The Tomb and the Tome
a film by Swagata Ghosh
The Tomb and the Tome is a short documentary chronicling the journey by generations of Indians to the resting place of the first of India’s true moderns Raja Rammohun Roy, who died in Bristol of meningitis in the early hours of September 27, 1833.
A little book records some among the thousands who have been inspired to make this pilgrimage over a century and a half. Now closed and preserved for posterity, it is a record like no other. The film is a tribute to those who came before us.
The Tomb and the Tome was first screened at the Raja Rammohun Roy Commemoration at Arnos Vale Cemetery, Bristol in September 2015.
Relics of the Raja
In the 1830s, a growing resistance was building around Bristol’s flourishing slave trade. An unlikely Indian visitor to the city suddenly became the mascot of this resistance. Two centuries on, this visitor from India, Raja Rammohun Roy, continues to be relevant to the questions of our time.
Roy spent his final two years in the UK before his death in 1833, during which time he was much admired for his learning, and for his social reformist projects which became a symbol of contemporary social movements to end servitude. His admirers included abolitionist groups for whom, in life as in death, he became a powerful symbol of the argument against the white supremacist thinking that sought to justify the slave trade.
Relics of the Raja was first screened at Roy’s annual commemoration programme in September 2014 at the Arnos Vale cemetery, Bristol.
Bristol remembers Rammohun Roy
Every year on the last Sunday of September, groups of people from various parts of Britain, many of them with roots in Bengal, India, assemble at Arnos Vale cemetery in Bristol. They gather around an elaborate stone Indian style chattri monument, in remembrance of Raja Rammohun Roy, who lies buried in this tomb. Roy, often described as ‘the father of modern India’, was a philosopher, author, religious reformer and social activist who spent the last three years of his life in England as the emissary of the Mughal emperor at the court of William IV, before his sudden death in 1833.
The Brahmo Samaj, the Indian reformist religious movement of which he was the founder, lives on today as part of his rich legacy. This film was commissioned for the Indian government’s 180th anniversary programme to commemorate Roy’s death and was first screened at the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, Kolkata, India, in October 2013. Swagata was a speaker at the event in Bristol and also collaborated in the making of the film.
Swagata Ghosh 