eds) Surinder S. Jodhka and Jules Naudet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023; online edn, Oxford Academic, 23 January 2024), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198896715.013.28).
34 To briefly summarize, at the national and provincial level, two legislative amendments transformed the politics of Bengal in the 1930s and transformed minute aspects of administration into grounds for communal contestation. At the national level, the Communal Award complicated bhadralok dominance. Only Muslims could vote for Muslims, and Depressed Classes could vote for Depressed Classes. It implied that the vote share of caste Hindus was reduced to 28 per cent of the total house of 250. See Chatterji, Bengal Divided, pp. 20–26. The ‘Poona Pact’ led to reservation of specific ‘Hindu’ seats for Scheduled Caste candidates. In Bengal, the effect of the proposed legislation was to drastically reduce the proportion of caste Hindus: from 32 per cent to 20 per cent. See Ravinder Kumar, ‘Gandhi, Ambedkar and the Poona Pact, 1932’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, vol. 8, no. 1–2, 1985, pp. 87–101, https://doi.org/10.1080/00856408508723068.
35 N. N. Mitra (ed.), ‘Proceedings of the All-India Hindu Mahasabha’, in The Indian Annual Register, June (Calcutta: Annual Register Office, 1935), p. 328.
36 For an elaboration of ‘touch’ and caste, see Aniket Jaaware, Practicing Caste: On Touching and Not Touching (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018).
37 HSS Annual Report, 1936, p. 5.
38 Ibid.
39 William Thomson Morison, Report of the Indian Factory Labour Commission. Vol. II: Evidence (East India: Factory Labour Commission, 1908), Twentieth Century House of Commons Sessional Papers (Cd. 4519, LXIII.541, 1909), p. 194
40 HSS Annual Report, 1937, p. 6
41 Ibid., p. 7
42 In 1934, a worker charged 6 anna (or three for a child) per cremation. One rupee consisted of 16 annas. In July 1934, the crematorium received 217 whole bodies and 19 dissected bodies. Out of the 217 whole bodies, 134 were of adults and 83 were those of children. The total amount received was Rs 72, divided between two workers. CMC Health Committee Report, 16 July 1934, p. 14.
43 Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, ‘Srikanta’, Sarat Rachanabali (Kolkata: Ananda Publishing, 2010), vol. 2, pp. 377–619.
44 Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, ‘Bartaman Hindu Muslim Samasya’ (1926), Speech at the Bengal Provincial Congress, reprinted as a pamphlet by Deepankar Chattopadhyay, Vivekananda Sahitya Kendra, Kolkata, 2007. Also see an analysis in Chatterji, Bengal Divided, p. 191.
45 Kamala Sarkar, Bengal Politics, 1937–1947 (India: A. Mukherjee and Company, 1990), p. 142.
46 HSS Annual Report, 1946, p. 3.
47 Five were on the Howrah side of the river, and 38 villages were on the Calcutta side, mostly along the city’s east. B. K. Deb, The Early History and Growth of Calcutta (Calcutta: Romesh Chandra Ghose, 1905), p. 80. However, some texts argue that Topsia was part of Calcutta for revenue purposes, even though it was outside the boundaries of the Circular Canal. See Evan Cotton, Calcutta, Old and New: A Historical and Descriptive Handbook to the City (India: W. Newman, 1907), Chapter 6.
48 For a brief outline of Calcutta’s municipal history, see S. W. Goode, Municipal Calcutta, Its Institutions in Their Origin and Growth (Calcutta: Bibhash Gupta, 1916)
49 E. P. Richards, The Condition, Improvement and Town Planning of the City of Calcutta and Contiguous Areas (Hertfordshire: Jennings and Brewley, 1914), p. 15.
50 Ibid., p. 33.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid., p. 209.
53 The river’s changing flows, periodic cyclones, and turbulent monsoons continued to confound British urban planners in Calcutta, making city-planning increasingly frustrating. See Debjani Bhattacharyya, Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 158.
54 Richards, Town Planning, pp. 59, 436.
55 Porter, Census of India, 1931, pp. 66, 100. Janet Harvey Kelman, Labour in India: A Study of the Conditions of Indian Women in Modern Industry (London; New York: G. Allen and Unwin, 1923), p. 158.
56 J. Chakravarty, ‘Some Sanitary Problems of Ward XVIII and XIV’, Calcutta Municipal Gazette, 18 April 1925, p. 921.
57 GOB, Municipality, Proceedings B, 195-197, File M-1L-87, January 1919, WBSA.
58 Health Committee Report, 30 March 1932, p. 17. Ram Kumar Goenka, who was also a member of the HSS, wrote a memorandum for this meeting advocating for expansion of the Topsia crematorium and the European crematorium to counter burial demands, and also advocated for an electric crematorium in Nimtala. His support emerged from an anti-burial sentiment, rather than anti-crematorium sentiment, see p. 17.
59 GOB, Municipality, Proceedings B, 195-197, File M-1L-87, January 1919, WBSA.
60 Ibid.
61 By 1911, the Census listed the caste names Bagdi, Bhuiya, Kahar, Kaora, Kurmi, and Pasi as residents of Topsia. Most were migrants from eastern United Province and Bihar and worked in small factories in the region. Census of India, 1921: City of Calcutta (India: Superintendent Government Printing, 1921), p. 72. According to 1951 Census officer A. Mitra, the state classified Bagdi, Bhuiya, Kaora, and Pari communities as ‘Scheduled Caste’, while Kahar and Kurmi were listed under ‘Miscellaneous Caste’. See A. Mitra, The Tribes and Castes of West Bengal (Superintendent Government Printing, 1953), pp. 78–80. Kahar was recognized as an ‘Other Backward Caste’ in 1999, while Kurmi was recognized in 1994. National Commission for Backward Castes, List for West Bengal, https://www.ncbc.nic.in/Writereaddata/cl/wb.pdf, [accessed 9 January 2026].
62 For instance, Golam Jalani Khan owned a brick factory in Topsia as well as the land around which the sewage system was constructed. See Calcutta High Court, Tulsi Bibi vs Farrak Bibi and Ors, 22 August 1934, Calcutta, Case No. 815, in All India Reporter 1935 (Nagpur: V. V. Chitaley, 1935), p. 273.
63 ‘Danger to Calcutta Drainage’, Calcutta Municipal Gazette, 23 May 1931, p. 44.
64 S. K. Roy Chowdhury, ‘Entally Suburbs’, Calcutta Municipal Gazette, 24 January 1925, p. 455.
65 Ibid., p. 540.
66 Ibid., p. 541.
67 Colonial medical practitioners noted the relationship between meat eating and economic status. See G. D. McReddie, ‘Cancer and Meat-Eating’, British Medical Journal, 3 May 1902, p. 1120.
68 Roy Chowdhury, ‘Entally Suburbs’, p. 541.
69 Ibid.
70 CMC Health Committee Report, 14 February 1928, p. 394.
71 Ibid.
72 Ibid.
73 CMC Health Committee Report, 3 March 1933, p. 17.
74 CMC Health Committee Report, 21 February 1928, p. 406.
75 S. K. Roy Chowdhury was thinking about reclamations using the technologies available in the 1930s. Three decades later, Roy Chowdhury’s opponent and member of the Indian National Congress, Bidhan Chandra Ray, reclaimed the Saltwater Lakes while he was the chief minister of West Bengal. The area became the new Bidhannagar (named after B. C. Ray). For a full exposition of these new forms of reclamation in post-Partition Calcutta, see Swati Chattopadhyay, ‘“Bourgeois Utopias?” The Rhetoric of Globality in the Contemporary Suburban Landscape of Calcutta’, Working Papers in Contemporary Asian Studies, Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University, 2010.
76 He purchased Jorhat Electric Supply Limited, Assam Plywood Limited, Bharat Plastic Limited, Himatsingka Timber Limited, Himatsingka Mills Ltd., Himatsingka Motor Works Ltd. See Assam State Archives, General and Judicial, Electricity, G. 1049/33, 1933.
77 Anne Hardgrove has pointed out that the term ‘Marwari’ in the context of Calcutta is ambiguous. Many within the community thought that the word ‘Marwari’ was pejorative in Calcutta and identified themselves instead by caste names such as Agarwals and Baniyas. See Anne Hardgrove, Community and Public Culture: The Marwaris in Calcutta c. 1897–1997 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 10.
78 Claude Markovits, Indian Business and Nationalist Politics 1931–39: The Indigenous Capitalist Class and the Rise of the Congress Party (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 32.
79 Ibid., p. 78.
80 Data sourced from lists in the annual reports of HSS, for the years 1935, 1937, 1940, 1943, and 1946.
81 These hospitals’ statistics were grouped together in the HSS annual reports.
82 Some people paid the HSS to hire their hearse carriages. The HSS categorized medical college requests separately from the usual ‘paid cases’ by other families and hospitals.
83 Bodies recovered from the Japanese bombing of Calcutta’s dockyards.
84 Famine deaths.
85 Those who died during the communal riot of 1946. Bodies identified as Muslims were sent to Anjuman Mufidul Islam.
86 Calcutta Municipal Gazette, vol. 28, 1938, p. 74.
87 Ibid.
88 Ibid., 16 May 1931, p. 4.
89 Ibid., p. 5.
90 G. A. Natesan, The Indian Review (G.A. Natesan and Company, 1937), p. 266.
91 Calcutta Municipal Gazette, 16 July 1934.
92 The Hindu Mahasabha provided charity based on caste and communal networks. See Abhijit Sarkar, ‘Fed by Famine: The Hindu Mahasabha’s Politics of Religion, Caste, and Relief in Response to the Great Bengal Famine, 1943–1944’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 54, no. 6, November 2020, pp. 2022–2086, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X19000192.
93 H. K. Chaturvedi and S. Bhattacharya, ‘On the Change in Standard of Living of the Jute Mill Workers of Jagaddal between the Years 1941 and 1945’, Sankhya: The Indian Journal of Statistics (1933–1960), vol. 8, no. 4, 1948, pp. 361–365.
94 GOB, Municipality, Proceedings B, 44–46, File M-1P-4, December 1904, WBSA; GOB, Municipality, Proceedings B, 150–153, File M-1P-3, February 1905, WBSA.
95 Arup Maharatna, The Demography of Famines: An Indian Historical Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 23.
96 HSS Annual Report, 1943, p. 3.
97 Ibid., p. 6.
98 From emergency hospitals, it cremated 4,820 bodies. In 1943, the total number of bodies that the Samity cremated totalled 9,280. HSS Annual Report of 1943, p. 6.
99 Lieutenant Colonel E. Cotter, the public health commissioner of Bengal, remarked, ‘what had occurred was a breakdown of social and economic life of a large portion of Bengal’s population’. Evidence of Lt. Col. E. Cotter, Public Health Commissioner of Government of India to Famine Inquiry Commission, Nanavati Papers, August 1944.
100 HSS Annual Report, 1943, p. 8
101 ‘Fifty-Four Starvation Deaths: In Calcutta, Tales of Distress from Districts’, The Times of India, 27 September 1943, p. 6.
102 The Muslim population fell from 497,535 in 1941 to 305,032 in 1951. The Hindu population increased from 1,531,512 in 1941 to 2,125,907 by 1951. These numbers also meant that about 131,000 Muslims left Calcutta between 1941 and 1951, and 433,288 displaced Hindus came in Calcutta Municipal Area. A larger displaced population of Hindus—624,164 persons—were in the suburbs. The area under Calcutta Municipal Corporation remained the same during this time. See A. Mitra (ed.), Census of India 1951. Vol. VI, Part III (Calcutta City: Government of India Press, 1954), p. xvi.
103 HSS Annual Report, 1948, p. 1
104 HSS Annual Report, 1951, p. 4
105 Ashok Mitra, Calcutta on the Eve of Her Tercentenary (Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1990), p. 110.
106 Pasmanda, meaning ‘the one left behind’, refers to lower-caste Muslims. J. Seabrook and I. A. Siddiqui, People Without History: India’s Muslim Ghettos (London: Pluto Press, 2011), p. 9. On the Pasmanda anti-caste movement, see Khalid Anis Ansari, ‘Revisiting the Minority Imagination: An Inquiry into the Anticaste Pasmanda-Muslim Discourse in India’, Critical Philosophy of Race, vol. 11, no. 1, 2023, pp. 120–147, https://doi.org/10.5325/critphilrace.11.1.0120.
107 Amitangshu Acharya and Sudipto Sanyal, ‘Six Feet Under’, Live Mint, 25 November 2018, https://www.livemint.com/leisure/3npybjyh0d04sqxine2cck/six-feet-under.html, [last accessed 13 September 2025].
108 See, for example, concerns around mismanagement in Dhapa during Covid: Madhuparna Das, ‘Videos of Bodies Dragged for Cremation Emerge in Kolkata, Police Say Not of Covid Victims’, The Print, 11 June 2020, https://theprint.in/india/videos-of-bodies-dragged-for-cremation-emerges-in-kolkata-police-say-not-of-covid-victims/439969/, [accessed 9 January 2026].
109 ‘Questioning the Choice of Dhapa for Covid Deaths’, 29 April 2021, https://x.com/RATANKU21342615/status/1387898620540690435, [last accessed 2 May 2022].
110 Chattopadhyay, ‘What Researching Cremations of the Dead in Colonial India Taught Me’.