As India debates on cadavers, did you know that Kolkata exported 60,000 to 65,000 human skeletons annually?

Humour has the disguised power of making reality known in the most casual of ways. It can reveal to you your biggest mistake and darkest past, all the while making you laugh. In a country like India, where stand-up comedy has become a form of entertainment that spans across generations, every skit gets the internet talking.

Recently, a comment made by a doctor on a live show hosted by comedian Pranit More had the internet clutching its pearls. Sejal Pawar, a doctor posted at Mumbai's KEM Hospital, spoke about anatomy-related experiences involving cadavers and claimed that she and her colleagues would compare the sizes of the male cadavers' private parts. What ensued was a backlash with viewers calling the comment deeply insensitive and disrespectful towards body donors.

As the country continues to debate about sensitivity and respect, one is reminded of how sometimes new comments can scrape over old wounds. Not many know that once upon a time Kolkata exported about 60,000 to 65,000 human skeletons and skulls annually all over the world.

Kolkata's dark past

Skeletons are not easy to get. In most countries across the world, corpses receive a prompt burial. Thus, for 200 years, India's bone trade followed a route from remote Indian villages to the world's most distinguished medical schools. Often, they arrived without the informed consent of their former owners and in violation of the laws of their country of origin.

As per reports, the trade in human skeletons can be traced back to the British colonial period. During this time, the demand for anatomical models in medical colleges across Europe and North America was high, since companies in the West could no longer find enough bodies in Britain to satisfy the local demand and foreign export.

Thus, in British-ruled Calcutta, a London company found a ready supply of not only skeletons but also Doms, India's keepers and handlers of the dead. This meant robbers excavated bodies from Indian cemeteries which were then processed and prepared for export, often through Nepal. These were mostly unclaimed human cadavers left by hospitals, cemeteries and graveyards and dug by professional grave diggers from Bengal, Jharkhand, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

One notable company that rose in work and profit despite government interventions was the Young Brothers, a Kolkata-based firm founded in 1980. The company marketed itself as a leading producer and supplier of medical education and training models, including skeletal materials. In 1991, the LA Times, wrote about Bimalendu Bhattacharjee, whose family sold human skeletons to the outside world for nearly half a century. Numerous Calcutta families earned tens of millions of dollars for years, selling the skeletons to universities and high schools in the West.

The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, United Kingdom, houses 213 human remains of Nagas which in 2023 were initiated to be repatriated back to India. These remains were taken under duress and not given the due ritual of burial or treated with dignity, but were taken for research purposes.

The export of human skeletons from India continued even after independence in 1947. It is estimated that Kolkata exporters traded almost $1.5 million worth of skeletons just before the trade was officially banned in 1985. The Chicago Tribune reported that 60,000 skulls alone were shipped from Kolkata and over 40 years, from 1947 to 1985, about 2.4 million Indian skeletons and skulls were exported.

The first government ban on this above-board trade came in 1976, during the Emergency under former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The ban came in response to complaints from neo-nationalists who regarded the entire process as degrading and from Calcutta's Muslims who bury their dead and feared theft. Finally, it was in 1985 that a national hue and cry about the process led to a complete and official ban on it with the workers being given jobs at hospitals and medical colleges by the government.

Even recently, students at the Johannes-Sturmius-Gymnasium in Schleiden, Germany, gave their biology class skeleton a formal burial after discovering it was a real person's remains, likely a woman from India. The skeleton had been used for anatomical studies in the biology department since 1952, when the school bought it.

Thus, when you talk about cadavers, more like joke about them, being a doctor and an Indian citizen, one must know that the country's past involves the cries and search of many families who were never able to find the bodies of their loved ones, because they had been stolen and exported outside. Rather than imagining their body parts, one must imagine what their lives must have been like and how they turned up on a medical table to be dissected by future doctors and joked about by some.