Guwahati: The small Catholic community in Guwahati, which is worried over an acute scarcity of burial place, will observe All Souls’ Day at the two cemeteries in the city on Monday.
An estimated 3,000 Catholics in the city share the Navagraha cemetery with the Baptist community, where there is space crunch. The other cemetery at Chenikuthi, which is reserved only for the Catholics, is a 134-year-old graveyard and is caught in a decade-long legal battle.
All Souls’ Day or Commemoration of All the Faith Departed in Catholicism is observed as a day praying for the dead and praying for God’s grace for the mercy of the souls. With the city witnessing an increase in the population of Christians and fast shrinkage of open space, Catholics here are worried that in the near future the present burial spaces in the two cemeteries would fast deplete, The Times of India reported.
A pending land dispute has brought all restoration work, which includes giving the old graves a facelift, construction of a small chapel, fencing of the cemetery compound, planting of trees in Chenikuthi cemetery, to a halt.
“The Catholic community has not been provided with any alternative. The Chenikuthi cemetery is one of the oldest in the Northeast. An attempt was made in the last decade to declare it as a heritage site. For more than a century the catholic community here has been burying their dead here. It is up to the court to decide the matter,” said Allen Brooks, a Catholic and member of the State Minority Commission.