In a piece published in the Eastbourne Herald on November 21, 1953, a certain Mrs H.C. Bowker in her address to the Eastbourne Auxiliary of the British and Foreign Bible Society, rued the fact that despite the Bible being translated into 26 Indian languages and certain parts of it into 30 others, about 100 odd languages, still remained untouched. This she elucidated meant lesser penetration into the Indian heartland. She had after all served as a missionary in Eastern India and was now the secretary for the society, looking after the women’s wing in an area “two and a half times the size of Great Britain”.

She admonished the people who are given to thinking that the “Indian people are slow” because when it came to politics, they really were not, she believed. Her main concern however, was summed up in the byline: Bible or Karl Marx for India: Ex Missionary’s Advice to Local Auxiliary.

Eighty per cent of the literature circulating in India, she professed, was communist, and unless they stepped up to the task and supplied them with Bible the poor Indians would all take to reading Karl Marx. In one particular Indian state, she suggested, St Mark’s Gospel sold “like hot cakes” because the poor Indians mistook it for Marx’s writings. This particular incident is not only interesting for the paranoia that the image of Marx seemed to evoke in certain circles of 1950s Britain and still continues to, but also because of the fear that Marx would win over India.

Mrs H.C. Bowker of the Bible Society was perhaps not entirely aware that Indians had taken to Marx in a big way since the 1917 despite the Bible having arrived much earlier. Ramakrishna Pillai’s biography of Karl Marx had been published in 1912 and M.N. Roy’s Communist Party had been founded in 1919. Marx may have made his first humble appearance on the Indian stage in the early 1900s though. He was mentioned in a journalistic piece in the Amrita Bazar Patrika in 1903, reproduced from an English article on the Rise of foreign socialists. This has been revealed by the painstaking research of Joshi, Damodaran, Hardayal, Pillai et al.

The reception of Karl Marx’ writings in the Indian languages are a complex narrative but the Indian interest in Marx the man has increased steadily since translations of his works and influences of the Bolshevik Revolution were felt in Indian literature. For those influenced by Marx’s ideas during school or college days, a trip to London today, would remain incomplete without travelling to Highgate.

Highgate is home to one of London’s “magnificent seven”, one of the seven garden cemeteries created as an alternative to overcrowded parish burial grounds. Highgate cemetery is the third oldest among them. For the uninitiated, this is the final resting Karl Marx. Highgate has served as a pilgrimage spot for many Indians. While an exact number of the Indian visitors cannot be ascertained it would be safe to presume that Highgate cemetery receives more visitors than the India House set up by Syamji Krishnavarma, also at Highgate. The latter had hosted the likes of Madan Lal Dhingra, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Mahatma Gandhi at this very place. In fact it was at India House where Gandhi met Savarkar and may have decided to eke out a path for India’s independence markedly different from the one espoused by Savarkar.

Post 1907, Savarkar was firmly in charge of India House. Today a replica of 65 Cromwell Road (India House) stands tall in Mandvi Taluk, Kutch, Gujarat, named Shyamji Krishnavarma Memorial. Highgate therefore, should in any case have served as an interesting pilgrimage spot for Indians in search of places of Indian resistance in the metropole. India house should have been popular to history buffs and enthusiasts interested in anti-colonial struggles the world over. Does this have something to do with the popularity of emancipatory maxims which are Universalist as opposed to particularist ones with racial overtones? We can only guess.

However, Highgate cemetery became so well known since Marx’s burial here that people who identified with his ideas began to find a burial place somewhere close to him. Perhaps with the hope that the day a proletarian revolution came to the shores of what was once the Fleet and the spectre of Marx would arise from his grave, and shout out to fellow comrades who lay buried close by. From Claudia Jones, Mansoor Hekmat and Yusuf Mohamed Dadoo to Eric Hobsbawm recently, many lifelong Marxists chose Highgate as their final resting place. This part of the cemetery is the resting place of atheists, agnostics, humanists, rationalists, with the epithets the deceased favoured etched on their headstones.

Marx’s journey from Trier in Germany to London, Britain, had not been an easy one. At Deans Street, Soho, the squalor had been astounding for Jenny, as was the exorbitant rents they were paying (22 pounds annually for two small rooms), the equivalent of which would have fetched them modest accommodation in Germany. The young Marx who had been quite the Bohemian in the universities of Bonn and Berlin, was possibly for the first time facing a multi-ethnic immigrant situation, with many of his neighbours steeped in debt. After his death on March, 14, 1883, he was laid to rest three days later at Highgate, in the same grave as his wife Jenny, 15 months ago.

For the person who would be hounded by creditors a major part of his life, to be buried at Highgate could have raised eyebrows. It was after all a profit making venture in Marx’s time. 18,325 pounds is the average cost of a burial at Highgate today, according to funeralbooker.com, making it the costliest in UK. Engels is said to have stepped in and purchased the small plot by the side path where first Jenny, then Marx, then Harry Longuet their grandson, and finally Helena Demuth were buried. Two important things happened since then. Running Highgate was not profitable anymore in the 20^th century and by 1970s the owners locked it up and left for good. A charitable trust “Friends of Highgate Cemetery” established by something akin to modern-day crowd funding, finally took over its operations and restored it’s lost glory. The charity is in charge of it to this day. The second important thing which has since happened has been the revival of interest in Marxism. As a result, the footfall has only increased since that fateful day in March, 1883.

Eleven mourners were present on the day of the funeral at Highgate on March, 17, 1883. About 200 people had gathered during the inauguration of Marx’s memorial on March, 14, 1956, 73 years after his death. Palme Dutt, Harry Pollitt and others had led the gathering. The monument by sculptor Laurence Bradshaw was funded out of the Marx Memorial Fund set up by the Communist Party of Great Britain, and remains one of the major attractions of Highgate cemetery.

A tabloid newspaper the Daily Express happened to come up with a scoop in November 1954 that the Marx family grave was exhumed and the remains of the four re-interred in the new tomb this time with Eleanor Marx’s ashes as well. Whatever the veracity of this, Highgate has continued to welcome more visitors riding high on the popularity of the bearded philosopher interred here.

Marx’s monument, often vandalised in the past, has in many ways ensured the survival of cemetery which has been cash strapped on many occasions in the past. In June, 1968, as part of anti-Vietnam war protests, then student leaders Karl Dietrich Wolff, Tariq Ali and Daniel Cohn-Bendit sang the Internationale in front of the Marx Memorial, surrounded by their supporters.

On March 14, 1983, 100 years to his death, close to a thousand people turned up at Highgate which included a group of 120 young communists having walked all the way from Trier, the city of Marx’s Birth in then West Germany. Highgate is also the final resting place of Douglas Adams, Mary Ann Cross (George Eliot), Michael Faraday, among others. Across the Road from the East cemetery is the West which has accessible only by guided tour and is captivating, with Victorian architectural delight at every step.

One wonders what would have happened had Marx died exactly a year later. It would have been possible to cremate him as Dr William Price had cremated his first born child on March 14, 1884 for the second time. This time legally, albeit after a dramatic trial at Cardiff , post which cremation was declared legal. What would have happened to the modern pilgrimage around the site of his burial had Marx been cremated? Engels had after all been cremated in August, 1895, as per his wishes, at Britain’s first custom built crematorium in Woking.

The pilgrimage in that case, it may be safe to presume would have found other places associated with his eventful life, other areas for spontaneous high-pitched Internationale every year on March 14. His name and work have after all endured through the ages, as Engels had suggested in his speech by the grave of his friend in 1883. In March, 1883, wreaths and telegrams had come in from the London Communist Workers’ Educational Society, Petrovsky Agricultural Academy, Russian Socialists, French Workers’ Party, Spanish Workers’ Party, etc.

In the Guardian report from 1956, exactly 73 years after his death, on the day of the inauguration of the Marx monument at Highgate, wreaths are mentioned to have come in from the Bulgarian people, the Romanians, the Czechs and the Russians, beside the London district committee of the Communist Party. The offerings at Marx’s grave even today represent diverse cultural associations.

Rohit Dutta Roy is a Doctoral Scholar, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge.

Rohit Dutta Roy