Cemetery off Shankarseth Road in Pune

The newspaper story of 1998 brought out by Harshawardhan, about the discovery of an abandoned 19th century British cemetery off Shankarseth Road in Poona (Pune), prompted me to look for it in Google Earth and Wikimapia.org. Way back in the late 1960's I lived for 4 years in a housing society called Mira Society that lies a stone's throw away from Shankarseth Road and the cemetery. Shankarseth Road and the Dhobi Ghat (Washermen's Place) were on my daily route, though I never suspected the existence of a cemetery near the Dhobi Ghat.

You can see this place on Google Earth at coordinates 18 30 05.43 N and 73 52 33.09 E. It is actually labeled as Dhobi Ghat in Wikimapia. It lies to the left of the large open space called Golibar Maidan (Firing Ground). (Building No 1, Mira Society lies just a little lower down, though no KR Bora lived there at the time I was there.) The Office of the Controller of Defence Accounts (Officers) or CDA(O), whose task is to maintain pay accounts of all Army Officers (numbering more than 30,000), lies just to the south of Golibar Maidan. Near it is a small cluster of Army-owned buildings called 'Separated Families Accommodation', given to families of
officers serving in remote areas.

It is easy to see why the Dhobi Ghat is where it is. To the East and South lie the cantonments of Poona. Officers and others living there needed clothes-washing services of dhobis (washermen). The Mutha Right Bank Canal, taking off from the old Khadakwasla Dam at the foot of the Sinhagad Fort, crosses the Shankarseth Road near the Golibar Maidan. The canal is clearly seen in Google Earth and Wikimapia. Availability of this water brought the Dhobi Ghat here. Golibar Maidan too is where it is as the soldiers living in the Cantonment needed a large empty ground for their firing practice. This entire area, full of residential and office buildings today, was totally empty till the 1950. The entire length of Shankarseth Road was taken up by a couple of Film Studios, which have since then disappeared.

The name of Shankarseth given to the road is also evocative of the Raj. It was unusual for the Raj days to name a street after a native, but an exception was made for Shankarseth, surely because he was a 'loyal progressive native'! Jagannath Shankarseth (Nana as he was affectionately called) was a rich person who lived in Girgaon, where his house still stood till the 1950's, just outside the Fort area of Bombay. He was the undisputed leader of the native community in the 1850's and was a well-known philanthropist and social reformer. He was also one of the founders and a
Director of the GIP Railway. His is one of the faces adorning the columns in the Main Hall of the Victoria Terminus in Bombay (now called Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus or CST, recently seen the terrorist attack. (See the portion '100 years of Victoria Terminus,Bombay in the webpage http://www.irfca.org/articles/vikas/stamps.html ). His large sitting statue in marble is kept at the entrance of the Asiatic Society's Library in Bombay. The square in Girgaum called 'Nana Chowk' is an important landmark of old Bombay and is named after Nana Shankarseth as he lived in the vicinity of that spot. (Hardly anyone knows - indeed cares for - this small detail!)

He is remembered by the young generation of today for the prestigious prize called 'Shankarseth Scholarship' given to the student who scores top marks in Sanskrit in the Secondary School Certificate Examination. This scholarship is now more than ahundred years old. With the diminishing of the importance of Sanskrit (like the Classics in the Western countries) this scholarship has lost some of its glamour, though in earlier times it was the ambition of every bright student appearing for the High School Final certification examination to become the Shankarseth Scholar of his year. Among several such scholars who distinguished themselves in later life, was Sir Chintaman Deshmukh (C.D. Deshmukh as he is now known) of the ICS. He was the first Indian Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, prior to 1947. After independence he was Nehru's Finance Minister for a few years before his differences with Nehru on granting Bombay to Maharashtra when linguistic states were created in 1956 led to his resignation.

All these stray thoughts came to me when I read the newspaper piece about the cemetery and I have noted them down in the hope that the Listers will find them informative.