Charting a passage to India

PARK STREET Cemetery in central Calcutta, or Kolkata as it is now known, is a good place to encounter the Irish who once served in the British army in India, including many who were employed as petty officials in the centuries before Indian independence.

Yet a stroll through this and other Christian cemeteries throughout India shows the extent to which the Irish were involved in the subjugation and colonial administration of India. Nowadays, Park Street Cemetery is a haven of peace in a city of 15 million inhabitants, the thirteenth largest city in the world, and India’s fourth largest. It is also a place with headstones bearing names like Hennessy, Kane, Hopkins, Ward, Walsh and Montgomery.

I met Ronnie Jones at his atmospheric auction rooms on Calcutta’s throbbing Park Street one sunny Saturday morning last November. Ronnie’s maternal grandfather, Richard Loane, was born in Cork, had joined the British army in Ireland, and arrived in Calcutta some time in the early 1920s, and married his wife Gladys shortly afterwards.