Polycoloniality: European Transactions with Bengal from the 13th to the 19th Century 9789389812558, 9789388271417

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In memory of my mother

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Acknowledgements A project like this, especially one that has been in gestation and in continuous accumulation of more and more information for more than a decade, has so many people and organisations to thank for it, that I do not know where to begin—whom to thank first. Let me offer my foremost thanks not to an individual person, but to an internet concern, archive.org, whose making available all kinds of rare and old books, and the most-difficult-to-track of sources, ready at one’s fingertips has made a study like this possible. I am deeply grateful for two grants that I received for conducting research on ‘polycoloniality’—the University Grants Commission Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst - Project-based Personnelexchange Programme (UGC-DAAD-PPP) grant for the project ‘Polycoloniality in India: Cultural Transactions with Europe from Early Modernity to the 19th Century’, executed at the Georg-AugustUniversität Göttingen, Germany, 2014–2016; and the Marie Curie International Research Exchange Scheme of the European Union: ‘SPeCTReSS’ (Social Performances of Cultural Trauma and the Rebuilding of Solid Sovereignties) Grant, for the project ‘From Cultural Trauma to Transnational Transactions: Polycolonial Translations in South Asia, with Focus on Bengal’, executed at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland, 2017–2018. Next, I thank Professor S.P. Ganguly, retired Professor of Spanish at JNU, whose invitation to me in January 2009 to present a paper at his conference on ‘Multiculturalism: Spanish and Indian Scenario’, set me off on the path to trace, to begin with, the Portuguese legacy in Bengal, which soon took the form of a full-blown study of ‘polycoloniality’ involving the other non-English colonial presences in Bengal too. In the decade that has passed by since then, during which a stray query took the form of a veritable obsession and which now has taken the shape of this book, I have been fortunate to have had the company of several amazing academic friends from all over the world, who ix

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have all had some role in the shaping of this book, by virtue of either being collaborators with me on projects under whose aegis this work has been done, or having been hosts who have invited me to share the ideas contained in this book at their fora, thus having helped me incubate what had been only a germ 10 years back. I thank Neelam Srivastava of Newcastle University, UK; Claire Joubert of Université Paris-8, France; Antonia Navarro-Tejero of the Universidad de Córdoba, Spain; Joe Duggan of the Postcolonial Theology Network, University of Manchester, UK; Joachim Küpper of Freie Universität Berlin, Germany; Shuchi Kapila and Tim Arner of Grinnell College, Iowa, USA; Mark Brett of Whitley College, Melbourne, Australia; Esther Mombo of St Paul’s University, Limuru, Kenya; Barbara Schaff of the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany; Madhu Benoit and Susan Blattes of the Université Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble, France; Laura Izarra of the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil; Tomasz Bilczewski of the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland; and, last but definitely not the least, Isabel Karremann, earlier with the Julius-Maximilians-Universität, Würzburg, Germany, and now with the Universität Zürich, Switzerland. They have all provided me with platforms to research on and articulate the ideas contained here at different stages of its preparation; this book would not have been possible without them. I particularly thank Ambika Tandon, who interned with me for a brief in 2015 and procured much of the data and material that I have put to use here. I am deeply thankful for her help on this project. I also thank three of my former students for their specific inputs that have found place in this book: Oeendrila Lahiri for sharing with me much of her work on Dutch Chinsurah, and Nawazish Azim and Abdul Hamid for being associated with me on the UGC-DAAD-PPP project mentioned above, and for giving me numerous insights towards my thinking of polycoloniality. I thank all my former and current colleagues and students at the Centre for English Studies, JNU, for being such wonderful company, intellectual and otherwise, and it is because of them that the desire for doing academic work still persists.

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A special note of thanks goes to the team at Bloomsbury India, without whose tireless efforts this book would not have seen the light of day. I particularly thank R. Chandra Sekhar, Publisher, Academic Books, for pushing me into writing this book, and thereafter bearing with me most patiently when I missed countless deadlines. I also thank Shreya Chakraborti, Editorial Manager, and her team, for meticulously copy-editing the manuscript and giving it its current form and shape. And, finally, I thank Simi, who has borne with me through thick and thin for all these years, and without whom this book would definitely have not been possible.

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Introduction Two major problems beset many current enquiries into erstwhile European colonialism, or, what is generally known as ‘postcolonialism’, as also the traditional historiography of colonial periods that precede it. The first problem in theorisations on colonialism is that colonial encounters are often seen as ‘mononational’, with the colonial history of a particular colonised nation being primarily ascribed to a single master colonising nation, for example, England for South Asia, and especially for Bengal. This is obviously factually wrong, and as many know, and as I would show in detail in the chapters to follow, several European colonial powers were at work simultaneously in Bengal; from the 16th to the 19th centuries, parts of Bengal were colonised not by the English alone, but by the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, the Danish, the ‘Germans’ (Flemish agents of the Austrian empire, and representatives of the Prussian kingdom, to be precise), the Swedish and the Greeks too. Further, traders and travellers from other European nations, like the Italians and the Russians, would also visit Bengal regularly, the earliest such contact being probably towards the end of the 13th century, and the travels peaking in the 15th and 16th centuries. It is to address the erroneously and unduly Anglocentric colonial history of Bengal and the postcolonial commonsense that emerges therefrom, that this book intends to take us through pre-English and extra-English European contact with Bengal—both from travellers who wrote about Bengal and/or passed through it from the 1290s to the 1500s and from the actual colonisers in Bengal. Talking about the non-English European colonial powers operational in Bengal and to give an approximate dateline for them, one can note the Portuguese (1512–1797; de facto in Bandel with some formal administrative powers well into the 1800s; in some parts of India from1498 till 1961), the Dutch (1623–1825; in some parts of India from 1606), the French (1673–1950; in some parts of India from 1668 till 1954), the Danish (1698–1845; in some parts of India from 1620 till 1868), the Austrians (1723–1794), the Prussians (1753–1760), 1

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the Swedes (1731–1811),1 and the Greeks (c.17th century–?).2 To have a comparative frame of reference, one can note that the English, who I do not discuss in this book on purpose, had their first colony in Bengal from around 1650. My primary objective in this book is to precisely build a case for this—what I call the ‘polycolonial’3—situation in Bengal, where there were multiple European colonial powers operating simultaneously, mostly in contestation with each other in their scramble for a piece of the Bengal pie, from the 16th to the 19th century. Elsewhere, I have simply defined ‘polycoloniality’ in the following words: The term ‘polycolonial’ refers to a situation where multiple imperial powers are in the process of simultaneously vying to colonise the same tract or nation or continent – as was the case in early modernity with the Portuguese, the Spanish, the English, the Dutch, the French, the Danish, etc., concurrently colonising parts of Asia, Africa, the Americas. (Bhaduri 2018, 155)

Here, I wish to delve into this concept much deeper and look in detail at the diverse activities of the non-English European functionaries, summarily tracked above. While narrating the same, I also wish to build up a case for the deployability of this concept in the broader cultural politics of today, one that involves not just setting some factual inconsistencies in earlier historiography right but also develops the  he Swedish did not have a colony or enclave in Bengal, but had a company, the Swedish T East India Company (or Svenska Ostindiska Companiet in Swedish, or SOIC), which carried out colonial trade in Bengal. The dates given here are of the company being founded and it getting bankrupt, and thus the maximum possible range of dates of its trade with Bengal. While the Swedes did not have a formal settlement in Bengal, there were Swedish settlers there, including some important ones. See for details, sections in Chapters 5 and 6 in this book. 2 The Greeks had settled, as a trading community, in and around Calcutta by the 17th century, and stayed on well into the 20th century and had a formal colony or enclave at Rishra. However, details about this colony are difficult to come by and its dates cannot be cited with any certainty. See my discussion of Greeks in Bengal in Chapter 5 in this book. 3 I cannot claim the term ‘polycolony’ (or its derivatives) as a neologism coined by me, as it has been used almost in its current sense, in the context of China at least as early as Jack Chen’s Inside the Cultural Revolution, where it is defined as ‘a colony of several powers’ (1975, 23), and more recently in the context of the Americas by Amy Turner Bushnell, who talks about ‘polycolonial histories of early modern America’ (2002, 4). However, this term and concept has been used by me in the context of South Asia, almost exclusively and extensively in a sustained manner from 2009 onwards. 1

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concept along the lines of the ethics of the plural, the multiple, the hybrid and the many. This would lead us to the second problem that besets much of colonial historiography and postcolonial commonsense. More often than not, the coloniser/colonised duo is seen as an irreconcilable binary, with each conceived of as the very ‘other’ of the other, promoting a hostile and rather Manichean model of coloniality. However, as I would show in this book, probably because of the multiplicities and the resultant slippages and fissures within its plural fabric, polycoloniality allowed for very fruitful and often hospitable, rather than hostile, hybridising transactions between the coloniser and the colonised, and decolonising possibilities also arose as a result of these interactions. The second objective of this book is thus to show that while we tend to look at colonialism and cultural projects within the same in fairly contrarian terms, colonial encounters and transactions have often proved to be productive of the very discourses that would move towards the colony’s undoing, and this, in Bengal, has been an outcome, to begin with, not of the English and their colonial practices, but of the polycolonial experiences of Bengal in the colonies of the other European powers. This book thus intends to explore—in the context of Bengal’s encounters with Europe from the late 13th century through travellers, but more specifically after the advent of colonial powers in the 16th century—how the multiple colonial players in the Bengal of the early 16th to the mid-19th centuries contributed verily and variously to the matrix of a pluriformal, heteroglossic, and productive polycoloniality. The objective is, however, not to just set right a few inconsistencies in historical commonsense. More importantly, if the objective of studying history is to appropriate its lessons to understand the present, attempts to view erstwhile coloniality in monologic or dualistic terms prove useless in theorising contemporary neo-imperialism or globalisation, wherein one encounters a continuously implicated hybridisation in the multinational world order. For instance, it is our staid mononational understanding of erstwhile imperialism that forces a lot of critical discourse to erroneously ascribe the very complex polymorphous ‘glocal’ project to a mono-model ‘American imperialism’, thereby very

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clearly missing its multiplicitous object of critique. My submission is that postcolonialism, because of its reliance on a mononational understanding of colonialism and imperialism, has failed to deliver the vocabulary and critical tools required to properly understand contemporary multinational new-imperialism, and we have failed to suitably deal with this new world order, because of our reliance, in anti-colonial critique, on this baggage of mononationally founded ‘postcolonial’ theory. At another level, along with new-imperialism, another problem that is increasingly troubling the world today is that of new-fascism. All over the world, more and more people are turning sectarian, identitarian, communal and fundamentalistic, and networks of mutual hatred are driving the human race to the brink of self-annihilation. My submission again is that postcolonialism— with its build-up of Manichaean discourses of hostility amongst races and peoples, its construction of itself often around the discourse of victimology that feeds on narratives of past expropriation and exploitation that breeds the possibility of retributive reaction, and its reliance on nationalism as a tool of articulation of resistance— fails to combat the evil of identitarianism that plagues us today, and in fact, often ends up fanning the fire. The point that I wish to make, and which I articulate more succinctly in the Conclusion later, is that ‘polycoloniality’ as a concept, since it looks at imperialism and colonialism from a multinational perspective, and since it talks about plurality, hybridity and hospitality, allows for a theoretical framework that can prove to be more apt in handling both these problems—newimperialism and new-fascism— that we need to contend with today. Thus, while the immediate points being made in this book are that in Bengal there were multiple rather than single colonial presences and that these powers, far from repressing and suppressing native articulation, could actually be credited for its very beginnings, the more important meta-point is to generate a model of viewing imperialism from a collaborative multinational perspective, which would prove beneficial in theorising our contemporary states of multinational capitalism, globalisation, new-imperialism and emergent fundamentalism, sectarianism and communal fascism better. The third and final objective of this book is thus to rid theorisation on imperialism

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of much of its jingoistic insularities, to rethink postcolonialism in a way, and prepare it more aptly to take on the cosmopolitics of the current multinational, multicultural, hybridised, globalised, and yet deeply vivisected, communalised and sectarianised world. Before I move on to giving a chapter-by-chapter account of the book to follow, let me give a brief summary of the history of the English in Bengal, especially because I leave them out of its scope completely, primarily due to the rhetorical argument I make against the inaccurate and undue Anglocentric mononational construction of the colonial history of Bengal to pitch a stronger bid for polycoloniality, but without at least a brief mention of whom, the polycolonial saga I narrate will not be fully ‘poly’. Though the first Englishman to visit Bengal was Ralph Fitch, who came to Hooghly in around 1585, and whose account of the place I discuss in Chapter 1 below, and though in December 1600, the East India Company was incorporated by a royal charter, English attempts to secure trade concessions from the Mughal Empire in Delhi failed in spite of repeated attempts in 1617, 1620, 1621 and 1632, and the English were relatively late in arriving on the polycolonial scene of Bengal. It was only after the expulsion of the Portuguese from Hooghly by the Mughals in 1632, and the subsequent elbowing of the Dutch, that the English East India Company could have a foothold in Bengal, when in 1650, the English established a factory at Hooghly and in December that year, James Bridgeman was sent with three assistants to establish a settlement there. By 1657, the English had other establishments in the area—at Balasore, Kasimbazar and Patna, and the Hooghly factory was made the head agency in Bengal for all these subordinate agencies. Soon, however, Hooghly was made subordinate to Madras as it suffered humiliating defeats in the hand of the Mughal governor of Bengal in 1661 and 1662. In 1668, the Bengal Pilot Service was inaugurated as the English began to undertake the pilotage of the river Hooghly, for which the other Europeans—the Portuguese, the Dutch, and soon the French—had to become dependent on the English in navigating the Hooghly upstream. In 1679, the Bengal Factories were recognized and the trading came under the general control of the Chief and a Council of Four at Hooghly, and in 1681, they were made independent of Madras, and William

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Hedges was appointed Agent and Governor of the factories in Bengal. They finally got a farman or permit from Aurangzeb to govern the area the next year (in 1682), but being refused the permission to build a fort at the mouth of the river Hooghly by the Mughals under the governor of Bengal, Shaista Khan, in 1685, the Company requested King James II to permit the use of force against the Mughal army. One Admiral Nicholson was sent with ships to Chittagong with plans to conquer and fortify that, till recently Portuguese, port city, and proceed next to conquer Dhaka, the then capital of Bengal. It was to help this expedition that Job Charnock, an old Bengal hand, who was in charge of the company’s trade in Bengal from 1658 to 1680, but by then was stationed in Madras, was directed to join it with 400 soldiers from Madras. Charnock, apparently by mistake, reached Hooghly instead, but beaten by the troops of Shaista Khan on 28 October 1686, had to retreat further downstream to Sutanuti, where he reached on 20 December 1686. Having liked the place immensely because of an Armenian post being already there and its proximity to pre-existing centres like the Portuguese trading post of Betor and the Dutch post of Baranagar, and also due to the natural defence the area offered with the river to its west, canals to its north and south, and marshlands to its east, Charnock thought of this place as being appropriate to build the English capital in Bengal, and from January 1687, repeatedly sought permission from the Mughal emperor, through the governor of Bengal, to build fortifications there. These permissions were serially denied by Shaista Khan, who instead, on 16 August 1687, allowed Charnock and the British to settle and build fortifications in Uluberia, a few kilometres southwest of today’s Kolkata. Shaista Khan retired in 1689, and his successor Ibrahim Khan, as the governor of Bengal, was somehow more sympathetic to Charnock’s persistence (as indeed by then the cooperation of the British was required for the safe passage of Mughal mercantile vessels off India’s west coast), and finally the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb issued another farman, with which Charnock returned to Sutanuti on 24 August 1690 with 30 soldiers, and hoisted the Royal Standards of England there, ‘founding’ the English city of Calcutta. After Charnock’s death in January 1692 (or January 1693, since the British followed the Julian calendar till 1752, and the new year

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beginning in March, January 1692 may actually be January 1693 as per the current Gregorian calendar), in 1696, his son-in-law Sir Charles Eyre started work on constructing the fort, Fort William, so named after the then British King William III, and on 10 November 1698, formally leased three contiguous villages—Sutanuti, Kalikata and Gobindapur—from the landlord Sabarna Roy Choudhury, to build the city of Calcutta around the fort. In December 1699, Eyre was appointed the first President and Governor of Bengal, formalizing English colonial rule. In 1699, however, a new English Company was formed, duly constituted under the name of ‘The English Company Trading to the East Indies’ (Census of India 2011, 12), and its President and Agent made his headquarters at Hooghly, independent of the establishment at Calcutta. The two rival companies were amalgamated in April 1702, when orders were sent to the President to quit Hooghly and retire to Calcutta, which was done in 1704. Though Calcutta became the new headquarters, the English kept up their designs on Hooghly, leading to frequent conflicts with the Mughal faujdar there. In June 1756, threatened by the sheer size of the fort and the adjoining city at Calcutta, and disturbed by the frequent troubles caused by the English at Hooghly, the last independent Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-daula, attacked Calcutta, conquered it, and briefly renamed it Alinagar. In retaliation, English troops, under the leadership of Major General Robert Clive, fought the Nawab’s army, wrested Calcutta back by February 1757, and in the decisive Battle of Plassey, defeated Siraj-ud-daula on 21 June 1757, to formally establish English colonisation in practically the whole of Bengal, in the process taking over, temporarily though, the other European colonies that lay in its way too. The rest, as we all know, is history (Census of India 2011, 12–13). Let me now move on to a brief description of the chapters that follow. The first chapter, ‘European Travellers to Bengal from the 1290s to the 1500s’, looks at travellers from ‘early modern’ Europe who came to Bengal and wrote about the place before the polycolonial game for control over Bengal would begin in earnest, thus forming almost a preface to polycoloniality. The chapter begins with the Italian Marco Polo (1254–1324), who may or may not have actually visited

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Bengal (though he certainly visited other parts of the subcontinent— Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Sri Lanka, the Coromandel coast, the Malabar coast, and right up to today’s Gujarat and Sindh—in 1292), but writes a whole chapter about it all the same: Chapter XLV of Book II of his The Travels of Marco Polo (1298–1299). If Marco Polo did visit Bengal, this would have been in or a bit before 1290, the period to which the accounts of this book belong, making him the oldest of the ‘modern’ Europeans to visit Bengal, and even if he did not, and wrote the description only on the basis of received accounts, it still is the oldest such account. The chapter, after a detailed discussion of Polo’s account of Bengal, considers another Italian, John of Montecorvino (1247–1328), who travelled up the Coromandel coast of India, by some accounts even up to Bengal, and wrote a letter about the same on 22 December 1292, a letter that the chapter discusses. The chapter then moves on to discuss in detail the writings of two more Italians— Nicolo Conti (1395–1469), who travelled up the river Ganges from its mouth to northern India and then via the mountains to the mouth of the Ganges again, and thus twice through Bengal, in the 1430s, and narrated his travelogue, The Travels of Nicolo Conti, in Latin ([1444] 1492); and Ludovico di Varthema (1470–1517), who came to Bengal in 1505, and wrote an elaborate travelogue about his visit, The Travels of Ludovico di Varthema (1510), which was also translated readily into all major European languages, including English. Thereafter, the chapter mentions other European travellers who came to other parts of India, in the 14th and 15th centuries—the French Jordanus Catalani, the Italian Odoric of Pordenone, the Italian Giovanni de’ Marignolli, the Russian Afanasy Nikitin, and the Englishman John Mandeville—but does not discuss them in any detail, because they did not come to or write about Bengal. Instead, the chapter moves on to discuss two more travellers to Bengal—Duarte Barbosa (1480–1521), the first Portuguese to visit Bengal in the 1510s and write about it in his Book of Duarte Barbosa (1516); and Ralph Fitch (1550–1611), the first Englishman who visited different parts of Bengal from 1585 to 1586 and wrote about the same in his famed travelogue composed after his return to London in 1591. The choice of Ralph Fitch may seem odd, considering I have deliberately chosen to keep the English out, and in any case, he came a

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bit late to Bengal, but I thought including the very first Englishman to reach Bengal and write about it would be an interesting episode to the prologue to polycoloniality that this first chapter is. The second chapter, ‘The Portuguese in Bengal’, traces the history of Portuguese colonial activities in Bengal from the 1510s onwards. Though the Portuguese, referred to in Bengali as firingi or hārmād,4 could set themselves up in Bengal only by the 1510s, the chapter begins by noting how Vasco da Gama and his successor Albuquerque had already been writing about Bengal. The chapter notes how the first Portuguese mercantile contact with Bengal was made in 1512–1513, when a Portuguese trader, Martin Lucena, arrived by land route from the Indian west coast and became a resident at Gaur, the then capital of Bengal. While the first maritime mercantile contact happened in 1516, the first formal mercantile expedition happened in 1517 when João Coelho, a member of the team sent directly by King Manoel, reached Chittagong, and the first military expedition happened when Lopo Soares, the governor of Portugal’s holdings on the Indian west coast sent a fleet of four ships which conquered Chittagong on 9 May 1518 and renamed it Porto Grande (grand port). The chapter discusses in great detail, which need not be repeated here, how the Portuguese spread rapidly to different parts of Bengal, and in 1536–1537, Sultan Ghiyasuddin Mahmud Shah of Bengal permitted the Portuguese to set up another colony at Satgaon, around 50 kilometres north of today’s Kolkata, which they renamed Porto Pequeno (small port). The progressive silting of the Satgaon port led the Portuguese to look for alternate locations, including at Betor in Howrah in the suburbs of today’s Kolkata, and in May 1578 they obtained a farman or permission from the Mughal emperor Akbar, resulting in the official establishment of their colony of Ugolim or Hooghly, a few kilometres east of Satgaon, in 1579. Soon, however, the prosperity of Hooghly invited the later Mughal emperor Shahjahan’s attention, and his army laid siege on the city on 20 June 1632 and captured it three months 4

The word firingi, probably derived from the word ‘Frank’, and often generically used to refer to all white foreigners in India, was the more benign way of referring to the Portuguese; the word hārmād, derived from ‘armada’ on the contrary primarily referred to the Portuguese in their malign avatar as pirates, brigands and slave-traders.

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later on 13 September. In spite of the rout, the Portuguese clergymen were permitted by Shahjahan, through another farman in 1633, to have control of Bandel, just north of Hooghly, and Bandel continued to be an autonomous Portuguese-governed territory at least till 1797, and they exercised certain powers in Bandel till as late as 1869. While this was in western Bengal, in eastern Bengal the Portuguese had control of their Porto Grande Chittagong, of course, but also of other places like Sandwip and Dianga, but here, constant skirmishes with the kingdoms of Arakan and Tripura, the local Bengali chieftains, and the Mughal emperor, did not allow the Portuguese to build a stable colony. They led their lives through sporadic bouts of piracy and brigandry, and were practically ousted from the Bengal delta region in 1665 by Shaista Khan’s army, after which they established newer colonies more inland in Sripur, Bakla and Chandecan, and also retired to more sedentary lives in places like Firingee Bazaar in Dhaka. The chapter discusses all this in detail, as it also does the minor Portuguese settlements, both in western and eastern Bengal, and the architectural heritage left behind in Bengal by the Portuguese, primarily through churches. The chapter concludes by mentioning the immense contribution of the Portuguese in the areas of multiculturalism, education and the development of Bengali language, primarily through print, they being pioneers in the field, promising to discuss the same in detail in the sixth chapter. The third chapter, ‘The Dutch in Bengal’, looks at the Dutch or the Olondāj5 colonial enterprise in Bengal. The first Dutchman to pass through Bengal was the merchant and historian Jan Huyghen Van Linschoten in the 1580s; the chapter begins with a discussion of his account of Bengal in his travelogue Itinerario, published in 1596. The chapter then moves on to the history of the establishment of various Dutch trading companies, leading to the formation of the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), or the United East India Company, in 1602, and the Netherlands having its first Indian colony in Petapauli in southern India in 1606. Explorations to Bengal started by 1615; in

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 londāj, a close phonetic rendering of the word ‘Hollandaise’, is an alternate name for O the Dutch in the languages that Bengal would have first heard of them and thus this name has stuck on.

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1622, the Dutch commander, Jan Cornelisz Kunst, was sent to Bengal with a fleet of three ships to explore the possibility of trade relations there, and around 1623, VOC established a colony at Chinsurah, just south of Hooghly, and soon at several other parts of Bengal like Kasimbazar, Malda, Dhaka, Rajshahi, Falta, Mirzapur in Burdwan, and Baranagar in the north of what would soon become Calcutta. After the ouster of the Portuguese from Hooghly in 1632, the Dutch obtained a new farman from the Mughals in 1634 to administer Hooghly, but Chinsurah, where they erected the Fort Gustavus by 1656, became their chief colony. Anglo-Dutch conflicts began from the end of the 17th century itself, but truly worsened by the mid-18th century, and the English army comprehensively defeated the Dutch in the Battle of Bedara of 1759 and captured all their holdings in Bengal. Though the English later returned the Dutch territories, including Hooghly– Chinsurah, they had practically become like English vassals, and Baranagar was formally ceded to the British in 1795, and the Dutch colony of Hooghly–Chinsurah notionally survived until 7 May 1825, when in pursuit of their interests in Indonesia, they ceded it to the British in lieu of Bencoolen in the island of Sumatra through the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London, March 1824. The chapter narrates this history in great detail but also puts focus on the Dutch architectural heritage still left behind, primarily in Chinsurah, and it ends on the more promising note that though the Dutch had been rendered into mere notional rulers of small enclaves in Bengal, it is they who presented Bengal with a whole new mode of visual arts—the DutchBengal school of painting, the first college in Bengal—the Hooghly College established in 1812, and the first press and type foundry in Bengal, leading the print revolution in Bengali, all of which is again stated to be discussed in Chapter 6. The fourth chapter, ‘The French in Bengal’, is about the French—or Farāshi6 in Bengali—colonial presence in Bengal, which actually lasted till 1950, that is for three more years after the English left India in 1947. The first Frenchmen to have come to Bengal were the travellers Vincent 6

 arāshi is a fairly close phonetic rendering of ‘Français’ as the French would call F themselves.

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Le Blanc, who visited the elusive ‘Towne of Bengale’, Chittagong and Satgaon around 1575, and wrote his posthumously published travelogue The World Surveyed (1648), and François Pyrard de Laval, who passed through Chittagong in 1607, and wrote his travelogue The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval (1611). The chapter begins with a detailed discussion of the account of Bengal in these two travelogues. Colonially speaking, the French had their first mercantile voyage to India as early as 1527, but it was only in 1642, that La Compagnie française des Indes orientales or the French East India Company, was formed, and they could first set up trading posts in Surat in western India, with a farman from Aurangzeb, only in 1668, and could have their first stable colony in Pondicherry, under François Martin, only in 1674. Someone called Duplessis was the first French entrepreneur to come to Bengal in 1673, and he built a warehouse and stayed up to 1676 at Chandernagore, a few kilometres south of Chinsurah on a tract of land given to him by the nawab of Bengal, Ibrahim Khan, in 1674. The French officially established a colony in Chandernagore in 1688, after François Martin, the Commissaire of Pondicherry, sent his son-in-law André Deslandes on 30 August 1688 to explore possibilities. In January 1693, Deslandes received a farman from Aurangzeb to administer the area, and in 1701, the Fort D’Orleans was constructed there. Additionally, the French also established five lodges (‘loge’ in French) at Cassimbazar, Jugdea, Dhaka, Balasore and Patna, the last two technically being now in Odisha and Bihar, and not in Bengal. Chandernagore rose to its height of prosperity with Joseph François Dupleix, who was the governor from 1731 to 1741. Soon the Anglo-French war broke out and the British captured Chandernagore on 24 March 1757, but by the 1763 Treaty of Paris, Chandernagore was returned to the French on 25 June 1765, which, barring a few more years here and there when the English took control over Chandernagore, they administered till 2 May 1950, when through a referendum, an overwhelming majority of Chandernagorians decided to join the Union of India. The chapter reports all this in great detail, concentrating particularly on how, during the French Revolution, Chandernagore had also revolted and declared itself free, leading to its eventual grant of the Constitution in 1791, and voting rights to all citizens, including the Indians. The chapter also discusses the French

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architectural legacy in Chandernagore and closes with the promise of discussing in Chapter 6 the greatest contribution of the French in providing Bengal with urban public spheres, with revolutionary spaces, with a democratic form of governance, with social reforms, etc. The fifth chapter, ‘The Other Colonial Europeans in Bengal—the Danes, the “Germans”, the Swedes, the Greeks’, deals with the final set of Europeans to have come to Bengal with colonial intent and contributed to its polycolonial fabric—the Danish, the ‘Germans’ (technically the Austrians, primarily represented by Belgian or Flemish agents, and the Prussians), and, to a lesser extent, the Swedish and the Greeks. This chapter looks first at the Danish, known as Dinemār in Bengali, attempts at colonisation in parts of Bengal. The Danes started their trading activities in India when King Christian IV of DenmarkNorway founded the Dansk Østindisk Kompagni or the Danish East India Company, by a letter patent issued on 17 March 1616. While the Danish set their first colony in Tranquebar in southern India in 1620, their arrival in eastern India was in 1625, when Robert Crappe, the chief of the company, set up two factories at Pipli and Balasore, both in today’s Odisha. On 20 May 1673, they obtained a general permission, and on 5 August 1676 a special permission to trade in Bengal, but the Danes did not ever have a formal imperial farman. It was only in 1698 that they were permitted by the Mughal governor Azim-usShan to set up a factory at Gondalpara, a couple of kilometres south of Chandernagore, which they renamed Danmarksnagore, and held till 1714 when they had to abandon it, and which could be restored to them only through another special permit from the Mughal Emperor Muhammad Shah dated 11 March 1721. The Danish company never received a proper farman, and had to give up their holdings in Bengal in 1728, till, again on 15 July 1755, Alivardi Khan, the nawab of Bengal, permitted them, under one Soetman, to settle at Serampore, around 20 kilometres south of Gondalpara, which they built up like a colony and named Frederiksnagore after King Frederick V. In 1772, the Danish-Norwegian crown took over the colonies in India, and Colonel Ole (Olav) Bie was appointed the first crown-regent of Serampore in 1776; Serampore greatly progressed under him, with it becoming the hub of missionary activities in Bengal from 1785 onwards, due to its

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demi-colonial status. In 1845, Serampore was ceded by the Danish to the British, though they held on to the Nicobar Islands (in the Bay of Bengal, called Frederiksøerne by the Danes) till October 1868, when they sold them too to the British. The chapter describes all this and more in great detail also bringing into focus the Danish architectural legacy in Serampore, much of which, including the Denmark Tavern Hotel, has been renovated lately. Out of the two sets of ‘German’ (known as Ālemāni7 in Bengali) companies, the Austrian Companies, based in Ostend, were primarily operated by Flemish merchants. The oldest of these companies was the Ostend Company, or in Flemish, the Oostendse Compagnie, or Generale Indische Compagnie, which was chartered by the Austrian Emperor Karl VI (Charles VI), on 17 December 1722. It established its first colony in Covelong or Kovalam on the southern fringes of Chennai, and in 1723, with assistance from the French, procured permission from the then Nawab of Bengal, Murshid Quli Khan, to build a factory in Bengal at Banquibazar (Bankibazar) and Hydsapour (today’s Ichapur), a contiguous area on the east bank of the Hooghly, in the Ichapur and Palta region, just north of today’s Barrackpore. They held on to this colony off and on with the Ostenders being driven out of their colony in 1733 and in 1744, but they returning again and again to it and gaining a second lease of life in the 1770s under the new Austrian East India Companies set up in Antwerp and Trieste, founded by Willem Bolts. Thus, the Austrians held on to Bankibazar till 1794, though in a rather unstable way. The other ‘German’ colony was a result of the King of Prussia, Frederick the Great or Friedrich der Große having annexed East Friesia and the port town of Emden in it by 1744, and establishing the royal Prussian Asiatic Company in Emden to Canton and China (Königlich Preußische Asiatische Compagnie in Emden nach Canton und China) in 1750 to trade with China, and the Bengal Company of Emden (Bengalische Handelsgesellschaft) in 1753. It was through the latter that, in spite of stiff opposition from the Bengal Nawab and the other European powers already in that belt, the Prussians had their colony in Bengal, usually referred to as 7

Ālemāni is the Bengali phonetic equivalent for ‘Allemagne’, the French word for Germans.

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the ‘Prussian Gardens’, around today’s Bhadreswar, just south of Chandernagore, which they held for a very short period from around 1753 to 1760. The Swedish, the next European power that this chapter discusses, did not have a settled colony in Bengal but undertook colonial trade with Bengal under the Swedish East India Company (Svenska Ostindiska Companiet or SOIC) founded in Gothenburg on 13 June 1731, after many abortive attempts. They conducted trade with China and Bengal under four different Octroi-s, and in spite of getting offers to set up a colony in India, they chose to retain their itinerant maritime status. The last European settlers discussed in this chapter are the Greeks, who settled as a trading community in Bengal probably in the 17th century itself, concentrated in the major cities of Kolkata and Dhaka, while also having a settlement at Rishra, around five kilometres south of Serampore. The description of the Greeks in this chapter focuses less on their trade and their colony at Rishra, and more on their cultural and political life, about their consolidation in Calcutta of their own freedom struggle back home, their legacy left behind in the form of the Greek Church and Greek Cemetery in Kolkata, the Greek Monument in Dhaka, and Sister Nectaria Paradisi, the last of the Greeks still living in Kolkata, etc. The chapter, thereafter, briefly mentions three non-European communities—the Armenians, the Chinese and the Jews—who also settled in significant numbers in colonial Bengal, but since they are not Europeans, to whom this book restricts itself, they are not discussed in any great detail. The chapter closes with the promise, as in all the other chapters, to discuss in Chapter 6, the monumental contribution made by the Danish in setting up the first university of Bengal (actually of the whole of Asia) in Serampore, and their bringing about the entire print revolution in Bengal through their Serampore Press; the role that the German Willem Bolts and the Swedish Johann Zacharias Kiernander played in the development of the press in Bengal; and the role the Greeks played in fomenting a decolonising revolution in Calcutta. This is followed by the sixth and final chapter, ‘The Impact of Polycoloniality’, the longest chapter of the book, which argues that Bengal’s tryst with ‘colonial modernity’ was indeed a polycoloniality-

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induced affair, where the non-English colonial presences, rather than the English, took the lead. It identifies seven registers through which a people may be thought to have got initiated into ‘colonial modernity’: (1) exposure to the possibilities of cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, hybridity and diaspora, (2) systematic initiation of institutionalised ‘western’ education, particularly higher education, (3) an indelible impact on language and literature, (4) introduction of print culture, (5) a defining influence on art and culture in general, of both the high and popular sort, including material culture like food practices, (6) introduction of ‘progressive’ social reforms, often in defiance of traditional practices and (7) the induction of the paradoxical possibility of resistance and revolution, leading to decolonisation itself. The chapter argues, with illustrations, that on all these fronts, the English seemed to have lagged behind the other European players in the polycolonial field of Bengal. It shows how in all the seven registers, the polycolony took the lead over the English: (1) the Portuguese and Dutch Hooghly–Chinsurah–Bandel, the French Chandernagore, etc. became true cosmopolitan ‘cities’ much before Calcutta, and even Calcutta was not an English invention but a filling-up of spaces already marked by the Portuguese, the Armenian, and the Dutch, exposing Bengalis to diasporic possibilities and hybridity, (2) in Bengal the first schools for children were Portuguese, the first college was Dutch, and the first university was Danish, all set before the English would venture into any of these, (3) in terms of creating new linguistic repertoires for Bengali, the Portuguese influence on the Bengali language was prior to and much greater than English, (4) all the early activities involving Bengali print were Portuguese, Dutch, French, German, or Danish, and even Swedish affairs, and the English started much later, (5) in culture, in the domain of visual arts, there was the Dutch-Bengal school of painting; in the domain of performing arts, proscenium theatre was initiated in Bengal by a Russian; popular and subcultural forms mostly had French influence, and the Portuguese impact on Bengal’s material food culture is undeniable, (6) social reforms like abolition of slavery and sati, and political reforms like introducing Bengal to electoral democracy and selfgovernance were all started in Bengal by the French in Chandernagore much before the English, (7) the inculcation of a revolutionary and

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potentially decolonising spirit in the Bengali psyche was due to the French and Greek involvement with revolutions in Bengal and due to Chandernagore’s emergence as a city of refuge, where revolutionaries could go in hiding and consolidate further rebellious activities. The chapter, after detailing all these, especially through a very detailed account of the print history of Bengal, closes with a discussion of a few interesting personalities in this polycolonial saga. The first is Zamor (1762–1820), a Bengali who participated in the French Revolution. And the next is a set of three true embodiments of polycoloniality— the Russian polymath Gerasim Stepanovich Lebedev (1749–1817), the Portuguese or Luso-Indian performance poet in Bengali Hensman Anthony or Anthony Firingi (1786–1836), and the Luso-Indian poet, academic and radical activist Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809– 1831)—without whom the Bengal Renaissance or Bengal’s brush with colonial modernity is inconceivable, thus highlighting once again that Bengal’s initiation into ‘modernity’ was not an English influence, but a result of its polycolonial encounters with the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, the Danish, the Germans, the Swedish and the Greek. Finally, there is a ‘Conclusion’ which questions as to why, in spite of the facticity of all the points made in all the chapters, and as to the Bengal experience being fully polycolonial, a commonsensical understanding of the history of colonial Bengal still suggests that the English were the only colonisers of consequence in Bengal, and credit Bengal’s initiation into ‘colonial modernity’ to the English influence on its people. This final section to the book argues that there is the need for an alternate colonial historiography of Bengal, one that is ‘polycolonial’ in content and intent, and reiterates further the objectives of this book, and concludes with the presumption that the presentation of this treatise on polycoloniality might well constitute a move towards such an alternate template, that will prove much more efficacious in understanding and dealing with the problems that beset our world today, which postcolonial commonsense, with its mononational biases, is not able to suitably comprehend. So much for an ‘introduction’ to the book. Now let the chapters speak for themselves, as I present this book, on polycoloniality, to the readers, and ask them to savour its contents and judge it for themselves.

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References Bhaduri, Saugata. 2018. ‘Polycolonial Angst: Representations of Spain in Early Modern English Drama’. In Theatre Cultures within Globalising Empires: Looking at Early Modern England and Spain, edited by Joachim Küpper and Leonie Pawlita, 150–159. Berlin: De Gruyter. Bushnell, Amy Turner. 2002. ‘The First Southerners: Indians on the Early South’. In A Companion to the American South, edited by John B. Boles, 3–23. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Census of India, West Bengal. 2011. Series-20 Part XII-B: District Census Handbook: Hugli – Village and Town Wise Primary Census Abstract (PCA). Kolkata: Directorate of Census Operations West Bengal. Available at: http:// censusindia.gov.in/2011census/dchb/1912_PART_B_DCHB_HUGLI.pdf (accessed on 24 November 2019). Chen, Jack. 1975. Inside the Cultural Revolution. New York: Macmillan.

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European Travellers to Bengal from the 1290s to the 1500s This chapter intends to study the writings of travellers from early modern Europe who would have come to Bengal and written accounts of the same, much before the colonial enterprise of various European nations—the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, the Danes, and to a lesser extent the Germans, Swedes and the Greeks—would begin in earnest in Bengal. This chapter will take us through the voyage of some travellers and their travelogues, starting (somewhat dubiously) from the 13th century, but mostly belonging to the 15th and 16th centuries, restricting the set to only Europeans and only to those who would have come to, or at least written about, Bengal. The first ‘modern’ European to talk about Bengal was the Italian Marco Polo (1254–1324). He, in Chapter XVII to XXXIII of Book III of his The Travels of Marco Polo the Venetian (1298–1299), describes his journey, around 1292, in the Indian subcontinent—from Andaman and Nicobar Islands to Sri Lanka, to the Coromandel coast, along the Malabar coast, and right up to today’s Gujarat and Sindh (Polo [1298–1299, 1908] 1914, 347–388)—but there is no mention of Bengal here. It is however in his Book II that Marco Polo mentions Bengal (or Bangala) several times, with an entire chapter—Chapter XLV: ‘Of the Province of Bangala’—devoted to the place; apart from this, it is also referred to in Chapter XLII in terms of Kublai Khan’s (referred to as the Grand Khan) battle in 1272 with the King of Mien (today’s Myanmar) and Bangala. The descriptions pertain to a period preceding 1290 when Polo left Kublai Khan’s court and are thus definitely the earliest ‘modern’ European references to Bengal, though it is doubtful whether Marco Polo really visited Bengal, or based his account on what 19

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he heard about the place from other sources, presumably belonging to the Khan’s court. In Chapter XLII of Book II, Marco Polo shows how ‘in the year 1272 the grand khan sent an army into the countries of Vochang and Karazan’ (252) and When the king of Mien and Bangala, in India […] heard that an army of Tartars had arrived at Vochang, he took the resolution of advancing immediately to attack it, in order that by its destruction the grand khan should be deterred from again attempting to station a force upon the borders of his dominions. (253)

though it is the Grand Khan’s army which finally emerges victorious. There is no historical evidence of Kublai Khan’s army ever having fought a battle with any king of Bengal, but as the editor of the version I am referring to points out, the battle could have been only with the Burmese king of Mien, who ‘might at that period have styled himself king of Bangala as well as of Mien, from the circumstance of his having conquered some eastern district belonging to Bengal’ (Footnote 2, p. 253), which is quite likely given the contiguity of Myanmar and parts of eastern Bengal. Bengal thus being invoked in this chapter only by extension, let me not go into details of the battle, and instead move on to Chapter XLV of Book II, where Marco Polo indeed gives an account of proper Bengal. As Marco Polo says, ‘The province of Bangala is situated on the southern confines of India’ (260), the southerliness here definitely being relative to Marco Polo’s familiar terrain of China rather than there being any confusion about this referring to some place in southern India erroneously identified as Bengal. Polo has a brief comment to make about the language of Bengal—‘It has its peculiar language’ (260)—but he focuses more on the religious customs and the scholarly class of the region—‘The people are worshippers of idols, and amongst them there are teachers, at the head of schools for instruction in the principles of their idolatrous religion and of necromancy, whose doctrine prevails amongst all ranks, including the nobles and chiefs of the country’ (260). Marco Polo also mentions the food habit of the people of Bengal: ‘The inhabitants live upon flesh, milk, and rice, of which they have

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abundance’ (260), and stresses particularly on the primacy of trade in the region: ‘Much cotton is grown in the country, and trade flourishes. Spikenard, galangal, ginger, sugar, and many sorts of drugs are amongst the productions of the soil; to purchase which the merchants from various parts of India resort thither’ (261). Marco Polo also draws our attention to the slave trade in Bengal, particularly to the prisoners of war who are castrated and sold as prospective guards of princely harems in other kingdoms: They likewise make purchases of eunuchs, of whom there are numbers in the country, as slaves; for all the prisoners taken in war are presently emasculated; and as every prince and person of rank is desirous of having them for the custody of their women, the merchants obtain a large profit by carrying them to other kingdoms, and there disposing of them. (261)

While the descriptions are quite apt and suit late-13th-century Bengal, there are serious doubts about whether Marco Polo ever visited Bengal, or even its northeastern and eastern limits bordering China and Myanmar, in person, and therefore we have to search further to identify who the first ‘modern’ European was, to have actually come to Bengal, while also having written about the place. A claimant to such a description is often presumed to be another Italian, John of Montecorvino (1247–1328), who is thought to have visited the east coast of India at least till Mylapore (in today’s Chennai) and probably up to Bengal, and to have written a letter about the same on 22 December 1292,1 which is certainly the earliest ‘written’ account on India by a ‘modern’ European; Marco Polo’s period of visit may have preceded Montecorvino’s but his written account saw the light of day only in 1298–1299. The pioneering nature of Montecorvino’s visit is noted by James D. Ryan, in his 1993 article ‘European Travelers 1

 he letter states that it is written ‘on the 22nd day of December in the year of our Lord T MCCX (CII or CIII)’ (Montecorvino [1292] 1993, 67), and the editor, Henry Yule says in his footnote, ‘The date in the MS. at Florence is obscure, but M.CC.X ... at least is legible. […] John left Tauris in 1291, and on his way passed, thirteen months in Southern India. Hence the date is doubtless M.CC. XCII or M.CC. XCIII. It is worth noting that as Marco Polo, if Rashid’s statements quoted below be exact, could not have been later than 1292 in visiting Maabar on his way westward, the two Italian travellers may have met in that region’ (67). The date of the letter has thus been taken as 22 December 1292 in this study.

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before Columbus: The Fourteenth Century’s Discovery of India’, where he says, The first of these missionaries to visit India […] seems to have been John of Montecorvino, who left Rome in 1289 with a sheaf of papal letters, to open the China mission. […] Although India had long been included in the list of lands to which missionaries were sent, there is no evidence that Westerners visited the subcontinent before John, or that they had any substantial knowledge concerning India or its peoples. (1993, 652)

However, there are serious doubts about whether John of Montecorvino also really visited Bengal. While some sources do mention him having come to Bengal, more specifically ‘Meliapore in Bengal’,2 this is, in all probability the result of confusing the name of the sea (Bay of Bengal, many places on whose coastline Montecorvino did visit, and on whose coast is Mylapore, almost certainly what Meliapore refers to in today’s Chennai where St. Thomas’s tomb is located, and which he definitely visited), with the name of the province. Confusion also arises because the letter is signed as ‘This letter was written in MAABAR, a city of the province of SITIA in Upper India’ (Montecorvino [1292] 1993, 67), and the sheer mention of ‘Upper India’ has made people speculate that he would have travelled further up the east coast, with the names ‘Maabar’ and ‘Sitia’ also leading to some speculation as to whether these could be higher up the east coast, and even in Bengal. However, Montecorvino clearly mentions in his letter an ‘Upper India, which is called MAEBAR, in the territory of St. Thomas’ (61), suggesting that for him ‘Upper India’ and ‘Maebar’ or ‘Maabar’ connoted territories around today’s Chennai, with ‘upper’ being just a relative term vis-à-vis the coastline. Commenting on the place names Maabar and Sitia, the editor Henry Yule says, The ‘Province of Sitia’ is named by no other traveller that I know of. The island or peninsula of Ramisseram was, however, called Sethu, 2

S ome web sources like Wikipedia and New World Encyclopedia state ‘Travelling by sea from Nestorian Meliapore in Bengal, he reached China in 1294’ (https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/John_of_Montecorvino; and https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/ Giovanni_da_Montecorvino), but these are not very reliable sources, and the mention of Bengal in Montecorvino’s itinerary is probably because of the confusion of the name of the sea with the name of the place as explained.

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‘The Bridge’ or Causeway, from which the chiefs of the adjoining territory of Ramnad or Marawa derived their title of Sethupati or ‘Lord of the Bridge’, and perhaps this name is disguised under the form Sitia. (Montecorvino [1292] 1993, Footnote 2, p. 67)

Thus, Maabar and Sitia could refer to places as south as the Gulf of Mannar and the towns Ramnad (today’s Ramanathapuram) and Rameswaram adjoining it, rather than any place further up the Indian east coast, or in Bengal. In fact, the northernmost point on the east coast of India that Montecorvino mentions in his first letter and which is thus the northernmost town in India that he certainly visited is ‘Siu Simmoncota’. He says that the first port on the Indian coast that he had reached is called Minibar (probably Malabar), and: […] then 300 miles between east and south-east from Minibar to Maabar, which (latter however) you enter steering to the north; and from Menabar [Maabar?] you sail another 300 miles between northeast and north to SIU SIMMONCOTA. The rest I have not seen, and therefore I say nothing of it. (65)

The location of this Siu Simmoncota is doubtful; however, the northernmost point on the Indian east coast—as Yule speculates albeit in ruling it out—is Samulcotta (today’s Samalkota near Visakhapatnam in northern coastal Andhra Pradesh), which in the 1780s became an important place in India’s transactions with colonial modernity by virtue of the gardens set up and the botanical experiments carried out there by William Roxburgh. But this is nevertheless more than 1,000 kilometres away from what would qualify as Bengal. Thus, as fascinating as it would have been to have Europeans visit Bengal in the 13th century itself and write about it (and while Marco Polo, whether he visited Bengal in person or not, would have at least certainly written about the place), Montecorvino probably did neither, and I will desist from discussing further the contents of his 1292 letter referred to above, because the descriptions therein, in all probability, pertain to coastal regions in today’s Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, rather than to Bengal. Further, since his writings are not substantial, and as Ryan says, ‘it had little apparent impact in Europe’ (1993, 655), I will instead focus

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on two more Italians—Nicolo Conti (1395–1469), who travelled, among other places, up the river Ganges from its mouth to northern India and then via the mountains to the mouth of the Ganges again, and thus twice through Bengal in the 1430s, and wrote his travelogue in Latin ([1444] 1492); and Ludovico di Varthema (1470–1517), who came to Bengal in 1505, and wrote an elaborate travelogue about his visit in 1510, which was also translated readily into all major European languages, including English—whose writings on their visits to Bengal would have created sufficient impact on the European imagination of the place. I deliberately leave out Ibn Battuta (1304–c.1368), who visited Chittagong (Chattagram) and Sylhet in eastern Bengal in 1345, and wrote about the same in fair detail in his travelogue, A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling (1355), because though the first early modern ‘westerner’ (Ibn Battuta was from Tangiers in Morocco, just off the coast of southern Spain) to certainly visit Bengal and write about it, he cannot be considered a ‘European’, to whom alone I restrict this study. Many European travellers came to India between the four Italians mentioned above, that is between the late 13th and early 16th centuries, and wrote travelogues, but since none of them, presumably, came to Bengal, the place to which I have restricted myself, they are not relevant here, though one can list the most important amongst them: the French Jordanus Catalani or Jordan of Sévérac (c.1280–c.1330), who in his Mirabilia (1329–1338, probably the earliest full-length ‘modern’ European travelogue mostly on India), describes his experiences on the Indian west coast from Baluchistan to Cochin (Kochi), and particularly Thane near today’s Mumbai, in the early 1320s; the Italian Odoric of Pordenone (1286–1331), whose travels (along with his companion, James of Ireland, the first person from the British Isles to set foot in India) from West Asia to Thane and to Quilon (Kollam) and Mylapore, and then to East Asia around the 1320s is documented in his The Travels of Friar Odoric: 14th Century Journal of the Blessed Odoric of Pordenone; the Italian Giovanni de’ Marignolli (1290–c.1359), who visited southern India in 1346, and wrote about it in his Chronicles of Bohemia (1355); and the Russian traveller Afanasy Nikitin (c.1433– 1472), who visited western and inland southern India between 1466

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and 1472, which he chronicled in his travelogue, A Journey beyond the Three Seas (published posthumously in 1489). Also to be noted is that the first Englishman to have apparently travelled to and written about India is Sir John Mandeville, whose The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (1357–1371) includes accounts of his travels to India in Chapters XVIII and XIX, though his authenticity is often doubted. The above would be a fairly comprehensive list of major European travellers who came to India (though not to Bengal) between Marco Polo and Ludovico di Varthema and wrote about the same. The list becomes more numerous after that with formal colonial interactions and diplomatic relations causing numerous Europeans to visit and write about India (and Bengal) from the beginning of the 16th century, and therefore I will refrain from discussing them here. However, here, I will take up for study two more early modern European travellers who visited and wrote about Bengal—Duarte Barbosa (1480–1521), the first Portuguese to write about Bengal, which he visited in the 1510s, in his Book of Duarte Barbosa (1516); and Ralph Fitch (1550–1611), who visited different parts of Bengal from 1585 to 1586, and wrote about the same in his famed travelogue composed after he returned to London in 1591, making him officially the first Englishman to visit Bengal and write about it—because these two accounts have direct relevance to the issue of polycoloniality in Bengal, being the first as such by people of nationalities charged with a colonial project in Bengal. Thus, in the remainder of this chapter, I will take up for discussion, one after the other, the accounts of Bengal given by Nicolo Conti, Ludovico di Varthema, Duarte Barbosa, and Ralph Fitch, and hope to frame through them a good preamble to the more proper study of polycoloniality in Bengal to follow. Nicolo Conti (1395–1469), a Venetian from a noble family, was a resident of Damascus as early as 1429; he started his eastward journey from there and later returned to Venice in 1444. From Damascus, Conti travelled overland to Persia and then took a boat to India. The first Indian port that he reached was Cambay (Khambat in today’s Gujarat), from where, after travelling through other towns of south-central India, ‘he arrived at the great city of Bizenegalia’ (Conti [1444, 1857] 1994, 6), which is surely Vijayanagar; from there, after passing through a few

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more towns of southern India on his way, he ‘arrived at a maritime city which is named Malepur […where] the body of Saint Thomas lies honourably buried in a very large and beautiful church’ (7), which is surely Mylapore. He continued his journey via the island of Zeilam (Ceylon/Sri Lanka) to the island of Sciamuthera (Sumatra), where after spending a full year, he sailed northward ‘leaving on his right hand an island called Andamania’ (8), and after a few days ‘entered the mouth of the river Ganges’ (9), thus beginning his Bengal journey. I reserve an account of Conti’s description of what he encounters specifically in Bengal for a bit later and instead resume recounting his journey further upstream. As the travelogue runs, ‘Having departed hence he sailed up the river Ganges for the space of three months, leaving behind him four very famous cities, and landed at an extremely powerful city called Maarazia’ (10), which the editor R.H. Major identifies with Mathura (Introduction, lxiv),3 and then having ‘taken the route towards some mountains situated towards the east’ (10), which would certainly be the eastern Himalayas, he returned to Bengal. From there, he proceeded on to Racha, which Major identifies as Aracan (Arakan/ Rakhine in today’s Myanmar), and having passed through what seem to be parts of Myanmar, Thailand, southern China, and Java, he sailed back to the southwest coast of India, to Coloen (Quilon/Kollam) in the province of Melibaria (Malabar). He visited the usual towns of Malabar next—Cocym (Cochin/Kochi), Colanguria (Kodungallur), Calicut (Kozhikode), etc.—from the last of which he left India for his homeward journey, and via Sechutera (Socotra), Ethiopia, Gidda (Jeddah) and Egypt, returned finally to Venice. As the travelogue says, ‘At length, after so many journeys by sea and land, he arrived in safety at his native country, Venice, with his two children’ (21). The returning to Venice with ‘two children’ must appear surprising, but as it is stated, at least when Conti was in Java, he ‘remained here for 3

 his identification, in my opinion, is extremely doubtful. Not only is there not sufficient T phonetic resemblance between Maarazia and Mathura, the latter is not even on the river Ganges, and does not have mountains towards its east. An alternate, and a more convincing view suggests it could be any princely state in upper Bengal or Bihar, with ‘Maarazia’ being a corruption of ‘Maharaja’, the title of the prince, with which Conti may have conflated the name of the city itself (Sale et al. 1759, Footnote G, p. 125).

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the space of nine months with his wife and children, who accompanied him in all his journeys’ (16). The text further says, ‘He afterwards travelled through the desert to Carras, a city of Egypt [Cairo], with his wife and four children and as many servants. In this city, he lost his wife, and two of his children, and all his servants by the plague’ (21). This is why he was left with only two children when he returned to Venice. It must have been fascinating for an Italian to travel through all these countries with his wife and children, which would have posed its own hazards too, as is evident in the reason behind one of the most curious features of the travelogue—that it is narrated in the third person, which has a story to it which runs thus. It is because of the safety of his wife and children that Conti had to convert to Islam in Egypt. As we are told, when, on his return from India, he had arrived at the confines of Egypt, on the Red Sea, he was compelled to renounce his faith, not so much from the fear of death to himself, as from the danger which threatened his wife and children who accompanied him. (3)

When he reached Venice, Conti sought absolution from Pope Eugene IV for this conversion, and the Pope’s only condition was that he narrate everything about his adventures to the papal secretary, who wrote it all down in Latin. As Major points out, As he had been compelled, in order to save his life, to renounce the Christian religion, he besought absolution for his apostasy from Pope Eugene IV. That pontiff granted his petition, merely requiring of him as a penance that he should relate his adventures to Poggio Bracciolini, the Pope’s secretary. The latter wrote them in Latin. (Introduction, lx)

Thus, the whole narration is Bracciolini’s reportage of Conti’s narration, and therefore it is in the third person. Anyway, coming specifically to Conti’s account of Bengal, the first city in Bengal that he comes to after sailing inland from the mouth of the Ganges is called Cernove: ‘at the end of fifteen days he came to a large and wealthy city, called Cernove’ (10) which scholars have tried very hard to identify. Major identifies it with Karunagar (Introduction, lxiii) but as one does not know of any major town in Bengal by that name, for

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Major’s speculation to be true it has to be taken as a corruption of Gaurnagar, Gaur being the then capital of Bengal. Aniruddha Ray in his Banglapedia article on Conti identifies Cernove with Sonargaon near Dhaka which also may or may not be right. A much more convincing identification is of Cernove with Shahr-Nau or Shehr-i-Nau or ‘New Town’ which as Edward Thomas has pointed out was the name of the new mint town referred to in a 1379 coin of the Bengal Sultan Sikandar Shah. He says, ‘The decipherment of the name of this mint (as Col. Yule reminds me) determines for mediæval geography the contested site of Nicolò Conti’s Cernove’ (Note 2, 210). This ‘Shehr-i-Nau or the New City, the Cernove of Portuguese travellers on the Ganges’ (Westmacott 1874, 407), was the fourth mint town of Bengal after Lakhnauti (Gaur), Firozabad (Maldah) and Satgaon (Hooghly), and was the very town that Conti returns to on his way back from northern India and can be identified as a new settlement built on the outskirts of either Lakhnauti or Satgaon or somewhere in between. E. Lethbridge, the translator of the Latin ‘A Fragment of Indian History’ by Johannes de Laet (1631), identifies Cernove with Tondah (Tandah/Tanda/Tanra), which is located just opposite Gaur, and was the capital of the Karrani rulers of Bengal from 1563 to 1576, and thereafter, with Akbar’s conquest of Bengal, the first capital of the Mughal Bengal Subah, and a mint-town. Lethbridge says, Mr. Thomas in his Chronicles mentions Shahr Nau as one of the mint-cities of Bengal. He supposes it to be the name of the new city founded near the site of the old Lakhnautí; though this does not seem quite consistent with the statement in the text. […] Nicolo Conti describes Cernove as ‘a large and wealthy city’, fifteen days’ sail up the Ganges. […] Stewart describes ‘Tondah’ (History of Bengal, page 95) as separated from Gaur by the old bed of the Ganges. He mentions that it was made the capital of Bengal by Sulaimán Kararáni; and it may possibly be identical with Mr. Thomas’ Shahr Nau. (1873, Footnote ||, pp. 172–173)

I find this identification quite convincing, and though Tanda may have reached its capital glory more than a century after Conti would have visited it, more around the time of Ralph Fitch’s visit as we will see

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below, it could have already been a fairly important town in the 1440s too. The other Bengal town Conti visits and names is called ‘Buffetania’, which Major identifies with Burdwan and Ray with Chittagong. Both are possible—the former because of the phonetic similarity and the latter because of the fact that Conti proceeds from this town to Arakan; but what really matters is how Conti praises all the habitations he saw in Bengal: ‘On both banks of the stream there are most charming villas and plantations and gardens, wherein grow vast varieties of fruits’ (10). Conti also takes pains to describe the river itself—the mighty deltaic Ganga of Bengal—which he seemed to have been awestruck by: ‘This river is so large that, being in the middle of it, you cannot see land on either side. He asserts that in some places it is fifteen miles in width’ (10). He is also awestruck by the flora, particularly the mighty bamboo— On the banks of this river there grow reeds extremely high, and of such surprising thickness that one man alone cannot encompass them with his arms: they make of these fishing boats, for which purpose one alone is sufficient, and of the wood or bark, which is more than a palm’s breadth in thickness, skiffs adapted to the navigation of the river. (10).

—and the fauna, particularly the aquatic animals, ‘Crocodiles and various kinds of fishes unknown to us are found in the river’ (10). But he is most appreciative of the people of Bengal or of eastern India. Dividing India into three zones—from Persia to the Indus, from the Indus to the Ganges, and what lies east of the Ganges—Conti reserves his greatest civilisational approbation for the dwellers of the third part of India, that is, Bengal and beyond: All India is divided into three parts: one, extending from Persia to the Indus; the second, comprising the district from the Indus to the Ganges; and the third, all that is beyond. This third part excels the others in riches, politeness, and magnificence, and is equal to our own country in the style of life and in civilization. For the inhabitants have most sumptuous buildings, elegant habitations, and handsome furniture; they lead a more refined life, removed from all barbarity and coarseness. The men are extremely humane, and the merchants very rich, so much so that some will carry on their business in forty of their

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own ships, each of which is valued at fifty thousand gold pieces. These alone use tables at their meals, in the manner of Europeans, with silver vessels upon them; whilst the inhabitants of the rest of India eat upon carpets spread upon the ground. (21)

However, the using tables for meals bit may make one wonder if Conti refers to 15th-century Bengal at all when talking about eastern India, and there is sufficient reason to presume that his ‘eastern India’, while indeed starting from the east of the Ganges and thus covering Bengal, stretches till Indonesia and southern China. Conti also describes the abominable act of sati that he must have witnessed during his trip quite graphically. Though he ascribes it to ‘central India’ in the description, given that Conti did not travel very deep into central India and that his classification of western, central and eastern India may not necessarily match ours, and given the prevalence of sati in Bengal and the likelihood of Conti having witnessed the practice there, I am including it as a description of Conti’s brush with the darker side of Bengal. Conti reports: In central India the dead are burned, and the living wives, for the most part, are consumed in the same funeral pyre with their husband, one or more, according to the agreement at the time the marriage was contracted. The first wife is compelled by the law to be burnt, even though she should be the only wife. But others are married under the express agreement that they should add to the splendour of the funeral ceremony by their death, and this is considered a great honour for them. The deceased husband is laid on a couch, dressed in his best garments. A vast funeral pyre is erected over him in the form of a pyramid, constructed of odoriferous woods. The pile being ignited, the wife, habited in her richest garments, walks gaily around it, singing, accompanied by a great concourse of people, and amid the sounds of trumpets, flutes, and songs. In the meantime one of the priests, called Bachali, standing on some elevated spot, exhorts her to a contempt of life and death, promising her all kinds of enjoyment with her husband, much wealth, and abundance of ornaments. When she has walked round the fire several times, she stands near the elevation on which is the priest, and taking off her dress puts on a white linen garment, her body having first been washed according to custom. In obedience to the exhortation of the priest she then springs into the fire. If some show

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more timidity (for it frequently happens that they become stupefied by terror at the sight of the struggles of the others, or of their sufferings in the fire), they are thrown into the fire by the bystanders, whether consenting or not. (24)

Conti also goes on to describe in great detail the dressing mores, social customs, food habits, religious beliefs, educational precepts, and all such aspects of the lives and manners of the people of India, but since it is very difficult to presume how much of it pertains to Bengal since Conti’s India stretches from Persia to Indonesia, and I want to restrict myself here to accounts of Bengal alone, I will refrain from dwelling any more on these, and move on instead to the next early modern European traveller to come to and write about Bengal. This traveller is the Italian Ludovico di Varthema (1470–1517) who came to Bengal in 1505, and wrote an elaborate travelogue about his visit: The Itinerary of Ludovico di Varthema of Bologna from 1502 to 1508 (1510), though the 1863 John Winter Jones translation that we follow here calls it simply The Travels of Ludovico di Varthema. Varthema left Europe at the end of 1502 and came—via Cairo, Beirut, Tripoli, Aleppo, Damascus, Mecca, Aden, Zeila in Ethiopia and Hormuz—to India. He landed in Diu, and then travelled through Khambat, Chaul near today’s Mumbai, Dabhol, Goa, different parts of the Deccan (places like Mangalore, Kozhikode, Kannur and Kollam on the west coast, St Thomas, that is, Mylapore on the east coast, and Bijapur and Vijaynagar in southcentral India) and Sri Lanka, and reached Bengal from ‘Tarnassari4 [after] seven hundred miles, at which we arrived in eleven days by sea’ on 13 March 1505 (Varthema [1510, 1863] 1997, 211). From there, after travelling through Pegu, Malacca, Sumatra, Java and some other Indonesian islands, he returned to the Coromandel and Malabar coasts, left from Cochin or Kannur on 6 December 1507 and returned to Rome in December 1508, via Mozambique, the 4

 eorge Percy Badger, the editor of Varthema’s Travels, identifies Tarnassari with G Tenasserim in Myanmar, but I share Joan-Pau Rubiés’s doubt that ‘Tarnassari cannot in my opinion be identified with Tenasserim (Mergui) in Siam, as the English editors of Varthema, Percy Badger (1863) and Carnac Temple (1928), repeatedly did’ (Rubiés 2000, Footnote 61, p. 151), since it makes very little sense for Varthema, who was sojourning so far in the Deccan and the Coromandel coast, to go to southern Myanmar first to reach Bengal, and Tarnassari is probably a town in southern India itself.

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Cape of Good Hope and Lisbon. His travelogue appeared in Italian in 1510 and was translated into Latin in 1511, German in 1515, Spanish in 1520, French in 1556, Dutch in 1563, and English in 1577, thus opening up Bengal for the first time in more than two centuries to a broad European imagination, because, after Marco Polo, the other accounts—of Montecorvino (if it concerns Bengal at all) and Conti— were not much in circulation by then. Varthema devotes two chapters—‘Chapter concerning the City of Banghella’ and ‘Chapter concerning some Christian Merchants in Banghella’ (210–212, 212–214)—in ‘The Third Book Concerning India’ in his Travels solely to his experiences in Bengal which he calls ‘Banghella’. He talks specifically about arriving at ‘the city of Banghella’ (210), and since there is currently no city by that name in Bengal, it can be said from the description that follows that he must have come to Gaur, the then capital of Bengal, and conflated the name of the province with its capital city, though there is some debate as to which city is referred to by the name Banghella. The editor of the volume, George Percy Badger, in his footnotes to the part of the book where Varthema’s actual text lies, is firmly of the view that ‘Gour was undoubtedly the capital of Bengal at this period, but it appears that the name of the province was very commonly applied to the city, more especially by foreigners’ (Footnote 3, p. 210), but he is not so sure about it in his Introduction to the volume and says that the city of Banghella or Bengala could also be Chittagong or Satgaon, or even an unidentifiable, and now lost, third city. Badger says, In my annotations on the text (p. 210), I have inferred that this place was the ancient Gour on the Ganges; but the following judicious remarks, which Colonel Yule has been good enough to transmit to me, lead me to doubt the accuracy of that identification. He observes: “I think it is to be deduced from what Varthema says, that the ‘city of Banghella’ was a seaport, and therefore could not be Gour. In an old Dutch Latin geography book, […] I find Bengala put down as a town close and opposite to Chatigam (Chittagong.) I don’t lay much stress on this; but I suspect it was either Chittagong, or Satgong on the Hoogly, which was the great port one hundred years later, and also in Ibn Batuta’s time.” […] But the following quotation from

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Patavino, whose work was published in 1597, seems to upset my friend’s deduction as well as my own; for it also describes Bengala as a town distinct from either Gour, or Chittagong, or Satgong. […] I find, moreover, on further investigation, that Rennell likewise recognizes Satgong and Banghella as distinct towns, and gives some clue towards determining the position of the latter. […] he says: “In some ancient maps, and books of travel, we meet with a city named Bangella; but no traces of such a place now exist. It is described as being near the eastern mouth of the Ganges, and I conceive that the site of it has been carried away by the river […] Bengala appears to have been in existence during the early part of the last century. (Introduction, lxxx–lxxxii)

In fact, Badger puts his scholarship to the ultimate test and hazards an educated guess as to where this city of Bengala would have been located, if it indeed had been distinct from any of the three likely contenders. He says, In the absence, therefore, of any direct proof to the contrary, beyond the not very reliable information contained in the old atlases, I am inclined to infer that Bengala occupied a position between the Hattia and Sundeep islands, situated at the present mouth of the Brahmaputra, which I conceive to be the eastern branch of the Ganges of the earlier geographers […] That I may be mistaken is more than possible; but it is worth while hazarding an erroneous opinion on a subject of this nature, if it were only for the sake of eliciting ulterior research and discussion, which may result in defining the correct site of the ancient city of Bengala. (Postscript to Introduction, cxxi)

Whatever be the location of the city of Banghella or Bengala, what really matters is that Varthema thought of it as a fabulous place: ‘This city was one of the best that I had hitherto seen, and has a very great realm’ (211), and later ‘this city, which I believe is the best in the world’ (214). Varthema goes on to describe the Sultan who ruled over this city and who ‘maintain[ed] two hundred thousand men for battle on foot and on horse’ (211); this would make me believe that the city should indeed be Gaur, because it is not likely for any other city in the then Bengal to have had such a well-endowed ‘sultan’. Anyway, to move on, and not get caught in what could be a merely nomenclatural debate, it can be seen how Varthema goes on to describe the plentiful food production

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and the commercial pre-eminence of Bengal, and the richness of the merchants who stayed there: This country abounds more in grain, flesh of every kind, in great quantity of sugar, also of ginger, and of great abundance of cotton, than any country in the world. And here there are the richest merchants I ever met with. Fifty ships are laden every year in this place with cotton and silk stuffs […] These same stuffs go through all Turkey, through Syria, through Persia, through Arabia Felix, through Ethiopia, and through all India. (212)

Varthema may be thought of as a bit hyperbolic when he claims Bengal to be the best city in the world, with more food production than any country in the world, and with the richest merchants ever; but one can pardon him because Bengal must have indeed overwhelmed him, which is quite something for a man as well-travelled as Varthema was. More interestingly, Varthema also encounters some Christian merchants in Bengal and writes a whole chapter on them. He tells us, ‘We also found some Christian merchants here. They said that they were from a city called Sarnau’, and ‘that in their country there were many lords also Christians, but they are subject to the great Khan [of] Cathai’ (212). The location of Sarnau itself can be debated; one may be tempted, because of the obvious phonetic similarity, to equate it with Shehr-Nau or Conti’s Cernove discussed just a couple of pages before, and thus a town in Bengal itself, but that the Christian merchants are from a place governed by the great Khan of Cathay, almost certainly places Sarnau within the Chinese empire. Badger notes in his footnote ‘that Ferdinand Mendez Pinto designates the kingdom of Siam “The Empire of Sornau”. (Voyages and Adventures, p. 284.)’ (Footnote 3, p. 213), suggesting that Sarnau could be in Thailand too, but in his Introduction, he identifies it with Sanay or Sandoy, reported earlier by Odoric of Pordenone as the summer capital of the Great Khan, which is, of course, the fabled Xanadu, the modern Shangdu (lxxxii–lxxxiii). I am not very convinced by this identification, but since it is quite beside the point, let me move on with Varthema’s encounter with the Christian merchants. Varthema describes the clothing of these merchants, with quilted cotton sleeves, red caps, silk breeches, a lot of jewellery, but

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peculiarly they ‘do not wear shoes’ (213), and he is particularly amazed at the fact that they are ‘white’ and Christians: ‘These same men are as white as we are, and confess that they are Christians, and believe in the Trinity, and likewise in the Twelve Apostles, in the four Evangelists, and they also have baptism with water’ (213). Varthema identifies them as possibly Armenian based on their script: ‘But they write in the contrary way to us, that is, after the manner of Armenia’ (213), though Badger convinces us in a footnote that this is a wrong identification as the Armenian script is also written from left to right, and they must have been Nestorians writing in some Arabesque script. The point to be noted is that whether they were Armenians or Central Asians from Shangdu or from any other place, Bengal of the early 16th century was already host to traders from diverse locations and nationalities, already a potent polycolonial crucible. Varthema also observes these Christian merchants’ food habits: ‘they eat at a table after our fashion, and they eat every kind of flesh’ (214), but he is primarily enamoured by their promise ‘that if we would go to a city where they would conduct us, that they were prepared to secure for us as much as 10,000 ducats for them, or as many rubies as in Turkey would be worth 100,000’ (214) and decides to leave with them on a ship for Pego (Pegu/Bago in Myanmar), leaving behind his best city in the world, ending his Bengal journey thus: ‘We departed thence with the said Christians, and went towards a city which is called Pego, distant from Banghella about a thousand miles’ (214). Our third traveller to Bengal is Duarte Barbosa (c.1480–1521) who was in the service of the Portuguese government in India between 1500 and 1516. Based initially in Cochin (Kochi), noted for his linguistic skills, Barbosa was posted in 1502 as a scrivener and an interpreter from Malayalam to Portuguese in a factory in Cannanore (Kannur). Travelling intermittently through southern and eastern India, and combining his experiences therein with those of his prior voyages from Portugal to India and the later ones in southeast Asia, Barbosa wrote The Book of Duarte Barbosa (Livro de Duarte Barbosa) in around 1516. The chapter §102 titled ‘The Kingdom of Bengala’ in Vol. 2 of this book is where the account of his visit to Bengal in the 1510s is recorded. After his return to Portugal in 1516, Barbosa joined his sister’s husband

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Ferdinand Magellan in 1519 on his around-the-world expedition and died in the Philippines in 1521. Though there is an insinuation on the part of Mansel Longworth Dames, the translator and editor of the 1921 version that I am following here, that Barbosa may not have really visited many of these places and would have written his account on the basis of reports, and the same may follow even for Bengal—‘In Bengal Barbosa was dependent on reports received from merchants, as no Portuguese expedition had visited that country in his time’ (Barbosa [1516] 1921, Introduction to Vol. II, xxvi)—I would strongly believe that Barbosa did visit Bengal, and was the first Portuguese to do so, because an account such as his, however sketchy, is inconceivable without some degree of first-hand knowledge, especially given that there was indeed no Portuguese presence in Bengal before him to furnish him with the required information, the first Portuguese mercantile contacts with Bengal having been established by the land route only in 1512–1513 and by the sea route as late as 1516–1517. Barbosa entered Bengal from the Odisha coast through what would be the western-most distributary of the Gangetic delta system because talking of ‘The Kingdom of Otisa’, he says, ‘It extends along the coast northwards where there is a river called Ganges (but they call it Guorigua), and on the further bank of this river begins the kingdom of Bengal’ (133–134). Taking this river—probably the Subarnarekha, as Dames suggests in his longish Footnote 2 on this use of ‘Ganges’ (133–135)—as the border between Odisha and Bengal, Barbosa talks of travelling northwards into the estuarine coast to reach the ‘Kingdom of Bengala’: ‘Further on, leaving this River Ganges and following the coast in a northerly direction, comes the Kingdom of Bengala’ (135). What is to be noted is that Bengal is projected by Barbosa as having many towns both inland and coastal, populated primarily by Hindus, it being a place ‘wherein are many towns, as well inland as on the coast, the inhabitants whereof are Heathen’ (135), while the flourishing coastal mercantile trade is primarily held by the Muslims: ‘The Moors dwell in the seaports where there is great traffic in goods of many kinds and sailing of ships both great and small to many countries’ (135). Bringing together these triple factors of there being a trade-rich sea at hand, it being primarily controlled by Muslims, and there being big urban setups

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in Bengal, Barbosa observes, ‘this sea is a Gulf which runneth in between two lands, and going well into it there is to the north a right great city of the Moors, which they call Bengala’ (135). Once again, thus, we are back to the issue of a specific ‘city’ being called Bengala, and while we have debated earlier in the context of Varthema’s travelogue whether this is simply an instance of the name of the whole country being used for its principal city—whether it can be identified with a specific city like Gaur, Satgaon or Chittagong—or whether there was indeed a separate city called Bengala which is now lost, it would be worthy to note how the editor of the current volume, Mansel Dames, deals with the issue. Dames writes an almost 10-page long footnote (Footnote 3, pp. 135–145) to provide his take on which city the city of Bengala refers to. Dames makes the reader conscious of the debates concerning the identification of the city, adding that, ‘the cities whose claims have been discussed being Chittagong, Sunargaon (or another port near it, Sripur), Satgaon, and lastly Gaur, the ancient capital of Bengal’ (136), and considers elaborately the relative merits of the claims of each of these cities in the light of Varthema’s and Barbosa’s description of the city of Bengala, which seems a stable prosperous city in the Gangetic delta, the main port city of the region, and the capital city of a Muslim king. As for Chittagong, Dames shows how ‘This port lies entirely outside the Ganges Delta’ (136), and adds ‘that Chittagong only occasionally for short periods came under the power of Bengal, and that it was never the capital of a Muhammadan King. It does not in fact answer in any way to Barbosa’s description’ (136). Dames dismisses Chittagong’s possible claim of being the famed city of Bengala, by saying: This account shows clearly how far Chittagong was from being a principal port of Bengal or an outlet for its abundant products It was only a step on the way to the real Bengal, and to any place which could be called Bengala. Chittagong had been often made use of by travellers as a convenient point from which to enter the Meghna and attain the port of Sunargaon, and thence to ascend the eastern branch of the Ganges to Gaur. (137)

Dames takes up the case of Sunargaon (Sonargaon) and Satgaon next and though he observes that ‘These two places were situated near the

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mouths of the two principal branches of the Ganges and were both ports of great importance till the early part of the sixteenth century’ and that ‘Both Hugli and Satgaon on the western and Sripur and Sunargaon on the eastern branch were important places’ (140), he is not entirely convinced that any of these could be the city alluded to under the name ‘Bengala’. Moving on finally to the last claimant Gaur, Dames says, From the above it is clear that the real entry to Bengal was either by the port of Sunargaon (and later by “Serrepore” or Sripur lower down stream) on the Meghna or by Satgaon (and later by Hugli) on the western branch of the Ganges. These two ports were the centres of trade and by both these routes the capital, Gaur (Lakhnauti, Tanda), could be reached. Gauda or Gaur was the ancient name of Bengal and its capital seems from an early date to have been situated near the diverging point of the Eastern and Western branches of the Ganges. The town took its name from the country. For a time it was called Lakhnauti after a Hindu King, but the name Gaur came into use again, although the country had ceased to be called Gaur. The more modern name of Bangala seems in its turn to have passed in common usage from the country to the capital. (141)

Dames also draws our attention to inscriptions and numismatic evidence to show how both the city of Gaur and the province of Bengal were often referred to together as ‘Gaur-Bangala’ or ‘Gaur-Banga’, and thus the city of Gaur could indeed be referred to as the city of Bangala, and he surmises that ‘It must, I think, be considered as most probable that the capital of Bengal under its independent Kings was the place intended’ (143). Most importantly, Dames draws our attention to the version of Barbosa’s text in Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s edition of the same in his Navigationi et Viaggi (1550–1559), where there is an appended section called Sommario de Regni, Città et Popoli Orientali, apparently written by a Portuguese gentleman who wanted to add his own information to Barbosa’s, which has the following passage: Of the ports of the kingdom the principal is at the city of Bengala, from which the kingdom has taken its name. It is two days’ journey from the mouth of the river Ganges to the city, and in the greatest ebb of the tide there is a depth of three fathoms (braccia) of water. The city contains forty thousand hearths (fuochi), where the King has his residence constantly. This alone is roofed with tiles and built of good brick masonry. (qtd. in Footnote 3 on p. 134 contd., 143–144)

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For Dames, the information herein, that the city of Bengala was located ‘some distance up a branch of the Ganges and that it was the capital of Bengal’ (144) proves to be crucial evidence, and he concludes this long discussion with the certain conviction that ‘Gaur taken together with its subsidiary ports was the place known as Bengala in the early part of the sixteenth century’ (145). Moving on with Barbosa’s description of the city of Bengala, he observes that it is ‘a very excellent sea-haven’ (136), which can seriously compromise Dames’s identification of the city with Gaur which is nowhere close to the sea, which ‘has its own independent Moorish King’ (136–137). Barbosa points out the cosmopolitan nature of the city’s demographics: a bit intriguingly that ‘The inhabitants thereof are white men’ (137), and more understandably that ‘there dwell there as well strangers from many lands, such as Arabs, Persians, Abexis and Indians’ (138–139). He comments on the natural richness of the land: ‘that this land is large, fruitful and healthy’ (140–141) with ‘many cottonfields, patches of sugar-cane, of ginger and long pepper’ (142), and also its commercial prosperity with its residents being ‘great merchants and they possess great ships’ (141–142) of both the Arabian and the Chinese sort, ‘which are of great size and carry great cargoes’ (142) and trade all over the South and Southeast Asian coastline. Barbosa particularly focuses on the different kinds of very high quality of textile produced in and exported from Bengal, and on sugar: ‘Much good white sugar is also made here from canes […] for it is a principal article of trade’ (146), while also mentioning ‘ginger conserve, also of oranges, lemons and other fruits which grow in this land’ (147). He also talks about animals— ‘horses, cows and sheep in great numbers, herds of many other kinds in plenty’ (147)—and practically in the same breath trading of human beings, a sordid saga of the Muslim merchants of Bengal buying or kidnapping young Hindu boys from upper India, and castrating them and selling them: The Moorish merchants of this city ofttimes travel up country to buy Heathen boys from their parents or from other persons who steal them and castrate them, so that they are left quite flat. Many die from this; those who live they train well and sell them. They value them much as guardians of their women and estates and for other low objects. (147)

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Barbosa also talks in detail about the dresses and jewellery worn, and the personal lives of ‘the respectable Moors’ (147), which seems quite extravagant, indulgent and bordering on the indolent: ‘They are luxurious, eat well and spend freely, and have many other extravagancies as well’ (147), ‘and superfluity of wines, of which they make many kinds, for the most part from palm-sugar’ (148), and are also ‘cunning performers on musical instruments of diverse kinds’ (148). Barbosa ends his discussion of Bengal with comments on the gender, caste and community relations therein. Talking about gender relations, Barbosa shows how it is quite skewed, with polygamy being rampant amongst the rich merchants of Bengal: ‘Every one has three or four wives or as many as he can maintain’ (147–148). There is a lot of patriarchal control: ‘They keep them carefully shut up’ (148), as also patriarchal paternalizing: they ‘treat them very well, giving them great store of gold, silver and apparel of fine silk’ (148). However, it also seems that the women, though kept under such strict patriarchal protection during the day, have their share of fun at night, and almost constitute subversive sites of alternate public gatherings: They never go forth from the house save at night to visit one another, at which time they have great festivities and rejoicings, and superfluity of wines, […] much whereof is consumed among these women. (148)

The disparity of castes is also something that does not escape Barbosa’s attention, and he notices how the ‘lower castes’ of the city of Bengala wear different and much less elaborate clothing, compared to the merchants: ‘The lower castes of this town wear short white shifts, which come half way down their thighs, and on their heads little twisted turbans of three or four folds’ (148). Finally, Barbosa also comments on the Hindu–Muslim relations in the region, and how conversion to Islam is rampant among the Hindus primarily to gain favours from their Muslim overlords: ‘The Heathen of these parts daily become Moors to gain the favour of their rulers’ (148). Barbosa ends his account with the comment that what he has observed in the ‘city of Bengala’ in terms of cohabitation and mutual relations between Hindus and Muslims is generalisable to the whole of the kingdom of Bengal: ‘On issuing forth from this city of Bengala

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and going further on there are many other towns likewise inhabited by Moors and Heathen both up country and on the coast, subject to this King’ (148). Thus ends Duarte Barbosa’s account of Bengal, which being from the first Portuguese to visit and write about Bengal, would have surely formed the blueprint for the polycolonial exercise to unfold in Bengal practically immediately after the composition of this book, with the Portuguese as its pioneers. Let me now finally move on to my last early modern European traveller who visited and wrote about Bengal by the 16th century, Ralph Fitch (c.1550–1611), the first Englishman5 to visit different parts of Bengal from 1585 to 1586, and write about it, as also about his entire course of travels, upon his return to London in 1591. I need not have included Fitch’s narrative here, because, from the 1510s, that is after Barbosa whom I discussed last, several Europeans—Portuguese at least, with their colonial and mercantile enterprise having gained full steam—would have come to Bengal and left their accounts about it throughout the 16th century, making Fitch not that much of a novelty. Also, my account of polycoloniality choosing to deliberately keep the obvious English colonial connection with Bengal out of its scope of discussion, I could have given Fitch a pass. But, I thought including him would be important not only to look, at least to begin with, at the other side of the polycolonial spectrum, that which involves the English, but also to destabilise the postcolonial commonsense about the English colonial connect with India having begun only around the mid-18th century, by pushing it one and a half centuries further back. Also, Fitch is such a curious traveller when it comes to Bengal, having chosen to visit such places like Cooch Behar, Tripura and Bhutan, rather than stick to the beaten track of the early modern European traveller’s Gaur, Satgaon, Sonargaon, Chittagong circuit! 5

 hough Ralph Fitch would have been the first recorded Englishman to have visited Bengal, T he would not have been the first ‘modern’ Englishman to have set foot in India. Even if we leave out the two people from the British Isles that I mentioned earlier in this chapter, and thought to have apparently visited India in the 14th century—John Mandeville, because he probably never really visited India or even existed for that matter, and James of Ireland, because he was Irish and not English—we must remember the Jesuit Thomas Stephens (1549–1619), who reached Goa on 24 October 1579, and led the rest of his life on the Konkan coast, writing and printing several books in Marathi and Konkani, including the now very well-known Krista Purana (1616).

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Funded by the Levant Company, which was founded in 1581 with Queen Elizabeth I’s approval, Fitch boarded the ship Tyger in February 1583, along with merchants John Newberie and John Eldred, a jeweller William Leedes, and a painter James Story, and set sail for Aleppo, from where they moved on to Baghdad and Basra. Here, Eldred stayed behind, while the others moved on to Hormuz. In Hormuz, all three were arrested, suspected of being spies and sent as prisoners to Portuguese Goa in September–October 1583. Upon securing release, thanks to the intercession of a couple of Jesuits, including Thomas Stephens, an Englishman already in Goa (see Footnote 5 above), Story stayed back in Goa to join the order, while Fitch, Newberie and Leedes left Goa in April 1584 to travel to the Mughal emperor Akbar’s court in Fatehpur Sikri. There, they presented to the emperor a letter from Queen Elizabeth I that they were carrying, thus becoming almost the first direct ‘ambassadors’ of the British crown to the Mughal court. It may be worthwhile to reproduce the letter in its entirety here, it being such an important document in India’s colonial history: Elizabeth by the grace of God, &c. To the most inuincible and most mightie prince, lord Zelabdim Echebar king of Cambaya.6 Inuincible Emperor, &c. The great affection which our Subiects haue to visit the most distant places of the world, not without good will and intention to introduce the trade of marchandize of al nations whatsoeuer they can, by which meanes the mutual and friendly trafique of marchandize on both sides may came, is the cause that the bearer of this letter Iohn Newbery, ioyntly with those that be in his company, with a curteous and honest boldnesse, doe repaire to the borders and countreys of your Empire, we doubt not but that your imperial Maiestie through your royal grace, will fauourably and friendly accept him. And that you would doe it the rather for our sake, to make vs greatly beholding to your Maiestie; wee should more earnestly, and with more wordes require it, if wee did think it needful. But by the singular report that is of your imperial Maiesties humanitie in these vttermost parts of the world, we are greatly eased of that burden, and therefore wee vse

6

‘ Cambaya’ or Khambat in Gujarat having been one of the westernmost ports on the Indian coast, the British administration, unfamiliar with the larger geography of India, must have thought ‘Zelabdim Echebar’ or Jalaluddin Akbar to be the emperor of Cambaya rather than having his court at Agra or Fatehpur Sikri.

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the fewer and lesse words: onely we request that because they are our subiects, they may be honestly intreated and receiued. And that in respect of the hard iourney which they haue vndertaken to places so far distant, it would please your Maiesty with some libertie and securitie of voiage to gratifie it, with such priuileges as to you shall seeme good: which curtesie if your Imperiall maiestie shal to our subiects at our requests performe, wee, according to our royall honour, wil recompence the same with as many deserts as we can. And herewith we bid your Imperial Maiestie to farewel. (‘Queen’s Letters to India and China’, in Fitch [1591] 1899, 44–45)

The jeweller Leedes stayed back in Fatehpur Sikri to work for Akbar with handsome remuneration, while Fitch and Newberie set off on a journey through India. Newberie decided to return in September 1585 via Lahore and was not heard of again, while in November 1585 Fitch started his travels down the rivers Yamuna and Ganga, through Allahabad, Benares and Patna, to reach Bengal in February 1586. Thereafter, he travelled extensively through Bengal, which we will discuss in detail, and then left for Southeast Asia, particularly Pegu and Malacca, and on his way back, spent time again in Bengal from November 1588 to 3 February 1589, before setting off through southern India and Sri Lanka to Goa to resume his return journey exactly the way he had come, and reach London in 1591. Fitch declares quite early in his narrative that his intended destination was Satagam (Satgaon) and announces with some exaggeration as to the size of the fleet at the beginning of his trip down the river Iemena (Yamuna): ‘I went from Agra to Satagam in Bengala, in the companie of one hundred and foure score boates laden with Salt, Opium, Hinge, Lead, Carpets, and diuers other commodities downe the riuer Iemena’ (100). Though his intended destination was Satgaon, the first town in Bengal that Fitch reaches is the then capital Tanda, a town we have already encountered as possibly Conti’s Cernove or Shehr-Nau, ‘which is in the land of Gouren’ (111), that is, Gaur. Fitch describes how this new capital had to be constructed because of the changing course of the river, and also observes how, though Bengal ‘hath in times past bene a kingdom, but now is subdued by Zelabdim Echebar’ (111). He also makes diverse observations about trade in Bengal: ‘Great trade and traffique is here of cotton, and of cloth of cotton’ (111); about the

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clothing of the inhabitants: ‘The people goe naked with a litle cloth bound about their waste’ (111); about the fauna: ‘Here be many Tigers, wild Bufs, and great store of wilde foule’ (111); and about the religious practices of the inhabitants: ‘They are very great idolaters’ (111). Thereafter, Fitch, most interestingly proceeds ‘into the country of Couche, which lieth 25. dayes iourny Northwards from Tanda’ (111) or Cooch Behar, clearly not on the usual European tourist map, and quite a detour from his intended itinerary. He names the king of the land, ‘a Gentile, his name is Suckel Counse’ (112), whom the editor, J. Horton Ryley, identifies with the help of ‘a Coorsinamah, or genealogical table of the Cooch Behar family, in which this prince appears under the name of Sukladuge or Seela Roy; [and] he was the progenitor of the Durrung branch of the family’ (Fitch [1591] 1899, Footnote 1, p. 112). Fitch remarks that Cooch Behar ‘lieth not far from Cauchin China’ (112), makes observations about its curious defence mechanism against the enemy using ‘Bambos or Canes’ to inundate fields to stop horses from marching in (112); about their produces: ‘They haue much silke & muske, and cloth made of cotton’ (112); about the longevity of the lives of the inhabitants; and about their religious beliefs that they all being Hindus are animal lovers: ‘Here they be all Gentiles, and they will kil nothing. They haue hospitals for sheepe, goates, dogs, cats, birds, & for all other liuing creatures. When they be old & lame, they keepe them vntil they die’ (112); and also about their curious edible currency: ‘Their smal mony is almonds, which oftentimes they vse to eat’ (113). Even more curiously, and at a gap of a few pages, after having discussed his journey through a few more places of Bengal, almost as an afterthought, Fitch talks about a trip from there to Bhutan, which indeed borders Cooch Behar: There is a country 4. daies iournie from Couche or Quickeu before mentioned, which is called Bottanter and the citie Bottia, the king is called Dermain; the people whereof are very tall and strong, and there are marchants which come out of China, & they say out of Muscouia or Tartarie. And they come to buy muske, cambals, agats, silke, pepper and saffron like the saffron of Persia. The countrey is very great, 3. moneths iourney. There are very high mountains in this countrey, & one of them so steep that when a man is 6. daies iourney off it, he may see it perfectly. (116)

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One can never say with any certainty whether Fitch really went to Bhutan from Cooch Behar, or an afterthought as it is, it is just a report of some hearsay. But even the discursive instance of this Englishman thinking about Bhutan and Tibet, and the central Asian land trade routes involving the Chinese, the Russians and the Tartars, rather than the usual maritime routes of trade, marks Fitch’s narrative as unusual and quite out of the box. To return to the linear order of the text, Fitch reports next how from Cooch Behar he proceeded to Hugeli, ‘which is the place where the Portugals keep in the country of Bengala which standeth in 23. degrees of Northerly latitude, and standeth a league from Satagan: they cal it Porto Piqueno’ (113), and thus to the site of his pioneering fellow Europeans in the polycolonial network—the Portuguese. However, the usual route from Cooch Behar to Hooghly was deemed unsafe—‘We went through the wildernes, because the right way was full of thieues’ (113)—pointing to the possible lawlessness in the Bengal of the time with the Mughals, the Portuguese, and the Bengal rulers all vying for its control. From Hooghly, Fitch proceeded to another Portuguese port town Angeli, today’s Hijli in southwestern Bengal, in today’s Kharagpur, which he presumes to be ‘in the countrey of Orixa’ (113). He comments on the rich production of rice, cloth and silk in Hijli, and marvels at the port’s thriving business: To this hauen of Angeli come eueryyere many ships out of India, Negapatan, Sumatra, Malacca, and diuers other places; & lade from thence great store of Rice, & much cloth of cotton wooll, much sugar, & long pepper, great store of butter & other victuals for India. (114)

From Hijli, after months of roaming around other parts of Bengal, Fitch travelled to what his originally intended destination apparently was, Satgaon. Fitch gives a rather backhanded compliment to the city and says, ‘Satagam is a faire citie for a citie of the Moores, and very plentifull of all things’ (114), but makes detailed observations about the commercial practices there like the system of having mobile markets, that is haat-s which are prevalent even today, at different places on different days of the week: ‘Here in Bengala they haue euery day in one place or other a great market’ (114), and the use of very long,

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seemingly unwieldy, boats in riverine commerce: ‘These boates haue 24. or 26. oares to rowe them, they be great of burthen’ (115). Fitch is also bewildered at the obsession of the local Hindus of Satgaon with water from the Ganges. He says, Here the Gentiles haue the water of Ganges in great estimation, for hauing good water neere them, yet they will fetch the water of Ganges a great way off, and if they haue not sufficient to drinke, they will sprinkle a litle on them, and then they thinke themselues well. (115)

From Satgaon, Fitch goes next to Tripura, or rather the port of Tripura: ‘From Satagam I trauelled by the countrey of the king Tippara or porto of Tippara or Porto Grande’ (115), which he identifies as ‘Chatigan or porto Grande’ (115), that is Chittagong. He notices how there are ‘continuall warres’ (115) amongst the kingdom of Tripura, the Mughals and the Mogs of Arakan (Mogors and Mogen, respectively, for Fitch) for control over the port of Chittagong. From Chittagong, Fitch moves again to a relatively unknown location, Bacola, which Ryley identifies as ‘probably Barisal, the present headquarters of the Bakarganj district’ (Fitch [1591] 1899, Footnote 1, p. 118). Following Badger’s suggestion of locating the elusive ‘city of Bengala’ somewhere in the Meghna delta between the islands of Hatiya and Sandwip, which we have discussed earlier, there have been attempts to identify Fitch’s Bacola with it. There are indeed phonetic similarities between ‘Bengala’ and ‘Bacola’, as also with Bakarganj or Barisal, and even a City-of-Bengala-sceptic like Dames partially concedes: With regard to the location of Bengala on the coast south of Chittagong the suggestion first made by Mr. Badger in his edition of Varthema, identifying it with Bacola seems deserving of consideration. The island of Bacola as shown in Lavanha’s map (and mentioned by De Barros in the text of his description of Bengal) corresponds very closely with that assigned by Hondius to Bengala. The resemblance of the names is sufficiently close to render some confusion probable. Bacola was visited by Fitch after he left Chittagong. (Footnote 3 on p. 134, contd. in Barbosa, 140)

However, the possibility of identifying Bacola with the City of Bengala, at least in Fitch’s times, gets deflated, because as one would remember,

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for Varthema and Barbosa, the city was ruled by a powerful Muslim king, whereas Fitch says, ‘From Chatigan in Bengala, I came to Bacola; the king whereof is a Gentile, a man very well disposed and delighted much to shoot in a gun’ (118), which not only makes the king of Bacola a Hindu but also seemingly a bit of a simple person who takes pleasure in simple delights like shooting a gun, definitely not the kind of a totally in control of himself Sultan we would expect in the legendary City of Bangala. Anyway, as usual, Fitch gives a list of the key produces of Bacola—rice, cotton, silk—and also describes the city and the dress of its inhabitants in the following words: The houses be very faire and high builded, the streetes large, the people naked, except a litle cloth about their waste. The women weare great store of siluer hoopes about their neckes and armes, and their legs are ringed with siluer and copper, and rings made of elephants teeth. (118)

Once again this is at quite a disconnect with the kind of elaborate clothing and jewellery that we saw the inhabitants of the city of Bengala deck themselves with in Barbosa’s description, suggesting once again that while Barisal and Bakarganj (or Bakla, as we will see later) it can indeed be, we should not try to read the city of Bangala in Bacola. From Bacola, Fitch moves into the big towns of interior east Bengal—to ‘Serrepore which standeth vpon the riuer of Ganges’ (118), ‘Sinnergan [which] is a towne sixe leagues from Serrepore’ (119), clearly, Sripur and Sonargaon, though the editor Ryley wrongly, and quite surprisingly, identifies the former with Serampore. Fitch brings to the notice of the reader the unstable political situation in these parts of Bengal—he mentions ‘Chondery’, the king of Sripur, and ‘Isacan’ (Isha Khan), ‘The chiefe king of all these countries’ (119)— who were all rebels who would have declared their own sovereignty, though technically, after the Mughal accession, Akbar should have had absolute power over Bengal. Fitch says, crediting the topography of south-central Bengal for the possibility of such rebelliousness, ‘They be all hereabouts rebels against their king Zelabdim Echebar: for here are so many riuers and Ilands, that they flee from one to another, whereby his horse-men cannot preuaile against them’ (118–119). Fitch passes unflattering comments on the houses of this region of Bengal:

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‘The houses here, as they be in the most part of India, are very litle, and couered with strawe, and haue a fewe mats round about the wals, and the doore to keepe out the Tygers and the Foxes’ (119), though he observes the region to be quite prosperous, where ‘Many of the people are very rich’ (119), and the belt itself is rich in produces and trading: ‘Great store of Cotton cloth goeth from hence, and much Rice, wherewith they serue all India, Ceilon, Pegu, Malacca, Sumatra and many other places’ (119–120). Fitch comments on the not-too-wellcovered sartorial mores of the inhabitants, and also comments on their food habits: ‘Here they will eate no flesh, nor kill no beast: They liue of Rice, milke, and fruits’ (119). It is here that Fitch ends the first leg of his journey through Bengal, and sails off from Sripur to Burma and Malacca, recording his departure thus: I went from Serrepore the 28. of Nouember 1586. for Pegu in a small ship or foist of one Albert Carauallos, and so passing downe Ganges, and Sundiua island. passing by the Island of Sundiua, porto Grande, or the countrie of Tippera, the kingdom of Recon and Mogen. (153)

It seems, even as Fitch leaves for Southeast Asia, he cannot quite let go of Bengal, the way he keeps enumerating the Bengal landmarks that he passes by—Sandwip, Chittagong, Tripura, Arakan. Needless to say, he returns to Bengal in two years, in November 1588, and seems very relieved to do so, and stays on for a few months more before finally sailing off to Cochin, bringing his magical tryst with Bengal to an end. As Fitch says, ‘it pleased God that we arriued in Bengala in Nouember following: where I stayed for want of passage vntill the third of February 1589, and then I shipped my selfe for Cochin’ (182). And here ends my first chapter—a preparatory one—taking one through, not the imperialising stratagems of the diverse European powers who would have come to Bengal with the objective of colonising parts of it, but accounts of Europeans who would have passed through Bengal during early modernity as occasional missionaries, casual merchants, or curious visitors, and written about their experiences to open up Bengal to a global imaginary, contributing thus to the weaving

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of the plural polycolonial web to come, whose warps and woofs I will try to unravel in the chapters that follow.

References Barbosa, Duarte. 1921. The Book of Duarte Barbosa, Vol. 2. (1516). Translated by Mansel Longworth Dames. London: The Hakluyt Society. Conti, Nicolo. 1994. The Travels of Nicolo Conti, in the East, in the Early Part of the Fifteenth Century, as related by Poggio Bracciolini, in his work entitled “Historia de Varietate Fortune”, Lib. IV (1444), translated by J. Winter Jones. In India in the Fifteenth Century, being a collection of Narratives of voyages to India, in the century preceding the Portuguese Discovery of the Cape of Good Hope (Part II), edited by Richard Henry Major, 3–39. London: The Hakluyt Society, 1857. Indian reprint, New Delhi: Asian Educational Services. Fitch, Ralph. 1899. Books II & III. In Ralph Fitch, England’s pioneer to India and Burma; his companions and contemporaries, with his remarkable narrative told in his own words (1591), edited by J. Horton Ryley. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Lethbridge, E. 1873. ‘A Fragment of Indian History’ (1631). In The Calcutta Review, translated by Johannes de Laet, LVII (CXIII): 170–200. Major, Richard Henry. 1994. ‘Introduction’. In India in the Fifteenth Century, being a collection of Narratives of voyages to India, in the century preceding the Portuguese Discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, edited by R.H. Major, i–xc. London: The Hakluyt Society, 1857. Indian reprint, New Delhi: Asian Educational Services. Monte Corvino, John of. 2005. (First letter from India, 1292), ‘Letter from Friar Menetillus, a Dominican, forwarding copy of a letter from John of Monte Corvino’. In Cathay and the Way Thither, Vol. 3, translated and edited by Henry Yule. London: The Hakluyt Society, 1914. Indian reprint, New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 58–70. Polo, Marco. (1908) 1914. The Travels of Marco Polo the Venetian (1298–1299). Everyman’s Library Edition, London: J.M. Dent & Sons and New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. Ray, Aniruddha. 2014. ‘Conti, Nicolo de’. Available at: http://en.banglapedia. org/index.php?title=Conti,_Nicolo_de (accessed on 5 December 2019). Rubiés, Joan-Pau. 2000. Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250-1625. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Ryan, James D. 1993. ‘European Travelers before Columbus: The Fourteenth Century’s Discovery of India’. The Catholic Historical Review, 79 (4): 648–670. Sale, George et al. 1759. The Modern Part of an Universal History: From the Earliest Account of Time, Vol. VII. London: S. Richardson & c. Thomas, Edward. 1866. ‘The Initial Coinage of Bengal’. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2 (1), January: 145–224. Varthema, Ludovico di. 1997. The Travels of Ludovico di Varthema in Egypt, Syria, Arabia Deserta and Arabia Felix. In Persia, India, and Ethiopia, A.D. 1503–1508 (1510), translated by John Winter Jones, edited by George Percy Badger. London: The Hakluyt Society, 1863. Indian reprint, New Delhi: Asian Educational Services. Westmacott, E. Vesey. 1874. ‘Early Muhammadan Bengal’. The Calcutta Review, LIX (CXVIII): 404–434.

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The Portuguese in Bengal As discussed in the previous chapter, while there could have been a few early modern Europeans to have visited Bengal before them, the Portuguese, or whom the Bengalis refer to as firingis or hārmāds, were the first among the Europeans to come to Bengal as a collectivity with the intention to settle in Varthema’s ‘best place in the world’. The construction of Bengal as a ‘beauteous Eden’ in the early-modern Portuguese imagination figures in their national epic, Luis Vaz de Camões’s Os Lusíadas (1572), The Lusiads: Here by the mouths, where hallowed Ganges ends, Bengala’s beauteous Eden wide extends. (Campos 1919, Frontispiece, Canto VII, Stanza xx, Mickle’s translation)

Though they set foot on Indian soil with the arrival of Vasco da Gama at Calicut (Kozhikode) in August 1498, it was only after the conquest of Malacca in 1511 that they could, with any success, venture into the Bay of Bengal. Though Bengal may have had to wait for close to two decades since Vasco da Gama landed in Calicut in 1498 for Portuguese colonial explorations to begin on its territory, J.J.A. Campos notes in his History of the Portuguese in Bengal (1919) that Vasco da Gama had already taken to Portugal the following information about Bengal: Benguala has a Moorish King and a mixed population of Christians and Moors. Its army may be about twenty-four thousand strong, ten thousand being cavalry, and the rest infantry, with four hundred war elephants. The country could export quantities of wheat and very valuable cotton goods. Cloths which sell on the spot for twenty-two shillings and six pence fetch ninety shillings in Calicut. It abounds in silver. (Appendix to the Roteiro of Vasco de Gama, qtd. in Campos 1919, 25)

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Campos also notes that ‘From time to time Albuquerque [the second Governor of Portuguese India] had written to King Manoel about the vast possibilities of trade and commerce in Bengal’ (25), and shows how in December 1513, Albuquerque wrote to King Manoel, ‘Bengal requires all our merchandise and is in need of it’ (Doc. de Arch. National da Torre do Tombo, p. 300, qtd. in Footnote*, p. 26). Thus, even before they set foot in Bengal, the province was already on the to-do list of the Portuguese. Their first settlement on the Bengal coast would come up the very next year in 1514 at Pipli when some Portuguese, who had escaped from São Tomé (today’s Chennai) facing persecution from the locals, arrived there. This Pipli is not to be confused with today’s inland town of Pipili in Puri district, but what was an old coastal port town in Baleshwar (Balasore) district, Odisha, located at the mouth of the Subarnarekha river, just around 10 kilometres from today’s West Bengal–Odisha border,1 which may have vanished into the sea by now, but played a very important role in the polycolonial history of the Bengal coast in the 16th and 17th centuries with the Dutch, French and English also having first entered Pipli for maritime trade in Bengal, which will be discussed at their appropriate places (Mishra 1984). While Duarte Barbosa may have been the first Portuguese to apparently travel to Bengal (through Pipli in all probability, as the previous footnote suggests) and write about it, the first Portuguese mercantile contact with Bengal was made in 1512–1513, when a private Portuguese trader, Martin Lucena, arrived by the land route from Portugal’s holdings on the west coast of India and became a resident at Gaur, and the first maritime mercantile contact happened only around 1516, when the Florentine merchant Giovanni de Empoli, who was a Portuguese factor in Sumatra, sent an emissary to Bengal, who arrived by navigating through the Ganga delta. No doubt we find a Portuguese 1

 hough technically in today’s Odisha, the extreme proximity of Pipli to Bengal (the T estuary of the Subarnarekha, on which Pipli was located is just about 10 kilometres from the current West Bengal–Odisha border near Digha), and that we are here talking about times when borders would have been much more fluid can make me consider Pipli as being located pretty much on the extended Bengal coastline. One can also note that I have discussed in the first chapter how Duarte Barbosa talks about a river forming the border between Odisha and Bengal, and though he calls it the Ganges (which obviously cannot be possible), the editor Dames suggests that it must be the Subarnarekha. Thus, Pipli would have been located exactly at the cusp of Odisha and Bengal in those times.

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map of Asia, drawn in 1516 by Diego Reinel, already marking out the Bengal coastline, though Portugal still had not made an expedition to Bengal. While both Lucena and Empoli’s emissary were individuals, the first formal Portuguese mercantile expedition intended for Bengal happened in 1517, when, probably heeding Albuquerque’s requests, King Manoel sent Fernão Peres d’Andrade with four ships to Bengal; but, while these ships made it to Southeast Asia, they could not make it to Bengal, as ‘a candle flame by an accident set fire to his largest ship and he was forced to return to Malacca where he hoped to replace the lost vessel’ (Campos 1919, 27), and Peres decided to send a single agent, João Coelho to Chittagong to make an advance announcement of the arrival of the full fleet. Coelho thus became the first formal Portuguese colonial agent to arrive in Bengal in 1516. The first ‘military’ expedition, the first Portuguese Armada, happened when Lopo Soares de Albergaria, Alfonso de Albuquerque’s successor as the Governor of Portugal’s holdings in India, sent a fleet of four ships commanded by João de Silveira from the Maldives, and it reached on 9 May 1518 to Chittagong, where João Coelho was already stationed. As Campos points out: Silveira sent with a messenger his compliments to the King of Bengal asking in the name of the King of Portugal for facilities of trade and for permission to erect a factory where the Portuguese merchants could rest during their voyages and exchange goods with other parts of India; but the messengers were never received. (28)

Since the Governor of Arakan, under whose jurisdiction Chittagong then fell, already knew and trusted Coelho as the real messenger of the Portuguese king, he presumed that Silveira was a corsair and attacked his ships, and thus what may not have been originally intended as a military expedition, took the form of a full-fledged armed conflict (29). Though Silveira did not emerge the victor in this conflict, this opened the path for more consolidated Portuguese interventions in Chittagong and beyond. Diego Lopes, who succeeded Soares, intended to spread the Portuguese influence beyond Chittagong and sent his commander, Antonio de Britto, to the court of the Sultan of Bengal, Nusrat Shah

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(1519–1532), in Gaur in October 1521 to establish diplomatic relations with Bengal. Most interestingly, and almost in a repeat of the CoelhoSilveira story, another Portuguese mission led by Rafael Prestelo had already reached the same court a few days before Britto, and a battle broke out between these two factions to prove who the ‘official’ ambassador of Portugal was. Ultimately, whatever was the outcome of this intra-Portuguese military conflict, it was Britto’s representative Gonçalo Tavares who secured from the Sultan a total exemption from payment of customs duties for the Portuguese in Bengal. In spite of such diplomatic victories, the Portuguese kept up their sporadic campaigns in Chittagong, like that by Ruy Vaz Pereira in 1526 or by Martim Affonso de Mello in 1528. The consequential one turned out to be Affonso de Mello’s second expedition in 1533, comprising five ships and 200 men, which was officially sent by Nuno da Cunha, the then Governor of Goa, with one of the ships, São Rafael being government property (Campos 1919, 33). Turning attention to Bengal proper, beyond Chittagong over which they already had fair control, Affonso de Mello upon reaching Chittagong, sent to Gaur, the capital of Bengal, his ambassador, Duarte de Azevedo with 12 men, including Nuno Fernandes Freire, to secure rights for the Portuguese to build a proper colonial establishment in Chittagong. The then Sultan of Bengal at Gaur, Ghiyasuddin Mahmud Shah (1533–1538), however, arrested this entire team and sent forces to Chittagong to arrest Affonso de Mello too, with several Portuguese dying also in the conflict that ensued. This led to a serious turn in the Portuguese military involvement in Bengal, leading eventually to the burning and sacking of Chittagong by them. Campos explains the whole sequence of events thus: Nuno da Cunha, the Governor, swore revenge when the news of this disaster reached Goa. He prepared in great haste a fleet of nine sail manned by 350 Portuguese. He sent it under the captainship of Antonio da Silva Menezes instructing him to demand an explanation from the King of Bengal why his ambassador who had gone to establish relations of peace and friendliness was so badly treated. If the King did not return Affonso de Mello and his men, Menezes was ordered to wage war with ‘fire and blood’. As soon as Menezes arrived in Chittagong he sent Jorge Alcocorado to King Mahmud Shah with the message of the

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Portuguese Governor and with the threat that if any harm were done to him or if he were not allowed to return within a month, war would be declared against him. […] Before these negotiations were over, a month had elapsed. Menezes thereupon, set fire to a great part of Chittagong and captured and killed a great number of people. (1919, 35–36)

In the meantime, Bengal got embroiled in new and unrelated, but somewhat more serious, political developments—the rise of Sher Shah and the defeat of the Mughal emperor Humayun and the consequences these had for the independent Bengal Sultanate—and Mahmud Shah planned to release Affonso de Mello to seek military advice from him, and also to enlist through him Nuno da Cunha’s help. Not fully aware of these developments, Nuno da Cunha asked Diogo Rebello, the Portuguese captain and factor of the Coromandel pearl fisheries, to go to Bengal to rescue Affonso de Mello and his men. Rebello arrived in Satgaon with two well-armed ships, being the first Portuguese to sail up the Hooghly to do so. Upon his arrival at Satgaon, ‘Rebello sent Diogo de Spindola, his own nephew, and Duarte Dias, to the King in Gaur with a message that if he did not liberate the Portuguese prisoners he would seize his ports and repeat in Satgaon what Menezes had done in Chittagong’ (37). Mahmud Shah, under the changed circumstances, not only released 22 Portuguese prisoners (though he held on to Affonso de Mello, making him his military advisor) but also agreed to grant land to the Portuguese in Chittagong and Satgaon and allow them to build factories and forts at these two places, in return for their help against Sher Shah. When Sher Shah attacked Gaur, the Portuguese sent two ships under the command of João de Villalobos and João Correa, and though ultimately they could not win the war for Mahmud Shah, they secured from him the right to build factories and fortifications in Satgaon and Chittagong.2 Thus, between 1536 and 1537, the Portuguese had their first formal

2

 echnically though Mahmud Shah did not quite keep his word. Rather than giving the T permission to the official Portuguese establishment to set up colonies in Bengal as was originally promised to Diogo Rabello, he bestowed permissions only to his personal favourites Affonso de Mello, Nuno Fernandez Freire and João Correa almost as royal gifts though it did not really matter in the long run.

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colonies in Bengal with Nuno Fernandez Freire and João Correa being made the chiefs of the customs-houses of Chittagong and Satgaon respectively, and Affonso de Mello being given permission to build factories, and all of them gaining the power to collect rent from the native inhabitants of these places, and to set up feitorias or factories or trading posts in them. Thus began the story of the first European colonizers of Bengal, the Portuguese, and their first two colonial settlements, Chittagong and Satgaon, which they spelled as Chatigam and Satigam, and nicknamed them, at least by 1554, Porto Grande, or the big port, and Porto Pequeno, or the little port, respectively (47). Sher Shah attacked Gaur again in 1538, and this time conquered it fully, ending the Hussain Shahi dynasty of independent Sultans of Bengal, and making the budding Portuguese colonies of Bengal run into relative difficulty for the next few decades. With the two colonies of Satgaon and Chittagong being fairly separate from each other and running on two different tracks under two very varied conditions, we can discuss the two separately now, one after the other, beginning with Satgaon, or the subsequent colonies of the Portuguese on the river Hooghly, that is, Satgaon-HooghlyBandel. Satgaon was an established river port on the southwestern bank of the now silted up Saraswati river, near its junction with the Hooghly river, and, with the setting up of the Portuguese colony there, like Gaur, it also became a veritable site of early multiculturalism in Bengal, with Hindus, Muslims and Europeans rubbing shoulders with each other in its cosmopolitan spaces. The progressive silting of the Saraswati, however, saw the Portuguese unloading their wares further downstream at Bettore or Betor in Howrah, in Shibpur, opposite today’s Garden Reach where the current port of Kolkata is located, on the outskirts of what would soon, in less than one and a half centuries, become Calcutta, or today’s Kolkata. As the Hooghly Gazette of 1912 by O’Malley and Chakravarti says, ‘In the Hooghly river their large ships came up to Bator (in the modern city of Howrah), while smaller ships went up to Satgaon’ (47). It cannot be denied that the Portuguese settlement at Betor would have been of a transient sort, erected like haats or temporary markets, rather than as a permanent township. As the Italian traveller Cesare Federici, travelling through Bengal in 1565,

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observed about this Portuguese arrangement at Betor, or what I will call the first European establishment in Kolkata: Every year at Buttor they make and unmake a village with houses and shops made of straw, and with all things necessary to their uses, and this village standeth as long as the ships ride there, and till they depart for the Indies, and when they are departed, every man goeth to his plot of houses, and there setteth fire on them, which thing made me to marvel. For as I passed up to Satagan, I saw this village standing with a great number of people, with an infinite number of ships and bazars, and at my return coming down with my Captain of the last ship, for whom I tarried, I was all amazed to see such a place so soon raised and burnt, and nothing left but the sign of the burnt houses. (qtd. in O’Malley and Chakravarti 1912, 47–48)

The Portuguese thus were, very interestingly, the first to colonially populate the environs of what would become the ‘second city’ of the British empire and the veritable epicentre of colonial modernity in South Asia, giving a polycolonial twist to the history of the city of Calcutta or Kolkata itself. This is a very important point to note: Calcutta, which has often been seen as the centre of colonial India was not founded by the British Job Charnock in 1690, as monocolonial historical perspectives would have us believe, but already marked by the Portuguese and, as I will discuss in the next chapter, by the Dutch. As Campos puts it: Gradually these goods swelled the markets of Calcutta and Chitpore, which were then very insignificant villages. It is to these thatched houses and villages which as Federici and Manrique say, were made and unmade by the Portuguese when they went back, that can be traced the origin of the great city Job Charnock founded. It is in those marts of Betor, Chitpore and Sutanuti which were supplied by Portuguese goods that can be seen the first glimmerings of the great commercial importance that Calcutta attained many years later. (1919, 114)

It is thus to the Portuguese and their establishment at Betor that the beginnings of Calcutta can be credited though Betor was more of a temporary arrangement rather than a full-fledged second colony in western Bengal for the Portuguese.

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With the progressive silting of the Saraswati, and Satgaon being rendered less and less viable as a port, this temporary arrangement could not go on for long, and the Portuguese needed to seriously think of relocating their centre to a proper colony. It was in this context that in May 1578, a delegation of the Portuguese, headed by Pedro Tavares (referred to in Mughal sources like the Akbarnama as Partab Bar Feringui), met the Mughal Emperor Akbar (1556–1605) and received a farman3 to found another city in Bengal with full religious liberty to preach and build churches, resulting in the official establishment of the second Portuguese colony of Ugolim or Hugli or Hooghly,4 just two miles east of Satgaon, but on the Bhagirathi river, much wider and deeper than the by-now completely silted up Saraswati. As Rev. H. Hosten says, ‘The Portuguese first settled at Hugli under a farman from Fatehpur Sikri between 1578 and 1580’ (42–43). The 1912 Hooghly Gazette, however, on the basis of a reference in the Badshahnama that Hooghly was established by the Portuguese under the Bengal Sultanate’s rule—which had lost occupation of that belt to the then king of Odisha, Mukunda Deva, between 1560 and 1567 and then to the Mughals after 1575—argues that the colony was established between 1568 and 1575 (O’Malley and Chakravarti 1912, 48–49). Whatever be the exact date of the establishment of Hooghly, certainly, the move to Hooghly led to the fall and the eventual desertion of Satgaon by the Portugese. As Rakhal Das Bandyopadhyay puts it: In the year 1540, its harbour was becoming difficult of access for ships. […] The growing Portuguese trade and the increasing shallowness of the river Sarasvatī necessitated a change of route for the incoming ships. The only alternative route was by the Bhagīrathī, which was A farman, literally an order or a permit, was an essential instrument, after procurement of which alone, or only after being formally permitted by the local ruler to set up trading posts and settle, manufacture and trade could early European colonisers formally begin their colonial and mercantile activities in India. 4 ‘Hooghly’ has been spelt differently by different historical sources: Ralph Fitch (1588) calls it Hugeli; Fr. Monseratte’s map (1560) marks it as Goli; the Ain-i-Akbari (1596– 1597) has Hugli; Fr. Fernandes (1599) has Gullum or Gullo; Bocarro (1612–1617) has D’Ogolim, Golim and Dogolim; Hughes and Parker (1620) have Gollye; Manrique (1628) has Ugolim; De Laet (1630) has Ugoli; Van den Broucke (1660) has Oegli or Hoegli; and Bernier (1665) spells it as Ogouli (Campos 1919, 64). I generally stick to the commonly accepted spelling Hooghly. 3

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not deep enough for large sea-going vessels. This, again, necessitated a transhipment from the larger sea-going ships to smaller vessels, which gave rise to Betur and ultimately to Calcutta. […] With the final conquest of Bengal by the Mughals, the last blow was dealt to Sātgānw by Emperor Akbar. The permission given to Captain Tavarez to erect a permanent town near Hughly brought about the desertion of Sātgānw. (1909, 256)

While the first colony of the Portuguese in western Bengal was indeed Satgaon, it is the Portugese’s second colony of Hooghly that has to be paid more attention to, because while Satgaon was an old port that the Portuguese merely occupied, Hooghly was a city they built themselves. As it has been pointed out earlier, Pedro Tavares went to Akbar’s court in 1578 seeking his farman to found a new colony in Bengal, and as Campos points out, Akbar took a great liking to Tavares and had several interviews with him. He gave him many valuable presents and a farman permitting him to build a city in Bengal wherever he liked. He granted the Portuguese full religious liberty with leave to preach their religion and build Churches and even baptize the gentiles with their consent. Besides, the Mughal officers were ordered to help the Portuguese with all materials necessary for the construction of their houses. (1919, 52)

The colony of Hooghly, established by Tavares by 1579 or 1580, rose to great prominence very rapidly, as we have already noticed in the previous chapter from Ralph Fitch’s account of the town, who would have visited it in 1588, a mere decade or so after its founding. By 1590, the Portuguese re-possessed Satgaon too, actually making the two colonies contiguous and expanding their colonial presence further, and as Campos says, ‘the Portuguese, had bought lands and possessed villages on both sides of the river for a considerable distance from their town of Hooghly. […] the Portuguese did not confine themselves to the banks of the river but extended their settlement sixty leagues inland’ (55–56). The importance to the Portuguese of Hooghly as a settlement, and its contiguous expanse to territories beyond the town is attested by the fact that it is in Bandel—around six kilometres north of the proper town of Hooghly—that the Order of the Augustinians

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would build a friary in 1599 to which the Church of Nossa Senhora do Rosário was attached; and that formally ‘in 1603, Hooghly, under the name of Golin, is described as a Portuguese Colony’ (O’Malley and Chakravarti 1912, 50) boasting of about 5,000 Portuguese inhabitants. The Portuguese may have fortified their colony in the SatgaonHooghly-Bandel belt as Rev. Long in his ‘Portuguese in North India’ (Calcutta Review, Vol. V, June 1846) reportedly said that ‘in 1599 the Portuguese erected a fort of a square form, flanked by four bastions, surrounded by a ditch on three sides and on the fourth by the Hooghly’ (cited in Campos 1919, 58). But, this may not be true considering the ease with which the Mughals overran it in 1632, and the possibility of there being a Portuguese fort in Hooghly has since been refuted (Hosten 1915, 80), and the only fort that the Portuguese occupied in this belt is thought to be a Mughal fortress near Hooghly, with around 400 soldiers, that Domingo Carvalho captured in 1603. However, with or without a fortress, the Portuguese ruled as sovereign rulers in this territory, often much to the consternation of the Mughal empire, which technically possessed Bengal at that time. In 1580, just after the Portuguese colony of Hooghly was established, in a major development in Europe, the Portuguese empire was annexed to Spain (Portugal would be a part of Spain for the next 100 years), and the King of Spain and Portugal nominated a Captain Convidor to Hooghly, directly under the Governor of Ceylon with four representatives elected by the citizens to assist him. There are two points to be noted here—that the Portuguese colony in Bengal was not placed under the government in Goa, the main seat of the Portuguese on the Indian mainland; and that Hooghly was governed by a local government comprising elected representatives—both of which led to the Portuguese administration of Hooghly being fairly autonomous. While, as stated earlier, in 1603 Hooghly had about 5,000 Portuguese residents, by 1632, the number had risen to more than 10,000. Hooghly had become, after Gaur and adjoining ShehrNau (Tanda), another multicultural space with ships from all over the world anchoring at its docks and new entrants on Bengal’s emerging cosmopolitan stage, like the Armenians and the English, setting up residence amidst its mansions and fortifications.

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While the privileges originally granted by Akbar to the Portuguese were maintained by his son Jahangir (1605–1627), soon, however, things changed with the next Mughal emperor Shahjahan (1628– 1658). Shahjahan had prior reason to be negatively disposed towards the Portuguese at Hooghly. When Jahangir’s powerful wife Nurjahan tried to make her son Shahryar, Jahangir’s fourth son, his heir, Prince Khurram (who later renamed himself Shahjahan), the rightful heir, revolted in 1621, and fled to Bengal and sought military assistance from Miguel Rodrigues, the then Portuguese Governor of Hooghly; but the latter declined. To make matters worse, another Portuguese, Manoel Tavares, who went to help the rebel prince with a few ships, abandoned him at a critical moment. Further, when in 1627, Shahjahan emerged as the successful heir to the Mughal throne, as the traveller Fray Sebastião Manrique says, in Hooghly ‘there was a government which did not think it fit to send an embassy to Shahjahan on his ascending the throne’ (Manrique, Itinerario, qtd. in Campos 1919, 62). Moreover, there were numerous reports of the Portuguese being involved in piracy, smuggling, kidnapping and slave trade, which the new Mughal emperor thought of curbing. Finally, the prosperity and the autonomy of Hooghly, and that the Portuguese did not seem to be mere traders under a Mughal licence any more, but the de facto rulers of significant tracts of Bengal, must have also made the new emperor feel threatened. It is because of a combination of all these reasons that Shahjahan sent the Subehdar of Bengal, Kasim Khan (1628–1632), to take possession of Hooghly in 1632. Kasim Khan initially took control of the further downstream port of Hijli, which was also under Portuguese command, to block all possible riverine reinforcements for the Portuguese; he laid siege by river on Hooghly from the south on 24 June 1632, and ‘only two days later the army consisting of hundred and fifty thousand men, ninety castled elephants and fourteen thousand horse (Manrique) began the operations by advancing from the north within a league from the town’ (Campos 1919, 133). Captain Manoel de Azavedo, possibly the then governor of Hooghly, led the defence, but his few hundred soldiers proved no match for the mighty Mughal army, which by 2 July 1632 captured the northern suburbs of Bandel, by 31 July 1632 attacked the main town of Hooghly, and conquered the

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whole colony by 25 September 1632, with more than a 1,000 casualties on the Portuguese side alone. The surviving Portuguese tried to escape down the river in ships but got caught at different places, particularly at Betor, though around 3,000 of them successfully managed to flee to the Saugor (Sagar) Island, located at the mouth of the Bhagirathi– Hooghly river, where the river meets the sea, and would later build a settlement there, with help from the king of Arakan and the Portuguese settlements in Chittagong and other parts of eastern Bengal. Many of these survivors later also moved on to the older port towns of Hijli (Angelim) and Tamluk (Tambolim) to settle there. More than 4,000 Portuguese were arrested and taken off to the Mughal capital of Agra, where they, especially the women, faced severe atrocities.5 The Portuguese never really left the Hooghly belt though, and most inexplicably the very Shahjahan, through a farman in July 1633, within seven months of their evacuation from Hooghly, gave 777 bighas6 of land to the Portuguese to reconstruct the church and the other religious structures at Bandel; a parwana7 by the Subahdar (Governor) of Bengal, Shah Shuja, in 1641 confirmed that though Hooghly was taken over from the Portuguese, the charge of the settlement at Bandel was to be with the Portuguese Father of the church, and would include their power to administer all civil and criminal matters barring those punishable with death. Bandel, thus, continued to be an autonomous Portuguese-governed territory at least till 1797 and the Portuguese exercised certain powers in Bandel till as late as 1869, as will be explained later. Why Shahjahan would allow the Portuguese to return to Bandel within a few months of their ouster from there is still a bit of a mystery. One account, first given in 1785 by Frei João de S. Nicolau who was Prior of Bandel during 1782–1784, suggests that it was because of a  or details of the Mughal expedition to Hooghly, especially the dates and figures, I have F relied on Campos, who has a whole chapter—Chapter XII: ‘The Fall of Hooghly’ (128– 140)—on this matter alone though other sources may provide slightly different dates and numbers. 6 A bigha is a traditional Indian unit of measuring area, more or less equal to one-third of an acre, that is around 1,350 sq. m. 7 A parwana is an order from an authority, which worked pretty much like a farman, though, generally speaking, a farman would be issued by a higher authority, like a sovereign ruler, while a parwana would usually be from a local administrator. 5

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miracle: one of the priests taken captive from Hooghly to Agra, the Revd. Father João Da Cruz, was sentenced to death by being trampled by an elephant; the elephant, however, instead of doing so, prostrated itself before him and caressed him with its trunk; and Shahjahan, considering this a miracle, released the priest and granted him his wish for his own liberty and permission to lead the surviving Christians back to Bengal. A well-documented recounting of this miracle and its fallout is ascribed to a Dr Wise in his ‘Statistical Account of Hooghly’, which was cited in The Bengal Catholic Herald, 21 May 1842, and which states: A firman was promulgated by beat of drum through all the country, ordering the immediate return of the captives, who were loaded with presents and sent back to their former residence. The Portuguese, thus received into favour, obtained a charter (sunud) signed by the Emperor, by which he allowed them to return to Hooghly and to build a town to the north of the former fort, still known by the Europeans as Bandel, and by the natives as Balaghur (strong house). The land thus assigned (777 bighas) was given free of rent, and the friars were declared exempted from the authority of the subadars, faujdars and other officers of state. They were even allowed to exercise magisterial power over Christians, but not in matters of life and death. At the same time the Emperor ordered all his officers and subjects in Bengal to assist the brave Portuguese. The Christians returned to Bengal in 1633. (qtd. in O’Malley and Chakravarti 1912, 52)

Some authors like Hosten, however, deny the possibility of such a miracle and believe that the land may have been acquired by the Portuguese by paying a bribe to Mir Muhammad Azim Khan, the Governor of Bengal, from 1632 to 1639 (Hosten 1915, 49–50). Whatever be the reason, the Portuguese certainly returned to Bandel in 1633, and latest by 1641 were given 777 bighas of land around the Bandel Church (which itself was rebuilt to its former glory by a João Gomes de Soto in 1640) and were allowed to set up their third colony in that part of Bengal (after Satgaon and Hooghly). The Portuguese did not only have mere ecclesiastical control over the church at Bandel but, as stated earlier, had governmental control over administrative matters of the territory. There is evidence of official documents signed by Portuguese officials in Bandel as early

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as 3 October 1657 by a ‘notary public of deeds for his Majesty in this Bandel’ Antonio Gil de Brito, and at least as late as 22 September 1794 by ‘Thomas de Faria, Escrivão Publico das notas d’esta Villa de Bandel’ (Campos 1919, 63). To prove further that the Portuguese control over Bandel was of a governmental sort, one can refer to three instances when the official Portuguese government raised issues with the Bandel Church as to who rightfully controlled the colony. First, in 1782, the Portuguese ambassador in London is said to have learnt from an English merchant that the Portuguese possessed an important commercial port near Calcutta managed by some private Portuguese who controlled the port under the Portuguese flag. The Portuguese ambassador having informed the Home Government about this Portuguese possession, the Viceroy at Goa was asked to furnish detailed information regarding it, who in turn asked the Provincial of the Bengal Missions to furnish the desired information, resulting in Fr. João de S. Nicolau, the Prior of the Bandel Convent from 1782 to 1784, drawing up the 1785 document, with details of how Shahjahan granted the territory to the church fathers, that I have already referred to earlier. Second, there was also a petition by a Portuguese, George Germain, on 31 December 1784, to the Queen of Portugal requesting her government to take possession of the lands in Bandel that should belong to the government and not to the Church, who only, as the petitioner suggests, took over the administration because of the dwindling number of Portuguese in the colony at a certain point of time. Third, the Portuguese government raised the question of control over Bandel again in 1820 and asked the Prior for a copy of the farman, by virtue of which the church claimed rights over Bandel. Frei Luis de Santa Rita, vicar of Bandel at that point of time, responded by saying that the original 1633 farman of Shahjahan was destroyed during Siraj-ud-daula’s 1754 raid of Bandel, though its copy existed from which he reproduced the 17 privileges the church enjoyed. He further said that the Prior of Bandel delivered Shah Shuja’s parwana of 1641 to the English government in 1786. I mention all this here to establish that Bandel was indeed a Portuguese-controlled colony, in all senses of the term, well into the 1780s and probably till 1820 too.

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In reality, by virtue of the 1633 farman of Shahjahan, and its confirmation in 1646 by Shah Shuja, the Portuguese government of Bandel, under the church Prior, exercised full governmental powers till 1797, when the English government took these powers away. The Prior of Bandel protested to Sir John Shore (afterwards Lord Teignmouth) that not only the farmans referred to above, but a letter from William Cowper, dated 17 July 1787, also showed that the British Collector was prohibited from exercising any civil or criminal jurisdiction over the inhabitants of Bandel. The English East India Company government of Calcutta decided that while it had no objection to the Prior’s continuing to arbitrate and settle the disputes of the Christian inhabitants of Bandel as heretofore, whenever it may be agreeable to the parties to refer to him for the purpose, […] the inhabitants of Bandel are subject to the jurisdiction of the Courts equally with other inhabitants of the Company’s provinces. (Toynbee 1888, 6)

The Portuguese thus ceased to have all governmental powers over their longest lasting colony in Bengal, that is, Bandel, by 1797, but still had some jurisdiction over the Christian residents of Bandel. As has been pointed out, ‘Even till the death of the last Augustinian friar, Frei José de S. Agostinho Gomes in 1869, the Prior was like a petty Governor, having a police force of his own’ (Campos 1919, 230). Thus, though routed by the Mughals from Hooghly in 1632, the Portuguese stayed on in the environs of the city as colonial settlers for almost two more centuries. The Venetian traveller Niccolao Manucci, speaking of his visit to Hooghly around 1660, says, ‘Here I found the chief inhabitants of Hooghly, all of them rich Portuguese for in those days they alone were allowed to deal in salt throughout the province of Bengal. […] there were many Portuguese of good sense, of good family, well established merchants at Hugli’ ([1708] 1906, 89). The French traveller François Bernier reports that in 1666 there were about 8,000 to 9,000 Christians in the Hooghly-Bandel belt and around 25,000 in the whole of Bengal, mostly Portuguese and their descendants: [I]t is this abundance [of resources in Bengal] that has induced so many Portuguese, Half-castes, and other Christians, driven from their different settlements by the Dutch, to seek an asylum in this fertile

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kingdom. The Jesuits and Augustins, who have large churches and are permitted the free and unmolested exercise of their religion, assured me that Ogouli alone contains from eight to nine thousand Christians, and that in other parts of the kingdom their number exceeded fiveand-twenty thousand. ([1670–1671] 1934, 439).

During 1669–1679, as the British merchant Thomas Bowrey notes ‘A great Multitude of Portugals inhabit the kingdom of Bengala, especially in Hughly and some other creeks or Rivolets of the River thereof. Many of them are filias dè lisboa (as they call themselves), viz. Europeans borne, but many more of them are filias dè indies’ ([1701] 1993, 191), and counts about 20,000 pure and half-breed Portuguese in the whole of Bengal, perfectly meshed with the local population, with around 10,000 in Hooghly-Bandel alone. Further, Portuguese ships are reported to have anchored at Hooghly, fairly regularly, till as late as 1740. Thus, though by the 1660s, the Portuguese had practically no political control over any part of Bengal apart from in Bandel, and had some presence in the Tamluk–Hijli belt in southwestern Bengal, this led to an even more fertile diasporic multicultural admixture of them with the Bengalis, with some of them even working as common labourers in ships, and at Dutch and English establishments and households in the neighbouring colonies. Many rich Portuguese merchants moved from Hooghly to the nearby French colony of Chandernagore, whose 18th-century municipal records show many of them living in their own houses, and some settled in Calcutta, leading to an even more pluralist coexistence of different European races simultaneously within the same space. The huge number of descendants of Portuguese, as primarily evidenced from their surnames, is visible even today in cosmopolitan centres of Bengal like Kolkata, Dhaka and Chittagong, and in certain pockets of rural Bengal too, and is living proof of the potent legacy of Portuguese-induced multiculturalism in Bengal. One can now move on to the settlements of the Portuguese in eastern Bengal, with Chittagong or Porto Grande as its primary centre. Chatigam or Chittagong on the east coast of Bengal, on the other hand, was a different story and had a different form of polycolonial experience to offer, because the port never really ‘belonged’ to the Portuguese on

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a stable basis for any significant length of time. This very unstable and volatile history of the Portuguese around their Porto Grande led the ones who stayed back in the belt to become mostly pirates and slavetraders, introducing Bengalis to a multiculturalism quite different from the cosmopolitan one they had on offer in Hooghly: a diasporic one of being taken away and sold off in distant lands by the dreaded hārmād.8 This different and anarchical nature of the Portuguese contribution to multiculturalism on the eastern part of Bengal can be credited to the fact that the Portuguese colonies in eastern Bengal were usually not formally part of the Spanish/Iberian empire, but were unregulated settlements of private merchants, brigands, buccaneers and adventurers. Nevertheless, Chittagong or Chatigam, or their Porto Grande, would have been of such great prominence to the Portuguese of the day, that Camões makes special mention of this port in his Lusiads thus: See Cathigam, amid the highest high In Bengal province, proud of varied store Abundant, but behold how placed the Post Where sweeps the shore-line towards the southing Coast. (Canto X, Stanza xxi, Burton's trans., qtd. in Campos 1919, Footnote *, p. 66)

As stated earlier, the first Portuguese expedition to Chittagong was in 1516, and it was in 1537 that Sultan Ghiyasuddin Mahmud Shah, in recognition of the help rendered to him by the Portuguese against Sher Shah, allowed them to set up a colony there under the governorship of Nuno Fernandez Freire. The Bengal Sultanate, or later the Mughal empire, hardly had any real control over places like Chittagong, so deep southeast into Bengal, and the Portuguese had to primarily contend with neighbouring kingdoms like Arakan and Tripura for control over this port, leading to the volatility of their command over Chittagong. 8

The word hārmād, a Bengali corruption of the word ‘armada’, originally referring to the fleets of Portuguese ships that would routinely attack coastal Bengal became the generic name for the marauding Portuguese, who would raid villages and enslave people in southern Bengal, and is a word that is often used in Bengali today, in an even more generalised sense, for any organised band of violent looters, pillagers and land-grabbers.

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Though apparently in control of Chittagong by virtue of the earlier permit from the Bengal Sultan, the Portuguese kept losing and winning it back from these two kingdoms throughout late 16th century. They had helped the kingdom of Tripura to capture the port of Chittagong from the kingdom of Arakan in 1586, but the Arakanese had wrested it back in 1588 and kindly allowed the Portuguese to settle around their fort. In 1590, the Portuguese conquered the nearby island of Sandwip under the leadership of Antonio de Souza Godinho, and made it a ‘tributary to the Portuguese Settlement of Chittagong’ (Campos 1919, 67), a conquest which was further confirmed only in 1602 by Domingo Carvalho and Manoel de Mattos, when they wrested the island from the Mughals, who had temporarily captured it from the owner of the island, Kedar Rai of Bikrampur. Taking advantage of the conflicts between Kedar Rai and the Mughals, Domingo Carvalho, who was originally in the service of Kedar Rai, captured the fortress of Sandwip, a huge island at the mouth of the Padma–Meghna delta in today’s Noakhali district; but facing resistance from the locals, he sought help from the Portuguese in Chittagong, and that is when Manoel de Mattos, who was the captain of the Portuguese in nearby Dianga, came in with 400 men, and together they comprehensively conquered the island, and divided its governance between the two of them, and formally declared the island a Portuguese colony. As Campos says, Though Domingo Carvalho and Manoel de Mattos were jointly governing the island, the former wrote to the Portuguese King that they held authority under the crown of Portugal. In recognition of their brilliant services the King of Portugal created Carvalho and Mattos Fidalgos da Casa Real (i.e. nobles) and bestowed on them the Order of Christ. (68)

However, the Portuguese lost Sandwip in 1605 to Kedar Rai aided by the Arakan army, to be recaptured again by Sebastião Gonsalves Tibau in 1607, but to be lost to Arakan again in 1617. Sebastião Gonsalves Tibau, who belongs to ‘another section of the Portuguese who shook off the authority of the Governor and beginning life as adventurers eventually became so powerful as to establish an independent kingdom’ (Campos 1991, 81), was a most fascinating

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character in the history of the Portuguese in eastern Bengal and deserves special mention. Tibau arrived in Bengal in 1605 and was elected as their commander by the 10 Portuguese survivors of the 1607 massacre of Dianga by the Arakan forces, who were frustrated at their official regime’s inability to hold on to Chittagong and its surroundings with any stability. Tibau as their independent ‘commander’ raised his own forces, conquering several islands at the mouth of the delta, including Sandwip in 1607 as mentioned earlier, and Dakhin Shahbazpur and Patelbhanga later, and colonising and governing them independently, primarily through a life of piracy. For the conquest of Sandwip in 1607, Tibau also took help from ‘a Spaniard named Gaspar de Pina [who] at the head of fifty men came to the rescue from Hijili’ (83) and the king of Bakla (Bacola or Barisal or Bakarganj, referred to in the last chapter), with some promise of sharing the spoils of the campaign with them. Tibau, however, went back on his promises and having riled his earlier partners, and in any case having a contrarian relationship with the Mughals and the kingdoms of Arakan (with whose royal family Tibau entered into a marital relationship, but not to much avail), could not hold on to his independent empire for very long, and had to cede it to Arakan in 1617. As it would have been noticed, the history of the Portuguese in Chittagong is inextricably connected to their activities in neighbouring Dianga and Sandwip, and so these two places need to be discussed in some detail too. By the end of the 16th century, the Portuguese had also set up a port in the nearby village of Dianga (today’s Firingee Bunder), opposite Chittagong on the southern bank of the Karnaphuli River, where the name Dianga still survives in the name of the ridge there, known as Diang Pahar. Though some scholars believe that the historical City of Bengala actually referred to Dianga, this is highly improbable, as the earliest mention of Dianga is found in a letter by a Fr. Fernandes, dated 22 December 1599 (Footnote ¶, Campos 1919, p. 76), while the City of Bengala, as has been discussed in the previous chapter, has been under reference from much before that. The Arakan army captured Dianga from the Portuguese and massacred them in 1607 (with Gonsalves Tibau, as mentioned above, being one of the only 10 survivors), but in 1615, they resettled in Dianga under a favourable

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relationship with Arakan. Sandwip, as has been mentioned earlier, played an even more important role. Talking about the strategic position and commercial importance, and therefore the curious status vis-à-vis the scramble amongst different powers for its control that Sandwip enjoyed and suffered from, Rila Mukherjee says in a 2008 article: Medieval Sandwip, called ‘Sundiva’, lay to the extreme east of the Bengal delta, in the area contiguous to the powerful medieval state of Arakan. It was not under the control of either the Husain Shahis or the Mughals, on the contrary, it was held by the kings (rajas) of the delta and frequently by Arakan. […] Lying in the shadowy frontier area between the states of Bengal and Arakan, Sandwip was, therefore, a contested area for local kings (delta rajas), the sultans of Bengal, the Afghans and the Mughals, on the one hand, and the Portuguese, the Arakanese and the Burmese kings on the other hand. Because it so often changed hands, and because it lies beyond national frames, the history of Sandwip is difficult to recover. […] Sandwip possessed a diverse economy: it not only served as a refitting station for riverine traffic but was also a source of many trade goods, such as rice, grain and cottons. Also, Sandwip was the major source of salt for much of the Bay of Bengal, exporting two hundred boatloads of salt each year. (69–70)

The first European traveller to have mentioned Sondiva or Sandwip seems to be the Italian Cesare Federici, who landed on this island because of a ‘touffon’ (tufān or typhoon, a sea-storm) in around 1565– 1566. Federici says, This Touffon being ended, wee discovered an Iland not farre from us, and we went from the ship on the sands to see what Iland it was: and wee found it a place inhabited, and, to my judgement the fertilest Iland in all the world, the which is devided into two parts by a channell which passeth betweene it, and with great trouble wee brought our ship into the same channell, which parteth the Iland at flowing water, and there we determined to stay fortie dayes to refresh us. And when the people of the Iland saw the ship, and that we were comming a land: presently they made a place of Bazar or Market, with Shops right over against the ship with all manner of provision of victuals to eate, which they brought downe in great abundance, and sold it so good cheape, that

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wee were amazed at the cheapnesse thereof. […] This Iland is called Sondiva belonging to the Kingdome of Bengala, distant one hundred and twentie miles from Chitigan, to which place we were bound. ([1587, 1588] 2004, 153–154)

What is to be noted is that Sandwip was therefore already an inhabited commercial centre by 1555, much before it became a Portuguese colony in 1590, and after the Portuguese took it over, it became a port more important than Chittagong, or even Mrauk-U, the capital of Arakan: ‘at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Sandwip contained 60 Portuguese trading ships as compared to 30 for Mrauk-U, the capital of Arakan, and 10 for Chattagrama’ (Mukherjee 2008, 75). While the roller-coaster ride of the Portuguese in Sandwip from 1590 to 1617 through Carvalho, Mattos and Tibau has already been discussed before, the importance of Sandwip for the official Portuguese empire becomes clearer with the emergence of Filipe de Brito e Nicote on the scene. Brito, originally an official in the Portuguese holdings of Syriam (Thanlyin) and Pegu (Bago) in today’s Myanmar, in 1602 ‘was given jurisdiction over Bengal in return for his promise to bring the Portuguese renegades living there back into the service of the Estado da India’ (76). In a written order to Brito on 23 January 1607, King Philip, the king of Spain and Portugal, underlined the importance of Sandwip to the Portuguese: ‘And because the conquest of Pegu and the island of Sundiva [Sandwip] has the importance that you know, I charge you dearly with doing for them everything in your power’ (qtd. in Mukherjee 2008, 76). Brito’s attempts failed and as we have already seen, Sandwip became more of an independent Portugueseruled piracy and slave-trade driven port under Seabstião Gonsalves Tibau between 1607 and 1617. In 1615, a joint Dutch-Arakan force defeated Gonsalves Tibau, and in 1617, Min-kamaun, the King of Arakan took over Sandwip fully under Arakanese possession, and the loss of Sandwip practically meant the end of Portuguese control over the east-Bengal delta. The very unstable nature of their settlement in Chittagong, and at neighbouring Sandwip and Dianga, made the Portuguese practically desert the delta, and locate more inland, northwards and westwards, and set up newer colonies in Sripur, Bakla and Chandecan

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(Chandkhan,9 owned by the legendary Pratapaditya of Jessore), all but the last of which have already been referred to in the earlier chapter, and will be mentioned again later. What is to be noted is that the King of Arakan in his days of friendship with the Portuguese in the 1590s had allowed them to build more forts in the Chittagong belt, which the King of Portugal and Spain refused, writing in his letter to the Viceroy dated 12 January 1591 that he did not consider them necessary: And thus I am told […] that Antonio de Souza Godinho has served me well in Bengualla and has made the Island of Sundiva (Sandwip) tributary to this State, and that he gained the fort of Chatiguão (Chittagong) by force of arms and that the King is making some offers (permitting the Portuguese) to build fortresses in his country. Because new fortresses when they are not quite necessary are useless and quite inconvenient to this State in which it behoves to have more garrisons to increase and preserve, than extra forts to guard and thus divert the forces of the same State, I do not consider it proper that the offers of this King should be accepted and it will be enough to maintain with him good friendship. (qtd. in Campos 1919, 75)

Had the official Portuguese administration taken the King of Arakan’s offer seriously, the Portuguese control over Chittagong and its surroundings could have been more long-lived. The Portuguese under Fray Sebastião Manrique did try to revive once again an ‘informal empire’ there between 1629 and 1643 with the help of Arakan, but as history would have it, Chittagong and its surroundings were captured by the Mughals under Shaista Khan’s army in 1665, after which the Portuguese of the area relocated mostly to Firingee Bazaar, south of Dhaka, where many of their descendants live even today, and some to other parts of eastern Bengal, ending a more than a century-old, though intermittent, colonial control over their Porto Grande. From 1643 (or even from 1617, the fall of Gonsalves Tibau) to 1665, the Portuguese in the Chittagong belt had been reduced to mere pirates and brigands. As Campos notices with some regret:

9

 he location of Chandecan or Chandkhan has been variously identified with Chandradwip T in today’s Barisal area (thus very close to Bakla), today’s Dhumghat in Jessore, or somewhere close to the Sagar Island (Campos 1919, 90–91).

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From the time of the fall of Gonsalves upto 1665, the history of the Portuguese in Eastern Bengal is a history of the Portuguese in their worst form. The fall of Gonsalves did not mean the end of his men. The vast rivers of Bengal and their banks became their homes. Schooled as they were not to recognise any law or authority, they sought the means of subsistence in plundering and piracy. Arising as a necessity, piracy eventually became an art, a trade. (157)

After the 1665 conquest of Chittagong by the Mughal forces under Shaista Khan, the Portuguese had to settle down from their wayward modes of living, and some of them stayed on in Chittagong with fairly respectable positions. As late as 1727, Alexander Hamilton observes: ‘Xatigam is a Town that borders on Bengal and Arackan […] The Mogul keeps a Cadjee or Judge in it to administer Justice among Pagan and Mahometan Inhabitants but the Offspring of those Portugueze […] are the domineering Lords of it’ ([1727] 1930, 15). However, most of the Portuguese moved on to other parts of eastern Bengal, to minor settlements, to lead a life enmeshed with the local Bengali population. This draws our attention away from the major Portuguese colonies in Bengal—settled in and around the Porto Grande (Chittagong–Dianga– Sandwip) and the Porto Pequeno (Satgaon–Hooghly–Bandel)—to what were the minor settlements of the Portuguese in Bengal spread over both western and eastern Bengal. The Portuguese had settled in different places in western Bengal outside the Hooghly–Bandel belt, like their fort at Chingrikhali in the Raichak–Diamond Harbour belt, ruins of which still exist. Besides, as already reported, the Portuguese settled in Angelim, or today’s Hijli (in Kharagpur), almost immediately after 1514 (when they landed at Pipli), making it their oldest colony in Bengal (since Pipli is technically in Odisha). They lost Hijli in 1636, but not before building three Augustinian churches dedicated to Our Lady of Rosary—two in Hijli proper and said to contain 300 parishioners by 1582 (Campos 1919, 94), and another at the village of Banja in the territory of Hijli. Another minor colony of the Portuguese in the same belt was Tamluk or Tambolim, which was an existing major port and a big centre of trade in salt, wax and slaves, and where the Portuguese settled primarily after being driven away from Hijli, building a church in 1635 and holding total control over it till at least 1695, as reported

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by the Italian traveller Giovanni Francisco Gemelli-Careri (Sen 2011, 356), and being very much present there as prominent traders till as late as 1724, as reported by Valentyn: ‘Tamboli and Banzia (Banja) are two villages where the Portuguese have their Church and their southern trade. There is much dealing in wax here’ (qtd. in Campos 1919, 96). Further, as Campos notes, just about 20 kilometres downstream from Tamluk, and a few kilometres south of Geonkhali lies Mirpur, popularly known as Firingi Para, where descendants of runaway Portuguese were given land to settle down by the local Raja of Mahishadal (95–96). Tamluk was, sadly though, a major centre of slave trade, as indeed was the very first settlement of the Portuguese on the Bengal coast, Pipli, in today’s northern coastal Odisha bordering West Bengal, where the Portuguese landed in 1514, as has been stated earlier. Pipli continued to be totally under the control of the Portuguese till as late as 1683, and we see a significant Portuguese presence till as late as 1723; it was where the Augustinians built a church and a residence, and which became the prime site for the English to try to have a slice of the polycolonial pie of Bengal for themselves from 1625 onwards, and of protracted conflicts between them and the Portuguese through the 1630s before they could have a foothold in Bengal; but that is quite another story. It is, however, the ‘minor Portuguese settlements’ in eastern Bengal that rightfully deserve greater attention, particularly because Dacca (Dhaka), the capital of today’s Bangladesh, was one of them. The Portuguese settled in Dhaka in about 1580, and while by 1586, Ralph Fitch already reports them to have become traders of much importance in the Dhaka region, Tavernier notices in 1670 the Portuguese church in Dhaka to be in very good shape: ‘The church of the Rev. Augustin Fathers is all of brick, and the workmanship of it is rather beautiful’ ([1676] 1889, 128). The Portuguese built another major Augustinian church in Loricul, about 45 kilometres south of Dhaka. After the first wave of late-16th and early-17th century Portuguese settlers in Dhaka, there was, of course, a second wave of Portuguese fleeing the Chittagong belt after 1665, who settled in the still extant Firingee Bazaar area south of Dhaka, as has already been said earlier. Dhaka must have been an important centre for the Portuguese well into the 18th century, as the first printed Bengali book (albeit in the Roman script), Manoel

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da Assumpção’s Kripar Shastrer Arthabhed, was composed in 1735 in Bhawal, just on the outskirts of Dhaka, as I will discuss in greater detail in my sixth chapter. Catrabo, which has been identified either with Katibari in the Manikganj subdivision, around 40 kilometres west of Dhaka or with Kutubpur or Khizrpur just about 10 kilometres to the east of Dhaka (Campos 1919, 92), is another place where the Portuguese set up a small colony from 1599 onwards. Bhulua, about 30 kilometres northwest of Dhaka, and an independent principality in the seventeenth century was another such place where the Portuguese had a colony and were so influential that the local prince’s guard comprised wholly of Christians, and ‘The Portuguese influence was so completely established in Bhulua that many of the people spoke Portuguese’ (Campos 1919, 93). I have mentioned earlier Sonargaon, which is just about 20 kilometres southeast of Dhaka on the river Meghna, and Sripur, a further 30 kilometres south and the seat of Kedar Rai, as important towns in the then-eastern Bengal, which also the Portuguese had settled in and had some control over. While all these were places in and around Dhaka, the Portuguese set up minor colonies in other parts of eastern Bengal too. I have already mentioned Chandecan (Chandkhan) in Jessore, the seat of Pratapaditya, who captured and beheaded Domingo Carvalho, and it is here that the Portuguese Jesuits opened their first church on 1 January 1600 (Campos 1919, 91). There must have been several other minor but important Portuguese centres in the Jessore belt, like the São Nicolau de Tolentino Church and Mission in Koshbhanga village in Bhushana in Faridpur, from where Dom Antonio de Rozario wrote the first book of Bengali prose, the1660s’ 120-page long Brahman-Roman-Catholic Sambad, which also I will discuss in greater detail in my sixth chapter. The Portuguese also had a small settlement in Bakla, which has already been identified earlier with Barisal in Bakarganj. As Jadunath Sarkar points out, as early as 30 April 1559, a treaty was signed in Goa between the then king of Bakla, Paramananda Rai, and Viceroy Constantino de Braganza, to throw open Bakla to Portuguese ships with low customs duties. Later, around 1600, when Pratapaditya of Chandecan occupied Bakla, taking over the kingdom from the late Kandarpanaraian Rai and putting his own son-in-law Ramchandra on the throne there, the Jesuit

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Father Fonseca was given permission to erect churches and carry out conversions in Bakla (Sarkar 1948, 358–360). It will be impossible to exhaustively enumerate all the minor settlements of the Portuguese in eastern Bengal, because, as Campos says, ‘In the Dacca, Backarganj, and Noakhali Districts the Portuguese had numerous minor settlements where they did not erect factories or forts, though they carried on a considerable trade’ (1919, 90), and there may not be adequate traces of them, and so let me stop here. Let me end this chapter by talking about the different churches that the Portuguese built all over Bengal; they were the first to bring Christianity to Bengal and this major influence of theirs, institutionalized through the churches, dot the Bengal landscape still. The Portuguese constructed churches in practically all of their numerous colonies in Bengal, and many of these churches still stand as markers of the polycoloniality-induced multiculturalism that Bengal is a proud inheritor of. The oldest of these were the Augustinian churches in Hijli, dedicated to Our Lady of Rosary and founded definitely before 1580, but since these structures have not stood the test of time, we can begin with the Augustinian Convent and Church of Bandel. The Portuguese Christian mission, which had already started with the coming of Jesuit missionaries Father Antony Vaz and Father Peter Dias to Hooghly in 1576, was further expanded with the arrival of a group of Augustinian Friars in 1580, and armed with the farman from Akbar in 1577, an Augustinian monastery and convent attached to the church of Nossa Senhora do Rosario (Our Lady of Rosary), a Jesuit college named after São Paulo (St Paul), a hospital and a Casa da Misericórdia (institution of charity) were built in 1599, with the foundation stone being laid on the day of the feast of our Lady of Assumption, that is on the 15th of August, at Bandel, a few kilometres north of Hooghly, which is now an iconic and much-visited basilica. The third-oldest church in Bengal founded by the Portuguese, this time in eastern Bengal, was built almost around the same time as the Bandel Church at Chandecan in Jessore when the Jesuit Father Francisco Fernandez went to Chandecan in October 1599, and with permission of King Pratapaditya built a church and a rectory there, which was called the ‘Holy Name of Jesus’, and

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was officially dedicated on 1 January 1600, with the King himself being present in the ceremony. The fourth church, called St John the Baptist Church, was built by the Portuguese in Chittagong on 24 June 1600 by Jesuit fathers Francisco Fernandez and Andre Boves with financial assistance from the King of Arakan. In 1612, Portuguese Augustinian missionaries introduced Christianity to Dhaka, and in 1628, established a church, called the Church of the Assumption, in the Narinda area of the city. The second church of Dhaka, dedicated to Our Lady of Rosary, was built in 1677 at Tejgaon. Even before that, by the 1660s, as has already been pointed out, the Mission of São Nicolau de Tolentino had been started in Koshabhanga by Dom Antonio de Rozario, and it spread all over eastern Bengal, leading to the 1695 (by some accounts 1664, which is unlikely) establishment of the church of St Nicholas of Tolentino at Nagori, 25 kilometres northeast of Dhaka, the third Portuguese church in Dhaka, which also maintained a dispensary and many schools, which are still under operation. Another Portuguese church, also dedicated to Our Lady of Rosary was built at Hasnabad, 30 kilometres southwest of Dhaka, in 1777, and which also runs several schools. A fourth Portuguese church in Dhaka was the Church of Our Lady of Piety built in 1815. Moving out of Dhaka, and back to western Bengal, one has already stated how the Portuguese built their church in Tamluk in 1635, which could well be the sixth-oldest documented Portuguese church in Bengal. Constructed somewhat later at the old Portuguese port of Bakla or Barishal in Bakarganj, one can note the Church of Our Lady of Guidance constructed in 1764 in Shibpur, also known as Padrishibpur because of the church fathers there, by one Pedro Gonsalves, and which was torn down and rebuilt and expanded by a Manoel de Silva in 1823; and this establishment also runs a dispensary and several schools. While the aforesaid are all churches constructed where the Portuguese had colonies of their own, interestingly, even in those parts of Bengal that the Portuguese were not in power—the British Kolkata, the Dutch Chinsurah or the Danish Serampore—it were the Portuguese who built the oldest Roman Catholic churches. The oldest Catholic church in Kolkata was established in 1690, on a plot of land given by Job Charnock to the Portuguese at the site of the Old Fort,

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which was torn down on 12 August 1693, under the orders of Sir John Goldsborough, but reconstructed again in 1700 at Murgihatta in central Kolkata, where it still stands, renovated and expanded significantly on 12 March 1797, as the majestic Roman Catholic Cathedral, or better known as the Portuguese Church of Calcutta. A second Catholic church in Kolkata was built by the Portuguese at Boithakkhana for which the foundation stone was laid on 13 June 1809, and which is called the Church of Our Lady of Dolours. The third Portuguese church in Kolkata was St Patrick’s Church in Dumdum, which was erected at personal expenses by Joseph Barretto, with its foundation stone being laid in February 1822. The fourth Portuguese church in Kolkata was the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on Dharamtala Street founded by a Mrs Pascoa Barretto de Souza for which the foundation stone was laid on 12 February 1832. Similarly, the Portuguese erected the Church of Jesus, Maria, Jose in Dutch Chinsurah in 1740, and the Church of Santa Madre de Deus in Danish Serampore, two colonies that I will discuss in two subsequent chapters. Thus, as one has noticed in this chapter, the Portuguese presence in Bengal, in its long history, was of three sorts: an ‘official’ one engaged in legal trade and colonial administration, an ‘adventurist’ one comprising explorers, pirates and slave traders, and a ‘settler’ one comprising those who mingled with the Bengalis and settled down in Bengal even after the Portuguese colonial control or the possibility of trade were over for them. Each of these three modes contributed its own kind of multiculturalism to Bengal and Bengalis—a cosmopolitan one, a diasporic one, and a hybridizing one—three sides, as it were, of mercantile colonial modernity. However, in spite of the divergence in these modes of Portuguese contribution to Bengali multiculturalism, the common thread that binds the three is how the Portuguese contact impacted Bengali language and culture. Even though the Portuguese had ceased to be a colonial power of any consequence in Bengal by the mid-17th century, or latest by the 18th century, and had abdicated in favour of the Dutch and other European powers, they left a formative and an indelible mark on the budding colonial modern sensibility of Bengal. This was done on the one hand through the setting up of schools and introducing the

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Bengali to ‘western’ education, which was first done by the Portuguese of course, they being the earliest colonial settlers in Bengal, but on the other hand also by impacting the discursive production of Bengal. Bengali language would not have been what it is today without the numerous loan words the Portuguese have left in Bengali, and more importantly, by virtue of the fact that the first prose work in Bengali, the first Bengali grammar and dictionary, and the first book in print in the Bengali language, are all products of the Portuguese. Also, apart from language and its articulation in print, it is the Portuguese who introduced the Bengali to other tenets of colonial modernity—to cosmopolitanism, through setting up of major urban trading centres; to multiculturalism, by introducing the Bengali to another religion and other ways of thinking and being; to hybridity by mingling freely with Bengalis racially and through inter-marriage; and to diasporic experiences by exposing the Bengali, primarily through slave trade, to other worlds of habitation. All of these will be taken up for greater discussion in the sixth and final chapter, but let it suffice to say here that the Portuguese could affect all this and more because they, rather than being the singular colonial masters of Bengal, were one of the several players in a polycolonial web. With this in mind, let me move on to my next chapter, about the Dutch in Bengal.

References Bandyopadhyay, Rakhal Das. 1909. ‘Saptagrāma or Sātgānw’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, New Series, V (7), July: 245–262. Bernier, François. 1934. Travels in the Mogul Empire, A.D. 1656–1668 (1670– 1671). Translated by Archibald Constable. London, 1891. Second edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bowrey, Thomas. 1993. A Geographical Account of Countries around the Bay of Bengal: 1669–1679 (1701). Edited by R.C. Temple, 1905. Indian reprint, New Delhi: Asian Educational Services. Campos, J.J.A. 1919. History of the Portuguese in Bengal, With Maps and Illustrations. Calcutta: Butterworth & Co. Federici, Cesare of Venice. 2004. ‘Account of Pegu’ (1587), translated from the Italian by Master Thomas Hickock (1588). SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research, 2 (2), Autumn: 130–159.

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Hamilton, Alexander. 1930. A New Account of the East Indies (1727). Edited by William Foster, in 2 volumes, Vol. II. London: The Argonaut Press. Hosten, Rev. H. 1915. ‘A week at the Bandel Convent, Hugli’. Bengal: Past and Present (Journal of the Calcutta Historical Society), X (1), January–March: 36–120. Manucci, Niccolao. 1906. Storia do Mogor, Or, Mogul India 1653–1708 (1708). Translated by W. Irvine, 4 volumes, Vol. II. London: John Murray. Mishra, P.K. 1984. ‘The lost and forgotten port – Pipli’. Orissa Historical Research Journal, XXX: 80–90. Mukherjee, Rila. 2008. ‘The struggle for the Bay: The life and times of Sandwip, an almost unknown Portuguese port in the Bay of Bengal in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’. Revista da Faculdade de Letras: HISTÓRIA, Porto, III Série, 9: 67–88. O’Malley, L.S.S. and Monmohan Chakravarti. 1912. Bengal District Gazeteers: Hooghly, Calcutta: The Bengal Secretariat Book Depot. Sarkar, Jadunath. 1948. ‘Chapter XIX: “The Portuguese in Bengal”’. In The History of Bengal, Volume II: Muslim Period 1200–1757, 351–370. Dacca: University of Dacca. Sen, Surendranath, ed. 2011. Indian Travels of Thevenot and Careri: Being the third part of the Travels of M. de Thevenot into the Levant and the third part of A voyage around the world by Dr. John Francis Gemelli Careri. National Archives of India, 1949. Reprint, New Delhi: Asian Educational Services. Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste. 1889. Travels in India (1676). Translated by Valentine Ball, in 2 volumes, Vol. 1. London: Macmillan. Toynbee, George. 1888. A Sketch of the Administration of the Hooghly District from 1795 to 1845, with some account of the early English, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and Danish settlements. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press.

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3

The Dutch in Bengal Moving on to the Dutch, or to the olondāj next, who were the second European power to set up colonies in Bengal after the Portuguese, it can be noted that the first Dutchman to pass through Bengal, in the 1580s, was the merchant and historian Jan Huyghen Van Linschoten (1563– 1611), who was the Secretary to the Portuguese Viceroy in Goa from 1583 to 1588. During this stint of his, he visited several parts of India including Bengal and wrote about it later in his Itinerario, which was published from Amsterdam in Dutch in 1596. An English-translation of the Itinerario was published from London in 1598, and called Iohn Huighen van Linschoten: his Discours of Voyages into ye Easte & West Indies; a German translation was published the same year, followed by two Latin translations from Frankfurt and Amsterdam in 1599; a French translation followed in 1610 suggesting the importance of this book for the emergent polycolonial European imaginary. The 16th chapter of Volume 1 of this aforesaid book is devoted to Bengal, which Linschoten introduces as ‘At the ende of the Kingdome of Orixa and the coast of Choramandel beginneth the River Ganges in the kingdom of Bengalen’ ([1596, 1598] 1885, 92). He mentions ‘the towne of Chatigan, which is the chief towne of Bengala’ (93–94), and also ‘Porto grande, and Porto Pequeno, that is the great haven and the little haven’ (95), thus touching upon both Chittagong and Hooghly, the two major settlements of the Portuguese in Bengal at that point of time. Linschoten does not have a very high opinion of the inhabitants of Bengal, as he says, ‘they are a most subtill and wicked people, and are esteemed the worst slaves of all India, for that they are all thieves, and the women whores’ (94). While this is meant as a word of caution for any nation desirous of trading with or colonising Bengal, Linschoten marvels at the plentifulness of produces in Bengal and the cheapness 81

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of it: ‘The country is most plentiful of necessary victuails […] and so good cheape that it were incredible to declare’ (94), and particularly stresses on the different kinds of fabric produced in Bengal—cotton, linen (probably jute, as it seems from the description), and silk: [M]uch Cotton linen is made there which is very fine, and much esteemed in India, and not only spread abroad and carried into India and al the East parts, but also into Portingal, and other places […] They have likewise other linen excellently wrought of a hearbe, which they spinne like yearne […] it is yealowish, and is called the hearbe of Bengalen […] likewise they make whole péeces or webbes of this hearbe, sometimes mixed and woven with silke. […] (95–96)

While this is all very inviting for a potential Dutch trading expedition to Bengal, what makes it even more exciting, from an administratively colonial point of view, is that the sole European colonisers of Bengal at that point of time, the Portuguese, were not much into administration, leaving the field open for future entrants like the Dutch. As Linschoten says, The Portingalles deale and traffique thether […] but there they have no Fortes, nor any government, nor policié as in India [they have], but live in a manner like wild men, and untamed horses, for that every man doth there what hee will, and every man is Lord [and maister], ney ther estéeme they any thing of justice, whether there be any or none, and in this manner doe certayne Portingalles dwell among them, some here, some there [scattered abroade]. (95)

Having gone through a detailed account of the Portuguese in Bengal in the previous chapter, we know that this description is not exactly true—the Portuguese did have formal settlements and governmental machinery in place in their Bengal colonies—but what is to be understood is that this entire write-up by Linschoten was probably meant as an advertisement to his fellow countrymen, the Dutch, to come over to the prosperous though a little wily Bengal, and set up trade there and govern it properly. And, this is precisely what the Dutch did. Around the same time as the publication of Linschoten’s work, in fact slightly prior to it, almost in anticipation of his entreaty:

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In April 1595, the Amsterdam-based ‘Company of Far Lands’ (Compagnie van Verre), which was the first among the so-called ‘precompanies’ (voorcompagnieën) […] sent out four ships to the East Indies under the command of Cornelis de Houtman. One of the ships was lost, but the remaining three came back in August 1597 with a cargo of pepper, nutmeg and mace. (Prakash 1985, 9)

This first successful Dutch mercantile voyage to the East Indies led to at least six more companies to be opened, two each in Amsterdam, Zeeland and Rotterdam, and in 1598, the two Amsterdam-based companies merged to form what is known as the ‘Old Company’, and in 1600 four more companies opened. As Om Prakash puts it, to avoid unnecessary competition and to make sure the Dutch emerge strong in the polycolonial tussle ‘The States-General was interested in having various companies come together […] Mainly through the mediatory efforts of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the various units agreed to come together, and the United East India Company was chartered on March 20, 1602’ (1985, 10). Thus, within six years of the publication of Linschoten’s work, the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), literally the United East India Company, better known as the Dutch East India Company, was set up in 1602, and the Netherlands already had its first Indian colony in 1606 in the form of a factory in Petapauli, and soon at Masulipatnam, on the Coromandel coast in southern India (Prakash and Chakraborti 2008, 30–31). Bengal became a Directorate of the Dutch East India Company possibly as early as 1610, though most say that Bengal really became a separate Directorate of the VOC only in 1655 (Datta 1948, 2; Raychaudhuri 1962, 209), and continued to be so until the company’s liquidation in 1800 after which the Dutch possessions of Bengal were a colony of the Kingdom of the Netherlands until 1825 when they were finally ceded to the British as per the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824. Though the Bengal Directorate was presumably formed in 1610, the VOC started planning to trade in Bengal only from 1612 onwards, when Dutch factors visited Bengal and Bihar and Van Berchem, the then Director of the Dutch factories on the Coromandel coast, started making plans for establishing a factory in Bengal. By 1615, Dutch ships started visiting the upper Bay of Bengal coast:

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[T]he earliest record of the arrival of Dutch ships in the north of the Bay was in 1615. In that year, we are told, a Portuguese fleet having sailed up the river of Arakan, the Rājā induced the masters of some Dutch vessels then in the harbour to assist him in attacking the enemy. (O’Malley and Chakravarti 1912, 56)

The first Dutch expedition to proper Bengal, as we know of it today, comprising a fleet of three ships under the Dutch commander Jan Cornelisz Kunst, was in 1622, and it is in 1627, that VOC established its first settlement on the Bengal coast at Pipli (Prakash 1994, 260–261), a port in today’s Odisha, just a few kilometres from the current Bengal border, which we have had occasion to discuss in the previous chapter. Further, in 1629, two yachts, Duive and David under Hendrik De Witt, arrived at Balasore; Witt obtained from the faujdar of Pipli a kaul or a written promise, in the name of the Nawab of Orissa and a settlement was established there (Prakash and Chakraborti 2008, 32) When the Dutch would have settled in proper Bengal is anybody’s guess, but the British merchant Thomas Bowrey, in his 1669–1679 account, suggests that both the Dutch and the English factories at Hooghly would have been established ‘much about the time of the horrid massacre of the English at Amboyna’ ([1701, 1905] 1993, 170),1 that is, in 1623, a date which has been disputed by many. However, by 1630, the Dutch were surely in the Hooghly belt, and the 1632 ouster of the Portuguese from Hooghly by the Mughals, discussed in detail in the previous chapter, came as a windfall to them. As VOC’s own website says, ‘In 1634 the headquarters were first moved temporarily but later definitively to Hougli, where until 1632 a Portuguese branch had been’ (‘Bengalen’). Actually, the Dutch obtained a new farman in 1634 from Azam Khan, the Mughal governor of Bengal, to establish a factory in Hooghly, which was confirmed by a second farman in 1635 from Azam Khan’s successor Islam Khan, and further in 1636 with a farman from Shahjahan himself, allowing the Dutch to trade in Hooghly and other factories in Bengal (Winius and Vink 1991, 21). This was followed by 1

 he Amboyna massacre refers to the 1623 torture and execution of 20 men, 10 of whom T were in the service of the English East India Company and the rest were Japanese and Portuguese traders on Ambon Island (now Maluku, Indonesia), by agents of the Dutch East India Company (VOC).

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another farman from Shahjahan in 1638, confirming the 1636 order and expanding the trading rights of the Dutch. A January 1641 nishan2 from the Mughal governor of Orissa confirmed their trading privileges at Pipli, and a further farman of November 1642 exempted the Dutch from paying transit duties on the Pipli-Agra route that went through Bengal (Prakash 1994, 266). However, it was only after another farman from Shahjahan in 1645 that the Dutch were officially allowed to set up a colony at Hooghly and it is between 1645 and 1647 that the VOC established its factory at Hooghly (Kail 1991, 126–127). Sadly though, floods seemed to be bothering the new Dutch settlement at Hooghly, and with the British having temporarily taken over Hooghly in 1651 (which the Dutch eventually got back), they were looking for other places to relocate to. Chinsurah, spelt Tjutjura by the Portuguese, an existing establishment adjoining Hooghly, was an obvious choice; but, the Dutch thought of expanding further too and under Pieter Sterthemius, the first Director of Bengal, the VOC leased three villages, Chinsurah, on the southern fringe of Hooghly, of course, but also Baranagar, on the northern fringes of what would soon become Calcutta, and Bazar Mirzapur, in Burdwan, for a total annual rent of Rs 1,574 (Prakash 1994, 269) to set up establishments at these places by 1656, with Chinsurah being the first of the colonies to be set up since the Dutch are reported to have been already fairly well-settled in it by 1653 (Datta 1948, 2). In 1656, the Dutch erected a fort and a church and several other buildings at their establishment of Chinsurah, making it their main colony. At around the same time, the Dutch also built a factory at Baranagar (spelt Baranagul or Bernagul by the Dutch, and Baranagore by the British), around 50 kilometres south of Hooghly–Chinsurah on the left bank, which would soon become north Calcutta. Once again, it should be noted, as has been pointed out in the previous chapter too, that though the formal establishment of Calcutta was by the British in 1690, the space where the city would come up was already marked out

2

A nishan literally means a flag or a sign; here it stands for something similar to a farman or permit, but probably of a lower order, it coming from the Governor of Orissa, rather than from the Emperor himself.

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by the Portuguese from the 1560s and by the Dutch from the 1650s. The Dutch also opened a factory in Dhaka in the 1650s, thus marking their presence in what would become the second city of colonial Bengal too, and set up colonies at several other prominent towns in Bengal like Patna (which though in today’s Bihar, was thought of then as part of larger Bengal), Cossimbazar (Kasimbazar near Murshidabad), Malda (next to Gaur), etc. (Winius and Vink 1991, 22). With the setting up so many colonies, that too in major places, ‘by 1676 the Dutch had deserted their factory at Pipli, and built a new one at Balasore’ (Datta 1948, 4), which remained their port for bigger ships. Sir Streynsham Master, the British ‘President’ at Madras from 1673 to 1681, whose Diaries form an invaluable record of the polycolonial happenings in late 17th-century India, reports it thus in his diary entry for 20 December 1676: The Dutch have left their Factory of Pipley, pulled down their house there, and built a new one at Ballasore, which is a handsome square building. Under the Directoreship of Bengala they have six Factoryes, vist. Hugly [Chinsurah], Cassambazar, Ballasore, Pattana, Dacca, and Maulda. ([1675–1680] 1911, Vol. II, 92)

Streynsham Master does not mention here the Dutch colonies of Baranagar and Mirzapur, or the smaller ones at Rajshahi and Falta, which I will mention briefly later, or those at Midnapore and Rajmahal, or some other small colonies. As Kalikinkar Datta says, They established factories within the jurisdiction of the Bengal subah not only at important centres of commerce, such as Pipli, Balasore, Patna, Futwah, Dacca, Maldah, Kalikapur near Cassimbazar, Chinsura and Baranagore, and Jugdea or Luckipur, but also at some villages in the interior […] (1948, 1–2)

Datta further lists these ‘villages in the interior’ as ‘Kagaram and Mowgrama [… and] Motipur (about 16 miles north of Muzaffarpur in north Bihar)’ (Footnote 4, p. 2) However, without going into which author mentions which colonies and leaves out which, let it suffice to say that by the mid-1670s the Dutch had significant colonial presence in Bengal with several settlements all over the province, and in Bihar and Odisha, so much so that it attracted the attention of the leading

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European travellers of the time. François Bernier, in 1665–1666, observes, ‘The Dutch have sometimes seven or eight hundred natives employed in their silk factory at Kassem-Bazar’ ([1670–1671, 1891] 1934, 440). Tavernier, who stayed at Patna from 21 to 28 December 1665, writes: ‘The Dutch Company has an establishment […] at a large village called Chapra, situated on the right bank of the Ganges, 10 coss above Patna’ ([1676] 1889, 122), and also talks about a ‘very fine house’ built by the Dutch at Dhaka. The Dutch developed an elaborate governmental system, with which they ruled their settlements in Bengal from their capital Hooghly– Chinsurah. Although technically under the Dutch government at Batavia, the Dutch Bengal government had fair powers and autonomy with a democratic yet hierarchical structure in place. As Kalikinkar Datta points out: The government at Chinsura consisted of a Director and seven members, five of whom had ‘concluding voices’ and the other two could ‘advise but not vote’. There were chiefs of the factories at Cassimbazar, Patna, and some other places. The Director was obliged ‘by his instructions to submit all matters, […] of any importance to the Council and to come to a conclusion on the subject by a majority of votes’. But it seldom happened that a resolution contrary to his inclination was adopted by the Council, for all members were dependent upon him, ‘with respect to the profits of their offices’. (1948, 5)

The Director had several privileges: ‘He received large emoluments’, ‘alone enjoyed the privilege of being carried in a palanquin’, and ‘Military honours were shown to him at the gite of the fort and he was always attended in his journey by many chabdars, peons, and other servants’ (5–6). Datta further elaborates how this entire governmental system of the Dutch in Bengal ran through a hierarchical organisation of ranks: The second in position to the Director was the chief of the factory at Kalikapur near Cassimbazar, who had the rank of a senior merchant. The Dutch Company’s Resident in the mint at Murshidabad was under his control. The third in rank in the Council was the chief administrator, who had equally the rank of a senior merchant, and was treated with

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the same respect as the Chief at Kalikapur. All affairs relating to commerce and the warehouses were entrusted to this officer, subject to the superior control of the Director. One member of the Council was Superintendent of the cloth-room, where the Company’s piece-goods were examined, sorted, and despatched. The Superintendent had under him a second with the rank of a junior merchant, three bookskeepers or assistants who had to look after the packing of goods, and some banians who rendered many useful services. (6)

The Dutch governmental Council at Hooghly–Chinsurah did not only administer matters related to trade, but also looked after law and order within their colonial territories, and had military, municipal, police and judicial wings too. As Datta further points out: The Captain or Chief of the military was also a member of the Council, but he had no vote and could only express his opinion. He had the rank of a senior merchant and he was next to the chief administrator in position. The fiscal or sheriff, who was at the same time Mayor of the town of Chinsura, had the rank of a senior merchant […] As a sheriff, it was his duty to see that the Company’s interests did not suffer on account of the private trade of its servants; and, as a Mayor, he decided all minor disputes among the Indians living within the Company’s limits. […] Besides this ‘Civil Council’ there was a ‘Council of Justice’, composed of some junior merchants and two military officers with the head administrator as its President. This Council could pass sentences of death subject to the confirmation of the Government at Batavia, but the Nawab’s Government did not allow the execution of those sentences ‘except within the walls of the Company’s lodge, or on board of their ships’. (6–7)

With such a robust and well-defined governmental system, much in replacement of the anarchy in the Portuguese colonies that Linschoten had pointed out and almost, as I surmised earlier, desired the Dutch to remedy, by the 1660s, the Dutch had emerged as the foremost colonisers in Bengal. With the strength of the Dutch in Bengal increasing, they took over from the Portuguese the role of controlling maritime traffic in the Bay of Bengal, and they started the system of ‘passports’, or that any Indian trader wanting to send ships from the ports of Bengal

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to other ports in India or abroad, would have to obtain permission from the Dutch through a document called the ‘passport’ or the ‘pass’ (Prakash 1964, 46–47). While this forced monopoly of the Dutch over the issuing of ‘passports’ led to a lot of bad blood between them and the Mughals, it also acted as a major bargaining chip for the Dutch, and they managed to earn a series of farmans from succeeding Mughals, each granting them more privileges than the preceding one. In 1662, Dirk van Adrichem, the Director of the Dutch factory at Surat, was sent as an ambassador to the then Mughal emperor, Shahjahan’s successor Aurangzeb (1658–1707), by the Governor of Batavia, and he managed to extract a farman from Aurangzeb dated 29 October 1662, which exempted the Dutch from transit duties in the three provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, and their custom duties were fixed as per the old rate of 3 per cent at Pipli and Balasore and 4 per cent at Hooghly (Prakash 1994, 271). On 25 December 1678, the Dutch procured a nishan from Prince Muhammed Azam Shah, Aurangzeb’s son and the Subahdar of Bengal, confirming the rate of 4 per cent at Hooghly, but in 1679, it was reduced to 3.5 per cent, and in 1709, by a farman of the new Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb’s successor, Shah Alam, that is, Bahadur Shah I (1707–1712), it was further reduced to a mere 2.5 per cent, which was confirmed by a farman of 1712 by the next Mughal emperor Jahandar Shah (1712–1713). In return for these favours, the Dutch had to often provide military, mostly naval, help to the Mughal army in its campaigns. This is especially evident in Shaista Khan’s 1665 battle against the Arakan and the Portuguese of Chittagong–Dianga– Sandwip, in which the Dutch naval forces played a major role, and which I have discussed in the previous chapter; and in them assisting the Mughal authorities to quell the 1695–1697 revolt by the zamindar Sobha Singh of Chatwa–Barda in Midnapore district when the Dutch cavalry, infantry and artillery were put to test (Winius and Vink 1991, 60–61). In spite of all this, there would be periodic conflicts between the Dutch and the local Mughal administration of Bengal, and also the English. Unlike the Portuguese before them and the English after them, the Dutch usually chose to focus on their trade rather than interfere in the politics of Bengal, but when they opened their factory

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for salting pork in Baranagar3 in the northern part of today’s Kolkata, they could not but get embroiled in actual fighting with the Mughal forces (Chatterjee 1967, 193), who may have even had some opposition to pork-production, but generally would create troubles for the Dutch ships leaving from Baranagar. In August 1684, under impending attack on their Baranagar factory from the Mughal forces, Martinus Huysman, the director of the factory, called for a Dutch squadron of four ships from Batavia, which opened fire on the looters at Baranagar, resulting in the Dutch ships being allowed to ply down the river without much trouble till November 1684. However, soon, the Dutch had a fresh quarrel with the Mughal government of Bengal and in 1685, Huysman had to evacuate the Baranagar factory; though, when in 1686, trouble broke out between the English and the local authorities, the Dutch were resettled in Baranagar by the Mughals themselves as a possible bulwark against the English (Kail 1991, 130). Things took a different turn when Murshid Quli Khan took charge as the divan of Bengal in 1700. In 1701, Aurangzeb issued a fresh farman banning all trade with the Europeans and ordered local officials to seize the Europeans’ assets on suspicion of them promoting piracy. Though this order was withdrawn in February 1703, it severely hampered the Dutch, especially in their smaller colonies, so much so that they had to practically shut down their Cassimbazar factory in 1704. To redeem the situation, the Dutch appointed their lawyer, Rajballabh, to intercede on their behalf to Murshid Quli Khan for a fresh parwana permitting their trade, which they succeeded in obtaining, probably upon paying a hefty bribe (Karim 1963, 194–195), but the Dutch were slowly but steadily losing their prime position in the Bengal trade to the English. The Mughal empire was also crumbling ever since Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, and Murshid Quli Khan had already become the independent Nawab of Bengal from 1717. The Dutch export to Europe began to decline from the 1720s in spite of numerous enabling measures from the newly independent Bengal nawabs; in 1730, Nawab Shuja-ud-din

3

The original Bengali name for Baranagar is ‘Barahanagar’, barāha (varāha in Sanskrit) meaning ‘pig’ and nagar meaning town, referring to the pork-curing factory that the Dutch set up there.

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(1727–1739) gave the Dutch a parwana confirming their old privileges; in 1748, Nawab Alivardi Khan (1740–1756) declared that Dutch private merchants would pay customs at the same rate as the VOC, that is, 2.5 per cent instead of the earlier 3.5 per cent, etc. (Datta 1948, 18). However, these favours from the Bengal nawabs notwithstanding, the Anglo-Dutch relationship in Bengal was taking a serious turn in the 1730s–1740s. Revolving primarily around competition concerning the saltpetre trade at their posts in Patna, we find the Council in Calcutta of the English writing complaints repeatedly to the Dutch Council at Hooghly, in 1739 and again in 1741, leading to two tripartite treaties (involving the French too)—in March 1744 and in April 1744, confirmed in a contract signed on 8 January 1746— determining the role and share of the three colonial powers in the trade of saltpetre and other commodities (Datta 1948, 8–9), but these agreements could not remedy their embittered relations. There was also the issue of opium trade: In 1746, the Dutch in India claimed an exclusive right of trade in opium, which the English East India Company obviously did not agree with, and the turf war between the two colonial powers over opium trade in Bengal continued well into the mid-1750s (Datta 1948, 18–19). Fearing massive inter-colonial warfare amongst these three European powers, and an eventual takeover of Bengal as a result of that, Nawab Alivardi Khan ‘issued a parwanah in July, 1745, forbidding the English, the French and the Dutch to commit “any hostilities against each other in his dominions” [and] Point Palmyras [south of Balasore] was fixed as the place from where neutrality was to be observed’ (Datta 1948, 12), a ‘neutrality’ which was mostly followed. Though the English and the Dutch would often gang up together in isolating the French following their relations in Europe and a few skirmishes were reported between the Dutch and the English through the 1640s (13–17), generally, the three colonial nations would cooperate and even forge alliances to try to keep at bay newer entrants to the Bengal polycolonial scene—the Austrians and the Prussians, who I will discuss in Chapter 5 later. But, Alivardi’s successor, Nawab Siraj-ud-daula (1756–1757), was not so prudent and tried to ally with the Dutch and the French and the Danes for

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his fight against the English (22), primarily his June 1756 sack of Calcutta, which the Dutch refused to, in their bid to remain neutral. In fact, Siraj-ud-daula summoned the Dutch Agent of Cassimbazar to his court in Murshidabad to ask for their military help against the English in Calcutta, but the Dutch Agent reportedly replied that his ‘Company was only mercantile, not constituted for making war, and that at Chinsura there were not more than 10 guns and 50 soldiers including both whites and blacks’ (qtd. in Datta 1948, 23). Similarly, apprised of Siraj-ud-daula’s campaign towards Calcutta, the English in Calcutta, through a letter from the President of the Council in Calcutta to the Dutch Director at Hooghly, dated 7 June 1756, appealed to the Dutch for their military help, in the name of being fellow-Europeans and also stating ‘that they were entitled to receive it according to the terms of the treaty subsisting between the Governments of England and the Netherlands’ (33); but, the Dutch refused citing ‘that the orders of our superiors charge us to remain neutral in all cases that do not concern us’ (35). Moreover, after the sack of Kolkata, when the beleaguered English sought to find refuge and help in the form of food, water, clothing, etc., in the Dutch settlement of Voltha or Fulta (Falta) further downstream and wrote a desperate letter to the Dutch President of Falta on 25 June 1756, the Dutch chose to turn a blind eye to their entreaties in the name of ‘neutrality’; and though on 20 July 1756, the Dutch of Chinsurah raised some aid for the English refugees at Falta, it was possibly too little and too late. The plight of the Falta refugees has been described in detail by Datta (36–40). This apparent bid at ‘neutrality’ vis-à-vis both sides cost the Dutch dearly on both fronts. The upset Sirajud-daula, on his way back from his successful conquest of Calcutta, laid siege on the Dutch factory at Hooghly–Chinsurah: ‘In fact, the Nawab after reaching Hugli on the 25th June, 1756, on his way back from Calcutta to Murshidabad, demanded 20 lacs of rupees from the Dutch Director, Mr. Bisdom’ (Datta 1948, 24), and lifted it only upon being paid the hefty sum of 4 lakhs, borrowed at 9 per cent interest from Jagat Seth (28) The English also, spared an early opposition from a combined force, grew in terms of their control over Bengal to such a degree that the Dutch could never recover their prior position.

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After the setback at Calcutta, the English resurrected their forces with the coming of Admiral Watson and Col Robert Clive to Bengal on 13 December 1756, who, after recovering Calcutta from the Nawab’s forces on 3 January 1757, practically conquered the whole of Bengal by defeating Siraj-ud-daula at the Battle of Plassey (Palashi) on 23 June 1757. As expected, the Dutch did nothing and it was only a matter of time before their own existence in Bengal would be all but over, especially now with the English under Clive also inimically disposed towards them because of their earlier so-called ‘neutrality’, and with Watson already writing a ‘note of warning’ to Bisdom (Datta 1948, 40) with several other letters to follow—all charging the Dutch with treachery against the English. Waking up a bit late to the threat of the English taking over the whole of Bengal, including the colonies that the Dutch thought were theirs, they soon found themselves in the middle of war and a hostile English takeover. On their way from Calcutta to Plassey, the English had already captured the French colony of Chandernagore between 14 and 23 March 1757, and created a situation of hostility and siege with Dutch Hooghly–Chinsurah too, but it is only two years after the victory of Plassey that the English started truly occupying the Dutch colonies, leading to the final nail in the Dutch coffin in Bengal, the Battle of Bedara of 1759. While the above reasons for hostilities between the English and the Dutch were already there, what added to it further was Siraj-uddaula’s successor Nawab Mir Jafar’s (1757–1760, 1763–1765) apparent attempt, in November 1758, to tie up with the Dutch and stage some kind of a resistance against his own puppeteers, the English, under active egging on from his son Mir Miran (Datta 1948, 49–50). Further, as Datta notes, In July, 1759, there was a rumour in Calcutta that the Dutch Government at Batavia had been fitting out a strong armament, which was destined for Bengal. Early in August, the arrival of a Dutch vessel in the Ganges, carrying on board a number of European and Malaya troops, gave some support to the rumour. (50)

As a cumulative of all these, hostilities commenced in full force between the English and Dutch forces, and the English launched a thorough

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onslaught against the Dutch colonies in Bengal, beginning with Baranagar, the closest to Calcutta. ‘According to Clive’s instructions, Forde started from Calcutta on the 16th November with a strong detachment to capture the Dutch factory at Baranagore’ (58), and on 20 November 1759, the English contingent under Col Forde seized the Dutch factory at Baranagar and started marching towards Chinsurah. The Dutch landed a reinforcement of naval troops sent from Batavia on 22 or 23 November at Sankrail, a few kilometres downstream from Howrah, with ‘seven hundred Europeans and about eight hundred Malaya soldiers’ (61). The English, however, won the naval battle on 24 November, and the Dutch attack by land on the English position near Chandernagore was also beaten back the very same day (62). Finally, on 25 November 1759, the English and the Dutch forces met face to face ‘on the plains of Bedara, about 4 miles from Chinsura’ (62), midway between Chandernagore and Chinsurah, and it is in this historic Battle of Bedara (or Badera or Biderra) that the English, under Col Forde, defeated the Dutch, under the Frenchman Col JeanBaptiste Roussel, most comprehensively. While Kalikinkar Datta has given a detailed account of the Battle of Bedara (62–67), O’Malley and Chakravarti describe it thus in brief: The action was short, bloody and decisive. In half-an-hour the enemy were completely defeated and put to flight, leaving 120 Europeans and 200 Malays dead, 150 Europeans and as many Malays wounded, while Colonel Roussel and 14 other officers, 350 Europeans and 200 Malays were made prisoners. The cavalry completed the rout, and only fourteen of the enemy escaped to Chinsura. The loss of the English was trifling. (1912, 62)

While on 3 December 1759, the Dutch conceded that they were responsible for the battle and agreed to pay damages to the English, there was a further development when Mir Miran marched towards Chinsurah, accusing the Dutch of disrupting the peace in Bengal and aiming at their extermination, leading the fully vanquished Dutch to seek protection from the English. In view of all this, the English returned to the Dutch their colonies by a convention signed between Mir Miran and the Dutch at Ghiretti (Ghereti/Gereti), just south of

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Chandernagore, on 5 December 1759, albeit with a very limiting set of conditions: ... that they shall never mediate war, introduce or enlist troops, or raise fortifications in the country; that they shall be allowed to keep up one hundred and twenty-five European soldiers, and no more, for the service of their factories of Chinsura, Cassimbazar, and Patna; that they shall forthwith send their ships and remaining troops out of country; and that violation of any one of these articles will subject them to utter expulsion. (Datta 1948, 66)

This is how Dutch power practically ended in Bengal, though they took part in occasional, though inconsequential, intrigues against the English and the Bengal nawabs, often involving the faltering Mughal empire under Shah Alam II (1760–1806), and even tried to relocate from Falta and Chinsurah by setting up a new settlement in the independent kingdom of Birbhum in western Bengal after August 1760 (Datta 1948, 75). The Dutch notionally held on till 1795 to Baranagar, Hooghly–Chinsurah, Dhaka, Kasimbazar, Falta, Patna and Balasore, and maybe some smaller establishments (barring 1781–1783, as will be explained later), and till 1825, to Hooghly–Chinsurah again from 1814, Dhaka and Patna again from 1817, and smaller establishments like Kasimbazar and Falta again from 1818, as will also be explained later; but they were really no more a power to reckon with in Bengal. After their victory against the Dutch in the 1759 Battle of Bedara, a further victory of the English over the Bengal Nawab Mir Qasim (1760–1763) in the 1764 Battle of Buxar, and the Grant of Diwani to them in 1765 by the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II made them even stronger vis-à-vis the Dutch, and the conflicts between the two over the control of Bengal became even more skewed in favour of the English. Thus, I desist from discussing any further the activities of the Dutch in Bengal from the 1760s to the 1790s and instead move straight to events in Europe in the latter half of the 18th century that would alter the fate of the colonies in Bengal. It is to be noted that political happenings in European nations and in their colonies elsewhere in the world, and emerging faultlines of new relations between the European nations— particularly the English, the Dutch, and the French—would have

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massive consequences for their polycolonial coexistence in Bengal. As Kalikinkar Datta says, The War of Austrian succession, the Seven Years’ War, the War of American Independence, and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, had profound repercussions on the history of India during the critical years of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century. In fact, India, then internally bankrupt in all respects and coveted as respective spheres of influence by the rival European nations like the English, the French, and the Dutch, became one of the theatres of their hostilities, destined to produce momentous consequences in world history. (10–11)

The ascendancy of the French to a position of great power compared to the other nations of Europe would lie at the crux of most of these newly emergent equations. In India too, this would impact Anglo-Dutch relations in the late 1770s and early 1780s, with the rise of the Frenchaided Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan in Mysore, who posed threats equally to the English and Dutch holdings in southern India. In November 1778, the Dutch proposed to the English government in Madras (modern-day Chennai), the formation of an alliance against Hyder Ali and the French (Datta 1948, 104), a plan that was, however, abandoned by 1781. A global event that negatively impacted the possibility of an Anglo-Dutch alliance in India was that in the autumn of 1780, United Netherlands joined the league against England in the American War of Independence, and England declared war against the Dutch on 20 December 1780, leading to the English capturing all the Dutch settlements in the Indian subcontinent—in southern India, Sri Lanka and in Bengal and Bihar—by 1781 (111–112). By July 1781, the English had all of the Dutch colonies in Bengal—Chinsurah, Baranagar, Patna, Dhaka and Kalikapur near Kasimbazar—under their full control. The signing of the Treaty of Versailles between England and France on 3 September 1783 followed by a similar treaty between England and Holland, ‘provided for the mutual restitution of conquests by the English, the French and the Dutch’ (142), and the English returned to the Dutch all their colonies that they had annexed in 1781, only to take them over again in 1795, again due to an international issue.

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Towards the close of 1794, the French conquered the whole of Holland, occupied Amsterdam in January 1795; the Stadtholder of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, William V, Prince of Orange, had to flee to England on 18 January 1795 and take refuge at the Kew Palace (147). At the Dutch House at Kew Palace where he was thus in refuge, the Stadtholder William V wrote the Kew Letters (also known as the Circular Note of Kew), which comprise a series of letters, written by him between 30 January and 8 February 1795. In these letters, primarily out of fear that the French, who had already overrun the whole of the Netherlands, would annex all the Dutch overseas colonies too, William V, in his capacity of Captain-general of the Dutch Republic, asked all Dutch colonial governors to cooperate with Great Britain against the armed forces of the French Republic and ‘to place their colonies under the protection of Great Britain’ (qtd. in Datta 1948, 148). As Datta goes on to say, [a] proclamation was accordingly issued to the Government of the Dutch Settlements in the East Indies demanding the transfer of all these to the possession of the English until the restoration of the old government in Holland after a ‘general pacification’ in Europe. They were assured therein that, during that period, their settlements would be entitled to ‘advantages, privileges and immunities’ similar to those enjoyed by the English Settlements in the East Indies. (147–148)

Accordingly, the Council in Calcutta deputed Mr Richard Birch in July 1795 to take possession of Chinsurah with the help of a military force if necessary, though he was instructed to take ‘care that no sort of violence be offered to any of the inhabitants and that no property, public or private, be in any shape molested or interfered with’ (qtd. in Datta 1948, 148). It also ordered Mr H. Douglas, Judge and Magistrate of Patna, on 14 August 1795, to occupy the Dutch factory there, and he was also instructed to treat the inhabitants with ‘attention and kindness’ and to let the Dutch know that their laws and customs shall not be infringed upon, that they will not be subject to the payment of fresh taxes or duties, and that they will be permitted ‘to trade to and from the English Company’s Settlements with the same advantages as the subjects’ of the English nation (Datta 1948, 149).

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This arrangement, whereby the English took over all the Dutch colonies in Bengal was, however, temporary. Soon after the Peace of Amiens, signed on 27 March 1802, whereby England was allowed to retain, among its fresh conquests, only Sri Lanka and Trinidad, and made to restore the rest to France or allies of France, Lord Wellesley got orders from the Home Government to give back to the French and Batavian Republics all their settlements in India excepting the Dutch ports in Sri Lanka (Datta 1948, 150). Soon after this, the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814, also called the Convention of London (Verdrag van Londen), was signed by the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and the Sovereign Principality of the United Netherlands in London on 13 August 1814, whose first article stipulated that, ‘all the Colonies, Factories and Establishments, which were possessed by Holland after commencement of the late war (i.e., before 1794–1795), which were in the Seas and on the continents of America, Africa and Asia with certain exceptions specified, be restored to that Dutch power’ (qtd. in Datta 1948, 147, 152). The ‘exceptions specified’ were that the British cede the island of Banca off the island of Sumatra in exchange for the Dutch settlements in Cochin and other parts of Malabar, and the Dutch cede Baranagar in exchange for an annual fee. In fact, plans for the Dutch to cede Baranagar to the British, either in lieu of commensurate land near Hooghly–Chinsurah or on an annual fee, was afoot from much before this, at least from 10 April 1775, when the Dutch themselves mooted this plan to Warren Hastings. A lot of surveys were made from 1777 to 1779 to operationalise this but nothing concrete happened till Lord Cornwallis again revived the plan on 12 January 1789. Kalikinkar Datta gives details of this whole exercise (143–145), and as he says, ‘Most probably the exchange took place in 1795’ (145). As for the rest of the Dutch territories, a certain Mr F.A. Van Braam was appointed Commissioner at Chinsurah to repossess the Dutch settlements in Bengal, and he, in turn, deputed Mr Frasis Cassiarees Regal in 1817 to receive charge of the establishments at Patna and Dhaka, and by the next year, that is, 1818, their other establishments in Bengal were also retrieved (152). From 1795 to 1814 thus, the Dutch held no colonies in Bengal (or anywhere, for that matter), and after 1814, they were left only with Hooghly—Chinsurah, Dhaka, Patna, Balasore, Kasimbazar and Falta

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in the Indian subcontinent. However, since both the English and the Dutch thought it prudent to neatly separate their colonial areas in South and Southeast Asia, with England retaining power over the Indian subcontinent, and through Burma and Malaya up to Singapore, and the Dutch focusing on Indonesia, the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824, also known as the Treaty of London, was signed between the United Kingdom and the Netherlands in London, to exchange holdings of the two nations in these two territories. The negotiations began on 15 December 1823, and the final treaty was signed on 17 March 1824, whose Article 8, which is of the greatest consequence to us here, reads: Art. 8 – H  is Netherlands Majesty cedes to His Brittanic Majesty all establishments on the continent of India, and renounces all privileges and exemption enjoyed or claimed in virtue of those establishments. (qtd. in Datta 1948, 154)

It is by virtue of this article that the Dutch colony of Hooghly– Chinsurah along with all the other smaller Dutch holdings in Bengal were ceded to the British on 7 May 1825 in lieu of Bencoolen on the island of Sumatra thus ending the two-century-old history of Dutch colonisation in Bengal. Datta describes the whole process in detail: Instructions had been already issued, on the 13th January, 1825,—to the Magistrates and the Collectors of Hugli, Murshidabad, Dacca, Patna, Cuttack, and the Twentyfour Parganas appointing them Commissioners to take charge respectively of ‘The Town and Territory of Chinsura’ and the Dutch factories and possessions at Kalikapur (near Kassimbazar in the Murshidabad District), at Dacca, at Patna, at Balasore and at Fultah. On the 7th May, 1825, Chinsura was formally delivered by Mr. B. C. D. Bouman, Commissioner appointed on behalf of the Netherlands Government, to Mr. W. H. Belli and D. C. Smyth, Commissioners on behalf of the British Government. (156–157)

While the above is a fairly comprehensive summary of the history of the Dutch in Bengal, let me now specifically focus on their primary seat in Bengal—Chinsurah—from where they governed their various holdings in Dutch Bengal for around two centuries. Though according to Kalikinkar Datta, as I showed above, the Dutch settled in Chinsurah by 1653, they built their factory there only

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by 1656, as the Dutch Admiral Jan Splinter Stavorinus, who visited Chinsurah in 1769, says in his Voyages to the East Indies, ‘It was built in the year 1656, as appears by date over the land gate’ (1798, 516). It was certainly completed before 1665 when the Dutchman Gautier Schouten visited it and described it thus: There is nothing in it [i.e. Chinsurah] more magnificent than the Dutch factory. It was built on a great space at the distance of a musket shot from the Ganges, for fear that, if it were nearer, some inundation of the waters of the river might endanger it, or cause it to fall. It has indeed more the appearance of a large castle than of a factory of merchants. The walls are high and built of stone, and the fortifications are also covered with stone. They are furnished with cannon, and the factory is surrounded by ditches full of water. It is large and spacious. There are many rooms to accommodate the Director, the other officers who compose the Council, and all the people of the Company. There are large shops built of stone, where goods that are bought in the country, and those that our vessels bring there, are placed. (Voyage aux Indes Orientales, 1658–1665, II, 156, qtd. in O’Malley and Chakravarti 1912, 57)

Practically all the major European travel-writers—Bowrey, Streynsham Master and Tavernier—compliment the Chinsurah factory on its size, design and prosperity. But Chinsurah was more than just a factory, it was a full-fledged living town, with life beyond its Dutch factory too, a wonderful description of which is found in Stavorinus: Chinsurah, known in the records and papers of the Company, by the name of Hougly, lies on the western bank of the Ganges, full forty leagues from its mouth at Ingelee and about ninety from Patna. It is partly built along the river, and requires full three quarters of an hour to walk round it. On the landside, it is closed by strong barrier-gates. Within, it is built very irregularly. It has many markets, which are here called bazars, at which all kinds of goods, and especially provisions, are sold; the bazar of the money-changers, which is a long and broad street, is the handsomest. (1798, 512–513)

Not content with having a great factory and bazaar alone, the Dutch went on to construct a proper fortress—Fort Gustavus—at Chinsurah, constructions for which continued till 1687 and 1692, as inscriptions on the northern and southern gates, respectively, suggest, and it was named

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Fort Gustavus after further fortifications between 1743 and 1753, under the Directorship of Jan Albert Sichterman, probably to fend off attacks by Marathas, the name coming from the then Governor-General of Batavia, Gustaaf Willem von Imhoff, who was also Sichterman’s nephew by marriage. The VOC website explains this transformation thus: ‘This location was protected in 1687 by a wall. In the 40s of the 18th century, the site was strengthened into a fortress with four corner bastions on a rectangular floor plan’ (‘Bengalen’). Stavorinus describes Fort Gustavus, as it stood in 1769, in the following way: The Company’s lodge, which bears the name of Fort Gustavus, is constructed in a large open place, about five hundred, or five hundred and fifty feet from the river. It is an oblong square; the longest sides, which are opposite to north and south, are about six hundred and sixty feet in length; the shortest, about the half. […] The walls are of stone, about fifteen feet high; but they are, at present, in such a ruinous condition, that it would be dangerous to discharge the cannon which are mounted upon them. Within, are the Company’s warehouses, and the house of the director, which is the only thing worth seeing. There are three gates, one by the river, one on the landside, to the north, and another to the south; this last leads to what is called the Company’s garden, in which there is neither a bush, nor a blade of grass. (516)

If Fort Gustavus was in such a bad shape in around 1770 when Stavorinus visited it, it is hardly surprising that now it has no traces whatsoever. However, though the fort and its garden were in a state of disrepair in his time, Stavorinus describes some other structures, which seem to have been in good shape, particularly a church, a grand building close to it, and an adjoining garden, all built by the same Sichterman we mentioned above: Chinsurah has a handsome little church with a steeple. The first was built by the director Sichterman, and the last was added by Mr. Vernet. […] Mr. Sichterman erected a very handsome building not far from the church, to which he gave the name of Welgeleegen (well situated). It lies close to the Ganges and a gallery, with a double row of pillars projects over the water, above which is an elegant terrace and balcony, which commands the finest prospect at Chinsurah; on one side the

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view extends as far as Chandernagore and on the other beyond Bandel. The gardens which are adjoining to this building, are delightfully shady and pleasant. (515–516)

Alexander Hamilton also praises the gardens of Chinsurah at the beginning of the 18th century: ‘The factors have a great many good houses standing pleasantly on the river’s side; and all of them have pretty gardens to their houses’ (qtd. in O’Malley and Chakravarti 1912, 59). After its takeover by the English from the Dutch in 1825, Chinsurah fell into bad times, and in just two years, what seemed to be such a cheerful and bustling city in the earlier accounts, already started appearing very gloomy and dreary. Mrs Fenton, who visited Chinsurah in January 1827, calls it ‘this city of silence and decay’, and says that while the English quarters were ‘cheerful and neat’, ‘the part that may be called Dutch exhibits pictures of ruin and melancholy beyond anything you can imagine. You are inclined to think that very many years must have passed away since these dreary habitations were the cheerful abode of man’ (qtd. in O’Malley and Chakravarti 1912, 64–65). While the gardens may have mostly vanished since then, the fort gone, and Vernet’s steeple on Sichterman’s church collapsed in a cyclone in 1864, some of the Dutch heritage still remains in Chinsurah— the steeple-less church (which was later converted into an office for the Hooghly Mohsin College), the Dutch cemetery (which has been recently done up and conducted extensive research on), the English barracks built at the site of and with material from the Fort Gustavus demolished in 1827 (now the Chinsurah Court), the Dutch barracks (now the Hooghly Madrasa), the Director’s residence Welgeleegen (which contains the VOC logo of 1687), General Perron’s house (now part of the Hooghly Mohsin College), the old Factory Building (now the office of the Divisional Commissioner of Hooghly), and the ornate, solitary tomb of Susanna Anna Maria Yeats (née Verkerk)4 who died

4

S usanna Anna Maria Verkerk seemed to have married only twice, but her grave is locally called ‘saat saheber bibir kabar’ (tomb of the wife of seven Europeans), and local lore has it that she had married seven men, all of whom had died under mysterious circumstances. The legend around her is said to be the inspiration behind Ruskin Bond’s story ‘Susanna’s Seven Husbands’ and Vishal Bharadwaj’s film Saat Khoon Maaf (2011) based on it. (‘Important Figures in VOC Chinsurah’)

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in 1809. Of all these, the Dutch Cemetery deserves special mention, primarily because of the academic and popular attention it has drawn due to a project by the Presidency University with funding from the Embassy of the Netherlands on it (www.dutchcemeterybengal. com), which in turn has led to conservation work and public interest in Bengal’s Dutch heritage. Interestingly, Stavorinus mentions the cemetery in Chinsurah, both an older one and a newer one, the latter referring to the current Dutch Cemetery: To the westward of the lodge, there was formerly a burying ground, which was adorned with many handsome tombs, and gravestones. But these were all destroyed under the Government of the Director Taillefert, except the monument of the Director Huysman, which was transformed into a powder magazine. The rest was made into a level plain, and the burying place was removed to another part of the town, where now every grave has an upright tombstone upon it. (1798, 516– 517)

As per the VOC’s own website, Taillefert was the Director of Chinsurah twice—once in 1755 and again in 1760–1763 (‘Bengalen’)—and Stavorinus having visited Chinsurah in 1769, this new cemetery is itself more than 250 years old and is itself quite a site. Stavorinus also mentions a Masonic Lodge, called Concordia, which seems to have been a very grand building and a centre of major social interaction, but it does not exist anymore: Something more than a quarter of an hour’s walk out of Chinsurah, towards Chandernagore, a large and handsome house was erected, during the direction of Mr. Vernet, as a lodge for the free-masons, which was completed and inaugurated while I was there. This festivity concluded in the evening with a magnificent firework and ball, at which the chief English and French ladies and gentlemen were equally present. This building, to which the name of Concordia was given, cost thirty thousand rupees, and the money was defrayed out of the private purses of the members of the council of Hougly. (517–518)

What is to be noted is that whether some of the heritage buildings of Hooghly–Chinsurah are still in existence or not, the Dutch did build a

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grand city, probably the first truly European city in Bengal, and left it as a mark of this legacy on Bengal’s polycolonial canvas. To move on fast to the other colonies that the Dutch had in Bengal, one can take recourse to the list that Stavorinus makes of the ones that were there when he visited in 1769: The territorial property of the Company in Bengal, is confined to the towns, or villages of Chinsurah and Bernagore. […] They have, further, their lodges or factories at Calcapore near Cossimbazar, at Patna, and at Dacca; and they have likewise a guard of natives at Ballasore. (512)

We can leave out Pipli, the first Dutch colony (1627–1635), Balasore and Patna out of our discussion here, since they are not technically within what is understood as Bengal today, and talk about the others, beginning with Baranagar, since it has been already mentioned several times before, and its location in contiguity with Kolkata makes it very important. As has been pointed out earlier, the Dutch primarily had a factory for salting pork at Baranagar, or Bernagul, as they called it, and the name of the place derives itself from the Bengali ‘Barahanagar’, meaning ‘City of the Hogs’. It may seem odd that a place now integrated into north Kolkata as a normal residential area was a huge piggery and butchery, but this is true, and Streynsham Master who visited the area on 13 September 1676 spoke of the hog factory where each year about 3,000 hogs were slaughtered and salted for export: September 13. [1676] – Wednesday morning, about 7 a clock, wee got to Barnagur where the Dutch have a place called the Hogg Factory, and I was informed they kill about 3000 hogges in a yeare, and salt them up for their shipping. ([1675–1680] 1911, Vol. I, 324–325)

Stavorinus, however, in his account of his visit to Baranagar in 1769 makes no reference to the pork factory, and instead has something to say about flesh-trade of a different kind, organised prostitution, that seemed to have been going on at Baranagar, and projects the colony as a rather desolate place that produced coarse fabric and acted primarily as temporary accommodation for itinerant company officials, and as some sort of a sleazy sex-work den:

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Bernagore is a village which belongs to the Company, and as at Chinsurah, the Dutch flag is hoisted, though they have no other of their servants resident here than an under-officer of the fiscal. It lies on the eastern bank of the Ganges, ten or twelve leagues below Chinsurah. The coarsest sorts of blue handkerchiefs are made here. The Company have a house, not far from the river, which serves for the temporary accommodation of such of their servants, as land here, in going up or down the river. Bernagore is famous on account of the great number of ladies of pleasure, who reside there, and who pay a monthly recognition to the fiscal of Chinsurah for the free exercise of their profession. (1798, 519)

The cessation in Baranagar’s primary business of pork production within the hundred years that span Master and Stavorinus could be because of the objection to the same by the Muslim governing elite of Bengal, as suggested by Anjali Chatterjee and earlier alluded to in this chapter (Chatterjee 1967, 193), or because of Baranagar’s slow but steady appropriation into the then emergent North-Calcutta culture, where courtesans and sex workers would play a major role. Whatever it is, the greatest contribution of Baranagar would have been in it being Calcutta, before Calcutta itself was—a rare feather adorning the polycolonial cap. Moving on to the other big city in which the Dutch had a settlement—Dhaka, the capital of erstwhile Mughal Bengal and of today’s Bangladesh—one notices that the Dutch opened a factory in Dhaka in the 1660s at the place where the Mitford Hospital now stands and they had a garden house at Tejgaon, where the Portuguese also had a church, as reported in the previous chapter. Apparently, the Dutch first came to Dhaka in 1636, as a diplomatic mission consisting of six people, but because of some altercation with the local authorities, they were arrested and reached Dhaka in handcuffs, and could free themselves upon a huge cost of more than a thousand rupees, but could nevertheless successfully secure an agreement with the nawab regarding business (Alam 2018). In spite of this, the Dutch could actually start business in Dhaka only in the 1660s, and as has already been pointed out earlier in this chapter, the Dutch had control over their colony in Dhaka till 1781, then again from 1783 to 1795, and

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finally from 1817 to 1825. As Dhrubo Alam, whose article I am using as my primary source here, shows, the Dutch factory and office were located by the Buriganga River, at the site of the present-day Mitford Hospital, and the Dutch also had a garden in the vicinity of Farmgate, somewhere between what is now the Ananda Cinema Hall and Tejturi Bazar area, as evidenced in a 1781 map by Major Rennell. As I have pointed out earlier, both Bernier and Tavernier, during their visit to Dhaka, note the Dutch factory there. After the English takeover of the Dutch properties of Dhaka in 1795 as Alam reports, the Dutch Trade Office was handed over to the collector of Dhaka in 1801, and the authorities demolished the building and used the rubble to repair roads of the city, and in 1810, the authorities proposed to build the present Mitford Hospital at that site. With the garden also vanishing with time, there is no material trace of the Dutch in Dhaka now, but for the grave of one Mr Langkheet, the chief of the Dutch factory of Dhaka, who died in 1775, and was buried in the English cemetery located in the Narinda area of the city. Some of the Dutch colonies were dedicated to producing and trading in silk, for example, the Dutch silk factory at Kalikapur in Kasimbazar, in Murshidabad (Calcapore in Cassimabasar, as the Dutch spelt it; also spelt as Cossimbazar or Cassimbazar by the English), located approximately 250 kilometres north of Chinsurah, was one of the older Dutch colonies, and a centre of silk cultivation. As reported, in 1715, there were approximately 4,000 local silk-weavers in the service of this factory, and the Cassimabasar lodge was renovated in 1739 (‘Bengalen’). The Kasimbazar colony suffered the same fate as most of the other Dutch colonies, that is from the 1780s onwards it was intermittently captured by the English, and in 1825, the Dutch had to leave it for good. As pointed out earlier, the Dutch had a factory at Malda too, also dedicated to trading in silk, but it was shut down quite early. As Stavorinus says around 1770, ‘They had formerly a factory at Malda, for the silk trade; but this has been abandoned for several years’ (1798, 512). A trading post of the Dutch also existed in Rajshahi, in today’s Bangladesh, located on the banks of the Padma River, and comprising factories for silk and indigo production. It was one of the last colonial settlements of the Dutch built in 1781, and thus, given the timeline of Dutch occupation

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of their establishments after that, not used by them for long, and instead passed on to the English. Unlike most other Dutch colonies where their edifices have crumbled or been demolished, the Dutch silk factory of Rajshahi, located in the Barakuthi, still stands on the Padma riverbank as an important landmark, and the campus of the University of Rajshahi is located on the site of the old Dutch settlement. Coming to the lesser settlements of the Dutch in Bengal, one can note Murshidabad, which the Dutch held between 1710 and 1759, and where they ‘had a building where VOC silver was minted into Bengali coin’5 (‘Bengalen’), suggesting that the Dutch minted coins too, with their own silver, albeit probably for the Bengal nawabs of Murshidabad. One of the oldest settlements of the Dutch along with Chinsurah and Baranagar in 1656 was, as one may remember, Mirzapur in Bardhaman, but it did not turn out to be a major colony after all, and not much is known about it. There were a few more Dutch colonies too: [B]esides Fort Gustavus at Chinsura and a silk factory at Cossimbazar, the Dutch had, on the Hooghly river, a garden just south of Chandernagore, a factory for salting pork at Baranagar, north of Calcutta, and, later, a station at Falta for seagoing ships. (O’Malley and Chakravarti 1912, 59)

Falta would have been an important post, as a station for merchant vessels because its location almost at the mouth of the Hooghly river would have given a huge advantage to the Dutch in controlling colonial and mercantile traffic in and out of Bengal. I am not very sure about the garden near Chandernagore, but if it was just a garden, as the name suggests, and did not have any other function, it can be said with some certainty that its role in the history of Dutch colonial and mercantile exploits in Bengal could not have been very significant. Also, one can recall how Kalikinkar Datta names a few more minor Dutch colonies— Futwah, Jugdea, Luckipur, Kagaram, Mowgrama, Motipur—and in our discussion a few more, like those at Midnapore and Rajmahal 5

 he original Dutch sentence on the VOC site reads, ‘Murshidabad (1710–1759) had een T loge waar VOC-zilver tot Bengaalse munt werd geslagen’, and what I have presented above is a non-Dutch-knower’s English translation of the same, aided partly by Google Translate and mostly by commonsense.

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have come up, but these must have been fairly minor posts, and it is impossible to discuss each and every place in Bengal where the Dutch may have set up some establishment. Let me conclude this chapter, therefore. The Dutch would have indeed vanished from the Bengal scene by 1825, and even before that, by the time of their rout at the Battle of Bedara in 1759, they would have been rendered somewhat irrelevant as traders and colonisers in Bengal, and yet, just like the Portuguese, who may have lost all governmental power in Bengal fairly early but left their indelible stamp on Bengal’s tryst with modernity nevertheless, the Dutch too did not depart without leaving behind their traces on the polycolonial landscape that would mould Bengal’s history forever. For starters: first, the Dutch gave Bengal its first modern public secular college, the Hooghly College established in 1812, five years before the Hindu College in Calcutta was; second, it is in the Dutch foundry at Hooghly that the first movable typefaces for Bengali print were cast and with which therefore printing in Bengali in Bengal started; and third, the Dutch inspired a whole new school of painting in Bengal, the ‘Dutch Bengal’ school of painting. All of these were formative of the Bengal story, where clearly not just the English, but multiple European players played their bit to usher it into a polycolonial modernity. I will discuss all this in greater detail in my sixth and final chapter, but currently, we can move on to the next player in this polycolonial game in Bengal—the French.

References Alam, Dhrubo. 2018. ‘The rise and fall of the Dutch in Dhaka’. The Daily Star, 5 February. Available at: https://www.thedailystar.net/in-focus/the-rise-andfall-the-dutch-dhaka-1530046 (accessed on 1 November 2019). ‘Bengalen’. Available at: https://www.vocsite.nl/geschiedenis/handelsposten/ bengalen.html (accessed on 13 December 2019). Bernier, François. 1934. Travels in the Mogul Empire, A.D. 1656–1668 (1670– 1671). Translated by Archibald Constable. London, 1891. Second edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bowrey, Thomas. 1993. A Geographical Account of Countries around the Bay of Bengal: 1669–1679 (1701). Edited by R.C. Temple (1905). Indian reprint, New Delhi: Asian Educational Services.

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Chatterjee, Anjali (née Basu). 1967. Bengal in the Reign of Aurangzib 1658– 1707. Calcutta: Progressive Publishers. Datta, Kalikinkar. 1948. The Dutch in Bengal and Bihar, 1740–1825 A.D. Patna: University of Patna. ‘Important Figures in VOC Chinsurah’. Available at: http://dutchcemeterybengal. com/dutch/node/187 (accessed on 25 December 2019). Kail, Owen C. 1991. The Dutch in India. Delhi: Macmillan India. Karim, Abdul. 1963. Murshid Quli Khan and His Times. Dacca: Asiatic Society of Pakistan. Linschoten, John Huyghen Van. 1885. The Voyage of John Huyghen Van Linschoten to the East Indies (1596, English translation, 1598), 2 volumes, Vol. 1. London: The Hakluyt Society. Master, Streynsham. 1911. The Diaries of Streynsham Master 1675–1680 and Other Contemporary Papers Relating Thereto, 2 volumes. Edited by Richard Carnac Temple. London: John Murray. For the Government of India, Indian Records Series. O’Malley, L.S.S. and Monmohan Chakravarti. 1912. Bengal District Gazetteers: Hooghly. Calcutta: The Bengal Secretariat Book Depot. Prakash, Om. 1964. ‘The European Trading Companies and the Merchants of Bengal 1650–1725’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review (IESHR), I (3), January: 37–63. ———. 1985. The Dutch East India Company and the Economy of Bengal, 1630– 1720. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1994. Precious Metals and Commerce: The Dutch East India Company in the Indian Ocean Trade. London and New York: Routledge. Prakash, Om and Manish Chakraborti. 2008. Europeans in Bengal in the PreColonial Period: A Brief History of Their Commercial and Cultural Legacy. New Delhi: Embassy of the Netherlands. Raychaudhuri, Tapan. 1962. Jan Company in Coromandel 1605–1690. A study in the interrelation of European commerce and traditional economies. Dordrecht: Springer. Stavorinus, John Splinter. 1798. Voyages to the East Indies. Translated by Samuel Hull Wilcocke, 3 volumes, Vol. I. London: G.G. and J. Robinson. Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste. 1889. Travels in India (1676). Translated by Valentine Ball, in 2 volumes, Vol. 1. London: Macmillan. Winius, George D. and Marcus Vink. 1991. The merchant-warrior pacified, the VOC and its changing political economy in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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4

The French in Bengal The next European power to arrive on the scene, and to coexist with the other colonisers for some time, were the French, called Farāshi in Bengali. Somewhat before the French would arrive as a colonial force to Bengal though, there were at least two French travellers who came to Bengal and wrote about it. These first Frenchmen to have come to Bengal were the travellers Vincent le Blanc (1554–c.1640; author of The World Surveyed: Or, The Famous Voyages & Travailes of Vincent le Blanc, or White, of Marseilles), who visited the elusive ‘Towne of Bengale’, Chittagong and Satgaon around 1575, and François Pyrard de Laval (1578–1623; author of The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval to the East Indies, the Maldives, the Moluccas, and Brazil), who passed through Chittagong in 1607. Let me begin my discussion of the French in Bengal by taking a look at these two travellers’ accounts of the place, one after the other. Vincent le Blanc gives his account of Bengal in Chapter 22, ‘Of the kingdom of Bengala, and Ternassery’, of the First Part of his The World Surveyed ([1648] 1660). He begins by talking about his arrival from the Coromandel coast to the Kingdom of Bengal, but soon brings us face to face with a toponymic confusion that we have encountered in detail in Chapter 1, by naming the chief town of Bengal as ‘Bengale’ itself, only further adding to the conundrum by stating that the locals call this city ‘Batacouta’ and it could be the same city that was referred to in antiquity as ‘Ganges’ on the banks of the river by the same name: Leaving the Coast of Coromandell, we came to the Kingdom of Bengale, the chiefe Town whereof beares the name, or at least so called by the Portuguese, and other Nations, & by the Natives Batacouta, one of the greatest antiquity in the Indies. Some would have it to be old Ganges, a Royall Town upon the River Ganges. (83)

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The invocation of the name of the ‘Town of Bengale’ leads us back to the discussion one has already had in the first chapter, in which one has generally concluded that while there are many possible contenders to this otherwise unlocatable city, it is in all probability Gaur, the then capital of Bengal, the most likely claimant for a city to be identified by foreigners with the name of the whole region. The identification of this city of ‘Bengale’ with a place called by the locals ‘Batacouta’ and the ancients as ‘Ganges’ complicates the matter further, as the city of ‘Gange’ referred to by classical greats like Plutarch and Ptolemy as the grand capital of the ancient and formidable kingdom of ‘Gangaridae’ located in the deltaic region of the river Ganga, which is indeed today’s Bengal, is often identified with archaeological finds at Wari-Bateswar (the name does sound similar to Batacouta) in today’s Bangladesh or Chandraketugarh in today’s West Bengal, neither of which would have been towns of any consequence in Blanc’s time. Dinesh Chandra Sircar identifies the ancient city of ‘Ganga’ as having been located in today’s Sagar island. Pointing out that ‘The people called Gangaridae is usually located in Bengal’ (1971, 214), Sircar adds that ‘The particular area of Bengal that was inhabited by the Gangaridae (Ganges people or Gangians) is indicated not only by the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (circa 80 A.D.) but very definitely also by the Geography of Ptolemy (circa 145 A.D.)’ (215). Sircar further points out that for Ptolemy the capital of the country was ‘Gange, the royal city’ (215) and ‘The latitude and longitude of the city as given by the geographer, although they can be hardly relied on, would suggest its location not far from the confluence of the Ganges and the sea’ (216). After going through several other references, both Greek and classical Indian, Sircar concludes, ‘The location of the city of Gaṅgā, capital of the Gangians or Vaṅgas in the vicinity of the confluence of the Gaṅgā and the Sāgara (sea) suggests that it was no other than the celebrated holy city of Gaṅgāsāgara or Gaṅgāsāgarasaṅgama mentioned in Indian literature’ (218). The point of this long digression was that the elusive City of Bengal could be just about anywhere, and while no local would have called any city in Bengal ever by that name, for European travellers, whichever city they would have perceived as being the main city of Bengal in their itinerary, they would have called the City of Bengal.

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Let us presume that since he visits Chittagong and Satgaon separately and mentions Sripur, Bakla and Chandecan (though the possibility of Chandecan as being the ‘Royal Town’ in question will be brought up soon later) as separate kingdoms, Vincent le Blanc’s city of Bengale was Gaur itself or Sagar Island. The latter becomes a strong contender not only because of the City of Ganga connect mentioned before but also because Blanc says, ‘The Town is scituate upon one of the mouthes of Ganges, whereof there are two Principall’ (83) suggesting two major estuarine distributaries girdling the city, which fits the location of Sagar (or Sandwip for that matter) very well. What really matters, however, is that he was the first Frenchman to visit Bengal in the 1570s, and had lived to tell his story! Blanc brings into focus a bit of the then political situation of Bengal— that it ‘remains stil subjected to the great Mogull, Prince of Tartary, and Supreme Lord of all Indostan: and yet there remaine some Lords in that Countrey, that are Soveraignes, and obey the Mogull in a Noble manner’ (83)—and a bit of its geography—‘This Kingdom reaches 200. leagues upon the sea side, and containes the Kingdomes of Sirapu [Sripur], Chandecan, Bacal [Bakla], Aracan, or Mogor [the land of the Mogs, not Mughals, which Blanc spells differently], and others’ (83). His attention is primarily drawn, however, to the religious plurality of the place: ‘The Inhabitants of Bengale are Idolaters, Mahometans, and some Christians, for there are Portuguaises, and Fathers of the Society’ (83). Blanc notes this multi-ethnic cosmopolitan ethos of Bengal in its trade practices too and observes that ‘the people are very civill, and given to trade. And all Nations have free traffick, like Persians, Greekes, Abyssins, Chineses, Guserates, Malabares, Turkes, Moores, Jewes, Russes, or Georgians, and many others’ (84). This also leads him to note the general prosperity of the city because of its flourishing trade: There is great commerce of Jewells, and other Merchandises, brought by the Mouth of Ganges streight to Bengale, going up six miles by land, but above twenty by water, by reason of the ebb and flow, which (as I have already said) is different from other seas, the smallest tides falling out at the full of the Moone, but when the water is at the lowest ’tis three fadome deepe round the Walls of the Town, so that ships safely enter the Haven, and are there very numerous. ’Tis thought there are

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fourty thousand families in the Town, and the King dwells in a stately Pallace built of brick, with faire gardens unto it. The Town is pleasantly seated. (84)

This again makes Gaur the likelier candidate for Blanc’s city of Bengal because this port city seems somewhat inland rather than right on the coast, and its huge population and stately palace suggest a proper urban settlement, which Sagar or any of the islands could not have had; but, as I said earlier, I will try to desist from the temptation of attempting to identify which city Vincent le Blanc had in mind exactly when referring to the city of ‘Bengale’ because one would run into muddy waters again, as Blanc categorically says, ‘The King of Bengale is an Idolater, as generally all the Eastern are’ (85), while the then Karrani Sultan of Bengal at Gaur was clearly a Muslim. Also, in his observation of how the King was welcoming of the Christian fathers, Blanc describes Chandecan as the king’s ‘Royal Town’: ‘This King hath entertained the Fathers of the society at Chandecan, his Royal Town’ (87), which may suggest Pratapaditya as the Hindu King referred to here, and Sagar Island1 being again one of the possible sites of the City of Bengal. It is best not to get entangled in this debate, and concentrate instead on what Blanc has to say about Bengal. Talking of the king, Blanc also takes off on some general Orientalist fantasies like this Hindu king of the city of Bengal having a contingent of Amazonian female bodyguards and a seraglio of amorous and licentious women: The King keepes a great Court, followed by a gallant Nobility, and his chiefest guard consists of women, […] they put more trust in them then in men, they march very gravely, are very valiant, and expert horseriders and vaulters, use the Cimitere and buckler, and battle axes very dexterously: you must take a care to come neer them in their March, for they will abuse you, […] the King maintains a great many of them in his Pallace, and the handsommest are richly attired.

1

 s has been discussed in Chapter 2 earlier, the location of Chandecan is also disputed, but A what is certain is that it was one of the primary seats of Raja Pratapaditya and a place of early Portuguese missionary presence. It has been variously identified with Chandradwip in Barisal, Dhumghat in Jessore, or the Sagar Island, the latter being one of the contenders of the ‘Town of Bengale’ tag here. See also Footnote 9 in Chapter 2 before.

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The Sun once set, ’tis forbidden to any man to come neere the quarter, the Seraglio is kept in, it lookes upon a faire garden, on the side of a pleasant river, where the Ladies walke at night, and ’tis death for any man to be found there. […] If the women are surprized in their amours, they run no danger, and men are very seldom exempt from punishments. (85)

Similarly, he talks of the languid climate of Bengal having contributed to some cases of freakishly long lifespans, including one person who was 330 years old: The Climate is very temperate, and well air’d, that makes them live long, witnesse the Moor of Bangale, aged three hundred and thirty years, in 1537. the oldest of the Countrey never knew him but old, and of the same growth, and remembred Cambaye without a Mahometan, his hair chang’d colour four times, from black to white, and he lost his teeth as often, and still they came again, he had about 700. wives in his life time, he was an Idolater for a 100. years together, and was the rest of his time a Mahometan […] (86)

Of course, these are so unrealistic and unlikely, that they put much of Vincent le Blanc’s account of Bengal under the shadow of suspicion, as to its veracity. However, such fantastic descriptions do throw some light on the early French imagining of Bengal in particular and the Orient in general. Coming to the other aspect of religious, mostly idolatrous practices of the people of Bengal, Vincent le Blanc notices with some amusement the reverence the natives, both Muslims and Hindus, have for the water of the river Ganges: The Moors and Gentills hold there is much holiness and vertue in that River-water, and wash themselves therein thorough Ceremony and Superstition […] They say ’tis the best and the wholesomest water in the World, and sent for 500. leagues off. Forty or fifty thousand persons bathe themselves therein at a time, and many Kings come disguised thither. (83)

While baffled at this superstitious reverence for the water of the river, Blanc is equally dismissive of the Europeans who avoid using water from the Ganges for this reason alone, suggesting instead how the water does have many curative properties:

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They [the natives of Bengal] esteem it a happiness to be near the Ganges, believing that water purifies them from all filth and sin, and therefore are carried thither both in health and sickness; some leave orders, that after their deaths their bodies may be burnt, and their ashes cast therein, that so they may go strait to heaven, […] and for this reason the Portuguese and other Christians abominate these rivers, and never make any use of the water but of force and necessity, wch is a little superstitious, on the other side, the water of Ganges, being the sweetest & the wholsomest in the world, and many drinking of it have been cured of great paines of the stomach which hardly afforded them any rest before; ’tis soveraign against many other pains, aches, and diseases. (88–89)

It is this equivocation that makes Blanc critical of the idolatrous practices of the Bengalis, and yet be in deep appreciation of their gallantry and elegance. While on the one hand, full of contempt for idolatry, Blanc says, The people are Gentils, and in their Temples adore many Idols strangely and horridly shap’d, […] some of those Idolaters prostrated themselves at our feet, and begun to make their prayers to us: and were extreamly incensed, when they saw we only endeavored to disabuse them, and to laugh them out of their fopperies and idolatries. (88)

On the other hand, he also says about the king that ‘he is valiant of Person’ (85), and of the people in general, ‘The Bengalians are the gallantest Persons of the East, both men and women, both sexes go richly apparel’d and perfumed’ (85). Similarly, on the one hand, he notices with horror the cruel and rampant practice of slave-trade in Bengal, that too often with castration as part of the process: All other Nations of the Indies flock thither to spend their money, and chiefly to buy young slaves to attend and guard their women, and manage their businesse; they are bought and sold as horses are here: they buy them young the safer to geld them; the Parents being poore, do not scruple to sell their children to strangers for three score, four score, and a hundred Ducates, more or lesse […]. The Law is, that if a slave return to his father, they are both enslaved to the master, untill redemption. (85–86)

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At the same time, Blanc marvels at the elegant fashion sense of the Bengalis: ‘their cloathings are stuffs of cotton, silk, damask, satin and velvet. Their breeches, cassocks, or coats, are almost of the Italian mode, especially when they visit Ladies’ (87). Vincent le Blanc also describes the climate of Bengal: that ‘although the Bengaliens lye under the Torrid Zone, they are cooled with much rain, that falls from May to mid-August, it rains from mid-day to midnight’ (87); and their dietary habits: ‘The Bengalians are curious, and delicious in their diet, they feed much upon preserves, and sweet-meats, for having all sorts of spices green, they confect of all sorts’ (86), and that ‘Their chiefest drink is milk, with Sugar and Cinamon; they make it of three sorts, Sugar and Cinamon are still added, and sometimes pepper, Durions, Mancoustan, and Bananes’ (87). He also describes some religious rituals and funerary rites of the people of Bengal, which seem too exoticised and unrealistic to merit any attention: For example, Bengalis apparently ‘maintain women to lament and weep over the dead, according to the ancient Roman fashion. These women are clothed in mantles of the Spanish fashion […] One of these women makes a Panegyrick of the dead’ (89) and such others. Instead, let me end my discussion of Vincent le Blanc’s account with brief references to his description of the two major cities in Bengal (apart from the City of Bengal) that he visits—our already familiar Chittagong and Satgaon. Blanc marvels at these two great port cities, both with significant Portuguese presence and rich in trade. He gives a much more detailed account of Chittagong (or Castigan or Catigan, as he calls it), beginning with: We went from Bengale in the company of many Merchants, to trade at Castigan, where were arrived some Portuguese ships, and in those meetings much is got, by the trade of gold and silver, and in the exchange of our own commodities, Castigan or Catigan belongs to the kingdom of Bengale, which reaches over 400. leagues of land […] Catigan is a good Haven Town, in the Mogor, or Mogull’s Country [i.e. under partial control of both the Mogs and the Mughals], a great Kingdom, and rich in all sorts of cattle, in fish, rice white and black, spices, especially pepper, myrabolans, and ginger, which they candy and preserve […] (87)

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Blanc is similarly all praise for Satgaon (or what he calls Sartagan or Sartogan), though it being the Porto Pequeno rather than the Porto Grande, and the river Saraswati on which it is located already in a progressive state of silting up and ‘losing itself’, he is a bit less detailed and effusive about this town: ‘In the kingdom of Bengale is the Town of Sartagan, or Sartogan, scituate upon a River, that runs and loses her self in Ganges, where the Portuguese have a fort. There are great plenty of rice, fine linnen cloaths, sugar, myrabolans, and many other drugs’ (88). Let me end my description of the first Frenchman’s encounter with Bengal here, and move on to the next French traveller to Bengal. François Pyrard de Laval, the second Frenchman to pass through Bengal three decades after Vincent le Blanc, gives in his 1611 travelogue a detailed account of the flora and fauna and the customs of the people of Bengal, albeit his stay being, by his own account, lamentably short, and restricted primarily to Chittagong and its surroundings. As the editor of the version I take up here, A.V. Williams Jackson, says: […] among the most interesting accounts of India at the opening of the seventeenth century is that given by François Pyrard of Laval, who set out for the Orient in 1601 and spent nearly ten years in travelling in As Froideveaux reports the East Indies, the Maldives, the Moluccas, and various parts of India, returning to his home in 1611. In the account of his travels, Pyrard devotes considerable space to places along the coast of India, including the district of Bengal, where he spent a month. In spite of the fact that he complains of the shortness of his sojourn in Bengal, he has given a good account of the country, as will be seen in the following selection from Albert Gray’s translation for the Hakluyt Society. (Laval [1611] 1907, 280)

Laval begins his description by talking about his arrival to Chittagong, and how welcome he was made to feel by the local provincial governor there. He says, After a month’s voyage, we arrived at Chartican (Chittagong, properly Chatigam), a port of the kingdom of Bengal, where we were received by the inhabitants with much rejoicing. On landing, they took me with them to salute the king, who is not, however, the great king of Bengal, but a petty king of this province, or rather

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a governor, with the title of king, as is generally the case in those parts. The great king of Bengal lives higher up the country, thirty or forty leagues off. On being presented to this petty king, he received me with great kindness, and gave me my full liberty, saying that if I would remain with him he would do great things for me: and, indeed, he bade bring me raiment and food day by day in great abundance. (280–283)

However, Laval says that he could not avail of this welcome for long, since ‘after a month’s sojourn’ (283), he got the opportunity to take a ship to Calicut, from where he had the chance of boarding Dutch vessels and get a passage back to France, an offer he could not refuse. He laments though the brevity of his stay, and almost apologises for the limitations of his account before properly beginning it: ‘I was so short a time in Bengal, that I cannot record many of its characteristics; however, here is what I picked up’ (283). Considering this limitation, it is indeed a very detailed account of Bengal that Laval gives. Laval begins by giving an account of politics in the then Bengal, the impending battle between the expanding Mughal empire, which had already fully annexed the independent Bengal Sultanate by 1576, and the ‘king’ Laval refers to: ‘About the time I left, the Mogor had declared war against him, and the king was preparing to receive him with more than two hundred thousand men and ten thousand elephants’ (283). Though Laval mentions earlier the ‘great king of Bengal’ and further says, ‘the king is the most puissant prince in India, after the grand Mogor’ (283), it should be noted that by the time of Laval’s visit, there could not have been a sovereign king of the whole of Bengal, and he must be referring to the same Pratapaditya that Blanc possibly refers to, or to one of the members of the Bāro-Bhuyān (twelve landed chieftains) confederacy, who in spite of being local chieftains, held out against the Mughals in a bid to relative sovereignty. Moreover, since Laval later says, ‘The great king is a pagan; he of Chartican, whom I saw, was a Mohammedan’ (291), it is almost certain that the so-called ‘great king’ of Bengal was some powerful Hindu chieftain, probably Pratapaditya, who had declared himself a sovereign king and died fighting the Mughals in 1612, rather than a real sultan or nawab, which Bengal had none, in any case, by then.

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Laval greatly marvels at the richness of Bengal, both in terms of its ample agricultural produce and vibrant trade relations with different parts of India and Southeast Asia: The country is healthy and temperate, and so wondrous fertile that one lives there for almost nothing; and there is such a quantity of rice, that, besides supplying the whole country, it is exported to all parts of India, as well to Goa and Malabar, as to Sumatra, the Moluccas, and all the islands of Sunda, to all of which lands Bengal is a very nursing mother, who supplies them with their entire subsistence and food. Thus, one sees arrive there every day an infinite number of vessels from all parts of India for these provisions. (284)

He also talks about the abundant production of ‘many good fruits’, ‘sugar-cane, which they eat green or else make into excellent sugar for a cargo to their ships’ and ‘scented oils’ (286). Laval also comments on the plentifulness of livestock and animal produce: ‘The country is well supplied with animals, such as oxen, cows, and sheep; flesh is accordingly very cheap, let alone milk-foods and butter, whereof they have such an abundance that they supply the rest of India’ (285–286). He also mentions different kinds of woven fabric like ‘carpets of various kinds, which they weave with great skill’ (286), as also exquisitely fine cotton, silk and jute fabric, all woven and embroidered with masterly craftspersonship by the Bengalis: Cotton is so plentiful, that, after providing for the uses and clothing of the natives, and besides exporting the raw material, they make such a quantity of cotton cloths, and so excellently woven, that these articles are exported, and thence only, to all India, but chiefly to the parts about Sunda. Likewise is there plenty of silk, as well that of the silkworm as of the (silk) herb, which is of the brightest yellow colour, and brighter than silk itself; of this they make many stuffs of divers colours, and export them to all parts. The inhabitants, both men and women, are wondrously adroit in all manufactures, such as of cotton cloth and silks, and in needlework, such as embroideries, which are worked so skilfully, down to the smallest stitches, that nothing prettier is to be seen anywhere. Some of these cottons and silks are so fine that it is difficult to say whether a person so attired be clothed or nude. (286–287)

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He also talks about ‘furniture and vessels [… of] extraordinary delicacy’ (287) also produced in and exported from Bengal. Laval seems to be particularly impressed by the bamboo and devotes a significant length of his writeup to the different types and uses of this versatile, strong yet pliant reed (287–289). Laval also talks about the fauna of Bengal—elephants and rhinoceroses—and in a rare bout of pardonable exoticisation, reports that ‘some say unicorns, too, which are said to be found in this land only. They say other animals will not drink at a well until a female unicorn has steeped her horn in the water, so they all wait on the bank till she comes and does so’ (289). He also does not forget that ‘In this land is the great river Ganga, otherwise called the Ganges, the most renowned in the world’ (292), and while, like Blanc, he points out the holiness of the river, he particularly focuses on the fact that ‘This river breeds also a large number of crocodiles, and is marvellously rich in fish; in short, it is the wealthiest in all produce in the East Indies’ (293). Like Blanc, Laval’s take on the human nature of the people of Bengal is mixed. He is also somewhat taken aback by the flourishing slave trade in Bengal, the apparent ‘shameless’ nature of the women, and that the people of Bengal are ‘cheats, thieves, and liars’: One of the greatest trades in Bengal is in slaves; for there is a certain land subject to this king where fathers sell their children, and give them to the king as tribute; so most of the slaves in India are got from hence. Nowhere in India are slaves of so little value, for they are all old and knavish villains, both men and women. The people are well formed in body, the women are pretty, but more shameless than elsewhere in India. The men are much given to trafficking in merchandise, and not to war or arms, – a soft, courteous, clever people, but having the repute of great cheats, thieves, and liars. (290)

On the other hand, Laval is full of praise for the fine silk and linen clothing that both the men and women wear, and that ‘very richly adorned with gold chains and pearls’ (291). Similarly, Laval is disgusted that ‘They are disorderly and very barbarous in their eating and drinking […] and have each three or four wives’ (291), but is in deep appreciation of the multiethnic cohabitation, tolerance and cosmopolitanism that the people of Bengal demonstrate:

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They trade in many places, making long voyages; so do many strangers frequent their country, for example, Persians, Arabs, and the Portuguese merchants of Goa and Cochin. Under the government of this king are men of many religions, Jews, Mohammedans, and Gentiles, or pagans, these latter showing as great a diversity of ceremonies as of countries and provinces. […] A large number of Portuguese dwell in freedom at the ports on this coast of Bengal; they are also very free in their lives, being like exiles. They do only traffic, without any fort, order, or police, and live like natives of the country […]. (290–291)

Overall, though it is a mixed bag of feelings with which François Pyrard de Laval—the second Frenchman to pass through Bengal in 1607— would have left, he does not hesitate to have the most complimentary view of Bengal: In short, I find no country in all the East Indies more abundantly supplied with all things needful for food, with the riches of nature and art; and were not the navigation so dangerous, it would be the fairest, most pleasant, fertile, and profitable in the whole world…. (289)

And once again, it is with a tone of lament at not having got to spend more time and to know better this fantastic place, he ends his account by saying, ‘This is all I was able to observe of this kingdom during the short time I was there’ (293). Let me now move on from the first two French travellers to Bengal to colonial enterprises of the French in the region. The French were actually not very late starters in the East-India polycolonial race though their efforts started bearing fruit a bit late. As Froideveaux reports, In the second quarter of the sixteenth century, about thirty years after the Portuguese had reached the Malabar Coast by way of the Cape, in July 1527, a Norman ship belonging to the Rouen merchants appeared, according to the Portuguese João de Barros, at Diu. In the next year the Marie de Bon Secours, also called the Grand Anglais, was seized by the Portuguese, at the very time when one of Jean Ange’s most famous captains was proposing to that famous merchant to sail to Sumatra and even to the Moluccas. In 1530 the Sacre and the Pensée actually reached the west coast of Sumatra; […] contemporary documents do not indicate the arrival of any other French ships in Indian harbours in the later years of the sixteenth century or the earlier ones of the seventeenth. (1929, 61)

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Thus, in spite of actually reaching India as early as 1527, in effect, the French could not establish any real trade relations with India for the next three-quarters of a century. However, as Froideveaux further reports, ‘In 1601 we have the equipment by a company of St Malo merchants, de Laval and de Vitré, of the two ships, the Croissant and the Corbin, the voyages of which have been related by François Pyrard de Laval’ (61), and which we have also been through a while before; and ‘in 1604-09 came the attempts of Henry IV to set up a French East India Company, like those established in the Netherlands and England’ (61). However, again, nothing concrete came out of this, primarily because of intense maritime competition with the other European powers in the polycolonial matrix, and even when a fresh ‘letters patent’ was issued in 1615 and two ships were sent to India, only one returned, making that effort a failed one too. It was a couple of decades further later that in 1642, La Compagnie française des Indes orientales or the French East India Company, was formed under the initiative of the then French Chief Minister, Armand Jean du Plessis, the Duke of Richelieu (better known as Cardinal Richelieu), but one cannot say it yielded the desired results (62). It was only two decades further down the line that, in 1664, the Compagnie was revived and re-organised under Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and it is only after that that French colonial efforts in India began in earnest, with representatives sent to the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb’s court to seek a formal farman from him to set up a colony in Surat, which they finally set up in 1668. As Froideveaux reports: There [i.e. in Surat] one of the agents sent in 1664 had long been awaiting his chiefs. Béber (for so he was named), after accompanying La Boullaye le Gouz to Agra in August-September, 1666, had returned to Surat, where he proceeded to act on a farman of Aurangzib granting the French a site and factory at Swally and permission to trade in the neighbouring town on the same terms as the Dutch and the English. (1929, 66)

Interestingly, while Béber had thus prepared the ground thoroughly by 1666, having reached India by 1664 itself, ‘only at the beginning of 1668, nearly four years after the formation of the Company, did any of its qualified representatives arrive by the sea-route in the Swally

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Roads on the coast of Gujarat’ (66). Thus, while there were influential individual Frenchmen in India already playing important roles by that time—like François Bernier, the physician to Aurangzeb from 1658, whom we have already encountered in Chapters 2 and 3—the French as a collectivity could first set up trading posts in Swally Roads next to Surat only in 1668; could establish a factory in Masulipatnam in 1669; could occupy St Thomé (São Tome, Mylapore in today’s Chennai) in 1672, and could have their first really stable colony in Pondicherry under François Martin further later only in 1674. However, while all these would have happened in other parts of India, here we are interested primarily in talking about the French setting up colonies in Bengal. What is to be noted is that though the first French colonies were indeed in Surat and southern India, once they had their colonial footprint in Bengal, it became their most important possession for quite some time. As Arghya Bose says, […] Bengal was the most important for the Company. For Bengal posed as not only the main market for its import goods, but also furnished the company with shiploads of oriental riches such as the linens of muslin, silk, metals, and opium – the richest of the company’s cargos to mainland France. Chandernagor [the main colony of the French in Bengal, as will be soon elaborated] had risen to exceptional economic importance by centralizing all of these economic operations to itself, so much so, that the Company’s oldest loge at Surate was brought under the direct and immediate direction of Chandernagor. And it was well aware of this importance it commanded being situated in one of the most affluent regions of the subcontinent. (2017, 21–22)

But how did this all begin? A French contingent led by someone called Duplessis was the first French team to arrive in Bengal in 1673, and they built a small warehouse in 1674 and stayed up to 1676 on a plot of land given to them by the nawab of Bengal, Ibrahim Khan, at Taldanga in Borokishanpur in the extreme northern part of today’s Chandernagore (Chandernagor/Chandannagar), which in itself is a few kilometres south of Chinsurah and about 30 kilometres north of today’s Kolkata. As O’Malley and Chakravarti point out in their 1912 Hooghly Gazette, this first settlement of the French in Bengal was by pure accident:

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According to the English factory records, the first settlement of the French in Bengal was made at Hooghly and was the result of an accident. In a letter to the Court of Directors, dated Balasore, the 28th December 1674, Walter Clavell, the English Company’s chief representative in the Bay, reported that in the preceding year a ship of the French King’s, named the Flemen, while returning to St. Thomé, was separated from the rest of the squadron sent by the Viceroy (M De la Haye) owing to foul weather. Not being able to make [to] Coromandel, she came to the Balasore Roads, where she was surprised and taken by three Dutch merchantmen bound for Hooghly. They ‘had the confidence to bring her up to Hooghly before their one factory;’ […] the Governor of Balasore persuaded some of the French to complain personally at Dacca. The upshot was that the Dutch were fain to buy the prize of the Moors, and the French were sent away with good words and liberty to build factories and carry on trade in what part of Bengal they would. (80)

This is how the French under Duplessis first arrived in Bengal in 1673 and got permission and a plot of land from the Nawab at Dhaka to set up a ‘small house’ just south of Chinsurah in 1674 (80). The location of this factory—about two miles south of Hooghly—and that by 1676, it was not under the occupancy of the French any more, is known from Streynsham Master’s diary entry of 12 September 1676: ‘[L]esse then two miles short of Hugly wee passed by the Dutch Garden and a little further by a large spot of ground [Chandarnagar or Chandernagore] which the French had laid out in a Factory, the gate to which was standing, but was now in the possession of the Dutch’ (Vol. I, 325). However, while the Chandernagore house may have been vacated by the French by September 1676, Streynsham Master’s entry of 23 September 1676 suggests that they had by then got at least another plot of land at Cassimbazar: ‘By the river side, about the middle of the Towne, wee passed by the spot of ground allotted to the French’ (Vol. I, 329), which would thus be the second establishment of the French in Bengal in place by September 1676. The French returned to their original establishment in what would become Chandernagore in 1688, after François Martin, the Commissaire of Pondicherry, sent his son-in-law André Deslandes on 30 August 1688 to explore possibilities of the same, and in January

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1693, Deslandes received a farman from Aurangzeb to administer the area, thus formally becoming entitled to set up a French colony in Bengal. The colony was formed by amalgamating three villages— Borokishanpur to the north (where their earlier ‘small house’ was located), Gondalpara to the south, and Khalisani to the west—and Sumanta Banerjee observes how it is curious that Calcutta was also carved out of three villages: By a curious coincidence, each city was constructed out of three villages. The French colonists built up Chandernagore from three rural settlements – Borkishonpur, Khalisani and Gondalpara. Calcutta was constructed by the British rulers from three villages – Gobindapur, Sutanuti and Kolikata. (2012, 1)

The name ‘Chandernagor’ referring to the entire colony thus formed first appears in a 1696 letter sent by Deslandes and Palle, officials posted in the colony to officials of the French East India Company. In Bengali local parlance, however, the place was usually referred to as Farashdanga, or the Land of the French, for a very long time. The European war saw the temporary fall of Pondicherry to the Dutch in September 1693, and the French concentrated more on Bengal. In 1701, the French administration under Deslandes built the Fort D’Orleans in Chandernagore (Sen 2012, 1), by building walls, bastions and ramparts around their already established territory. Fort D’Orleans has been described thus: almost in the middle of the settlement, surrounded by houses, which command it, a square of about 600 feet, built of brick, flanked with four bastions, with six guns each, without ramparts or glacis. The southern curtain, about 4 feet thick, not raised to its full height, was provided only with a battery of 3 guns; there was a similar battery to the west, but the rest of the west curtain was only a wall of mud and brick, about a foot and a half thick, and 8 or 10 feet high; there were warehouses ranged against the east curtain which faced the Ganges, and which was still in process of construction; the whole of this side had no ditch, and that round the other sides was dry, only 4 feet in depth, and a mere ravine. The walls of the Fort up to the ramparts were 15 feet high, and the houses, on the edge of the counterscarp, which commanded it, were as much as 30 feet. (Renault, qtd. in Hill 1903, 18–19)

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The French also established five lodges (‘loge’ in French)—at Cassimbazar (next to Murshidabad, which we have already referred to above), Jugdea (halfway between Dhaka and Chittagong near today’s Barisal and Sandwip, also mentioned before as a minor settlement of the Dutch), Dhaka, Balasore and Patna—which, along with their major colony at Chandernagore, comprised the entirety of French colonial holdings in the then area of Bengal with the last two lodges, of course, being in today’s Odisha and Bihar, respectively. In 1701, Chandernagore was brought under the authority of the Governor of Pondicherry, and thus made a formal part of French India, but for the first three decades, the colony fared miserably with very little trade coming its way. However, as O’Malley and Chakravarti point out, ‘In 1731 Joseph Francoix Dupleix was appointed Intendant of Chandernagore, and during the ten years in which he held that office he transformed the place’ (1912, 81). As Sailendra Nath Sen also says, ‘The place did not assume significant importance as a trading centre till the arrival of Dupleix as Governor (Intendant) in 1731. Within a decade he transformed the place and made it a great commercial centre’ (2012, 1) Chandernagore indeed rose to its height of prosperity with Joseph François Dupleix as its governor from 1731 to 1741, and became a very important trading centre, comparable with, if not busier and richer than, the neighbouring Dutch Chinsurah and the English Calcutta close by. But with the departure of Dupleix in 1741, upon he being transferred to Pondicherry, Chandernagore again fell in bad times. As O’Malley and Chakravarti say, After the departure of Dupleix on transfer to Pondicherry (1741), the Maratha raids, the unsettled condition of the country, want of funds and lack of vigour on the part of his successors, all combined to reduce the trade of the French in Bengal. There is ample proof of its decline. For instance, M. Renault, the Governor of Chandernagore, in a letter to Dupleix dated 30th September 1757, stated that when he took charge of the factory (in 1754?), it was in debt to the extent of 26 or 27 lakhs, but that by exercising his personal credit he managed to send back the next year three ships laden with rich cargoes. Again, in a letter of the Dutch Council at Hooghly to their Supreme Council at Batavia, dated 24th November 1756, it is said that the French ‘have done no business

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these last few years’ and in another letter to the Assembly in Holland, dated 2nd January 1757, they wrote that ‘what the French are about to send by Pandichery and the Danes by Tranquebara, will be of but trifling importance’. (1912, 83)

Things took a worse turn when soon, on the one hand, the Nawab of Bengal Siraj-ud-daula attacked and conquered Calcutta in June 1756 and in retaliation, the English defeated Siraj in the Battle of Plassey in June 1757, and on the other, the Anglo-French war broke out in Europe in December 1756. While the latter led to a general situation of hostility between the French and the English, the former led to Chandernagore being conquered by the English. To make matters more complicated, the English and Siraj-ud-daula both sought French help in their ongoing conflicts, but they, like the Dutch as we saw in the previous chapter, chose to stay ‘neutral’ invoking the wrath of both parties. O’Malley and Chakravarti show: Both Siraj-ud-daula and the English applied for help to the French, who declined to side with either party, but offered to shelter the English in their fort. While on his march to Calcutta, the Nawab forcibly took the French boats to transport his men across the Ganges, and on his return he levied from them a fine of Rs. 3,40,000. […] In December 1756 news came that war had been declared between France and England. […] Next month the Nawab concluded a treaty with the English, and on his way back past Chandernagore, sent friendly messages to M. Renault, repaid him one lakh out of the fine he had levied, granted the French a parwana with all the privileges allowed to the British, and even offered them the town of Hooghly if they would ally themselves with him. The French took the money, but declined the alliance. The English believed, however, that they had a secret alliance with Siraj-uddaula and determined to crush the French before attacking the Nawab. (1912, 84)

On 12 March 1757, the English army under Robert Clive marched to within two miles of Chandernagore, demanding that the French surrender and upon receiving no response to this began their siege on Chandernagore on 14 March 1757 with the navy under Admiral Watson also laying siege from the riverside. The French—‘M. Renault could muster with great difficulty 237 soldiers (including 45 pensioners and sick),

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120 sailors, 70 half-castes and private Europeans, 100 civilians, 167 sepoys and 100 topasses, in all 794 men’ (84)—were no match for the mighty English forces; on 23 March 1757, ‘M. Renault at about 9-30 a.m. hoisted the white flag’ (85) and the English fully captured Chandernagore on 24 March 1757. Though by the 1763 Treaty of Paris, Chandernagore was returned to the French on 25 June 1765, the French were reduced to an inconsequential power in Bengal because Article XI of the Treaty required the French ‘not to erect fortifications, or to keep troops, in any part of the Soubah of Bengal’ (qtd. in O’Malley and Chakravarti 1912, 85), and Fort D’Orleans was also totally destroyed during the six years of English occupation of Chandernagore. Samuel Charles Hill in his Three Frenchmen in Bengal (1903) lays the responsibility of the loss of Chandernagore and the subsidiary French establishments in Bengal to the English with three top officials of the French colonies in Bengal at that point of time—Pierre Renault, the then Governor at Chandernagore, Jean Law de Lauriston, the chief of the loge at Cassimbazar, and Jacques Ignace Courtin, the chief of the loge at Dhaka. Hill says, Thus began the ruin of the French in Bengal. The chief French Factories were, as I have said, at Chandernagore, Cossimbazar, and Dacca. The Chiefs of these Factories were M. Renault, the Director of all the French in Bengal; M. Law, a nephew of the celebrated Law of Lauriston, the financier; and M. Courtin. It is the doings and sufferings of these three gallant men [that led to the fall of the French in Bengal.]. (11)

Hill chooses not to talk about the fate of the French establishments at Balasore and Jugdea, as ‘At these the number of Frenchmen was so very small that resistance and escape were equally hopeless’ (12), nor of Patna, where ‘The chief, M. de la Bretesche, was too ill to be moved’ (12), but gives a very detailed account of the English conquest of Chandernagore in 1757, collecting it from different sources: The story of the siege is to be gathered from many accounts. M. Renault and his Council submitted an official report; Renault wrote many letters to Dupleix and other patrons or friends; several of the Council and other private persons did the same. […] M. Jean Law […] was Chief of Cossimbazar, and watched the siege, as it were, from

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the outside. His straightforward narrative helps us now and then to correct a mis-statement made by the besieged in the bitterness of defeat. (16–17)

Hill also uses several other sources, including writings from the English functionaries in the war like Clive, and of many French soldiers involved in the war, to bring out a blow-by-blow account of the siege of Chandernagore and its aftermath, but I will desist from going into such details any further. Let it just suffice to say that the final attack of Chandernagore by the English forces was a result, to a great extent, of misunderstandings and miscommunication, both between the English and the French, particularly about an apprehension as to whether the French had entered into some kind of an understanding with Sirajud-daula, and amongst the English themselves, particularly Clive’s and Watson’s divergent views as to whether to attack the French or have a treaty with them. As Hill points out: The Nawab and the English concluded a treaty of peace and alliance on the 9th of February, 1757. Renault mentions no actual treaty between the Nawab and the French, but […] the Nawab demanded that the Council should bind itself in writing […] It does not matter whether this engagement was signed or not. As a Frenchman thus mentions it, the rumour of its signature must have been very strong. It is probable that the English heard of it, and believed it to be conclusive proof of the secret understanding between the Nawab and the French. […] Such a rumour, therefore, was not likely to facilitate negotiations. Nevertheless, Renault sent M.M. Fournier and Nicolas, the latter of whom had many friends amongst the English, to Calcutta, to reopen the negotiations for neutrality. These negotiations seemed to be endless. The most striking feature was Admiral Watson’s apparent vacillation. When the Council proposed war he wanted peace when they urged neutrality he wanted war. Clive went so far as to present a memorial to the Council, saying it was unfair to continue the negotiations if the Admiral was determined not to agree to a treaty. […] However, in spite of all difficulties, the terms were agreed to, the draft was prepared, and only the signatures were wanting, when a large reinforcement of Europeans arrived from Bombay, and the Admiral received formal notification of the declaration of war, and orders from the Admiralty to attack the French. (28–30)

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Such were the constantly changing, and rather chance circumstances that led to the 1757 conquest of Chandernagore by the English forces, reducing the French power in Bengal to practically nothing for a few years to come. However, with the French having formally got back their possessions in India, Jean Law de Lauriston, whom we have already met before as the Chief of the Cassimbazar factory in 1757, was appointed Governor in 1764, and he concentrated on reviving Chandernagore in a major way, but not to much avail: ‘Law enterntained the idea of making Chandernagore the chief French settlement in India, leaving Pondicherry as a satellite. […] He established the Conseil Superieur at Chandernagore which Pondicherry refused to recognise’ (Sen 2012, 3). After Law, Renault de Saint-Germain took charge of Chandernagore, but he also could not do much to revive the fortunes of the colony due to severe English sanctions. In July 1767, Saint-Germain was succeeded by Jean Baptiste Chevalier and ‘Under him there was brief revival of the commercial prosperity of Chandernagore’ (3), though that also was not enough to make the colony resurrect its glorious days of the Dupleix era. In 1769, the French East India Company was abolished by the French Crown, and it itself assumed administration of the French possessions in India, but with even the official French government not having adequate wherewithal to resist the English onslaught in Bengal, the condition of Chandernagore steadily declined. As the French traveller Comte de Modave recounts in his Voyage en Inde du Comte de Modave 1773–6 about his 1774 visit to Chandernagore: This town, formerly so flourishing, presents to the eye nothing but sad pictures of heaps of ruins and deserted streets, without buildings and without inhabitants. A sad and profound silence attests its present misery as much as it recalls the memory of its eclipsed spendour. […] The settlement of Chandernagore is at present nothing but a shadow of what it was twenty-five years ago. (qtd. in Sen 2012, 3)

It comes as no surprise that when another Anglo-French war broke in Europe in 1778, the English again occupied Chandernagore on 10 July 1778, with the then governor Chevalier fleeing the scene and the Commandant Hanquart simply handing over the town to the English.

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Once again, Chandernagore was returned to the French through the Treaty of Versailles in September 1783, but under quite unfavourable terms: ‘the French agreed not to erect any fortifications or to employ a large number of troops, but to keep the place as a purely commercial settlement’ (Sen 2012, 4). With the desire to revive its colony in Bengal, the French authorities sent someone called Dangereux to Chandernagore in October 1784 as the First Commandant, and though, his name notwithstanding, he was unable to make Chandernagore return to its former glory, he was able to secure a commercial convention in 1787 between England and France, which eased some of the English restrictions on French trade there (4). Dangereux was succeeded in October 1787 by Mottet, whose brief rule was uneventful, and he was succeeded by Montigny towards the end of 1788. It was during Montigny’s rule that the relatively lacklustre French rule in Chandernagore was interrupted by probably the most interesting development in the colony’s history, which happened in the years of the French Revolution, from 1789 to 1790, which on the one hand weakened the French control over the colony further, but on the other, ushered in a whole new spirit of revolution and self-rule, unheard of in any other European colony in India till then. Inspired by the Revolution in France, a Revolutionary Committee was set up in Chandernagore too in 1789, which drove away the official French governor, Montigny. As O’Malley and Chakravarti point out: During the French Revolution, the citizens of Chandernagore shared in the republican fervour of their countrymen. The Governor fled to his country house at Ghiretti but was brought back to the town by an excited mob, which wished to copy the Parisians’ march to Versailles. There he was kept a captive for some time in spite of the demands made by Lord Cornwallis for his release. Eventually, it was decided to send the royalists in chains to the Isle of France [i.e. Mauritius], but Cornwallis stopped the brig on which they were shipped while on its way down the Hooghly and released the captives. According to another account, the Governor was refused admission to the town, and seeing no hope of any change in the sentiments of the republicans, withdrew to Calcutta and thence to Pondicherry. (1912, 86)

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In fact, as a consequence of this outbreak of the Revolution, Chandernagore set up a government of its own, with its own constitution, practically independent of Paris and absolutely independent of the French colonies of Pondicherry and Isle of France (Mauritius), under whose control the administration of Chandernagore fell. As Sen describes in detail: The news of the Revolution in France sparked off an upheaval at Pondicherry where the people set up a General Assembly of Citizens and a National Committee to control the authority of the Governor. Montigny was arraigned by the General Assembly as a veritable despot. Despite his forced submission to the General Assembly, Montigny wavered and fled to Chinsurah with his family on 13 May 1790. Thereafter Montigny retired to Serampore and made an abortive attempt to seize Chandernagore with the help of the English. […] Montigny was dismissed […] His successor, Mottet, had to suffer humiliation at the hands of the Revolutionary Committee of Chandernagore. He left Chandernagore and was succeeded by the Commandant, de Canaple, in February 1791. Canaple died of a stroke on 5 August. […] The Assembly of the Isle of France sent two Conciliation Commissioners to Bengal, Gautier and Yvon, to bring some semblance of order in Chandernagore. […] The Conciliation Commissioners and the Revolutionary Committee at Chandernagore drew up a new constitution on 6 November 1791. Chandernagore was declared free from the trammels of the tutelage of Pondicherry. There was to be a representative of the king, but the real power was vested in a General Assembly. It was to elect an Assemblée Administrative, which was to meet once in three months, and a smaller body, the Director, which was to be in charges of the administration. (2012, 4–5)

While I will discuss the impact of this in greater detail in Chapter 6 later, what is to be noted here is that the free ‘revolutionary’ government administered the colony independent of the official French government till 11 June 1793, when the English captured Chandernagore again. Ironically, thus when in 1802, the French got back Chandernagore through the Treaty of Amiens, albeit briefly, it were the English who handed it over to the official French regime, having captured it earlier from the revolutionaries. The 1802 handing over of Chandernagore to the French was very short-lived, and the English re-occupied it within

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a few months, and finally returned Chandernagore to the French on 16 December 1816, only after the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars. As O’Malley and Chakravarti show: In June 1793, during the war following the revolution, Chandernagore was reoccupied by the English without opposition, and was administered by a special officer, Mr. Richard Birch. It was restored by the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, only to be seized again a few months later on the resumption of hostilities. It was then administered by the Judge-Magistrate of Hooghly, and was finally made over to the French in 1816, after having been almost uninterruptedly in British possession for 23 years. (86–87)

Thus, between 1757 and 1816, during a period of almost 60 years, Chandernagore was actually in possession of the official French regime for less than twenty years, and after 1816, though the French continued to be the administrators of Chandernagore for a long 134 years more, till 2 May 1950, they had ceased to be a colonial power of much consequence in Bengal. After the independence of British India on 15 August 1947, an agreement was reached between India and France on 29 June 1948 to hold a plebiscite as to whether the French colonies in India would want to join the Indian Union. The referendum for Chandernagore was held on 19 June 1949, and more than 98.5 per cent of those who voted having opted to join India—‘The voters’ list drawn up by the French authorities had 12,115 names, of whom 7,529 participated in the referendum across 15 polling stations. Only 112 voted for France’ (Roy 2014)—the French decided to allow the Indian government to have de facto control over Chandernagore from 2 May 1950, with the city being officially ceded to India on 2 February 1951, through a ‘Treaty between the Republic of India and the Republic of France to Confirm the Cession of the Territory of the Free Town of Chandernagore’ signed on that day in Paris by Wing Commander Sardar Hardit Singh Malik, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of India in France, and Guy de la Tournelle, Director General for Political Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France. The treaty states, inter alia:

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PREAMBLE The President of India and the President of the French Republic CONSIDERING that the French Government, in a spirit of friendship and understanding, decided, in accordance with the letters exchanged with the Government of the Republic of India on the 29th June, 1948 and in conformity with the French Constitution, to recognize that the people of the French Settlements in India have the right to determine for themselves their destiny and their future status, CONSIDERING that after the consultation of the people of the Free Town of Chandernagore which took place on the 19th June, 1949, the Government of the French Republic has, at the request of the Government of the Republic of India, accepted the appointment, as a provisional measure, of an Indian Administrator in this territory on the 2nd May, 1950. […] Article I France transfers to India, in full sovereignty, the territory of the Free Town of Chandernagore. […] Article V The Government of the French Republic transfers to the Government of the Republic of India all the properties owned by the State and the public bodies lying within the territory of the Free Town of Chandernagore. (Treaty to Confirm the Cession of Chandernagore)

The de jure transfer actually took place on 9 June 1952 and Chandernagore was finally merged with the state of West Bengal on 2 October 1954, by the ‘Chandernagore (Merger) Act, 1954’. The other French holdings in India were merged on different dates: the ‘loges’ in Masulipatnam, Kozhikode and Surat were ceded by the French as early as October 1947, while the four enclaves of Pondicherry, Yanam, Mahe and Karikal were de facto transferred to the Indian Union on 1 November 1954 and their de jure union took place as late as 1962 when the French Parliament ratified the same. However, since I am primarily interested here in looking at France’s colonial holdings in

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Bengal, namely principally Chandernagore, I do not discuss these in any further detail. Though the French may not have been colonially significant in Chandernagore from the 1750s to the 1950s in spite of being the administrators there, they left behind a rich body of architectural pieces, many of which exist even today and draw the attention of locals and visitors alike. In 2016, the French government in association with the firm Aishwarya Tipnis Architects, created an online inventory of around 99 such buildings. As the site says, Similar to other colonial French settlements, it was planned on a grid iron pattern, with broad tree lined avenues opening on to the quay with modest ground plus one storied buildings aligned along the street much like Pondicherry and Senegal. Chandernagore was designed as a trading town and not a military establishment, native Bengali merchants were invited to trade and settle in the city and added to its prosperity. The urban fabric of Chandernagore is a physical manifestation of the confluence of the French & Bengali cultures […] Most of the houses retained their Indian planning around the courtyards and chose to employ European aesthetics in the architectural expressions of the buildings. (About Chandernagore)

While there are numerous public and private buildings in Chandernagore today in this distinct Indo-French style, many of them are in a dilapidated state and in need of restoration, and the key sites that are in a relatively presentable state are as follow: The Chandernagore Strand, a 1-kilometre-long tree-shaded promenade on the bank of the river Hooghly is one of its chief attractions, as is the Chandernagore Museum, better known as the Institut de Chandernagor or Dupleix Palace, which was established in 1812 in the house that was originally occupied by Dupleix in the 1730s—a French colonial building facing the strand with spacious verandahs and columns all around it. There are two churches too dating to the French times—the newer Sacred Heart Church (l’Eglise du Sacré Cœur), which was designed by French architect, Jacques Duchatz and inaugurated by Paul Goethals, the first Archbishop of Calcutta, on 27 January 1884, is in very good shape; while the remains of the older Church of St Louis, built in 1726, also

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draws visitors. The French Cemetery, which has around 150 tombs and the Chandernagore Gate, constructed somewhat later in 1937, and bearing the sign ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’ are also important landmarks as is the Clock Tower facing the Strand. A very impressive structure is what is now the subdivisional court of Chandernagore, which was earlier a spacious Parisien hotel; in fact, there were two famed and very French hotels in Chandernagore: ‘the Hotel de France and the Thistle Hotel’ (Murray 1919, 97). Some other public buildings of architectural significance are the Chandernagore College established in 1862 (originally the École de Sainte Marie, later renamed as École Publique des Garçons in 1887, as Collége Dupleix in 1901, as Collége de Bussy in 1945, and finally as Chandernagore College in 1948), the Chandernagore Library established in 1873, etc. Some private houses like the famed pātālbāri or the ‘underground house’, built in 1904 on the Strand, whose lowest floor remains submerged in water during the rainy season, and in which many famous personalities, like Rabindranath Tagore and Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, are reported to have stayed, are of particular curiosity. Thus ends the history of the French in Bengal, a history that begins in the 1570s with the arrival of the first French visitor to Bengal, or at least in the 1670s with the establishment of the first French settlement in Bengal, and ends in the 1950s, with the French ceding Chandernagore to independent India. There is no doubt that for the latter two centuries (1750s–1950s) of this three- or four-century-old history, the French were not a colonial power of any great significance (and that too, between 1757 and 1816, they were only intermittently in control of Chandernagore), but they left their own indelible mark on the polycolonial landscape of Bengal. The French gave Bengal the possibility of urban public spheres, with Chandernagore emerging as a ‘city’ with beautiful palaces and hotels and a strand along the river somewhat before Calcutta would have any of these. The French also provided in Chandernagore a subversive space for revolutions, as noted in its tryst with independence following the French Revolution and its acting often as a city of refuge for fugitive freedom fighters from British India. It is in Chandernagore, further, that the colonised Indian had his first taste of democracy and elections with the native

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population of the French colony having the right to stand and vote for elections to its local administrative bodies from very early on. These and more will be discussed in greater detail in the sixth chapter, but before that let me move on to the next chapter, dealing with the final set of Europeans who came to Bengal with colonial intent and contributed to its polycolonial fabric—the Danish, the ‘Germans’ (technically the Austrians, primarily represented by Belgian or Flemish agents, and the Prussians), and, to a lesser extent, the Swedish and the Greeks.

References ‘About Chandernagore’. Available at: http://heritagechandernagore.com/ (accessed on 27 November 2019). Banerjee, Sumanta. 2012. ‘A Tale of Two Cities under Colonial Rule: Chandernagore and Calcutta’. IIC Occasional Paper 39, New Delhi: India International Centre, 27 April. Blanc, Vincent le. 1660. The World Surveyed: Or, The Famous Voyages & Travailes of Vincent le Blanc, or White, of Marseilles (1648). Translated by Francis Brooke. London: Miter. Bose, Arghya. 2017. Chandernagor: Recognizing Alternative Discourses on the Colonial. Memari, Burdwan: Avenel Press. Froideveaux, Henri. 1929. ‘The French Factories in India’, Chapter III. In The Cambridge History of the British Empire, Vol. IV: British India, 1497–1858, edited by H.H. Dodwell, 61–75. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hill, S.C. 1903. Three Frenchmen in Bengal: The Commercial Ruin of the French Settlements in 1757. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. Laval, François Pyrard de. 1907. ‘A Description of Bengal by the French Voyager François Pyrard de Laval’ (from The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval to the East Indies, the Maldives, the Moluccas, and Brazil. (1611), translated by Albert Gray [1887]). In Historic accounts of India by foreign travellers, classic, oriental, and occidental, edited by A.V. Williams Jackson, 280–293. London: The Grolier Society. Master, Streynsham. 1911. The Diaries of Streynsham Master 1675-1680 and Other Contemporary Papers Relating Thereto, in 2 volumes. Edited by Richard Carnac. Temple. London: John Murray. For the Govt. of India, Indian Records Series. Murray, John. 1919. A Handbook for Travellers in India, Burma and Ceylon Including All British India, the Portuguese and French Possessions, and the Protected Native States, Tenth Edition. London: John Murray.

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O’Malley, L.S.S. and Monmohan Chakravarti. 1912. Bengal District Gazeteers: Hooghly. Calcutta: The Bengal Secretariat Book Depot. Roy, Subhajoy. 2014. ‘A vote for India, then and now’. The Telegraph, Kolkata, 29 April. Available at: https://www.telegraphindia.com/states/west-bengal/ a-vote-for-india-then-and-now/cid/1289400 (accessed on 20 December 2019). Sen, Sailendra Nath. 2012. Chandernagore: From Bondage to Freedom – 1900– 1955. Delhi: Primus Books. Sircar, D.C. 1971. Studies in the Geography of Ancient and Medieval India. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. ‘Treaty to Confirm the Cession of Chandernagore’. Available at: https:// mea.gov.in/bilateral-documents.htm?dtl/6750/Teaty+to+confirm+the+ Cession+of+Chandernagore (accessed on 15 December 2019).

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5

The Other Colonial Europeans in Bengal—the Danes, the ‘Germans’, the Swedes, the Greeks Let me now discuss the other European nations who had colonial ties with Bengal, but whose military or trade exploits were not as successful as that of the Portuguese, the Dutch, or the French (or, of course, the English, who I do not take up in this book), but who also contributed to the heady polycolonial mix. I begin with the Danish, move on to the ‘Germans’ (the Austrians and the Prussians), and conclude with the Swedish and the Greek. The Danes, known as Dinemār in Bengali, started their trading activities in India when King Christian IV of Denmark–Norway1 founded the Dansk Østindisk Kompagni, the Danish East India Company by a charter issued on 17 March 1616. For the first two years, this Company made no voyages ostensibly due to lack of capital, but in 1618 the first voyages of the Company were commenced with the main fleet setting sail under Admiral Ove Gjedde, and the trade director of the Company, Robert Crappe (or Grape, as per an alternate spelling in O’Malley and Chakravarti,

1

 enmark and Norway were part of the same kingdom from 1380 to 1814, beginning D in 1380 when King Olaf II of Denmark inherited the Kingdom of Norway. The union continued practically uninterrupted for more than four centuries (with Sweden also joining it in between 1397 and 1523), was consolidated in 1660 into the integrated state formally called Denmark–Norway, and was dissolved through the Treaty of Kiel in 1814 when Norway was practically ceded to Sweden. Technically thus, what I describe as Denmark here is Denmark–Norway, but I prefer to refer to it as Denmark alone, because the East India Company originally in charge of colonial exploits of this empire in South Asia bore the name of the ‘Danish’ alone and the colonies were usually identified by the Indians themselves as Danish alone, rather than DanishNorwegian.

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for instance), setting sail on the scouting freighter Øresund one month before the main fleet. While the main fleet reached Sri Lanka in May 1620 after losing more than half its crew, Crappe’s ship was sunk off the coast of Karaikal on the Coromandel Coast by Portuguese vessels, and though Crappe and 13 of his crew members survived, they were taken prisoners by the Nayak of Tanjore (Fihl 2009). Interested in establishing trade relations, the Nayak released Crappe and signed a treaty with him on 20 November 1620, granting the Danes the right to construct a settlement in the village of Tranquebar (today’s Tharangambadi in Tamil Nadu) and the permission to levy taxes, thus founding the first Danish colony in India, Fort Dansborg in Tranquebar (Bredsdorff 2009, 13; O’Malley and Chakravarti 1912, 74). While the Danish thus set their first colony in southern India in 1620, their arrival in eastern India, closing in towards Bengal, which is our point of interest here, was in 1625 when Robert Crappe set up a factory at Pipli which was however abandoned by 1643. Soon in 1636, another Danish factory was set up in Balasore, which also had to be given up by 1643, following a brush with the local Mughal governors and a new factory could be started by the Danes in Balasore only in 1676. As O’Malley and Chakravarti describe in detail about the Danish factory in Balasore: It remained their chief factory till 1643 or 1644, when they became involved in a quarrel with the Governor of Balasore, Malik Beg, who, it is said, poisoned the Danes, seized their goods, and demolished their factory. The Danes declared war, but, having neither a fleet nor an army, could do little […] In 1674 the arrival of a ship of 16 guns and one sloop enabled them to seize five vessels in the Balasore Roads. Thereupon the Governor, Malik Kasim, promised to give them the same trading privileges as the English, to build a factory for them at Balasore, and to pay them Rs. 5,000 to Rs. 6,000 for their expenses On receiving this promise, the Danes gave up the vessels they had seized; but as soon as their Commodore, with five or six men, went into the town and paid a visit to the Governor, the latter detained them, saying that, unless confirmed by the Nawab, the agreement could not be carried out. In 1676, Wilk Wygbert, another Commodore, came to Balasore in a ship, went up to Hooghly in a sloop, and thence by budgerow to Dacca.

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Here, at an outlay of Rs. 4,000 to Rs. 5,000, he got a pharman2 from the Nawab, Shaista Khan, authorising the Danes to trade free of custom dues in Bengal and Orissa. Under this authority a fresh factory was started by the Danes at Balasore in 1676. (1912, 74–75)

The British merchant Thomas Bowrey, who I have referred to earlier in Chapters 2 and 3, gives a detailed account of the setting up of this Danish factory in Balasore ([1701] 1993, 181–190), and Streynsham Master also visited the factory on 2 September 1676: ‘This evening I visited the Cheife of the Danes, Wilke Wygbert, at their Factory’ (Master [1675–1680] 1911, Vol. I, 318). Somehow, this new factory at Balasore was again lost by the Danes, but later gained repossession of in 1763 and held on till 1845 (Campos 1919, 126). Both Pipli and Balasore are in today’s Odisha, but their close proximity to what is technically Bengal today and thus both of them being considered colonial hotspots on the extended Bengal coastline, have been discussed severally earlier. Further, though from 1642, the Danish started routinely raiding ships in the Bay of Bengal and actually captured a Mughal ship and incorporated it within their fleet renaming it Bengali Prize, with the Dansk Østindisk Kompagni getting bankrupt in 1648 and after the death of their patron King Christian IV in 1648, his successor, King Frederick II, abolishing the Company in 1650 (Feldbæk 1981, 140), their tryst with the real Bengal had to wait for a few more decades. Even after the dissolution of the Company, the Danes held on to Tranquebar— from 1655 under the lone Danish resident there, someone called Eskild Anderson Kongsbakke—but it was only in May 1669, when the frigate Færø under commander Captain Sivardt Adelaer, officially appointed the leader of the Danish holdings in India, arrived that the Danish colonial enterprise in India started off again with the Danish East India

2

 ’Malley and Chakravarti may be mistaken here in calling Shaista Khan’s permit to the O Danes a farman, which only the Emperor could issue. It was surely a parwana, a permit of a lesser degree that provincial governors could issue. See my Footnote 7 in Chapter 2 earlier. It should also be noted how Streynsham Master rightly observes, ‘Alsoe, he [i.e. Wilke Wygbert] acquainted mee that at Dacca, from whence he was lately returned, he had procured the Nabob Shaster Cawnes Phyrwana [i.e. Shaista Khan’s parwana] for the Danes Nation to trade free of custome in Bengala and Orixa’ (Master 1911, Vol. I, 319). The Danes thus got a parwana from the Bengal Governor indeed, but not an imperial farman, a distinction that will prove to be crucial in the discussion to follow.

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Company also being re-established; it is after this that proper contact with Bengal was established. Even before Wilke Wygbert had got the parwana from Shaista Khan on 20 May 1673, the Danish Company obtained a general permission and on 5 August 1676 a special permission from a local chieftain Adil Khan Amir ul Omrah to trade in Bengal, but since the Danes did not have a proper permit till then, they could not formally set up a colony there. It was only in 1698 that they were permitted by the then Mughal Subahdar of Bengal, Sultan Azim-us-Shan (1697–1712) to set up a factory in Gondalpara in the southeast of Chandernagore, which they renamed Danmarksnagore, and held till 1714 when they had to abandon it and which could be restored to them only through another special permit from the then Mughal Emperor of Delhi, Muhammad Shah (1719–1748), dated 11 March 1721. Danmarksnagore in Gondalpara in southern Chandernagore, a locality that is even now popularly called ‘Dinemardanga’ or ‘Danish Land’, was thus the first Danish colony in proper Bengal, but not a very stable one. Alexander Hamilton, visiting the belt in 1727 and thus 30 years after the original establishment of Danmarksnagore and only six years after its repossession notes the poverty and instability of this colony: There are several other villages on the river’s side on the way to Hooghly, but none remarkable till we come to the Danes’ Factory, which stands about four miles below Hooghly. But the poverty of the Danes has made them desert it, after having robbed the Mogul subjects of some of their shipping to keep themselves from starving. ([1727] 1930, 19)

The Danes also established another settlement in Bengal around the same time further south towards the mouth of the Hooghly river but on the east bank, but this would have been too insignificant to have even been named properly. O’Malley and Chakravarti say, ‘Another factory of the Danes is shown in Valentijn’s map (published in 1723), on the east bank of the river opposite the mouth of the river ‘Bassandheri’, i.e., the Kana Damodar, under the name Deense Logie, i.e., the Danish lodge’ (1912, 75). Hamilton also observes the existence of this second minor and seemingly pointless establishment of the Danes and says,

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‘At a little below the mouth of it [the same river in Valentijn’s map, presumably], the Danes have a thatcht House, but for what Reasons they kept an House there, I never could learn’ (5). Anyway, the Danish Company never received a proper farman and thus could never stabilise its colonial holdings in Bengal, and had to practically give up both their holdings in 1728. The Danish East India Company itself also went into liquidation again in 1729. On 12 April 1732, King Christian VI signed a new charter to form a new company, the Asiatisk Kompagni (Asiatic Company, commonly known as the Danish Asiatic Company) which was given monopoly over trade in Asia for 40 years, and trade and colonial exercises of Denmark–Norway in India stabilised again, and the Danes got a second lease of life for their colonial exploits in Bengal. Though they could set up a colony in Bengal only in 1755 as O’Malley and Chakravarti point out, the commercial presence of the Danes in Bengal in this second phase runs back at least to 1753, from when, under a person called Soetman, they would conduct trade from Chandernagore with cooperation from the French: ‘[T]he Danes and French had for some time been on very good terms, for two years before this [i.e. before 1755] the Danes had been allowed to load and unload cargoes at Chandernagore, where they were seized, and represented by an agent named Soetman’ (77). On 15 July 1755, the Nawab of Bengal, Alivardi Khan (1740–1756) permitted the Danes under the same Soetman to settle at Serampore, about 20 kilometres south of Chandernagore, which they took over on 7 October 1755 as their second colony and named as Frederiksnagore after the then king of Denmark–Norway, King Frederick V. Actually, this permit was bought by the Danes from the Nawab at a hefty price, and that too because of intercession from their longstanding ally, the French. As O’Malley and Chakravarti point out, In 1755 the Danes re-established themselves, having secured from Ali Vardi Khan, at a considerable cost, the grant of a settlement at Serampore. For this grant apparently they were mainly indebted to the good offices of Monsieur Law, the Chief of the French factory at Cossimbazar […] Renault, the Governor of Chandernagore, also claimed credit for their re-establishment. (76)

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However, though the Danes were allowed to set up their colony at Serampore since they did not have a proper imperial farman, but just a purchased permit from the Bengal nawab, they were not allowed to fortify Serampore in any way: ‘Though the Danes had been allowed to settle at Serampore and to trade in Bengal, they were not permitted to fortify their settlement or keep up a garrison’ (77). This quasi-official status of the Danish colony at Serampore, or what I call a ‘demi-colony’ would lead to very fruitful possibilities as I will discuss later, but in its initial years, this lack of military mettle and official status led only to problems as they had to contend with the two real powers in the region—the Bengal nawab and the English. The first brush was with Alivardi’s successor, Nawab Siraj-ud-daula, who wanted the Danes (as also the Dutch and the French) to assist him navally in his 1756 siege of Calcutta, which the Danes could not but refuse, with ‘the Danish Governor replying that he had neither horse, foot or guns, but was living in a miserable mud hut with only two or three servants’ (77). Though this was true, the livid nawab, on his way back to Murshidabad after the successful conquest of Calcutta, levied a fine of Rs 25,000 on the Danes, which was an astronomical sum for them, since they had hardly any trade by then. The second brush was with the English when after they took over Chandernagore on 23 March 1757, French fugitives were allowed refuge by their old allies, the Danes, in Serampore, and the English retaliated by stopping passage of the Danish vessel King of Denmark in January 1759. A more serious brush with the English leading them to invade and take over Serampore temporarily happened in 1763: ‘There was a more serious quarrel in 1763. Some British sepoys were charged with assaulting some Danish peons and were sentenced to 25 lashes each. The British, thereupon, invested Serampore, but withdrew on receiving an apology’ (77). The lack of a formal status, lack of proper trade, lack of any army or fortification, and over and above that continuous skirmishes with powers that did have all of these led Serampore to being a rather impoverished colony in the first two decades of its existence. When the Dutch Admiral Jan Splinter Stavorinus, who I have cited earlier too in Chapter 3 earlier, visited Serampore on his way to Chinsurah in October 1769, he observes the relative inconsequentiality of Serampore as a colony:

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Going down (from Chinsura) I landed at Serampore, where the Danes have a factory; this is the most inconsiderable European establishment on the Ganges, consisting only, besides the village occupied by the natives, in a few houses inhabited by Europeans. Their trade is of very little importance. (Stavorinus 1798, 121)

Thus, the first two decades of the new Danish colony of Serampore were marked by poverty and inconsequentiality, but things were to take a turn towards the better by the mid-1770s. With the Asiatisk Kompagni’s 20-year monopoly running out in 1772, the Danish-Norwegian crown took over the colonies in India, and Colonel Ole (Olav) Bie was appointed the first crown-regent of Serampore in 1776. Not having a truly formal sanction as a colony from the Mughals, Serampore developed very interestingly into a multicultural cosmopolitan centre where people from all over the West could congregate. Bie wanted to make Serampore an attractive tourist resort with a paved strand, palatial buildings, the Palmer’s River View Hotel, the Denmark Tavern Hotel and many parks. The relatively unofficial status of Serampore also made it a site for money laundering on the part of English officials from other parts of Bengal, and the English also started using the ‘neutral’ Danish vessels for sending their goods to England, leading in turn to the prosperity of Serampore: The servants of the East India Company, not being allowed to remit their savings by bills on the Directors, had to make their remittances through foreign factories. Moreover, England was at war with the United States, France and Holland; and to escape the enemies’ privateers and men of-war, the English sent their goods home in the neutral vessels of the Danes. (O’Malley and Chakravarti 1912, 78)

Serampore thus turned into a major and prosperous commercial centre by the 1780s. The final, and probably the most significant, outcome of the Danes not having a farman was that it could become the primary site of missionary activities in Bengal because the colonies that were set with the official sanction of the Mughals could not as freely proselytise, and with even the English having banned all missionary activities in its territories till 1813, such activities had to take recourse to the Danish demi-colony of Serampore. From 1785, Serampore started receiving

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American ships and missionaries, and from the 1790s, under the Danish administration, Serampore became the most important centre in Bengal of missionary and diverse print activities, which gained particular fillip with the arrival of three English Baptist Missionaries— William Carey, Joshua Marshman and William Ward—in 1799, and the subsequent setting up of the Serampore Mission, Serampore Mission Press and Serampore College, whose contribution to the genesis of Bengali print media is familiar to many, and which I will discuss in detail in Chapter 6 later. However, in spite of Serampore becoming such a prosperous and vibrant cultural and trading centre, the Danish control over Serampore was to fall into bad times again from 1801. During the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), Denmark–Norway had a policy of ‘armed neutrality’, and their continuation in carrying French and Dutch goods from India to Europe led to the English Wars (1801–1814) between England and Sweden on one side and Denmark–Norway on the other, which had repercussions in India too. The English dispossessed the Danes of both their major colonies—Tranquebar and Serampore—in 1801, but returned it in 1802 through the Peace of Amiens, and again took over the Danish colonies in 1808 to return them only after the Peace of Kiel of 1815. Though the Danes got back their colonies from the English and held on to them for three more decades, their flourishing trade had practically disappeared: ‘Though the Danes recovered the town, they did not regain their trade. A shoal had formed in front of the town and their goods were ousted by British competition. Between 1815 and 1845 only one vessel visited the port’ (O’Malley and Chakravarti 1912, 78). Reduced to an absolutely inconsequential status in the subcontinental polycolonial field, the Danish administration concluded a treaty with the English on 22 February 1845 deciding to sell off all its holdings on the Indian mainland to the English for an amount of Rs 12 lakhs (1.2 million). After further ratifications to the treaty on 6 October, Serampore was transferred to the English on 11 October 1845, and Tranquebar and Balasore on 7 November 1845, thus bringing Danish colonial control over parts of mainland India to an official end. The Danes held on to their offshore Indian colony of Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal for a bit longer. It should be noted that

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Danish settlers arrived on the Andaman Islands in December 1755 and on the Nicobar Islands on 1 January 1756, and proclaimed the islands to be Danish property though they failed to successfully colonise them meaningfully, due to diseases and a generally hostile environment in the years to follow. In 1789, the Danes sold off their rights over the Andaman Islands to the English, and though they held on to the Nicobar Islands under the name Frederiksøerne (Frederick’s Islands), these were also practically abandoned by 1845. Between 1864 and 1868, Italy made unsuccessful attempts to buy the Nicobar Islands from the Danish, but the islands were finally successfully sold to the English on 16 October 1868, thus ending Danish control over any part of the Indian subcontinent. The Danish had thus left Bengal in 1845 and India altogether by 1868, but only after their colony, Serampore had already left indelible marks on the polycolonial landscape of Bengal. Apart from the most major contributions of the Danish demicolony of Serampore, in the form of print activities at Serampore Press and the establishment of Serampore College in 1818, which went on to be the first full-fledged university in India in 1827, the Danes left a rich architectural stamp too in Serampore, some of which still exists. One can particularly note the Strand with the Nisan Ghat or flagstaff and saluting battery, the Denmark Tavern Hotel opened in 1786 by the British innkeeper James Parr, the Danish Government House built in 1771 or the palatial mansion of the Danish Governor whose compound now houses the subdivisional courts and administrative offices, the Catholic Church built in 1776, the Old Danish Church or the St Olav’s Church built in 1805, the Danish Cemetery, the Baptist Cemetery, the Baptist Chapel, the Catcherie or the old courthouse and jail, and the building of Serampore College designed by a Dane named Major Wickedie and containing a front iron gate and two ornate staircases which were gifted by the King of Denmark himself. It is hardly surprising that when Bishop Reginald Heber of Calcutta visited Serampore in December 1823, he called it ‘a beautiful place, kept remarkably clean, and looking more like a European town than Calcutta’ (qtd. in O’Malley and Chakravarti 1912, 79) Most of these structures lay in ruin, but in 2008 a concern called ‘The Serampore Initiative’ was established at the Ethnographic Department of the

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National Museum of Denmark, with restoration architect Flemming Aalund and historian Simon Rastén carrying out elaborate archival and field studies in Serampore from November 2008 to April 2009, and producing in August 2010 a pioneering report titled Indo-Danish Heritage Buildings of Serampore, which soon formed the blueprint for conservation efforts in Serampore. The report says, The Serampore Initiative of the National Museum of Denmark was established in 2008 with the aim of identifying and describing the physical remains of the Indo-Danish history in Serampore, and subsequently assessing the possible need for restoration of selected buildings from this period. […] The principal aim of the present report is to document a selection of remaining heritage buildings from the Danish period in Serampore 1755 to 1845. Focus has been put on the former Danish government buildings and structures, but local historical houses and other European buildings in Serampore have been included as well […] We have largely refrained from giving specific recommendations on how to preserve the valuable historical buildings and features described. Forming a heritage strategy for Serampore is a highly complex task to be carried out in a formalized cooperation under the auspices of local authorities and institutions. (Aalund and Rastén 2010, 2–3)

This is precisely what happened after Aalund and Rastén’s report. On the one hand, the West Bengal Heritage Commission undertook the restoration of the Danish Government House under architect Gopa Sen, and on the other, a Danish team headed by anthropologist Bente Wolff, curator, National Museum of Denmark, started restoring the town centre to its former glory, and under the latter’s efforts, ‘The restoration of St Olav’s Church has won the Unesco Asia-Pacific Awards for Cultural Heritage Conservation 2016 and has set a standard of excellence for future conservation efforts’ (Das 2018). In 2017, another major heritage restoration project commenced in Serampore (Dasgupta 2017), which is renovating most of the old buildings to their former glory, and it has already successfully renovated and opened the Denmark Tavern Hotel on 28 February 2018: Now the tavern is a handsome yellow and white double-storeyed building with green doors and jalousied windows facing the river. It

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has well-furnished rooms for accommodation – two suites plus two dormitories in the rear wing on the first floor, and one suite plus another room on the ground floor – and a comfortable cafe where people can enjoy a cup of coffee. (Das 2018)

One wishes that all the heritage buildings of Serampore are restored to their former glory, and the project draws more and more people to the polycolonial history of Bengal, but let me now move on, one after the other, to the next two players in this history, the Austrians and the Prussians, who were collectively referred to in Bengali as Ālemāni or Germans. The first of these two ‘German’ colonial companies—what is usually referred to as the ‘Austrian East India Company’ was neither German (or even Austrian for that matter) nor a single company, but rather a collective term for several trading companies established in the 18th century under the then far-flung Austrian empire (or the Holy Roman Empire of the Habsburg Monarchy) and scattered in as distant places as Ostend and Antwerp in today’s Belgium and later, in Trieste in today’s northeastern Italy, bordering Slovenia and Croatia. The ‘Austrian’ colonial exercises in Bengal that I will discuss here were thus, technically, more Flemish (or Belgian) than German. The oldest of these companies was the Ostend Company, or in Flemish, the Oostendse Compagnie, or Generale Indische Compagnie, which was chartered by the Austrian Emperor Karl VI (Charles VI), on 17 December 1722 (Hunter 1886, Footnote 1, p. 372). Actually, even before the formal establishment of the Company, from 1715 onwards there were numerous ships that sailed from Ostend to different parts of India and China: ‘In 1717, Prince Eugene [Generalfeldmarschall of the Imperial Army] ordered two vessels to sail for India, under the protection of his own passports’ (373); and ‘in 1720, and again in 1721, they sent six ships, of which one was consigned to Bengal’ (O’Malley and Chakravarti 1912, 88), but the foundation of the Company made the campaigns more official. The Austrian Company established its first colony in Coblom or Cabelon (today’s Covelong or Kovalam on the southern fringes of Chennai), and in 1723, with assistance from the French, the Ostenders procured permission from the then Nawab of Bengal Murshid Quli Khan to build a factory in Bengal at Banquibazar

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(Bankibazar) and Hydsapour (today’s Ichapur), a contiguous area on the east bank of Hooghly, in the Ichapur and Palta region, just north of today’s Barrackpore. They built the colony from scratch: At first, the factors resided in houses constructed of mats and bamboos; but they afterwards built brick dwellings, and surrounded their factory with a wall, having bastions at the angles: they also cut a ditch, communicating with the river, of such a depth as to admit sloops of considerable burthen. (O’Malley and Chakravarti 1912, 89)

In fact, the Ostenders managed ‘to erect a strong building’ (88), and get strong trade results too, much to the consternation of their polycolonial rivals already operative in the same belt. O’Malley and Chakravarti report that ‘The European nations [i.e. the English and the Dutch] feared their rivalry […] The other Europeans accordingly intrigued against them, and having gained over the Faujdar of Hooghly, got him to induce the Nawab to order the closure of the factory’ (88–89). They further go on to suggest that the Nawab’s army under Mir Jafar (who would later become the Nawab of Bengal himself in 1757) laid siege to and conquered the Ostender settlement at Bankibazar with the chief of the settlement having ‘his arm shattered by a cannon ball’ (89) and being ‘obliged, in consequence, at dead of night, to scuttle out of the factory, and, embarking on board a vessel, he set sail for his own native country’ (89). O’Malley and Chakravarti date this event to 1723 on the basis of some reference in Hamilton, and to the fact that Murshid Quli Khan died in 1725, but this is doubtful, as the Ostenders having set up their factory in 1723 itself, its destruction in the same year is difficult to corroborate with the fair success in trading with Bengal that the Ostend Company is generally ascribed. One may find the date, 1733, given in The Imperial Gazetteer of India and in W.W. Hunter’s The Indian Empire: Its People, History, and Products, as I quote and show below from both sources, much more convincing. Hunter says, Each of these German settlements was regarded with hatred by the English and Dutch; and with a more intense fear by the less successful French, whose adjacent settlements at Pondicherri on the Madras coast, and at Chandarnagar on the Hugli, were also threatened by the

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Ostend Company. […] They stirred up the Muhammadan Government against the new-comers. In 1733, the Muhammadan military governor of Hugli picked a quarrel, in the name of the Delhi Emperor, with the little German settlement at Bankipur, which lay about eight miles below Hugli town on the opposite side of the river. The Muhammadan troops besieged Bankipur; and the garrison, reduced to fourteen persons, after a despairing resistance against overwhelming numbers, abandoned the place, and set sail for Europe. The Ostend agent lost his right arm by a cannon ball during the attack […] (1886, 373–374)

Whatever be the date of the sack of Bankibazar, what is certain, however, is that in May 1727, the Austrian Emperor, Karl VI, under pressure from the English, suspended the charter of the Company for seven years, and abolished it totally in March 1731 through the Second Treaty of Vienna with the English, in which the latter made the abolition of the Ostend Company as a pre-condition to them honouring the Pragmatic Sanction of 1717 whereby Karl VI tried to secure dynastic succession by making his daughter, Maria Theresa, his heir to the throne. A concession was made in the Treaty to allow two last ships of the Company that left Ostend for Bankibazar in 1732 (Keay 1991, 241). The Company officially stopped trading on 16 February 1734, and was fully disbanded on 16 February 1737; but the factory at Bankibazar was transferred from the Company to direct imperial ownership and continued to function even in the 1740s. The Imperial Gazetteer reports that ‘The “Ostenders” were again expelled from Bānkībāzār in 1744’ (1908, Footnote 1, p. 382) and elaborates the Ostender saga thus: Bānkībāzār. – Ancient village in the District of the Twenty-four Parganas, Bengal, on the Hooghly river near the modern Paltā, 3 miles above Barrackpore. The name of this village has disappeared from the map, and its site can be identified only from old charts. It formed the principal settlement in India of the ill-fated Ostend Company which was chartered by the Emperor of Austria in 1722. The settlement was regarded with great jealousy by the English, French, and Dutch; and the result was that, when the Court of Vienna was anxious to obtain the European guarantee for the Pragmatic Sanction in 1727, the Company’s charter was suspended. In 1733 the Muhammadan

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general (faujdār) at Hooghly, at the instigation of the Dutch and English, besieged Bānkībāzār; and the small garrison, after a despairing resistance against overwhelming numbers, abandoned the place and set sail for Europe. (382)

As stated before, the Ostenders did not desert their settlement in Bengal immediately after being defeated by the nawab’s forces, or even after the Company was disbanded by the Austrian Emperor, and O’Malley and Chakravarti say, ‘that after being forced to quit their factory the Flemish found protection with the French at Chandernagore’ (1912, Footnote *, p. 89), ‘The Flemish appear not to have given up all hope of sharing in the trade of Bengal even after this reverse’ (90), and quote the historian Robert Orme to show that Nawab Ali Vardi Khan, ‘in the year 1748, on some contempt of his authority, attacked and drove the factors of the Ostend Company out of the river of Hughly’ (90). The Austrian/Flemish tryst with colonial activities in India and Bengal was still far from over, even after being driven out of their colony so many times and the Company itself having got disbanded. The Austrian East India Company gained a second lease of life when from the 1770s a series of three new companies was founded in Antwerp and Trieste. The first of these was the Imperial Asiatic Company of Trieste and Antwerp—also known separately as the Asiatic Company of Trieste, or the Antwerp Company—founded in 1775 under the charter of Karl VI’s successor, Empress Maria Theresa, by Willem Bolts, an old Bengal hand who had served both the Dutch and the English Companies in Bengal in the 1760s. The Company was quite successful to begin with. It re-occupied its earlier colony at Bankibazar and held it till 1794; it also expanded its hold over India with Bolts meeting Hyder Ali, the Sultan of Mysore, and gaining permission from him to set up factories in Mysore’s Malabar coast dominions of Mangalore, Karwar and Baliapatam. Further Bolts also sent forces to the Nicobar Islands in June 1778 and took possession of the islands on 12 July 1778, but to be defeated and driven away by the Danes, who also claimed control over the Nicobar Islands in 1783. However, trouble broke out soon between Bolts and the chief financier of the Company, Charles Proli, who was in favour of doing more trade with China than India. After a meeting

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with the new Emperor Joseph II on 28 July 1781, Bolts surrendered all his shares of the earlier company, and a new company called the Imperial Company of Trieste and Antwerp for the Commerce of Asia was formed in August 1781 with Proli as its head and China as its primary trading area. The company went totally bankrupt in 1784, and shut down in January 1785, with Proli committing suicide. Not to give up, after the collapse of this second company, the Belgians opened a third company called the Imperial East India Company in February 1785, under the headship of Vicomte Edouard de Walckiers, which renewed ties with Bolts and resumed trade with India, including at Bankibazar in Bengal, which had to be finally put to an end in 1794 in the context of the French Revolution and the subsequent wars that totally shook Europe’s own foundations. As Hunter sums up about the Austrian East India Company as a collective exercise over time: ‘After a miserable struggle, it became bankrupt in 1784; and was finally extinguished by the arrangements made at the renewal of the English East India Company’s charter in 1793’ (1886, 374). The second set of ‘German’ companies (and this time truly German, Prussian to be exact) to establish a colony in Bengal were founded in the 1750s by the King of Prussia, Frederick the Great or Friedrich der Große (1740–1786). The possibility of the Germans having oceanic trade with India and China and setting up colonial relations with parts of Asia, including Bengal, opened up with the Prussian annexation of East Friesia (Ost-Friesland) in 1744 and thus gaining control over the port city of Embden or Emden. In a way, this was an attempt to fulfil the longstanding German dream of entering into the colonial trade circuit, which their neighbours, the English, the Dutch and the French had been successfully doing, and which the Austrian Empire also tried to but failed to achieve. As Hunter points out, What the Emperor of Austria had failed to effect, Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, resolved to accomplish. Having got possession of East Friesland in 1744, he tried to convert its capital, Embden, into a great northern port. (374–375)

This was attempted to be done by Frederick the Great by establishing two companies in close succession, both of which are often collectively

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referred to as the Emden (or Embden) Company. The first of the companies, the Royal Prussian Asiatic Company in Emden to Canton and China (‘Königlich Preußische Asiatische Compagnie in Emden nach Canton und China’, in German), generally referred to as the Asiatic Company of Emden was founded through a royal charter either on 4 August 1750 (Schui 2006, 143) or 1 September 1750 (Hunter 1886, 375), and was primarily oriented towards trade with China, as its name suggests. The Company may not have been particularly successful3: ‘The first of these Companies had a capital of £ 170,625; but six ships sent successively to China only defrayed their own expenses, and yielded a profit of 10 per cent, in seven years’ (Hunter 1886, 375). It was, therefore, that a plan to initiate colonial trade with India, rather than China, and particularly Bengal, was seriously started to be considered. Frederick the Great had already received a somewhat audacious proposal of conquering the whole of Bengal from an Englishman who seems from the account to be a bit of a charlatan, and which was refused. As Schui points out: The conquest of Bengal was proposed by an Englishman who called himself Clerck but whose real name, according to George Keith, the Prussian representative in Paris, was Mill. Clerck’s, or Mill’s, argument for the conquest of Bengal was clear: on the one hand the European merchants had been carrying bullion to Bengal for decades. In fact, the author maintained that all gold and silver that circulated in European commerce was eventually absorbed by the Indian subcontinent. On the other hand, not even an ounce of gold ever left Bengal. Therefore, he claimed, the land was clearly filled with treasures. Whoever was to conquer it would be in control of more gold and silver than the Spaniards took from their mines in South America. Fortunately for the king of Prussia, Bengal was not only hardly able to defend itself but Clerck knew also ‘exactement’ where the treasures of Bengal were

3

 here may be difference of opinion here. Carlyle (1858) claims, and as will be quoted in T detail later in the chapter, that the ships of this Company ‘prosperously reached Canton, and prosperously returned with cargoes of satisfactory profit’ (323), but Hunter (1886) suggests otherwise, as does Schui (2006), who talks about ‘the failure of the Asiatic trade company’ (160). I have stuck to this latter opinion, not only because they are from later sources, and thus likely to be more distant and objective, but also because in my opinion, it is the failure of the Asiatic Company that may explain the desperate establishment of the Bengal Company better.

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hidden. For this information, he asked for 50 million pounds sterling and for a monopoly for the trade with the future Prussian East India. […] Frederick’s envoy was not convinced by Clerck’s plan to conquer the riches of Bengal. The king’s reaction was probably not much more favourable and the plan was abandoned. (2006, 149–150)

Nevertheless, on 24 January 1753, King Frederick the Great established a second Prussian company, popularly called the Bengal Company of Emden—in German, ‘Bengalische Handelsgesellschaft’ (Hunter 1886, 375) or ‘Bengalische Handelkompagnie’ (Schui 2006, 152). This Company, was as unsuccessful as the former—‘The Bengal Company of Embden proved still more unfortunate; its existence was summed up in two expeditions which did not pay, and a long and costly lawsuit’ (Hunter 1886, 375)—but it is this Company that established the Prussian colony in Bengal, which we are concerned with here. Let us therefore concentrate on the activities of the Bengal Company of Emden, and the colony in set up in Bengal. While not many people may be aware of the fact that the Germans also had a colony in Bengal in and around today’s Bhadreswar, just south of Chandernagore, which they held from around 1753 to 1760, the Government of India does not seem to be unaware of this, and the ‘District Census Handbook— Hugli’ of the official 2011 Census of India report says in fair detail: The district of Hugli was also invaded by the Prussians through the Bengal Company of Embden founded in 1753 by Frederick the Great. Almost at a distance of a mile from Chandernagore their factory was erected with a garden attached to it known as the Prussian Gardens. In the year 1756, the Prussians faced a disaster when Nawab Sirajuddaula extorted Rs. 5,000/- from them and in August their only ship was wrecked. With this blow and growing trading rivalry with other European companies, the Royal Prussian Bengal Company was forced to wound [sic] up in 1760 with the English taking over. (Census of India 2011, 14)

Most of the historical accounts of the polycolonial past of Bengal do take notice of this colony of the Prussians, and particularly note the intense rivalry and sense of threat that their arrival in Bengal would have caused to the Europeans already entrenched there. Hunter draws

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our attention to the threat perceived by the other European colonial powers due to the arrival of the Prussians and how their deliberate non-cooperation was one of the primary reasons behind the Emden Company’s failure to have a strong foothold in Bengal: The failure of Frederick the Great’s efforts to secure for Prussia a share in the India trade, resulted to some extent from the jealousy of the rival European Companies in India. The Dutch, French, and English pilots refused to show the way up the dangerous Hugli river to the Embden ships, ‘or any other not belonging to powers already established in India.’ (Hunter 1886, the quote at the end is from a ‘Despatch from the Calcutta Council to the Court of Directors, dated 6th September 1754, para. 11’, Footnote 3, p. 375)

Hunter goes on to show how the then Nawab of Bengal, Alivardi Khan, himself had warned the English of the fallout of the Prussians having a foothold in Bengal and asked them to keep the Prussians out, and how the English would gladly be in complicity with this proposal: ‘If the Germans come here,’ the Nawab had written to the English merchants on a rumour of the first Embden expedition reaching India, ‘it will be very bad for all the Europeans, but for you worst of all, and you will afterwards repent it; and I shall be obliged to stop all your trade and business. ... Therefore take care that these German ships do not come.’ ‘God forbid that they should come,’ was the pious response of the President of the English Council; ‘but should this be the case, I am in hopes they will be either sunk, broke, or destroyed.’ (Hunter 1886, the quote from the Nawab is from a ‘Letter from the Nawab of Murshidabad: Bengal Consultations of 19th August 1751’, Footnote 4, p. 375)

The date of the letter from Alivardi Khan quoted from above, 19 August 1751, suggests that there was an imminent threat of the Prussians coming to Bengal even before the Bengal Company of Emden was established, probably on the basis of the news of the exploits of the Asiatic Company of Emden in the far east. This preparatory resistance to the Prussians would have only strengthened after the Bengal Company was actually formed and there were actual voyages to Bengal by the Prussians. W.O. Henderson also puts the blame for the failure of the Emden Companies in achieving much success in their colonial

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enterprises primarily on the rivalry and opposition they faced from the other Europeans, particularly the English: The Bengal Company of Emden was granted a charter in 1753 but its first two voyages were dogged by misfortune and the venture was wound up. The failure of Emden to develop its trade with India and China was due partly to the inexperience of Prussian entrepreneurs and partly to the opposition of England and other maritime states to those who intrude upon their preserves. (2006, 156)

Yet, in spite of all the difficulties and obstacles, and the pre-emptive and real resistance to them, the Prussians did arrive in Bengal around 1753, did establish a colony—at least a demi-colony like that of the Danish, and even end up horticulturally enhancing it in a presumably aesthetic way! As O’Malley and Chakravarti put it: The Prussians had obviously some difficulties to face before gaining a footing in Bengal. […] Still, the Prussians appear to have established themselves in the district [i.e. Hooghly] “three or four years” before 1756, on the same terms as those allowed to the Danes, viz., they might carry on their trade on payment of custom duties and hire houses for themselves and warehouses for their goods, but not erect fortifications or keep garrisons. Their factory appears to have been a mile south of Fort Orleans at Chandernagore, and had gardens attached to it, which are several times referred to as the Prussian gardens. (1912, 87)

In fact, their initial and probably pretended, opposition notwith­ standing, the Europeans proved more than eager to trade with the Prussians privately, often to the chagrin of the official colonial administrators, and this contributed to their initial survival. For Hunter, […] the English Court of Directors complain that their Bengal servants are anxious to trade privately with the Embden Company. […] The truth is that the German Company had effected an entrance into Bengal, and found the French, English, and Dutch merchants quite willing to trade with it on their private account. (1886, 375–376)

In fact, the problems that the Prussians would have actually faced leading to their final closure was more from the Nawab of Bengal on the one hand, and their own inexperience and even defection on the other,

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rather than their polycolonial rivals. As O’Malley and Chakravarti note, the year 1756 was particularly critical to the Prussians on both these counts: The year 1756 was a disastrous one for the Prussians. In June Sirajud-daula extorted Rs. 5,000 from them. In August their only ship, the Prince Henry of Prussia was wrecked while entering the Ganges, owing to the misconduct of an English pilot Hendrick Walters, whom the Board dismissed for his carelessness […] Their position was, in fact, so bad that Mr. John Young, the Chief of the Prussian factory, seeing himself “detested, despised and not knowing how to support himself with honour” withdrew to the English with merchandise worth Rs. 80,000. (1912, 88)

Further, the Company lacked adequate support from the Prussian government back home, which, like we saw in the case of the Ostend Company too, was ready to sacrifice its colonial companies at the altar of diplomatic expediency in Europe. As Hunter puts it, ‘the Embden Company was before long sacrificed by the Prussian king to the exigencies of his European diplomacy’ (1886, 376). It is because of a cumulative effect of all these reasons that ‘The Company was soon afterwards wound up; and the Proceedings of Calcutta, dated 21st August 1760, record a letter from John Young, dated London, 18th July 1759, requesting the English to take possession of all the effects of the Royal Prussian Bengal Company’ (O’Malley and Chakravarti 1912, 88). The lone German colony in Bengal, the ‘Prussian Gardens’ at Bhadreswar was thus ceded to the English in 1760, within just seven years of its establishment. In fact, talking about developments in Europe and the diplomatic wrangles emerging therefrom that would have led to both the Emden Companies being short-lived, one can see how they had to be slowly wound up after 1757, when the French forces conquered Emden during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). The major British writer Thomas Carlyle wrote History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Called Frederick The Great (1858) in 21 books, out of which Book XVI is titled The Ten Years of Peace. – 1746–1756, Chapter VIII of which, ‘Ost-Friesland and the Shipping Interests’, is devoted to a study of Frederick the Great’s toying with the Emden Companies. Carlyle succinctly sums up the

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entire history of the Prussian Companies—their establishment, their functioning, and their dissolution—thus: September 1st, 1750, […] ‘The Asiatic Trading Company’ stept formally into existence; Embden the Head-quarters of it; chief Manager a Ritter De la Touche […] First ship, Konig von Preussen […] sailed 17th February next; and was followed by a second, named Town of Embden, on the 19th of September following; both of which prosperously reached Canton, and prosperously returned with cargoes of satisfactory profit. […] within a year hence, January 24th, 1753, Friedrich founded another Company for India: ‘Bengalische Handelsgesellschaft’; which also sent out its pair of ships, perhaps oftener than once; and pointed, as the other was doing, to wide fields of enterprise […]. But luck was wanting. And, ‘in part, mismanagement’, and, in whole, the SevenYears War put an end to both Companies before long. ([1858] 1888, 322–323)

The Seven Years War killed both the Prussian companies and even ‘Attempts to revive the company after the war failed though groups of Emden merchants resumed voyages to the Far East in the 1770’s’ (Henderson 2006, 156). Thus ended the ‘German’ attempts to have colonial contact with Bengal, sacrificed to a great extent to the diplomatic compulsions of their nation(s) within Europe. As Hunter rightly says, ‘The German Companies, whether Austrian or Prussian, were sacrificed to the diplomatic necessities of their royal patrons in Europe; and to the dependence of the German States in the wars of the last century upon the Maritime Powers’ (1886, 376). Hunter, however, observes how, in spite of this let-down by their official governments, the Germans emerged by the time he writes his work in 1886, as major players in the polycolonial matrix of India, in Calcutta and in other parts of the subcontinent: But the German people has never abandoned the struggle. The share in the Indian trade which Prussian King and Austrian Kaiser failed to grasp in the 18th century, has been gradually acquired by German merchants in our own day. An important part of the commerce of Calcutta and Bombay is now conducted by German firms; German mercantile agents are to be found in the rice districts, the jute districts, the cotton districts; and persons of German nationality have rapidly increased in the Indian Census returns. (1886, 376–377)

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Nevertheless, their resilience and their eventual emergence as individual traders of great concern notwithstanding, there is no doubt about the fact that ‘German’ colonies in Bengal had dissolved by the end of the 18th century, with both the official ‘German’ players—the Austrians with a colony in Bengal from the 1720s to the 1790s, and the Prussians, for a brief period from 1753 to 1760—having formally withdrawn from the polycolonial playing field, though not before Willem Bolts from the Austrian side had already made important contributions to the development of Bengali print, as will be discussed in Chapter 6 later. The observation above, that the Germans ceased to have any colony in India by the end of the 18th century and yet occupied a significant position in the Indian colonial trade by the end of the 19th century, points towards a new possibility of being a polycolonial factor in spite of not having a settled colony, and this was precisely the case with the Swedish too, the next European power to participate in this plural polycolonial game, whom I discuss now. As Hunter notes, the Swedish Company could be set up only because of the suspension of the Ostend Company in 1727 and its formal abolition in 1731. He says, The last nation of Europe to engage in maritime trade with India was Sweden. When the Ostend Company was suspended, a number of its servants were thrown out of employment. Mr. Henry Köning [sic.], of Stockholm, took advantage of their knowledge of the East, and obtained a charter for the ‘Swedish Company,’ dated 13th June 1731. (376)

There were some earlier attempts on the part of Swedes to form colonial trading companies, but all of them were stillborn. For example, on 14 June 1626, a Gothenburg-based Flemish merchant, Willem Usselincx, received a permit for a trading company for 12 years from the then Swedish King Gustav II Adolf, but the King being killed in 1632, not much progress could be made; similarly, in 1718, a privateer named Morgan got a charter from the then Swedish King Charles XII for setting up an East India Company, but with this king also killed on 30 November 1718, the company could not take off. The Swedes had to wait for Henrik König, as the correct spelling of his name is, who put in an application for a charter in 1729, and it is only after the formal

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closure of the Ostend Company that in response to this application the Swedish East India Company (Svenska Ostindiska Companiet or SOIC) was permitted to be founded in Gothenburg on 13 June 1731. Actually, as Christian Koninckx points out, though the French and the Dutch recognised the Swedish Company, the English were suspicious of it being a cover for the disbanded Ostend Company, and were quite resistant to it: […] the United Provinces – no doubt implying the Hague government – ‘had already accepted the Company’s Rights in Europe’. Even France had not wished to block the Company. […] however, […] the British government was very hostile. It is true that on the English side the Swedish Company was suspected of being only a cover for a further attempt by the ‘Ostend’ shipowners to maintain trading by their dissolved Company. […] The English persisted in identifying the new Swedish with the old Ostend Company and remained suspicious […] (1999, 213–214)

The SOIC had to continuously contend with this suspiciousness of the English. Anyway, the initial permit for the new company was for 15 years, that is till 1746, under what was called the ‘First Octroi’ or the ‘First Concession’. This was followed by a ‘Second Octroi’ (1746– 1766), a ‘Third Octroi’ (1766–1786) and a ‘Fourth Octroi’ (1786–1806), all for 20 years each. After this, ‘This Company was reorganized in 1806, but did little; and after many troubles, disappeared from India’ (Hunter 1886, 376), with it being declared bankrupt on 18 May 1811, and getting dissolved on 13 December 1813. Though named the ‘East India Company’, the SOIC primarily traded with China, and under the First Octroi, out of a total of 15 expeditions, only three came to Bengal (Milburn 1813, 577); under the Second Octroi only two expeditions comprising three ships came to Surat in today’s Gujarat; there were no ships sent to Bengal or anywhere in India under the Third Octroi, and under the Fourth Octroi, only eight out of the 27 ships that went to China stopped en route in India (Koninckx 1999, 221). In fact, between 1731 and 1804, more than 130 merchant ships were pressed into service by the Swedish East India Company, out of which only three came directly to Bengal (215).

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The number of voyages to Bengal were so few because they proved to be mostly loss-making. As Koninckx shows: The only way out was to put an end to the Bengal expeditions or explore new markets. The outcome of the first voyage to Bengal (and to Porto Novo)4 had been the loss of the greater part of a cargo and a long juridical and diplomatic procedure, while the second voyage ended in a shipwreck and the third gave rise to a dividend no higher than 10 per cent; in the same period the Chinese expeditions were bringing in four to five times as much. (1999, 224–225)

Therefore, the SOIC usually avoided direct contact with Bengal, and did not set up, unlike all the European powers that we have surveyed so far, any establishment in Bengal, but continued to trade with it nevertheless, creating a novel model of colonial contact, which is transient and impermanent, adding another dimension to Bengal’s polycolonial experience. As Abhay Kumar Singh goes on to say, the Swedish Company ‘aimed at creating conducive climate for developing direct Bengal–Sweden oceanic trade but operating without establishing any commercial headquarter in Bengal’ (Singh 2006, 567). It is this peculiar strategy, and a curious model of colonisation—carrying colonial trade without a colony—that Arvind Sinha probes in his article ‘The Disinclination of the Swedish East India Company to Acquire a Port Settlement in India’ (1990). Sinha begins by saying: The Swedish company did not have any trading settlement in India and preferred to obtain Indian goods through other trading companies or private traders based in Bengal and in the Coromandel coast. This paper attempts to explore the possible factors influencing the decision of the Swedish company not to have a base in India. There is a document which refers to a proposal to acquire Karikal from the French but the suggestion was turned down by the Company directors. This paper tries to study the possible reasons for the disinclination of the Swedish company to make use of this opportunity. (2006, 702) 4

 orto-Novo, literally ‘New Port’ in Portuguese, is today’s Parangipettai in Cuddalore P district in Tamil Nadu, an important port in the colonial times, and also known for the Second Anglo-Mysore War fought there on 1 July 1781 between the British forces and Hyder Ali.

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As the Karikal experience would show, it is not that the Swedes did not have a colony because they could not afford one, or did not manage to procure one; they simply chose to not settle down in any fixed colonial locale. As Sinha describes this curious episode: T. Wroughton, a Swede had resided in Pondicherry for about seven years. He presented a memorial in January 1786 to the Swedish East India Company to establish a settlement on the coast of Coromandel, where several other European nations had their respective settlements or comptoirs. From his memorial it appears he had a frank discussion with Möns. Bussy, the French Governor. […] Bussy was prepared to sell off Karikal to them […] Bussy’s offer seems to have excited the aspirations of Wroughton who began to advocate immediate action. […] The Directors of the Swedish East India Company – John A. Grill, Groft fr. Kusell, etc., apparently did not take these suggestions very seriously. […] The strong arguments of Wroughton failed to persuade the Directors of the Swedish East India Company. (1990, 703–704)

How does one explain this refusal of the Swedish to set up a colony in India while continuing to do some colonial trade there, primarily with Bengal, Surat and Porto Novo? One has no concrete answer but this is exactly what makes polycoloniality so fascinating, where there can be one more European nation, Sweden, which chooses to have a colonial contact with Bengal, and yet decides resolutely not to settle down, not to have a colony there, and instead just flit around as ephemera in the gossamer polycolonial web. More importantly, a Swede, Johann Zacharias Kiernander, made very important contributions to the development of print in Bengal, but more of that is to follow in Chapter 6 later. One can now move on to the last of the European players in the polycolonial arena of Bengal—the Greeks. If the Swedes were curious as a European people with a nation but no colony doing colonial trade in Bengal, the Greeks are equally curious being a European people with a colony in Bengal but no nation to themselves, at least till 1832. Though they were not formally a nation yet, and thus could not have a formal government sanctioned ‘colony’, there were many Greek traders in Bengal from as early as the 17th century, and apart from being scattered all over Bengal, and particularly concentrated in the

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major cities of Kolkata and Dhaka, they also had a settlement at Rishra, around five kilometres south of Serampore. Not much is known about this colony apart from stray references—‘the Greeks had an outpost at Rishra’ (Betts 2013, 47); ‘Greeks at Rishra’ (Abram 2003, 815), etc.— and therefore I will concentrate on the Greeks in Bengal per se. So, when did the Greeks come to Bengal? As Sister Nectaria Paradisi, the last remaining Greek resident in today’s Kolkata, who works with the Philanthropic Society of the Orthodox Church, says, ‘From the 17th century, Calcutta was home to a Greek community’ (qtd. in Shah 2019). However, as Paul Byron Norris notes in his book Ulysses in the Raj (1992), we can only say with some certainty that Greek merchants must have begun coming to Bengal at least as early as the beginning of the 18th century, because there are two Greek tombstones, dated 1713 and 1728, in the aisles of the Catholic Cathedral of the Virgin Mary of the Rosary or the Portuguese Church, in Murgihatta, Kolkata (Norris 1992, 19). More importantly, whether they arrived in the 17th century or the beginning of the 18th century, one already finds Greeks to have risen to a position of prominence in Calcutta by the mid-18th century, as H.E.A. Cotton notes: ‘The Greeks […] owe their association with Calcutta to the allurements of commerce. The first eminent Greek settler in Calcutta was Hadjee Alexios Argyree, a native of Philippopolis, who came to Bengal in 1750 and earned his living as an interpreter’ (1907, 255–256). It is to this Hadjee Alexios Argyree that one can credit the foundation of the first major Greek structure in the city, the old Greek Church at Amratollah, officially called ‘Transfiguration of the Saviour’ (‘Η Μεταμορφωσισ Του Σωτηροσ’ in Greek) Church, which has a fantastic story behind its erection in 1780. As the narrative runs, The Greek Church stands in Amratollah Street […] It was erected in the year 1780 […] It owes its foundation to Hadjee Alexias Argyree […] In the year 1770 Argyree sailed as Interpreter […] in the ship Alexander from Calcutta, bound for Mocha and Jedda. They met with a severe gale and the vessel was dismasted. At the moment of extreme danger, when all expected that the vessel would founder, Argyree made a solemn vow to heaven that if they survived the peril he would found a Church in Calcutta for its Greek inhabitants. The ship weathered the storm, and arrived without further mishap at Mocha, and on his

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return to Calcutta, Argyree obtained permission from the Government to establish a Greek church. But death put a period to the further pious intentions of Argyree, and it was not until three years after his death at Dacca in August, 1777 that the foundation of the present church was laid in June, 1780. (Cotton 1907, 41–42)

The closeness of the Greeks to the then establishment in colonial Calcutta is evidenced by the fact that the English Governor-General Warren Hastings was himself one of the chief contributors to the erection of this church, and, in return when in 1788, Hastings was impeached on charges of corruption, two Greek priests and seventy Greek merchants signed a petition in his defence (Norris 1992, 31–32, 189–190) A major wave of Greek migration to Bengal started after the TurkoRussian War of 1774, and by the beginning of the 19th century, there were 120 Greek families in Calcutta. As Dimitrios Vassiliadis says in his article ‘Three Centuries of Hellenic Presence in Bengal’: A significant number of Greek families migrated to Bengal mainly from the rich commercial Thracian cities of Adrianoupolis and Philippoupolis, when their properties were destroyed during the Turko–Russian War in 1774. Another steady stream of immigrants arrived in the Eastern ports of India on the ships which carried British colonialists from the Ionian Islands as well as from the disaffected Greek cities in Cappadocia and the Aegean Islands. At the beginning of the 19th century, the Greek community in Bengal was comprised of about 120 families. (Vassiliadis 2005)

The establishment of the Greek Church also required priests, and this led to over and above the merchants and migrants who would have primarily come to Bengal so far, the inflow of clergymen and the educated class from different parts of Greece to Bengal, leading to the establishment of Greek educational institutions. ‘In 1786, Dimitrios Gallanos, the Athenian, established the first school for the children of the immigrants in Calcutta, while regular classes began in Dhaka as well’ (Vassiliadis 2005). This goes on to show that there were Greeks in Eastern Bengal too. In fact, the Greek established settlements in Dhaka and in its port, Narayanganj, towards the end of the 18th century, and

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in 1812, they built a church dedicated to Saint Thomas, on the Muqim Kuttra Road, east of Chowk Bazaar, in Dhaka, and by 1840, they had their own school (Vassiliadis 2005). The architectural traces of the Greek are still there in both Kolkata and Dhaka though with some alterations in location. In 1920, the Greek community of Calcutta sold off their old Greek Church premises in Amratollah and purchased a piece of land in Kalighat, where a new Greek Church, with the same name as the old one, was built in a neoclassical Doric pattern and opened in 1924, where it still stands in all its glory. The cemetery located in the land adjoining the old church was also moved to a new site in the Narkeldanga–Phulbagan area on the central-eastern fringes of the city, where it still exists with its intriguingly beautiful set of, according to the current caretaker of the cemetery, Basanta Das, ‘more than 200 graves’ (Shah 2019). The Greek Church and cemetery in Dhaka also underwent relocation and repurposing but with not as desirable an outcome as in Kolkata. The church in Dhaka was partly destroyed in a severe earthquake in 1897 and was abandoned, and two later references, dated 1907 and 1911, found in the archives of the Greek community, ‘describe the condition of the church in bleak tones. […] The local people stole the marble and the tombstones and the surrounding wall collapsed’ (Vassiliadis 2005). To make matters worse, in 1913, the British administration of Dhaka decided to expropriate the land of the Greek church and the adjoining cemetery for the construction of the Mitford Medical College (now Sir Salimullah Medical College). Fortunately, after some intervention, the portico of the church was moved to the old Greek Cemetery in Ramna and made into a Doric monument, which got incorporated into the University of Dhaka campus that was constructed at the very site of the old Greek Cemetery in 1921, and which still stands today within the Teacher–Student Centre compound on the campus: According to Father Halvatzakes-Velladios, the architect of the college was a Greek, named Doxiades, who requested the local authorities to convert the portico of the church to a Greek monument. The portico of the church was probably moved to the site of the old Greek cemetery in Ramna, that existed before the construction of the Greek church at Chowk Bazar […] Athanassios Alexiou, the Archimandrite of the

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Greek community in Calcutta, came to Dhaka for the inauguration [in 1915]. […] Six years later, in 1921, the construction of the University of Dhaka began on the same site. The Greek monument in the Doric order was left undisturbed and it can be seen today in the campus near the Teacher-Student Centre (T.S.C.) facing the campus wall at Kazi Nazrul Islam Road. (Vassiliadis 2005)

The monument presumably suffered heavy damage during the 1952 Language Movement and the 1971 War of Independence, but it was rebuilt a few years later and additional repairs were carried out in 1997 with expenses paid by the Greek Embassy in New Delhi (Vassiliadis 2005), and at least it still stands as a remnant of the lost Greek legacy in East Bengal. The Greeks in Bengal did not restrict themselves to trading and church-building alone. In the heady years of the early 19th century of freedom struggle in Greece, leading to its eventual independence from the Ottomans in 1832, Calcutta became a potent site of this resistance, and when the Greek revolutionary network, Society of the Friends (Φιλική Εταιρεία), asked for assistance from the Greek communities abroad, the Calcutta Greeks congregated on the second day of Easter in the year 1802, and made the following vow: In the year of our Lord 1802, in the Spring and Easter of our Lord, all the Greek traders residing in Calcutta from Pontos, and Bithynia, and Cappadocia, and Aeolia, and the land of Ionia, and mainland Greece, and islands, and Barbaria (North Africa), and Egypt, and Constantinople, and from all over the world, we gathered in the temple, in the evening after the divine service of the second day of the Resurrection, and took a sacred vow. We shall place in custody in Calcutta our spare money and gold and silver and other property for the resurgence of the race of the Greeks. No one will ever put a hand on them. They will be bestowed to the kingdom of the Greeks so that with the grace of God it will be resurrected. (qtd. in Vassiliadis 2005)

As Vassiliadis further shows, the prosperous Greek community of Bengal continuously provided support to the Greek revolution, thereafter constantly contributed significant capital to the authorities of the newly-formed Greek state, and a century later also supported

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the 1916 struggle for the liberation of the Greeks in Northern Epirus in today’s Albania, and the refugees escaping the 1922 persecution of Asia Minor Greeks by Kemal Ataturk. Once again, as was seen regarding the French in Chandernagore in the previous chapter and as will be further elaborated in the next chapter, polycoloniality, because of the fissures and slippages it possibly embodied, allowed for revolutionary and decolonising potential. In the decades following 1947, most of the Greeks left the city for Greece and other western countries; as Sister Nectaria Paradisi, the last Greek resident of Kolkata says, ‘Greeks started to leave India and move to London, Johannesburg, some moved back to Greece even’ (qtd. in Shah 2019). The Greek Church in Kolkata was shut down in 1960, and though it was re-opened in 1969, at that time ‘there were only 2 Greek men and 2 Greek ladies in Calcutta’ (Vassiliadis 2005), and it was shut down again in 1972, to be re-opened in 1991, and be open since then, with Sister Nectaria Paradisi actively involved in its affairs. Though there are many famous descendants of the Bengal Greeks spread all over the world today, naming whom is beyond the scope of this chapter, major Greek–Indian companies like the multibrand Ralli’s and the pharmaceutical giant Raptakos are not owned by Greeks any more. What remain of the Greeks in Bengal are only the Greek Church and the Greek Cemetery in Kolkata, the Greek Monument in Dhaka, and Sister Nectaria Paradisi herself, but the legacy of the Greek to the polycolonial history of Bengal is undeniable. Fortunately, there is an organisation called Ελληνο-Ινδικη Εταιρεια Πολιτισμου & Αναπτυξησ (Elléno-Indiké Etaireia Politismou & Anaptuxés, abbreviated as ElInEPA or ELINEPA, literally ‘Indo-Hellenic Society for Culture & Development’) which has a very resourceful website (elinepa.org) that documents the long history of Greek presence in India, as also in Bengal, and which is truly worth a look. There were three other communities from outside India who settled in Bengal in significant numbers in the period under discussion—the Armenians, the Chinese, and the Jews —but since I have restricted my discussion of polycoloniality here to European settlers alone, and none of these peoples were Europeans, I will not discuss them in any detail here, but only allude to them briefly.

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The Armenians were the first among these three Asian communities to have come to Bengal, and they had a ‘settlement at Saidabad (in the environs of Cossimbazar)’ of their own by the 16th century (Cotton 1907, 255), and serially settled in and traded with the European colonies as they developed in Bengal over the next three centuries. In fact, they were in Calcutta before the English: ‘[T]hey were already trading at Suttanutte before the coming of Charnock, for an inscription exists over a grave in the Armenian churchyard at Calcutta which bears date the 11th July, 1630’ (255). This shows, once again, that Calcutta was created, much before the English claim to have built it in 1690, by other settlers—the Portuguese, the Dutch, as well as the Armenians. In Calcutta, the Armenians built the still existent Armenian Church in 1724, and settled in the areas of Armanitola, Armenian Ghat, Armenian Street, etc., which still bear these names, and were exclusively occupied by the Armenians, becoming their enclave for more than three centuries. The Chinese started settling in Calcutta around the mid-18th century, primarily as labourers in the dockyards, but it was in 1778 that the Chinese entrepreneur Tong Atchew (or Achew or Achi) was granted 650 bighas of land by Warren Hastings just south of Budge Budge, a few kilometres southwest of Calcutta, to set up a sugar plantation and mill, thus establishing the first Chinese enclave in Bengal, called Achipur after its founder. Atchew died in 1783, the plantation was sold off by 1804, and the Chinese settlers of Achipur primarily migrated to Calcutta to set up their enclaves in the city, the two Chinatowns— the Old Chinatown in Tiretti Bazar area in central Kolkata, and the New Chinatown in Tangra in the eastern fringes of the city—both of which are thriving even now, though the number of Chinese settlers and their trade has gone down dramatically over the last few decades. The original Chinese colony of Achipur with its temple of the earth god and goddess and Atchew’s red horse-shoe shaped tomb is a bit of a pilgrimage today for the city’s Chinese, who flock there for the Chinese New Year celebrations to pay homage to their founder (Banerjee 2018; Chakravarty 2017; Datta 2006). The Jewish settlers in Kolkata were mostly Baghdadi Jews, that is from West Asia, and the first recorded Jewish immigrant to Kolkata

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was Shalom Aharon Obadiah Cohen, who arrived in 1798. A steady flow of Jews followed, the community numbering from 5,000 to 6,000 in its heyday, who did not have a specific enclave to themselves, unlike all the communities we have discussed so far, but settled all over central Calcutta and controlled important businesses and establishments. Most Jews left the city after the establishment of Israel, and there are now just a few families left, but three monumental synagogues, a couple of wellestablished schools, several place names, and a legendary bakery and confectionary—Nahoum’s—still bear the stamp of the Jewish legacy of Kolkata (Chakrabarti 2014) Let me now move on to my final chapter where I look at the impact that polycoloniality had in Bengal, and how these multiple non-English settlers in colonial Bengal left their indelible mark on the Bengali cultural, social and political landscape, constituting the Bengalis’ brush with ‘colonial modernity’, around several registers, and in all of them, most importantly, to have done so prior to and more significantly than the English would.

References Aalund, Flemming and Simon Rastén. 2010. ‘Indo-Danish Heritage Buildings of Serampore: Survey report by the Serampore Initiative of the National Museum of Denmark’. Copenhagen: The National Museum of Denmark. Available at: https://natmus.dk/fileadmin/user_upload/natmus/ etnografisksamling/billeder/Serampore/Serampore_report_2010_web.pdf (accessed on 25 December 2019). Abram, David. 2003. The Rough Guide to India. London and New York: Rough Guides Ltd. Banerjee, Sudeshna. 2018. ‘Calcutta through Chinese eyes’. The Telegraph, 1 July. Available at: https://www.telegraphindia.com/states/west-bengal/calcuttathrough-chinese-eyes/cid/1419947 (accessed on 22 December 2019). Betts, Vanessa. 2013. Footprint Focus – Kolkata and West Bengal. Bath: Footprint Handbooks. Bowrey, Thomas. 1993. A Geographical Account of Countries around the Bay of Bengal: 1669–1679 (1701). Edited by R.C. Temple (1905). Indian reprint, New Delhi: Asian Educational Services. Bredsdorff, Asta. 2009. The Trials and Travels of Willem Leyel: An Account of the Danish East India Company in Tranquebar, 1639–48. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum.

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Campos, J.J.A. 1919. History of the Portuguese in Bengal, With Maps and Illustrations. Calcutta: Butterworth & Co. Carlyle, Thomas. 1888. History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great (1858). In 10 volumes, Vol. VI. London: Chapman & Hall. Census of India. 2011. West Bengal, Series-20 Part XII-B: District Census Handbook: Hugli – Village and Town Wise Primary Census Abstract (PCA). Kolkata: Directorate of Census Operations West Bengal. Available at: http:// censusindia.gov.in/2011census/dchb/1912_PART_B_DCHB_HUGLI.pdf (accessed on 18 December 2019). Chakravarty, Ipsita. 2017. ‘The legend of Tong Atchew, the “first ancestor of the Chinese in India”’. Scroll.in, 28 January. Available at: https://scroll.in/ magazine/826383/the-legend-of-tong-atchew-who-was-the-first-ancestorof-the-chinese-in-india (accessed on 12 December 2019). Chakrabarti, Kaustav. 2014. Glimpses into the Jewish World of Calcutta 1798– 1948. Kolkata: Readers Service. Cotton, H.E.A. 1907. Calcutta Old and New: A Historical & Descriptive Handbook to the City. Calcutta: W. Newman & Co. Das, Soumitra. 2018. ‘How a Bengal Town is Embracing Its Danish Past’, 18 March. Available at: https://thewire.in/history/how-a-bengal-town-isembracing-its-danish-past (accessed on 20 December 2019). Dasgupta, KumKum. 2017. ‘The Danes are back: How a Bengal town is restoring its European legacy’. Hindustan Times, 13 December. Available at: https:// www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/the-danes-are-back-how-a-bengaltown-is-restoring-its-european-legacy/story-lzWjnk1hh9cfeHMrwhLhmI. html (accessed on 9 December 2019). Datta, Rangan. 2006. ‘Next weekend you can be at … Achipur’ (1587). The Telegraph, 19 March. Available at: https://www.telegraphindia.com/states/ west-bengal/next-weekend-you-can-be-at-achipur/cid/1283123 (accessed on 25 November 2019). Feldbæk, Ole. 1981. The Organization and Structure of the Danish East India, West India and Guinea Companies in the 17th and 18th Centuries. Leiden: Leiden Univ. Press. Fihl, Esther. 2009. ‘Shipwrecked on the Coromandel: The first Indo-Danish contact, 1620’. Review of Development and Change, 14 (1 and 2): 19–40. Hamilton, Alexander. 1930. A New Account of the East Indies (1727). Edited by William Foster, in 2 volumes, Vol. II. London: The Argonaut Press. Henderson, W.O. 2006. Studies in the Economic Policy of Frederick the Great (1963). London and New York: Routledge. Hunter, W.W. 1886. The Indian Empire: Its People, History, and Products. London: Trübner & Co.

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Keay, John. 1991. The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company. London: Macmillan. Koninckx, C. 1999. ‘Sweden and India in the eighteenth century: Sweden’s difficulty in gaining access to a crowded market’. In Merchants, Companies and Trade: Europe and Asia in the Early Modern Era, edited by Sushil Chaudhury and Michel Morineau. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 212–226. Master, Streynsham. 1911. The Diaries of Streynsham Master 1675–1680 and Other Contemporary Papers Relating Thereto, in 2 volumes. Edited by Richard Carnac Temple. London: John Murray. For the Government of India, Indian Records Series. Milburn, William. 1813. Oriental commerce: Containing a geographical description of the principal places in the East Indies, China, and Japan, with their produce, manufactures, and trade. London: Black, Parry and Co. Norris, Paul Byron. 1992. Ulysses in the Raj. London: British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia. O’Malley, L.S.S. and Monmohan Chakravarti. 1912. Bengal District Gazeteers: Hooghly. Calcutta: The Bengal Secretariat Book Depot. Schui, Florian. 2006. ‘Prussia’s “Trans-Oceanic Moment”: The Creation of the Prussian Asiatic Trade Company in 1750’. The Historical Journal, 49 (1), March: 143–160. Shah, Manasi. 2019. ‘The only Greek of Calcutta: Sister Nectaria Paridisi of the Greek Orthodox Church is the only Greek left in the city’. The Telegraph, 3 February. Available at: https://www.telegraphindia.com/culture/heritage/ all-greek-to-calcutta/cid/1683507 (accessed on 20 December 2019). Singh, Abhay Kumar. 2006. Modern World System and Indian ProtoIndustrialization: Bengal 1650-1800, Vol. I. New Delhi: Northern Book Centre. Sinha, Arvind. 1990. ‘The Disinclination of the Swedish East India Company to Acquire a Port Settlement in India’. Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 51: 702–705. Stavorinus, John Splinter. 1798. Voyages to the East Indies. Translated by Samuel Hull Wilcocke, in 3 volumes, Vol. I. London: G.G. and J. Robinson. The Imperial Gazetteer of India, 1908. New Edition, Vol. VI: Argaon to Bardwān. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Vassiliadis, Dimitrios. 2005. ‘Three Centuries of Hellenic Presence in Bengal’. ELINEPA, 31 December. Available at: https://elinepa.org/en/threecenturies-of-hellenic-presence-in-bengal/ (accessed on 22 December 2019).

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The Impact of Polycoloniality As has been discussed earlier at the end of every chapter, the different European players on the polycolonial stage of Bengal contributed immensely to usher in the Bengalis into their tryst with colonial modernity. Many of the essential features of ‘colonial modernity’ are: 1. exposure to the possibilities of cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, hybridity and diaspora; 2. systematic initiation of institutionalised ‘western’ education, particularly higher education; 3. an indelible impact on language and literature; 4. introduction of print culture; 5. a defining influence on art and culture in general, of both the high and popular sort, including material culture like food practices; 6. introduction of ‘progressive’ social and political reforms, often in defiance of traditional practices; and 7. the induction of the paradoxical possibility of resistance and revolution, leading to decolonisation itself. These are all seen to have been originally initiated in Bengal through the practices of the non-English polycolonial players—the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, the Danish, the ‘Germans’, the Swedes and the Greeks—though most of the official colonial historiography of the Bengal Renaissance often erroneously and motivatedly ascribes all of this to the English. Let me discuss the polycolonial impact on these seven registers one after the other. One can begin with the first of the registers above—Bengal’s brush with multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, hybridity, its becoming diasporic, etc. As it has been already noticed earlier at the end of the 173

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second chapter, the Portuguese presence in Bengal was of three sorts: an ‘official’ one engaged in legal trade and colonial administration, an ‘adventurist’ one comprising explorers, pirates and slave traders, and a ‘settler’ one comprising those who mingled with the Bengalis and settled down even after the Portuguese colonial control was over in Bengal. It was also stated earlier that each of these three modes contributed its own kind of multiculturalism to Bengal and Bengalis—a cosmopolitan one, a diasporic one and a hybridising one—the three sides of mercantile colonial modernity making the Portuguese the pioneers in this field, to be followed by the other polycolonial European powers. Let me begin with the first of these points, that of cosmopolitanism. It has already been observed earlier how, while even before the advent of the Europeans the major towns in Bengal like Gaur and Satgaon were already fairly multicultural, it is with the Europeans that the possibility of truly urban cosmopolitan spaces sprung up. It has been pointed out in the earlier chapters how under the Portuguese, and later the Dutch, the Bandel– Hooghly–Chinsurah belt became the first truly urban multicultural space in Bengal with ships from all over Asia and Europe anchoring at its docks and new entrants on Bengal’s emerging cosmopolitan stage, including the English, setting up residence there from the early 1600s. It has also been noticed how the French and the Danish gave Bengal the possibility of its first urban public spheres, with Chandernagore and Serampore emerging as ‘cities’ with mansions, hotels and a strand along the river, and an urban public culture, somewhat before Calcutta would have any of these. Most interestingly, it has also been reported in the previous chapters, how even the environs of Calcutta—the city that the English would apparently establish on 24 August 1690, and which would turn out to be the epicentre of urban colonial modernity in Bengal in the centuries to come—was in fact already settled in and used for trading purposes by the Portuguese (at Betor in Shibpur, Howrah, opposite Garden Reach in the current Kolkata Port area) at least from as early as the 1560s, by the Armenians (in Sutanuti in today’s central Kolkata) before the 1630s, and by the Dutch (in Baranagar, in today’s north Kolkata) from the 1650s. Urban cosmopolitan multiculturalism in Bengal is thus definitely a ‘polycolonial’ product, induced by the other European colonisers of Bengal (and even the Armenians, who

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being Asians, I have generally left out of the scope of this book, but for a brief mention towards the end of the fifth chapter), rather than the English. Similarly, the beginnings of some Bengalis having to become diasporic in modern times can also be credited (or blamed, depending on the perspective) to the Portuguese and the Dutch, whose flourishing slave trade in Bengal that has been alluded to on multiple occasions in the previous chapters led to many hapless Bengalis from the coastal villages being captured and enslaved by pirate ships and sold off to different parts of the world, and thus being forcefully thrust into a multicultural world of dispersion. Bengali slaves and indentured labourers were shipped to the burgeoning European plantations and settlements in the Caribbean, the Pacific islands, the southern African mainland and the islands off its coast, and also to Europe. There would have been quite a few diasporic Bengalis in Europe by the 18th century, the story of one of whom—Zamor, as he was called—I will narrate later in this chapter. On the other hand, Bengalis and South Asians in general, were also employed as sailors, or lascars as they were called, in significant numbers in European ships from the late 15th century itself. The lascars, many of whom were Bengalis, would not only travel the world but also often settle in European countries, leading to a sizeable polycoloniality-induced Bengali diaspora. Finally, talking about hybridity, it should be noted that while the other Europeans were a little resistant to it, though they would also practise it to a certain extent, the Portuguese were most open to inter-marriage, and, as has been reported earlier, they would get dissolved into the Indian and Bengal ethnoscape through a thorough admixture with the natives, leading to a vibrant body of hybrid Eurasians—Luso-Indians primarily, with an attendant hybridisation of cultural mores and modes of living too— who form a significant part of the population of Bengal even today. Let me move on to the second register, that of formal institutions of ‘western’ education, particularly of higher education. Probably the most important impact that the Portuguese contact has left on Bengal is in the field of education, with the first brush of Bengal with ‘western’ education happening in the Augustinian and Jesuit convents and colleges established in Bandel in 1599. Even before the establishment

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of this first ‘western’ college in Bengal, the Portuguese already exposed Bengalis to ‘western’ education, by sending many of them to be educated at their college in Goa, at least as early as the 1550s: The Jesuits, then as now, not only converted the people of Bengal but also sent Bengali children to be educated in the great Jesuit College of Santa Fé in Goa, which was afterwards known as the College of São Paulo. Fr. H. Josson S.J. mentions the names of five Bengali children who were pupils of the College of Santa Fé in 1558 – Filippe, Gaspar de Deus, Antonio do Ermo, and two Pedros. In the catalogue of the pupils of that College, dated 1559, and still preserved in the Royal Library of Ajuda, Portugal, several names of Bengali children are mentioned. (Campos 1919, 102–103)

However, it is in 1599 when the Portuguese Jesuits established the College of São Paulo (St Paul) in Bandel, run in close coordination with the Augustinian church there that formal ‘western’ education began in Bengal. In 1622, with the appointment of Father Peter Gomes as the Rector of the College, the education mission really took off and within a decade, the likes of B. Rodrigues, James Gomes, Simon de Figuredo and Andre Machado made it a great centre of learning initiating around 10,000 Bengalis into western education. The Bandel Church continued its education mission and throughout the next three centuries established several branches of the Don Bosco School, Auxilium Convent and St Paul’s School—some of the state’s bestknown educational centres even today—in different parts of Bengal. There is also by the beginning of the 18th-century reference to a second college in Hooghly, this time built by the Jesuits alone, rather than in collaboration with the Augustinians, which could thus be the second ‘college’ in Bengal, though its existence, or purpose, is often doubted. I further think that the confusion as to whether there were one or two colleges in Hooghly–Bandel at that point of time, may have resulted because of the two orders—Augustinians and Jesuits—operational there, and the same college—the College of St Paul—may have been referred to differently by different authors. As Campos says, Various writers refer to a College of Jesuits in Hooghly and their superior was indeed called the Rector. According to Fr. Barbier S.J.

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who wrote an account of the Episcopal Visitation of Bishop Laines of Mylapore in 1712–15 this Bishop died at the College of Hooghly. Fr. J. Tieffentaller S.J. who wrote a sort of a statistical account of Hooghly in 1765 speaks of the Jesuit College as already in ruins. But Fr. Hosten holds that this College was nothing but the Jesuit residence in which only two or three Jesuit Fathers lived with occasionally a lay brother. The Jesuit Mission ministered in Hooghly till 1740 when Fr. George Deistermann the last Jesuit Rector died. But Fr. Delaunoit says there was one Jesuit managing the Church and the college even up to 1746 when they were given up. (108–109)

Thus the first exposure of Bengalis to ‘western’ education in the 1550s and the first ‘colleges’ in Bengal under the Augustinians and Jesuits in 1599, and probably the Jesuits alone again around 1700, were all Portuguese enterprises and predated the first English school. The latter was the Charity School on Free School Street in Calcutta established between 1726 and 1731, probably in 1729, which was re-organised as the ‘Calcutta Free School’ in 1789, further renamed St Thomas’ School and moved to its current Kidderpore campus in 1923, which is the oldest school in English controlled Bengal (Old Calcutta). It may be argued that these Portuguese ‘colleges’ were hardly colleges in the usual sense of the term, and they were just church schools meant for religious instruction and meant probably for young children, but in a way so was the English ‘Free School’, or at least certainly it was a school for children. However, the oldest ‘secular’ institution of ‘higher education’ in Bengal, the oldest ‘college’ in any sense of the term, was also a product of polycoloniality rather than English endeavours. The first ‘colonial modern’ college in Bengal, founded to impart secular higher education to the general public, was Hooghly College, established in Dutch Chinsurah in 1812 (currently the Hooghly Collegiate School, as it was renamed in 1836, after the school wing was separated from the college wing, and the latter was named the New Hooghly College, currently Hooghly Mohsin College). Though two colonial modern higher educational institutions in British Calcutta are older than the Hooghly College—The Calcutta Madrassa, established in 1781 (currently Aliah University), and the Fort William College, established in 1800 and closed down in 1854—they were either

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not for secular education or not open to the general public, the former being only for Islamic scholars and the second for training Indian languages to English civil servants, thus making Hooghly College in Dutch Chinsurah certainly the oldest college in Bengal for secular public higher education. Needless to say, the ‘colleges’ in British Calcutta that we often associate with the spread of colonial modernity in Bengal—Hindu College (1817, now Presidency University), Bishop’s College (1820) and Sanskrit College (1824, now The Sanskrit College and University)—were all established after Hooghly College. It could be argued that and has already been shown earlier in Chapter 3, Chinsurah was actually under English control between 1795 and 1814, and thus the 1812 establishment of Hooghly College was not done by the Dutch. However, it should not be forgotten that England was already mandated to return Chinsurah to the Dutch as per the Peace of Amiens dated 27 March 1802 and though the de facto transfer may have happened only after the Convention of London signed on 13 August 1814, the Dutch were almost in charge of Chinsurah de jure in 1812, and they did hold on to Chinsurah, the land where Hooghly College is located till 1825. Moving a step further up on the ladder of higher education, from ‘college’ to the ‘university’, it should be noted that the oldest university in Bengal (and, in fact, the whole of Asia) is of Danish origin, and thus again a non-English, polycolonial product. The Serampore College, established in 1818, was the first institution in Asia to award formal degrees, and thus the first university, in the usual current sense of the term. Though some colonial higher educational institutions in and around Calcutta mentioned earlier are older than Serampore College, or are of similar antiquity, they were not formally authorised to confer degrees in the usual sense of the term. Serampore College became a full-fledged university in 1827, much before the establishment of the University of Calcutta (1857). King Frederick VI of Denmark, through a ‘Royal Charter of Incorporation’ on 23 February 1827, empowered the college to formally confer degrees making it the oldest ‘university’ in Asia and the third university within Danish territory after Copenhagen and Kiel. In 1857, the ‘secular’ departments of Serampore College were affiliated to the newly founded University of Calcutta,

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while its theology wing still continues to be a separate university called the Senate of Serampore College (University). The Serampore College was established by three English missionaries—William Carey, Joshua Marshman and William Ward—who, as has been stated before since missionary activities were not allowed in the English-controlled territories till 1813, chose to locate their institution, which was aimed at religious as well as secular education, in the Danish demi-colony of Serampore, since this settlement without a proper farman could engage in activities which the formal colonies could not. The Royal Charter of Incorporation, empowering this college to issue degrees and thus become a ‘university’, was issued after Joshua Marshman visited King Frederick VI in Copenhagen in August 1827. The relevant clause of this charter as reproduced from the official website of the college runs thus: The Seventh Clause of the Royal Danish Charter given by King Frederick VI, incorporating Serampore College on 23rd February, 1827, as Serampore was then a Danish settlement, stated, thus, ‘And We further appoint, grant and declare that the said William Carey, Joshua Marshman, John Clark Marshman,1 the members of the first Council, and their successors forever, shall have the power of conferring upon the students of the said College, native Christians as well as others, degrees of rank and honour according to their proficiency in as ample a manner as any other such College.’ (The Council of Serampore College)

Images of the pages of the original charter can be seen reproduced on the official website of the Serampore College (http://seramporecollege. org/a-s-c/gallery/). After 1845, when the Danish ceded Serampore to British, and even after 1857 when the secular departments of the College were affiliated to the University of Calcutta, and even now, degrees of all levels conferred by the two constituent colleges, 52 affiliated colleges, and five affiliated centres throughout India, affiliated to the Senate of Serampore College (University), are governed by the Danish Royal Charter of 1827, as further confirmed by the Bengal Government Act IV of 1918, and recognised by the University Grants Commission of India under Sections 2(f) and 12(b) of the UGC Act, 1956. The initiation of 1

 illiam Ward having died in 1823, Joshua Marshman’s son was included in the trio in W his place in the charter.

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Bengalis into ‘western’ education, from the school to the college to the university level, was thus a ‘polycolonial’ project, brought about by the Portuguese, the Dutch and the Danish, and not the English, who were late starters. Let me now move on to the third register of the polycolonial impact, that on Bengali language and literature. The indelible Portuguese mark on the Bengali language is seen in how the Bengali words for several common objects are actually Portuguese loan words. While it will be impossible to list all such words in Bengali that are of Portuguese origin, let me list here a few obvious ones, putting the Portuguese word first, the Bengali word next, and its English equivalent in brackets. It is hardly surprising that most words associated with Christianity in Bengali are Portuguese loan words—cristão–krisṭān (christian); cruz–kruś (cross); igreja–gīrjā (church); Jésu Cristo–jīśu krisṭo (Jesus Christ); padre–pādrī (church priest), etc. But, surprisingly, many common words, which have become absolutely naturalised in Bengali, are also actually Portuguese loan words, like: acabar–kābār (finish) [also mes-acabar mās-kābār (month-end)]; aia–āyā (nanny); alcatrão– ālkātrā (tar); alfinete–ālpin (pin); armario–ālmāri (cupboard); baciõ– bāsan (utensil); balde–bālti (bucket); boião–boyām (jar); botão–botām (button); basta–bæs (enough); cadeira–kedārā (chair); camara–kāmrā (room); camisa–kāmij/kāmiz (shirt); chave– chābi (key); chapa–chhāpā (stamp/print); cartucho–kārtuj (cartridge); escola–iskul (school); espada–ispāt (steel, referring to sword); estação–isṭiśān (station); estirar–istiri (to iron); fita–fitā (ribbon); falto–fāltu (excess); grade– garād (grilled partition); guarda–gārad (prison; actually any space of incarceration); gudão–gudām (godown); janela–jānāla (window); jôgo–juā (gamble, referring to playing); leilão–nilām (auction); mastro–māstul (mast); mesa–mej/mez (table); pato–pāti-hẫs (goose); pipa–pipā (keg); pires–pirich (saucer); sabão–sābān (soap); saia–sāyā (petticoat); toalha–toāle (towel); veranda–bārāndā (verandah); verga– bargā (rod); etc. (Campos 1919, 214–227). I have deliberately left out the loan words for food items here because I will take that up in a later section. As for the polycolonial influence on Bengali literature, it can be noticed how numerous canonical texts of Bengali literature from the

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16th to the 18th century refer to the Portuguese and the Dutch—the firingi and the olandaj—and Bengali folklore, especially in the southern coastal parts of Bengal, abound with references to these two European nations, to their people and to their exploits in Bengal. A proper account of all that would occasion another book, and so I will refrain from detailing the same here, and simply note that the polycolonial encounter of Bengal with the diverse pre-English and extra-English European settlers left an indelible mark on its literature. More importantly, to see how the Portuguese themselves contributed to the development of Bengali literature, one can notice that the first piece of prose writing in Bengali, however astounding it may sound, is by a Portuguese, Father Dominic De Souza, who translated a religious tract into Bengali before 1599 (Chattopadhyay 1939, 6).2 While this was a shorter tract, the first book-length prose writing by a Bengali and in sadhu bangla, or what would become the literary medium for the next three centuries, is also not without the most spectacularly multicultural Portuguese connection, it being the 1660s 120-page long Brahman– Roman–Catholic Sambad by Dom Antonio de Rozario (b.1643). Antonio was originally a scion of the royal family of Bhushana in the Jessore–Faridpur area, who was kidnapped by Portuguese pirates and sold off as a slave in 1663. On being rescued by a Portuguese priest, Manoel de Rozario, he converted to Christianity, took a new name and came back to his estate and founded the St Nicholas of Tolentino Church and Mission in Kosh Bhanga village and wrote the book. This was also one of the first Bengali books to be printed later from Lisbon in 1743, and that may take us to the next register I take up for discussion—that of the polycolonial roots of the development of print in Bengal. Moving on to the fourth register—that concerning the development of print—though here I am supposed to focus on Bengal, since Bengal was somewhat of a late starter in print, the history of the printing 2

 he numbering of pages in this ‘Praveśak’ (Introduction) is in the complicated quartenary T numeral system (a system often used in older Bengali books to number pages of the introduction, preface, etc., much like Roman numerals are used for similar sections in English books), and may appear as something like ‘12’ to the eye used to Arabic numerals. However, the quote here is actually from the sixth page of the ‘Introduction’ in the decimal system, and thus, to simplify matters, I cite the page number as ‘6’.

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press in the rest of India, which is much older than that in Bengal— and with an equally ‘polycolonial’ Portuguese, Dutch, French, Danish and German interface—ought to be signposted first. In the rest of India, printing presses were set up: in 1556 in Portuguese Goa; in 1569 in the then Portuguese and soon-to-be Danish Tranquebar; in 1578 and 1579 in the then Portuguese and soon-to-be Dutch Quilon and Cochin respectively; in 1674 in English (till very recently Dutch and Portuguese, respectively) Surat and Bombay; in 1675 in Portuguese Ambalakad; in 1712 in Danish Tranquebar; and in the 1750s in French Pondicherry to be transferred in 1756 to English Madras; while it is only the 1770s type foundry in Dutch Chinsurah that led to the first press in British Calcutta in 1777, and the 1800 press in neighbouring Danish Serampore. Before moving to print in Bengali and Bengal, thus, let me move to a few milestones in polycolonial printing in South Asia outside Bengal. Printing operations began in India in 1556 when a printing press originally intended for missionary activities in Abyssinia (Ethiopia) was unloaded in Portuguese Goa, where it was set up at the St Paul’s College, and under the supervision of the Spanish cleric João de Bustamante, often called the Indian Gutenberg, started printing and publishing books immediately. The initial books were in Latin or Portuguese, but soon keeping in view the need for books in the vernacular Konkani and Tamil (the primary languages in the Portuguese holdings), the first book in the Tamil script was printed in 1577 (though the first Tamil book in the Roman script, Carthila e Lingoa Tamul e Portugues, was published as early as 1554 from Lisbon), and Devanagari type-fonts were created in 1577. Books in Konkani though continued to be published primarily in the Roman script, including, for instance, the well-known Krista Purana (1616) by the Englishman Thomas Stephens (1549–1619). The last book in the Tamil script was printed in Goa in 1612, and the last Konkani book in the Roman script in 1674, by when vernacular publishing activities in Goa practically stopped due to discouragement from the Portuguese administration. Printing in Tamil was revived in a new press in Portuguese Ambalakad (Ambazhakkad in today’s Kerala) under the Italian Jesuit missionary Roberto de Nobili in the 1670s. Printing in Tamil resumed majorly in Danish Tranquebar

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(Tharangambadi in today’s Tamil Nadu) in 1712 under the initiative of the German Lutheran missionary Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg (1682–1719) and his companion Heinrich Plütschau (1678–1747). Tamil printing was refined further by the German Jesuits Bernhard Bischopinck (c.1690–c.1746) in Dutch Cochin in the 1730s, and Johann Phillip Fabricius (1711–1791) in the press (procured from the French Pondicherry) in English Madras from 1756. While the first English press was set up in Surat in 1674, what is interesting is that the first full-length English book to be printed in Asia—A Guide to the English Language by Thomas Dyche—was in 1716 from the press in Danish Tranquebar run by the German Ziegenbalg, making the history of English printing in India also so polycolonial. Similarly, the German Hermann Gundert (1814–1893), called the ‘father’ of modern Malayalam printing, can be credited with the setting up of the Malayalam print industry (Kesavan 1985). One of the first full-length books in Bengali to be printed is, as has already been reported earlier, the Brahman–Roman–Catholic Sambad composed by Dom Antonio de Rozario around the 1660s, but printed in Lisbon in 1743. This is one of the three oldest extant printed books in the Bengali language, all published in 1743 from Lisbon in the Roman script, the two others being by Manoel da Assumpção, the Augustinian Rector of the Mission of St Nicolas of Tolentino at Nagori in Bhowal near Dhaka. These two books are Crepar Xaxtrer Orth, Bhed (Kripār Śāstrer Arthabhed, in more acceptable Bengali orthography in transliteration), composed in Bhowal in 1735; and the first grammar of Bengali, Vocabolario em idioma Bengalla, e Portuguez dividido em duas partes, a book in two sections, comprising first a brief grammar of Bengali and then a Bengali-Portuguese bilingual dictionary, written between 1734 and 1742. That all these three books were published together in 1743 and comprise the original trinity of Bengali books printed in octavo from Lisbon under the initiative of Manoel da Assumpção is borne out by Fr Hosten: Father Manoel da Assumpção, a Portuguese, […] a member of the congregation of the East Indies […] being about 1742 Rector of the Mission of St. Nicolas of Tolentino in the kingdom of Bengalla, he wrote and printed in the Vernacular […] (1) A catechism of the Christian

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Doctrine, in the form of a dialogue. It was printed in 8vo at Lisbon in 1743 by Francisco da Silva. The contents are: A discussion about the Law between a Christian Catholic Roman, and a Bramone or Master of the Gentoos. […] Composed by the son of the king of Busna Dom Antonio, […] it was translated into Portuguese by father Frey Manoel da Assumpção […] It is a dialogue between the Roman Catholic and the Gentoo Bramone written in two columns, Bengala and Portuguese. […] (2) An abridgement of the Mysteries of the Faith, composed in the Bengalla language by Father Frey Manoel da Assumpção […] It is also in two columns, Bengalla and Portuguese […] printed at Lisboa by Francisco da Silva 1743, 8vo […] (3) A Vocabulary in Bengala and Portuguese divided into two parts […] Lisboa a officina de Francisco da Silva, 1743, 8vo. [/] It contains two parts: A Bengala-Portuguese and a Portuguese-Bengala vocabulary. It is preceded by a Compendium of Bengala Grammar. (qtd. in Sen, S. 1937, 1–33)

All three of these being Portuguese creations, printing books in Bengali, albeit in the Roman script, thus began with the Portuguese and not the English. It should, however, be noted that, although the Portuguese set up the first Indian printing press in Goa in 1556, they could not follow it up in Bengal due to the unstable nature of their colonies, and though publication of Bengali books in the Roman script continued with fair frequency from Lisbon, the print media in Bengal had to wait for some more time till the Dutch and the Danes developed the indigenous Bengali press using Bengali typefaces. Interestingly, while the press in Bengal and printing in the Bengali script was still more than a century away, Bengali characters were already printed in Europe by the 1660s rather polycolonially by the Germans, the Dutch, the French and the Portuguese, but not by the English. To mention the presumably earliest such instance, ‘Bengali characters were printed from plates as early as 1667 in Athanasius Kircher’s China Illustrata published from Amsterdam. There were at least seven other books, a few by Portuguese authors publishing from Lisbon, that printed samples of Bengali letters using the same process’

3

 nce again, the page numbering for the introductory sections of the book is in the O complicated quaternary numeral system; I have simplified it and presented it in Arabic numerals in terms of the actual number of the pages quoted from in the concerned section.

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(Chaudhuri 2009, 7). Thus, apparently, the first printing of Bengali characters was by a German (as Kircher was) in a book published from the Dutch capital, though, having been through the book and the concerned printed characters contained in it, I think the Indic characters printed in it are a lot of Devanagari (Kircher 1667, 147–158) and a bit of Tibetan (127), rather than Bengali. One may have to locate the first instance of printing of Bengali characters in other sources, and wherein M. Siddiq Khan’s detailed list of instances of early printing of Bengali characters from Europe—all by the French, the Germans, or the Dutch—prove helpful: The first printed Bengali alphabet appeared in a work of the Jesuit Fathers, Jean de Fontenay, Guy Tachard, Etienne Noel, and Claude de Beze. Bearing the title Observations physiques et mathematiques pour servir à l’histoire naturelle …, it was published at Paris in 1692. A second Bengali alphabet was included in a Latin work written by Georg Jacob Kehr, AurenkSzeb, printed at Leipzig in 1725. This displayed the Bengali numerals from 1 to 11, as well as the Bengali consonants and a Bengali transliteration of the German name, Sergeant Wolfgang Meyer. These characters were copied by Johann Friedrich Fritz in his Orientalischer und occidentalischer Sprachmeister, printed in Leipzig in 1748. A Hindustani grammar, by Johannes Joshua Ketelaer appeared in Miscellane Oriental, published at Leyden [sic.] in 1743. This reproduced almost the whole Bengali alphabet, calling it alphabetum grammaticum, including both consonants and vowels. (1962, 5)

While all this is interesting polycolonially, all the above instances of Bengali printing being from Europe, none of these led directly to the indigenous press, and to the printing in Bengali from Bengal, and therefore let us return to that history instead. The first attempt to develop a Bengali font in Bengal was in 1766– 1768 by the ‘German’ Willem Bolts, then serving the Dutch and English East India Companies, and later with the Austrian ‘Antwerp Company’, whom we have already encountered in fair detail in the previous chapter and who was not quite successful (Chaudhuri 2009, 7; Khan 1962, 56). The first two presses actually set up in Bengal were in 1777— one in Dutch Hooghly–Chinsurah by John Andrews and promoted by Nathaniel Brassey Halhed (1751–1830) and provided with typefaces

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by Charles Wilkins (c.1749–1836) dubbed as ‘the Caxton of Bengal’ (Khan 1962, 56), and the other in English Calcutta by James Augustus Hicky, better known for starting the first newspaper from Bengal—the Bengal Gazette—in 1780. There seems to have also been a third press in Calcutta, in 1777–1778 itself, run by the Swedish missionary Johann Zacharias Kiernander, but more of that later. The first book printed in Bengal to contain the Bengali script was the 1777 translation of The Code of Gentoo Laws by Halhed published from the Hooghly press, which contained a plate each of Bengali and Devanagari characters, but these were printed with plates and not movable types. Hicky, on the other hand, in December 1777, published an almanac, Calendar for the year of our Lord MDCCLXXVIII. Calculated to the Meridian of Calcutta, which contained on most pages printed material in the Persian and Bengali scripts, but these also do not seem to have been done with movable types. While the first of these two presses was obviously polycolonial, located as it was in Dutch territory, the second may seem apparently fully English, founded by an Englishman and in English Calcutta, but Hicky’s press also had a very interesting polycolonial connect, or rather disconnect. It is reported how the Swedish, Johann Zacharias Kiernander, the first Protestant missionary to have arrived in Calcutta in 1758 from Tranquebar had come to Hicky in 1777 with the original plan for publishing the Calendar. Hicky had refused to take him on board but had instead probably plagiarised his idea and brought out his own one. Kiernander published an alternate calendar from another press acquired by his son and this led to a lot of acrimony and litigation between the two: In November 1777, a missionary named Johann Zachariah Kiernander approached Hicky to print calendars for the next year. Kiernander had been importing calendars from South India and was looking for a cheaper alternative. [/] However, there was a disagreement over price, so the Kiernander went in search of his own printing press. By January 1778 Kiernander’s son Robert appears to have acquired a press, although it is unclear from where.[…] These calendars set off a competition that soon turned rancorous. Hicky began printing his own calendars. Unable to compete with Hicky on price – and upset that Hicky had very likely plagiarized their calendar – the Kiernanders

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began giving theirs away for free. (The disagreements later became so rancorous that later Hicky used his newspaper to accuse the elder Kiernander of embezzling from a charity and Kiernander sued Hicky for libel). (Otis 2019)

The Hicky-Kiernander scuffle in well documented, and it is such interesting polycolonial wrangles that make Bengal’s initiation to print culture so colourful and interesting. To move on, it is the second-known grammar of the Bengali language (after Assumpção’s, mentioned above), Halhed’s A Grammar of the Bengal Language (1778) printed from the Hooghly press, which was the first to print Bengali letters using movable typefaces based on fonts developed by Wilkins and his associate, the master type-cutter Panchanan Karmakar, in the type foundry at Dutch Chinsurah. Halhed’s grammar was wholly in English though and used little Bengali script only for illustrative purposes; so the credit for the first fully Bengali tract printed in the Bengali script from Bengal goes to the 1784 translation of the Impey Code by Jonathan Duncan, published from the English government in Calcutta’s own press, the Honourable Company’s Press or popularly known as the Company Press. It may seem again that the Company Press, started in Malda in 1780 and moved to Calcutta in 1784, which brought out this book and several other such translations into Bengali of rules and regulations with fair regularity in the 1780s and 90s, was without any polycolonial connection; but, one should remember that all their books were printed using typefaces forged by Wilkins and Karmakar in their foundry in Dutch territory (Khan 1962, 59). One of the earliest presses in Calcutta to print regularly in Bengali but with typefaces not forged in the Chinsurah foundry seems to be the Chronicle Press founded in 1786, which published the newspaper Calcutta Chronicle and General Advertiser, which used a different font: ‘A differently designed Bengali typeface may be seen in the work of the Chronicle Press’ (Chaudhuri 2009, 8). One of the chief architects of the Chronicle Press was Aaron Upjohn, who brought out the first bilingual Bengali–English dictionary, An Extensive Vocabulary, Bengalese and English, Very Useful To Teach the Natives English and To Assist Beginners in Learning the Bengali Language in 1793 (Khan 1962, 60), and also

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started printing illustrations and maps on a large scale. Once again, it may seem that Chronicle Press had no polycolonial connect and was wholly English, but there are suggestions that Aaron Upjohn was probably a Portuguese, originally named Anthony de Souza (Chaudhuri 2009, 8)! Further, people even from European countries that we have not covered within our polycolonial ambit, like Russia which did not have any settlements in Bengal nor made any official mercantile voyages to it, started participating in the race for opening Bengali presses in Calcutta. It seems ‘Gerasim Steppanovich Lebedeff (1749–1818), a Russian probably from Ukraine’ (Chaudhuri 2009, 5) (alternately Gerasim Stepanovich Lebedev, 1749–1817, a Russian from Yaroslavl, Russia), who we will discuss later in this chapter as the progenitor of modern Bengali theatre, ‘is said to have embarked on founding a press in Kolkata, financed by the Czar, for printing Bengali books’ (Chaudhuri 2009, 5). However, it is not to say that all presses in Calcutta had some polycolonial connect, for example, the press of Ferris and Company which produced Henry Pitts Forster’s ‘a complete bilingual dictionary by in two parts, the first being English to Bengali and the second Bengali to English […] in 1799 and 1802, respectively’ (Khan 1962, 60), the second English–Bengali dictionary and one which was more thorough than Upjohn’s, or the Calcutta Gazette Press that brought out the newspaper Calcutta Gazette, founded by Francis Gladwin do not seem to have any such connection. As I am sure did not the numerous presses and periodicals that mushroomed all over Calcutta by 1800: ‘There were at least 34 periodicals before the year 1800’, and ‘By 1800, there were 17 printing houses and 40 printers in Kolkata, and they had produced a total of 667 titles’ (Chaudhuri 2009, 5), but the first full-fledged Bengali press was, of course, the Mission Press founded in Danish Serampore in 1800 by William Carey, which from its demi-colonial location in the polycolony ushered in a true print revolution in the whole of South Asia. The Serampore Mission (1800–1845), founded by William Carey and his two associates, Marshman and Ward, on 10 January 1800, and its press, the Mission Press, which also took upon itself much of the printing work of the Fort William College (also founded in 1800, and of which also Carey was one of the key functionaries),

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deserves special mention in this story of the inception of Bengali printing, modern Bengali language, and modern Bengali prose. As has been stated earlier, the British administration having effectively banned proselytisation and missionary activities within its territories, missionaries had to go elsewhere in Bengal, in this case to the city of refuge offered by the Danish demi-colony of Serampore. With the collaboration of Panchanan Karmakar, who moved from Dutch Chinsurah–Hooghly to Danish Serampore, William Carey established the first prolific press in Bengal—the Serampore Mission Press—and printed in August 1800, the first book-length work in Bengali prose in the Bengali script published from Bengal, Mathew Rachita Mission Samachar, a translation of the Gospel of Mathew published as Mangal Samachar, attributed to Ramram Basu and John Thomas; followed by a translation of the whole of the New Testament in Bengali in February 1801. Many translations into Bengali followed, including that of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress in 1821. The publication of translations and the consequent development of Bengali prose, the modern Bengali literary register, and the Bengali print industry in the Mission Press in Danish Serampore were not restricted to Christian religious texts alone. Bengali translations from Sanskrit of Hitopadesh (1804) and the Ramayana and the Mahabharata (1806) among other texts, as also Itihasmala, a series on Indian history beginning with Ramram Basu’s Pratapaditya Charit (1821, the first book by a Bengali printed in the Bengali script), and a Bengali–English dictionary (1825) followed. The Serampore Mission Press also started bringing out the first Bengali monthly magazine Digdarshan from April 1818 and from 23 May 1818, the first Bengali newspaper, the weekly Samachar Darpan. There are some suggestions that the newspaper Bangal Gezeti (as ‘Bengal Gazette’ was spelt in it) was the first Bengali newspaper, it having been started by Ganga Kishore Bhattacharya in 1816: We are sorry, we cannot give the place of honour to the Darpan of the missionaries of Serampore, though we do not in any way desire to underestimate its services. The veteran missionaries might have taken the lead in printing books for the Bengalis, but they were not the first to inaugurate a journal in Bengali. That honour is due to a Bengali

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Brahmin – Gangadhar [sic.] Bhattacharji. He started in 1816 – just two years before the missionaries of Serampore – the Bengal Gazette, which was the first Indian newspaper published in any Indian vernacular […] Thus we see that in the field of Bengali journalism, no foreigner took the lead, but the people themselves. […] The first Bengali paper published, the Bengal Gazette edited by Gangadhar Bhattacharji of Calcutta. It saw the light in 1816. Unfortunately it survived only for a short year. (Bose and Moreno 1920, 5–6)

But this date is highly disputed because no copy of the publication survives and a notification in the Government Gazette of 14 May 1818 announces the imminent opening of this paper and thus probably it would have started only in 1818, that too a bit after Samachar Darpan. Furthermore, even if the date is correct, one cannot take away the Danish connect from it because Bhattacharya was, to begin with, a compositor at the Serampore Mission Press. From 1821, the Serampore Press also started publishing under the editorship of Marshman the weekly English newspaper, Friend of India, which merged in 1875 with another newspaper The Englishman to become The Statesman, a newspaper that runs even now. In the list of ‘secular’ publications of the Serampore Press, one must add the huge number of school textbooks and educational materials it brought out in Bengali on subjects ranging from chemistry to physics to biology to geography to history, in association with the Calcutta School Book Society founded in 1817. Between 1818 and 1854, it [i.e. the Calcutta School Book Society] printed 363,748 copies of educational texts in Bengali, in addition to English and bilingual titles. Some of these were printed at the Mission Press in Shrirampur or Kolkata, others at the press run by the Society. (Chaudhuri 2009, 24)

Apart from printing for the Calcutta School Book Society, the Serampore Press brought out its own educational books too, like John Clark Marshman’s Jyotiṣa o Golodhyāya (1819) on astronomy, William Yates’ Padārtha Vidyāsāra (1825) on physics, and John Mack’s Kimiyā Vidyāsāra (1834) on chemistry, and serialised publications like Felix Carey’s Vidyāhāravalī (1834 onwards), a series on science in general but mostly on medical sciences.

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The type-cutter Panchanan Karmakar, in collaboration with his son-in-law, Manohar, and grandson Krishnachandra, set up a huge print industry, which in spite of British resistance, continued to flourish under Danish protection, and the British, in view of its importance had to partially allow missionary activities in its territories from 1813. Another outstanding contribution of the Serampore missionaries was the 1809 installation of India’s first paper mill, propelled by a steam engine. The publishing activities of the Serampore Mission were not restricted to Bengali alone, and the Danish institution may well be credited to have started the print revolution in the whole of South Asia. Astoundingly, between 1801 and 1834, ‘In 34 years, 212,000 volumes in 40 different languages, were printed on a hand-press, all the types being cast in the Serampore type-foundry’ (Kesavan 1985, Vol. 1, 247). Actually, in 25 years, the press published books in 47 different languages in 18 different scripts—Bengali from 1801; Hindi, Marathi, Telugu, Kannada, Oriya, Tamil, Sanskrit, Punjabi and Persian from 1804; Kashmiri in 1811; Konkani, Multani, Sindhi, Bikaneri, Nepali, Udaipuri, Marwari, Jaipuri, Khasi and Burmese from 1816; Armenian in 1817; Assamese in 1818; Pushto and Gujarati by 1820; Haroti, Baghelkhandi and Kanoji by 1821; Chinese in 1822; and Balochi, Bhatenari, Dogri, Garhwali, Kumauni, Lahnda, Malvi, Mewari, Magadhi, Ujjaini, Brajbhasha, Palpa, Manipuri, Malay, Javanese, Siamese, Singhalese and Bhutanese by 1826. These were primarily translations of the Bible, but there were also grammars, dictionaries, and books on historical and linguistic issues (Kesavan 1985, 254; see also Alban et al. 2005). Let me now move on to the fifth register, that of the impact of polycoloniality on culture, particularly popular culture, beginning with the visual arts. By the second quarter of the 19th century, a new era dawned on the Bengal art scene when, after the diminishing of the influence of the Mughals, and correspondingly of Mughal miniature art, affluent traders, primarily from the Dutch Chinsurah and the French Chandernagore, started commissioning local and European artists to create portraits and landscapes with Indian religious subjects but influenced by European ideas of imagemaking. This hybrid exercise of miniature artists picking up oil and

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canvas as medium and adding perspective, and European artists picking up Indian, usually mythological and religious, subjects and incorporating miniature techniques in their execution, led to what is called ‘Early Bengal Oils’, which is also generally referred to as the ‘Dutch Bengal’ (at times ‘French Bengal’) school of art. These paintings and prints, emerging from the mid to the late 19th century, mostly from the Dutch and French colonies in Bengal, thus fused Hindu mythological subjects with Mughal miniature techniques and European academic realism, and initially catered to company officials of all the European powers in Bengal, as also to rich Bengali landlords, but soon entered the mass market through the print medium. They mostly predate Raja Ravi Varma’s 1894 establishment of his press in Ghatkopar and the mass production of his oleographs also exhibiting a similar fusion. Some leading practitioners of this genre of ‘polycolonial’ art were Annadaprasad Bagchi (1849–1905), Bamapada Bandyopadhyay (1851–1932), Nabakumar Biswas (1861–1935), Bhabanicharan Laha (1880–1946), Shyamacharan Shrimani, Phanibhushan Sen, Krishnachandra Pal, Yogendranath Mukhopadhyay, Shashikumar Hem, etc. The Dutch Bengal (and French Bengal) modes of painting on the one hand seamlessly fused with the pat paintings of Kalighat in Calcutta, which had become a popular artistic medium of representing both religious subjects and social scandals in Calcutta, but, on the other, they also ended up replacing Kalighat pat and Battala bazaar art as the primary mass medium of artistic articulation. The practitioners of Dutch Bengal (and French Bengal) art in the latter half of the 19th century set up studios in north and central Calcutta, like the Calcutta Art Studio, Chorbagan Art Studio and Kansaripara Art Studio, and focussed on bulk production of brightly colourful lithographs representing popular deities that aimed to be sold at very cheap rates to average households. This mode of art, also known as Pre-Bengal School art, was soon surpassed by the Bengal School of Abanindranath Tagore and others, but while the latter, in fusing folk idioms with realistic modes of painting veered away from ostensibly religious subjects and entered the domain of ‘high art’, Dutch Bengal (and French Bengal) art survive as ‘popular art’ even today in their print

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avatar of religious kitsch aimed for mass consumption as a potent polycolonial legacy in the domain of Bengali visual culture. Moving on to the performing arts, one can note how theatre in Bengal—that primary tool through which much of the Bengal Renaissance would evolve—was itself not an English but a polycolonial product with the earliest Bengali play to be staged in Calcutta in 1795 being adaptations from the French playwright Molière by the Russian Gerasim Lebedev at the New Theatre on Ezra Street named after a Jew. But here, I will talk less about the urban Bengali proscenium and more about folk and subaltern performance forms that flourished in 19th century Bengal, and see the polycolonial connect in them. Sumanta Banerjee, in his A Tale of Two Cities under Colonial Rule: Chandernagore and Calcutta (2012) makes us notice how the performance scene in the French Chandernagore developed very differently from that in British Calcutta. He quotes from a popular song that projects Chandernagore as the land of licentiousness: For the citizens of Calcutta during the 18th and 19th centuries, Chandernagore, or Farashdanga as it was known to the Bengalis in those days, was associated with a swanky lifestyle in a permissive environment. A popular rhyme in those days [quoted in the journal Basantak, vol. 1, no. 5. 1873] ran like this: Jodi merja hotey chao, tabey Farashdangaye jao. Kasta-pere dhuti chherey, kala-perey nao. Lak juboti chharbey poti Jodi nangta-pere pao. (If you want to be a grandee, go to Farashdanga. Give up your scarlet-bordered dhoti and take the black-bordered one. But if you choose a dhoti stripped of all such frills, lakhs of women will desert their husbands to fall for you…). (2)

Banerjee points out how the class and caste composition of the Bengali elite in French Chandernagore was different from that in Calcutta, with those in the former ‘more inclined towards acquiring wealth through trade and commerce than from landed estates’ while those in the latter ‘preferred investments in real estate, earning rents from rural zamindaries and huge plots in the city where they set up bazaars and slums’ (3); and further, ‘the hold of Brahmin orthodoxy was far less among the Bengali population of Chandernagore compared to

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contemporary Calcutta. The majority of the Bengalis of Chandernagore came from the labouring agricultural and artisan castes like Kaibarta (fishermen and peasants), Tanti (weavers), Dhopa (washermen), Goala (milkmen) and Chutor (carpenter)’ (3–4). For Banerjee, this difference in caste and class composition, led to a more permissive and liberal society in Chandernagore compared to Calcutta, leading to the major role played by women in performing arts emerging from Chandernagore, a metonym here for polycolonial Bengal: These communities were inclined towards Vaishnavism, which allowed a more permissive and liberal social lifestyle than the Brahmanical order that ruled Calcutta Bengali society. For one thing, the Vaishnavite lifestyle permitted more freedom to women as compared to Calcutta—which could explain the prominence of women performers in Chandernagore’s popular culture. (4)

This relative class, caste and gender fluidity in polycolonial Bengal as exemplified by Chandernagore here led to three things in the domain of the performing arts: first, the possibility of women leading performance troupes as in the case of a particular troupe where after the death of the male owner, ‘his daughter-in-law took over the management of his troupe, which came to be known as “Bou-Mashtarer Dal”’, and this ‘bou-mashtar’ (or the ‘daughter-in-law-master’) could even have in Chandernagore a lane ‘Bou-Mashtarer Gali’ named after her (10); second, that folk and popular cultural forms like ‘kobi-gan, kathkata, panchali’ (7), etc. could gain importance there, with even half-castes like Hensman Anthony (Anthony Firingi, who I will discuss later in this chapter) becoming major practitioners of the form, while ‘most of the popular folk cultural forms in Calcutta faced tremendous opposition from these bhadraloks, who carried on a sustained campaign against them, usually with the help of the British administration, mainly on grounds of obscenity, and finally succeeded in exiling them from the precincts of the city’ (11); and third, that a thriving subcultural underworld flourished in Chandernagore, comprising sex workers and criminals, including the curious ‘part-time sex-workers (known by the term half-gerosto, or half-housewife and half-prostitute), and some full-time professionals’ (12). Chandernagore also became a site

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of refuge for ‘criminals’ of all sorts: ‘Just as Calcutta’s prostitutes fled to French-ruled Chandernagore to escape British laws, some of the most notorious members of Calcutta’s criminal underworld sought shelter in Chandernagore, knowing well that the British police would be prevented from pursuing them in French territory’ (16) producing thus its own subterranean subcultural public spheres, constituting, as it were, the cultural obverse of the British-induced high Renaissance, that in its austere cultural forms catered only to a certain male, upper-class, upper-caste Hindu elite. Let me end this section on the polycolonial impact on culture, by talking about material culture, as exemplified by food. Without going into the myriad ways in which different foreign settlers in Bengal would have impacted its cuisine, let me stick to the Portuguese alone. Much of what Bengalis consume today is inconceivable without Portuguese contribution, with they having brought to its shores tobacco towards the beginning of the 16th century, potato and guava towards the beginning of the 17th century, and cashew nut, papaya, pineapple, custard apple, star apple, etc. thereafter. It is no wonder, the Portuguese contribute to Bengali language the names of so many consumables, and I will list some prominent ones amongst them, following the same pattern that I had followed before, by giving the Portuguese word first, then the Bengali word, and finally the English meaning: achar– āchār (pickle); ananas–ānāras (pineapple); ata–ātā (custard apple); caju–kāju (cashew); carambola–kāmrāngā (star apple); couve–kopi (cabbage); limão–lebu (lemon); pão–pẫu-ruṭi (bread); papaia–pepe (papaya); pera–peara (guava/pear); tabaco–tāmāku/tāmāk (tobacco), etc. (Campos 1919, 214–227). What is even more striking is that even something that we may consider as quintessentially Bengali today, like sweetmeats made of milk solids, are actually Portuguese imports because the art of curdling milk to produce chhānā with which these Bengali sweets are made is something that the Portuguese taught the Bengali and was not there in Bengali cuisine prior to that. A living proof of this influence lies in ‘Bandel Cheese’, a particular kind of cheese that is native to Bengal, more specifically to the very colony that the Portuguese held on to in Bengal for the longest, and is a telling trace of the polycolonial legacy of Bengal in the domain of lived food culture.

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One can now proceed to discuss the sixth register through which colonial modernity works itself out—social and political reforms— and once again, one will see how major progressive changes were brought about in the non-British colonies, particularly in French Chandernagore, much before they were in British territories. It has already been mentioned, in the context of Sumanta Banerjee’s analysis of the development of alternate performance traditions in Chandernagore, how this French colony bore much more ‘liberal’, permissive, and fluid class, caste and gender relations. Arghya Bose also practically resonates the same: The most basic of these manifestations was one in the socio-economic sphere – there was the massive influence of Vaishnavism in creating a more liberal and permissive social order in the town, one that effectively challenged Brahmanical orthodoxy, one that allowed for movement up the socio-economic ladder by means of trade and commerce. (2017, 23)

One can see how this possible pre-existing fluidity in social relations amongst its inhabitants allowed for the French administration to bring about progressive social reforms in Chandernagore—like the abolition of slavery and sati—much before similar reforms would be brought about in British Bengal: As early as 1789, the French governor of Chandernagore abolished slave trade in his territory, while in Calcutta slaves continued to be openly bought and sold even till the 1830s. It was as late as 1843 that the Anti-Slavery Act was enacted to stop the practice [in English-governed Bengal]. The last instance of ‘sati-daha’ (self-immolation of widows on their husbands’ burning pyre) in Chandernagore was reported in 1808, while in Calcutta or English-governed Bengal it continued till 1829 when it was officially banned. (Banerjee 2012, 4)

For Sumanta Banerjee, such French attempts at reforms, not yet conceived in the English colonial territories, was extended to the domain of penal reforms too with a much more humane and lenient order in place in Chandernagore as compared to British India. He says, ‘As in English-ruled Calcutta, capital punishment was on the statute book. But its implementation seemed to be infrequent’ (4), and

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therefore ‘the operations of the French penal system in Chandernagore often worked in favour of the citizens of Calcutta who sought escape from persecution by the British police there’ (5). This possibility of a different kind of, a more enlightened and reformed, colonialism was also manifest in the political rights that citizens of Chandernagore enjoyed, where, unlike anywhere else in colonial India, political reforms from the times of the French Revolution had already accorded the residents of Chandernagore a constitution, and democratic electoral powers to choose their own representatives. For Arghya Bose, Most importantly, the revolution in Chandernagor had ushered in a new epoch of civic equality guaranteed by the 1791 Provisional Constitution of Chandernagor. This extended to the political domain under the reign of the Third Republic in France with the town enjoying the privilege of direct representation in the French Chamber of Deputies by popularly elected representatives. This, along with several other socio-economic and political developments standing in downright contrast to the mainstream British colonial experience had additional and eventual implications in shaping the very nature of nationalism in Chandernagor, come the dawn of the 20th century. (2017, 23–24)

While we will come to nationalism and the spirit of revolution, leading to decolonisation itself, as something arising from the polycolonial experience, in our seventh and final register below, let us here look at the nature of political and social reforms brought about by the French government in Chandernagore. The French did not have separate laws for its colonies; they were all governed by the same law applicable in the mainland and drawn up by the Minister of the Interior of France. French India had seats for one representative each in the councils of Depute and Senateur of France, who were elected directly by the citizens of the colonies, including those of Chandernagore, who themselves had the right to be elected to those seats too. Further, a Municipality was created in Chandernagore on 1 August 1880 with elected representatives, thus ensuring some sort of self-rule for the citizens of Chandernagore. No doubt, Arghya Bose talks about ‘a fundamentally different sociopolitical physiognomy in colonial Chandernagor as compared to the rest of India’ (28).

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It is this difference that needs to be talked about: the plural and different ways in which different parts of India in polycolonial situations had different experiences of civic and political reforms, and thus different trysts with colonial modernity. Arghya Bose considers ‘La Revolution à Chandernagor as the moment when Chandernagor stood at the crossroads of modernity’ (29) and believes that ‘the existence of intellectual traditions fundamentally different in France than that in Britain’ have led to ‘the formation of a dissimilar, rather divergent form of colonial modernity in French India in general, and Chandernagor in particular – very non-identical to its British counterpart in the rest of the subcontinent’ (28). He stresses on ‘the fundamentally different ways in which colonialism, and in turn, anti-colonial nationalism operated in French Chandernagor’ (28), and argues that the guiding ideas of the revolution in metropolitan France proffered an overarching framework for the evolution a modernity in Chandernagor nuancedly dissimilar to its British counterpart. While this meant that everyone rightly recognized in the revolution a radically liberal spirit, it is equally important to realize that this liberalism was yet to permeate the domain of politics. […] But the one step that the revolution in Chandernagor did achieve at this step, towards a more democratic socio-political system is civic equality of sorts. […] contemporary French political thought in general and that of the revolution, in particular, drew a sharp distinction between civic and political equality, […] deification of the natural rights of man, and hence, civic equality, was the fundamental intellectual project of the 1789 revolution in metropolitan France. The supremely absolute manifestation of this line of thought was manifested in the Declaration des droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen in the same year – and elements of this intellectual inclination are translated and evidently decipherable from the 1791 constitution of Chandernagor. (30)

It is only at the next step, during the Third Republic, that Chandernagore ‘accomplishes what could not be realized in the previous episode – the emergence of political equality’ (30). This phased granting of civic and political equality, of ushering in social and political reforms—the question as to which among the two should precede which being one of the burning questions in postcolonial India still—is what marks the

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diversities of colonial experiences in a polycolonial India. As Arghya Bose rightly points out, it was at the same time that the French colonies in India were becoming part of a Republic, and were being granted ‘the setting up of representative political institutions in the town, and the emergence of popular electoral politics’ (31) that the English colonies were being annexed into an empire, and this is really what makes all the difference: it has to be considered that such moves towards a more representative political system in Chandernagor came at a time when the British Indian subcontinent was just experiencing a transition from the raj of the East India Company to that of the English monarch who did but assume the title of the ‘Empress of India’. Put this in contrast to the French colonial policy under the Third Republic adopting a policy ‘directed at obliterating all differences between colonies and mainland France by endowing them with the same administrative, judicial, social and other institutions at giving their inhabitants full civic rights and obliging them to the same duties’ as citizens in metropolitan France. (32)

Thus even in the sixth register, concerning colonial modernity bringing in social and political reforms, it is the polycolonial plural matrix, in this case particularly the French colony of Chandernagore, that introduces India to legislated abolition of social evils and ushers its people into participatory democracy, much before the English colonies would have any of that. It is with this understanding that one can end the discussion of this register here and move on to the last register— that which concerns revolution and decolonisation. It has already been shown earlier how polycoloniality allows for the possibility of undoing colonisation itself, through providing platforms for subversion, revolution and even decolonisation. It has been discussed in Chapter 4 how during the French Revolution, Chandernagore itself had also revolted, and freed itself from the official French regime and set itself up as an independent territory, and it has been discussed just earlier how the grant of the constitution and civic and political rights to its citizens was very much a result of this event. It has also been shown in Chapter 5 how the Greeks in Bengal, from within the polycolonial matrix, contributed to the revolution leading

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to their own decolonisation. In continuation of that discussion, it can be seen how, more concretely speaking, the polycolonial situation in Bengal— that there were enclaves outside the ambit of British power within easy reach—provided for possible locales for seeking refuge under persecution and also sites for conducting subversive activities. The metaphoricity of French Chandernagore as a site for revolution, it having launched a revolution itself, and also withstood English aggression bravely and defiantly is underscored by Arghya Bose when he says, With Dupleix enlarging and embellishing the town taking it to even greater commercial heights, and Law de Lauriston’s ambitions of making Chandernagor the chief establishment in India, Chandernagor was already speaking a language of insubordination and independence while most of India had very little left of that spirit. (23)

Chandernagore was not a town that merely symbolised defiance but one that was an actual site of subversion too. Many major freedom fighters within British India hounded by the police in their own colony would seek refuge to Chandernagore and carry on their subversive activities from there knowing that the British police would not be able to do anything to them, they being technically on foreign territory. As Sumanta Banerjee says, ‘In fact, as is well known, from the early 20th century, Chandernagore became a refuge for Bengali militant nationalists who sought escape from the British police in Calcutta’ (18). Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950), later Sri Aurobindo, a firebrand revolutionary who recurrently planned and launched armed assaults on the British, would be the best-known case. Facing imminent arrest and severe action by the Calcutta Police in 1910, Aurobindo chose to take refuge in the proximal French colony of Chandernagore, where he stayed in hiding from some time in February to 31 March 1910, before fleeing to the more distant French colony of Pondicherry, where he would spend the rest of his life. Apart from people from British territories seeking refuge in Chandernagore, the city had its own share of homegrown revolutionaries too, like Kanailal Dutta (1888–1908), an associate of Aurobindo, who was hanged to death on charges of killing Narendranath Goswami, a fellow detainee who had turned

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approver against Aurobindo. Another major Chandernagore-based anti-British crusader was Motilal Roy (1883–1959), originally an associate of Aurobindo and part of the armed struggle, who provided Aurobindo with hideouts during his refuge in Chandernagore, and who in 1920 set up the Prabartak Sangha in Chandernagore, which was a nationalist organisation but designed more on the lines of spiritual and social work rather than armed rebellion with Aurobindo as its spiritual inspiration and Motilal himself as the sangha-guru. Mahatma Gandhi visited the Prabartak Sangha at least twice in 1925 and 1927 to inspire people of the French colony to join the freedom struggle against the English. The most famous revolutionary, not born but brought up, in Chandernagore is Rash Behari Bose (1886–1945), who studied at the Dupleix College in Chandernagore, where he got initiated to armed revolutionary politics against the British Raj and got involved in the same 1908 Alipore Bomb Case in which Aurobindo was implicated and for which Kanailal died. To flee prosecution, in this case, he went outside Bengal and got involved in the 1912 failed assassination bid on Lord Hardinge and in the Gadar Party and its revolution in 1915 to flee prosecution for which he fled India and took refuge in Japan in 1915, married a Japanese woman and took Japanese citizenship in 1923. Bose is best known for how in 1942 he formed the Indian Independence League and the Indian National Army or the Azad Hind Fauj in Japan with the Indian prisoners of war held by Japan during the Second World War, whose command he would famously hand over to Subhash Chandra Bose to launch a proper military campaign in alliance with the Axis powers to free India from the British. While Chandernagore thus housed many revolutionaries, some born there, some schooled there, some in refuge there, a question still arises as to why they would all fight against the British, someone else’s colonial problem, and not against the French, their own masters? This question is raised by Arghya Bose in a tellingly rhetorical manner: Why did Chandernagor remain largely unaffected and indeed, pose secluded from the entirety of the radically nationalist feelings that was rocking the entire subcontinent in general, and the unbelievably proximate Calcutta, at the start of the twentieth century? Why was there the distinguished absence of any substantial activities of

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violence against the French establishment based in Chandernagor when the town itself was the ‘sore’ in British imperial supremacy in the subcontinent, the cradle of terrorist tumult against the British establishment in Calcutta? And why did Chandernagor itself not see the rise of a popular anti-French pro-independence movement pre1947? (2017, 32)

While Bose does provide an answer to his question, that ‘from these nonidentical forms of colonial modernities and structures of colonialism evolved a variety of nationalism fundamentally non-identical from that of the one which stormed the subcontinent until 1947’ (32), the answer has been obvious. The residents of Chandernagore had already had their own revolution in the 1790s, and they did not perceive the fellow-republican French colonisers as their enemies, the way the imperial subjects of British India perceived the Englishmen. They were rather well-treated in their colony, with significant rights. For Sumanta Banerjee, Unlike Calcutta, where both the Bengali nationalist political leaders and the practitioners of popular culture had to face persecution from the British administration at different times, Chandernagore’s Bengali population seemed to have been largely left to themselves by a comparatively non-interfering French administration. (2012, 18)

And, that is why they could lend themselves to the decolonising struggles of other people, or even to revolutions of another sort, because in the 1930s, as the Communist movement was taking shape in India, Dr Hiren Chatterjee, a commissioner general under the French government in Chandernagore, took a leading part in the movement and organisation of the party, with the party deciding to make Chandernagore its district headquarters, because it was under French rule, and thus immune from the possibly severe British persecution, and almost naturally the home for any revolutionary activity. Let me end my discussion of this seventh register or how polycoloniality could lead to revolutionary possibilities by briefly narrating a story from the other side—a story of not how the French enabled revolutions in Bengal, but how a Bengali participated in the Revolution in France—the story of Zamor. Zamor (1762–1820), as

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we know his name, was born in Chittagong in 1762 and was captured and enslaved at the age of 11 in 1773, and sold off to King Louis XV of France, who in turn handed him over to his mistress Jeanne Bécu, Comtesse du Barry, better known as Madame du Barry, who took great liking for him, educated him and christened him as Louis Benoit. The Comtesse thought he was African and the few portraits that we have of him also project him with distinctly African looks: ‘What did Zamor look like? The few paintings we have show him as having an unmistakably African cast, especially the one at Louvre by MarieVictoire Lemoine’ (Gupta 2008). The Comtesse treated Zamor as some kind of curiosity and marvelled at his intelligence, insolence and independence. As she says in her memoirs, The second object of my regard was Zamor, a young African boy, full of intelligence and mischief; simple and independent in his nature, yet wild as his country. Zamor fancied himself the equal of all he met, scarcely deigning to acknowledge the king himself as his superior. (qtd. in Gupta 2008)

As time passed, the Comtesse became closer to Zamor and started treating him as more than a mere plaything; to quote from her memoirs again: At first I looked upon him as a puppet or plaything, but [...] I became passionately fond of my little page, nor was the young urchin slow in perceiving the ascendancy he had gained over me, and, in the end [...] attained an incredible degree of insolence and effrontery. (qtd. in Gupta 2008)

As Zamor grew up, this ‘ascendancy’ in his stature and ‘insolence’ in his nature, coupled with he becoming educated and getting to know better about the exploitative situation he himself was in and the disparity with common folks that the Comtesse’s lavish lifestyle represented, he got invariably drawn towards the Revolution that was brewing. Zamor would have been of a ripe age of 27 when the French Revolution broke out. He joined the Jacobins, became a follower of the English revolutionary participating in the French Revolution, George Grieve, and also became an office-bearer in the Committee of Public

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Safety (Gupta 2008). Zamor got Madame du Barry arrested in 1792 but when she got released and got to know that Zamor had betrayed her, she dismissed him from service with three days’ notice. This stoked the revolutionary fire in Zamor even more and he brought further charges against her before the Committee, which finally led to the decapitation of Madame du Barry by guillotine on 8 December 1793. It is at the trial that Zamor disclosed that he was from Bengal, his birthplace being Chittagong. Zamor himself was also soon arrested by the Girondins because of his being a Jacobin and he spent six weeks in prison. Not much is known about Zamor between 1793 and 1815 when he resurfaced as a not-too-liked schoolteacher in Paris and died in 1820, a desolate man: ‘Then in 1815, he took up residence on Rue Maitre d’Albert, not far from the Latin Quartier. He taught school in the quarter but was said to be very mean and hit the kids. When he died on February 7, 1820, nobody went to his funeral’ (Gupta 2008). Thus ends the story of the boy from Bengal who gets caught up in the intricacies of the polycolonial web and becomes a revolutionary in France. As has been shown so far, Bengal’s brush with colonial modernity, the Bengal Renaissance as it is often called, was truly polycolonial on all counts though official historiographies often present it as a monocolonial project catalysed by the English alone. We have seen, however, how on all possible fronts—whether it be in terms of ushering Bengal into urban cosmopolitanism, or setting up institutions of higher ‘western’ education, or creating new linguistic repertoires for Bengali, or introducing Bengal to print capital, or impacting Bengali culture on different fronts, or bringing about social and political reforms in Bengal, or inculcating a revolutionary and potentially decolonising spirit in the Bengali psyche—it is the multiple European powers at polycolonial play in Bengal—the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, the Danish, the Germans, the Swedish, the Greek—who have always been ahead of the English. Let me end this chapter by drawing brief attention to three major figures of the Bengal Renaissance, who were polycolonial in themselves, to further strengthen my point. The first figure I have in mind is someone who has already been mentioned twice in this chapter—the Russian polymath Gerasim Stepanovich Lebedev (1749–1817). Though Russians cannot be

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called polycolonial players in Bengal in any sense of the term, one has noticed twice earlier—first in Chapter 1, when Ralph Fitch talks about Muscovite traders in Bhutan; and then in Chapter 4, when Vincent le Blanc spots Russian traders in the ‘City of Bengale’—that there were Russians too in and around Bengal in that period and Lebedev can be considered to be the most illustrious one in this line. Lebedev was an adventurer, a theatre pioneer, a musician and musicologist, a linguist, a translator, a mathematician, an Indologist, an illustrator, and a printer, all rolled into one. Best known for introducing proscenium theatre to Bengal with his 1795 production in Bengali with a Bengali cast and crew of adaptations of Molière’s Love Is the Best Doctor and Richard Jodrell’s The Disguise at a theatre built by him on Ezra Street, Kolkata, this is but the tip of the iceberg of the storehouse of talent that he was. He was a self-taught, though acclaimed, violinist, the earlier travels in his life and the primary means of his livelihood for the 10 odd years that he was in Calcutta being based on his violin playing skills. He was a musicologist too, having written one whole book—A Collection of Hindustani and Bengali Arias—on Indian music in Calcutta; he learned Bengali, Hindi and Sanskrit, and that too to such an extent that not only could he translate Molière from French to Bengali and Jodrell from English to Bengali, as mentioned earlier, and parts of Bharatchandra’s Annadamangal from Bengali to Russian, but he could also compile a Bengali dictionary and publish a whole linguistic treatise—Grammar of the Pure and Mixed East Indian Dialects—from London in 1801. He was a bit of a mathematician too having composed one book on arithmetic in Bengali, and he was also an Indologist, having written the book An Impartial Review of the East Indian Brahminical System of Sacred Rites and Customs published from St Petersburg in 1805, and considered his most important work. This book is so well appreciated because rather than an agent of European civilisation’s vilification of the pagan religion and primitive ways of life in India, or an Orientalist’s fantastic adulation of the exotic way of life here, which mark most early works in Indology, Lebedev’s shows a wonderful relativism, which actually ends up denouncing colonial intrusion, as the following quote from the book would show:

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(The Hindu) allegorical images may seem strange to newcomers unable to grasp the underlying meaning due to their ignorance of Sanskrit. Indians could have just as much right if not more to sneer at these newcomers, since the latter, boasting of their faith, forget that Christ the Saviour himself used allegories to expound his teachings. From all that has been said by us above it is abundantly clear that Indians are far from being savages and have more right to ascribe that reproach to those who treat them in a way more cruel than the most bloodthirsty ferocious beasts. They are not idolators but recognize as such those self-conceited strangers who, in their insatiable greed for enrichment, devour up whole kingdoms to the misfortune of the human race. (‘G.S. Lebedev’)

Lebedev was also an illustrator, though his attempt back in Russia to illustrate an Indian goddess did leave a lot of scope for improvement, though with a violin in one hand and a bottle in another, the goddess was probably but an incarnation of Lebedev himself: Back in Petersburg Lebedev attempted to give a pictorial representation of the multi-armed goddess, Durga as a book illustration. We can only assume that the long return journey took its toll on his memory. The multiple arms emanate not from the shoulders but from the elbows. He must have recalled that the female deity held a musical instrument, but which one? After wracking his brains he finally made do with a violin! And why not? It had, after all, opened the doors of Bengali homes to Lebedev! There still remained one more empty hand. Perhaps out of sheer desperation he decided to place a bottle in it. (Sahni 2006)

Finally, he was also a printer. It has already been reported how he either planned to, or actually did, start a Bengali press in Calcutta in the 1790s with financing from the Czar of Russia. What is absolutely certain is that when he went back to Russia, he actually ‘founded in St. Petersburg a printing house equipped by Bengali and Nagari scripts’ (‘G.S. Lebedev’), apparently ‘the first of its kind in Europe’ (Sahni 2006). It is deeply poetic that he died in his printing house in July 1817, just like it was as poetic when he was framed on false charges of debt and driven away from Calcutta, apparently because his theatre was too successful. The next pillar of the Bengal Renaissance that I take up for a brief discussion, and who I have mentioned earlier in this chapter,

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is Hensman Anthony or Anthony Firingi (1786–1836), a truly polycolonial personality of pure Portuguese or, more likely, of mixed Luso-Indian descent, and a major poet of the popular Bengali performance-poetry genre kabigaan, or ‘poetry-singing’, ‘the most colourful product of Chandernagore’s popular culture—Antony Firingi’ (Banerjee 2012, 9). Not much is known about Anthony’s early life, and accounts often vary. Sumanta Banerjee says, ‘He was the son of a Portuguese gentleman who had settled in Chandernagore towards the end of the 18th century’ (9), while Campos describes him as ‘a Feringhi (probably a Bengali Christian) named Antonio’ (1919, 265). The latter is relatively unlikely though because while Campos probably presumes Anthony was a Bengali because of his supreme ability in writing Bengali lyrics, it is unlikely that a ‘Bengali Christian’ would have been called a ‘Feringhi’; at most he could have been of a mixed Luso-Indian lineage. Dinesh Chandra Sen gives some further information about a brother: ‘He and his brother Mr. Kelly were of Portuguese parentage, and had settled in Bengal’ (1911, 707). Some sources say he was very rich and had amassed ‘immense wealth’ through trade (Campos 1919, 266; Sen 1911, 707). What all the sources seem to agree on is that he had a live-in relationship outside wedlock with a Brahmin widow, and that they lived at Ghereti or Gereti or Gareeti near Chandernagore. Whether ‘[u]nder her influence, he adopted the manners of Bengali Hindus, discarded his European clothes for a dhoti and chadar, learnt Bengali and set up a troupe of kobi-walas’ (Banerjee 2012, 9), or whether ‘[t]hough he was a Christian he did not interfere with the religious views of the Brahmin lady and in fact joined in the Hindu ceremonies that were performed in his house. During the Hindu festivals his house was a resort of Kaviwallas who were a kind [sic.] minstrels’ (Campos 1919, 266) with Dinesh Chandra Sen also having a similar view (1911, 707), we will never know, but what we do know is that Anthony became a kaviwallah or kabiyāl (literally a ‘vendor of poems’) himself, that too probably the most famous one of his times: ‘He indeed founded a party of Kaviwallas who excelled all others in satirical extempore compositions’ (Campos 1919, 266). Sumanta Banerjee and Dinesh Chandra Sen both tell us that initially Anthony would not have had sufficient command over Bengali to compose his

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own songs, and employed a bandhon-dar or lyricist, Gorakshanath, to write the songs which he would perform, but a dispute over payment made Anthony give up his dependence on Gorakshanath and start composing songs himself. According to Banerjee, ‘We should be grateful to Gorakshanath since his refusal compelled Antony to start composing his own songs at such contests. And some of his songs still remain classic examples of the eclectic culture that Chandernagore nurtured’ (2012, 9). What Anthony Firingi’s songs really represent is the possibility of mutual cohabitation and tolerance between the two religions, and it is his contemptuous rejection of any attempt on the part of his rivals to ridicule him on the basis of his race or religion, and the deep syncretic feeling that his songs embody that make Anthony a monumental figure within the popular cultural pole of the Bengal Renaissance: For instance, at one such kobir-larai, the famous kobi-wala from Calcutta Ram Basu made fun of his Hindu manners, saying that however much he might try to be a Hindu, he could never rescue himself from his Christian origins. Antony Firingi hit back: Ami bhajon sadhon janineney, nijetey firingee Khrishtey ar Krishney kichhu probhed naire bhai. Shudhu namer phere manush phere Eo kotha shuninai. Amar khoda je, Hindur Hari shey. (I don’t know devotional hymns and austere practices. I’m a Firingee (Christian) by origin/But, there’s no difference between Christ and Krishna, dear brother./I haven’t heard of men running after mere names. The One who is my God, is the same Hari of the Hindus.…) (Banerjee 2012, 9–10)

Also to be noted and all sources agree on this that Anthony Firingi established a temple to goddess Kali, the Firingi Kalibari, that still stands on Bowbazar Street in Kolkata and is a major religious shrine of the city. Hensman Anthony represents the true spirit of polycoloniality—of hybridity, of pluralism, of mutual respect, of tolerance, of syncretism— and he translated it all into the popular cultural domain of the then Bengal. The third and final intellectual giant, who I have not mentioned so far, but who is probably the foremost figure of the Bengal Renaissance and a Luso-Indian and thus the very embodiment of polycoloniality,

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and in paying homage to whom I will fittingly close this account of mine on polycoloniality, is Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809–1831). Derozio was a Luso-Indian or Eurasian as the older term would run of mixed-breed descent from Portuguese and Indian lineage. He was a poet, an educator, a radical thinker, and an inspirational leader who would lead a whole generation of ‘Young Bengal’ into progressive thinking, changing the very contours of Bengali modes of thinking and being, for close to two centuries now, and all this within his unbelievably short life of only 22 years plus. He is what polycoloniality is all about, and needless to say, Campos goes completely overboard describing him: It is a memorable fact in the history of the Luso-Indians that, in general, they have never attained to any literary or scientific merit. From the surrounding gloom, there emerges, however, one illustrious and brilliant name, worthy to be inscribed in the Pantheon of the Worlds Poets – Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, who blazed in the skies of the realms of poetry like a meteor and as quickly disappeared. An account of his life is a record of the achievements of only 23 years of existence. Yet this brief span of life sheds an undying lustre on the whole Luso-Indian community. (1919, 263)

Derozio is all about youthfulness, about energy, about a radical zeal to rend apart all things old and to usher in the new. He became a lecturer of English and History at Hindu College at the age of 17, published his much-acclaimed first book of poems at the age of 18, was Assistant Headmaster of Hindu College by 21, forced to resign from his job by 22, and, alas, a departed soul by his 23rd year. But Derozio was not just an ebullient anarchic youth, who inspired impressionable people even younger than him to do reckless things; he was a deep social thinker, a committed activist, an ardent reformer, who could inspire and lead people to meaningful social change: ‘Derozio, played the role of a reformer. He worked for the emancipation of Hindu society and instilled into his pupils the ideas of liberalism, and taught them to think for themselves’ (Campos 1919, 263–264). However, Derozio had to pay a price for this—orthodox parents of some of the students complained against his teachings, and he had to quit his

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job, but that did not deter him from teaching the truth: ‘An inquiry was instituted and though the charges against Derozio were proved to be unfounded, he was compelled to resign. His pupils, however, frequented his house where he taught just as he did in the school’ (264). Further, he did not stop writing; his numerous journalistic pieces and poems stand testimony to posterity of what he was capable of. However, his life was cut short by a very untimely cholera and Derozio departed this world on 26 December 1831 at the age of 23. As Campos most mournfully laments: As in the case of Keats, fate was unusually cruel to Arts. Death singled out the great Luso-Indian poet, philosopher and reformer, in the midst of his ambitions still unrealized and at a time when his genius was blossoming forth in the fairest flowers of the maymorn of his life. (265)

But what Derozio has left behind as legacy is immeasurable; the whole of the Bengal Renaissance, the very foundations of Bengal’s tryst with modernity, but more importantly, as a figuration of polycoloniality, the promises of what hybridity can do, what promises of a hospitable future for all of us the ‘poly’, the multiple can hold, are all embodied in this Luso-Indian legend.

References Alban, Donald Jr., Robert H. Woods Jr. and Marsha Daigle-Williamson. 2005. ‘The Writings of William Carey: Journalism as Mission in a Modern Age’, Mission Studies, 22(1): 85–113. Banerjee, Sumanta. 2012. A Tale of Two Cities under Colonial Rule: Chandernagore and Calcutta. IIC Occasional Publication 39, New Delhi: India International Centre, 27 April. Bose, Arghya. 2017. Chandernagor: Recognizing Alternative Discourses on the Colonial. Memari, Burdwan: Avenel Press. Bose, P.N. and H.W.B Moreno. 1920. A Hundred Years of the Bengali Press, being A history of the Bengali newspapers from their inception to the present day. Calcutta: The Central Press. Campos, J.J.A. 1919. History of the Portuguese in Bengal, With Maps and Illustrations. Calcutta: Butterworth & Co.

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Chattopadhyay, Sunitikumar. 1939 (B.S. 1346). ‘Praveśak’ (Introduction). In Manoel da Assumpção, Kripār Śāstrer Artha-Bhed (Crepar Xaxtrer Orth, Bhed, Lisbon: 1743), edited by Sajanikanta Das. Calcutta: Ranjan Publishing House. Chaudhuri, Sukanta. 2009. Printing and Book Production in Bengal. Brochure for an Exhibition by the same name at Rabindranath Tagore Centre, Kolkata, February: 14–21; Kolkata: School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University. ‘G.S. Lebedev – Founder of the Russian Indology (1749–1817)’. Mumbai: Cultural Centre of Russia. Available at: https://web.archive.org/ web/20070823042637/http://www.russian-centre-mumbai.org/ russianindology/personalities.htm (accessed on 22 December 2019). Gupta, Abhijit. 2008. ‘Child from Chittagong’. The Telegraph, Kolkata, 11 March. Available at: https://www.telegraphindia.com/entertainment/child-fromchittagong/cid/602590 (accessed on 9 December 2019). Kesavan, B.S. 1985. History of Printing and Publishing in India, in 2 volumes. New Delhi: National Book Trust. Khan, M. Siddiq. 1962. ‘The Early History of Bengali Printing’. The Library Quarterly, 32 (1), January: 51–61. Kircher, Athanasius 1667. China Illustrata. Translated by Dr Charles D. Van Tuyl. Stanford University. Available at: https://htext.stanford.edu/content/ kircher/china/kircher.pdf (accessed on 11 December 2019). Old Calcutta (Kolkata). 2013. ‘Oldest known School of Calcutta’, 7 May. http://oldkolkata.blogspot.com/2013/05/oldest-known-school-of-calcutta. html (accessed on 21 December 2019). Otis, Andrew. 2019. ‘The First Printed Works of Bengal’. Special Collections, SOAS Library, 28 June. Available at: https://blogs.soas.ac.uk/ archives/2019/06/28/the-first-printed-works-of-bengal/ (accessed on 17 December 2019). Sahni, Kalpana. 2006. ‘Fiddler on the loose’. Daily Times, Pakistan, 17 June. Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20060622104127/http://dailytimes. com.pk/default.asp?page=2006%5C06%5C17%5Cstory_17-6-2006_pg3_5 (accessed on 25 December 2019). Sen, Dinesh Chandra. 1911. History of Bengali Language and Literature. Calcutta: University of Calcutta. Sen, Surendranath. 1937. Editor’s Introduction, ‘Sampādaker Prastābanā’. In Brahman Roman Catholic Sambad ([1660s] 1743), edited by Dom Antonio Rozario. Calcutta: University of Calcutta Press. The Council of Serampore College. http://seramporecollege.org/a-s-c/about/ council/ (accessed on 20 December 2019).

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Conclusion As the preceding chapters have pointed out, Bengal, as indeed India itself, was colonised not by the English alone, but by a host of other European nations—the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, the Danish, the ‘Germans’, the Swedish, the Greeks. They were also accompanied by a steady flow of travellers and traders from other European nations— the Italians and the Russians at the very least, who find mention in this book—from the late 13th to the 19th century, leading to a situation that I have described as ‘polycoloniality’. The previous chapter, particularly, has also pointed out how it is these pre-English and extraEnglish European colonies that took the lead in Bengal’s tryst with ‘colonial modernity’ on all conceivable fronts—whether it be in terms of ushering Bengal into urban cosmopolitanism (with the Portuguese and Dutch Hooghly–Chinsurah–Bandel, the French Chandernagore, etc. having become true ‘cities’ much before Calcutta, and even Calcutta being not an English invention but a filling-up of spaces already marked by the Portuguese, the Armenian and the Dutch); or setting up institutions of higher ‘western’ education in Bengal (with the first schools for children being Portuguese, the first college being Dutch, and the first university being Danish, all set before the English would venture into any of these); or creating new linguistic repertoires for Bengali (with the Portuguese influence on the Bengali language being prior to and much more extensive than English); or introducing Bengal to print culture (with all the early activities involving Bengali in print being Portuguese, Dutch, French, German or Danish, and even Swedish affairs, with the English being rather late starters); or impacting Bengali culture on different fronts (the Dutch–Bengal school of painting in the domain of visual arts, proscenium theatre being initiated in Bengal by a Russian, popular and subcultural forms also mostly having French influence in the domain of performing arts, and the Portuguese impact on Bengal’s food culture); or bringing about social and political reforms in Bengal (with social reforms like abolition of slavery and sati, and political reforms like introducing Bengal to 212

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electoral democracy and self-governance having been started in Bengal by the French much before the English); or inculcating a revolutionary and potentially decolonising spirit in the Bengali psyche (credited in this study to the French and the Greek involvement with revolutions in Bengal and Chandernagore’s emergence as a city of refuge)—and the English, at best, only followed. Yet, most of the commonsensical understandings of the history of colonial Bengal project the English to have been practically the only colonisers in Bengal, and credit Bengal’s interaction with them as being the basis of its brush with ‘colonial modernity’, thereby eliding the rich ‘polycolonial’ history of Bengal. This book evidently tries to address this elision and tries to fill up the gaps, by foregrounding Bengal’s fascinating journey through polycoloniality. But a basic question that has to be raised is as to why was there this elision, to begin with. Why did traditional colonial historiography of Bengal choose mostly to ignore the experiences of the non-English colonies, and the exploits and the achievements of the non-English colonial players, and build up instead a monocolonial narrative involving primarily the English alone? Was the plural and chequered history of Bengal’s tryst with polycoloniality, which was often very divergent from its encounter with English colonialism, too inconvenient for a historiography aimed at constructing a uniform narrative of colonialism in India and Bengal? As Arghya Bose also says, it is necessary to ask what ‘led to the marginalization of this history, this discourse in the epistemology of Indian colonialism’ (2017, 28). My submission is that it is a flawed mononational understanding of India’s plural polycolonial history that has led traditional colonial historiography to take the experience of British colonialism as the only model, and theorise on colonialism in India in a myopic way that has left the experiences of the other colonies outside its ambit. Arghya Bose, talking in the context of the ignoring of Chandernagore in most attempts at writing the colonial history of Bengal (but an argument that can be surely extended to all the other non-English colonial contexts in Bengal too), laments that: This uniquely distinct discourse on colonialism was only fated to become a marginalized history in Indian academics, given that it could not be accommodated in any post-1947 historiography in

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general, and the dominant nationalist one in particular. In plain words, while there have definitely been particularities in the colonial experience based in Chandernagor, this experience was over time, left unexplored, less talked of, and eventually marginalized primarily because Chandernagor’s unique political and civic experiences either could not be accommodated in and explained by mainstream narratives on Indian colonialism or ran antithetical to the projects of such historiographies. (28)

He further says, ‘the experiences in colonial Chandernagor were in itself “othered” in Indian academics because it could not be accommodated in the Indian colonial historiography that was largely developed basing on the British presence in the subcontinent’ (32–33). It is this ‘othering’ of a whole gamut of experiences out of sheer convenience, leading to an incorrect and incomplete historiography of colonialism that has to be challenged, and this is what ‘polycoloniality’ as a concept attempts to do. The need, therefore, is to prepare a template for an alternate historiography, one that foregrounds Bengal’s multiple colonial histories, often very different in tenor and outcome from the English one, the need for an understanding of the ‘polycolonial’ history of Bengal. As Arghya Bose also says (though again with the plea to include Chandernagore alone in a supplementary historical project of colonial Bengal, while my argument here would be to include them all), ‘the need, hence, is to evolve an alternative colonial discourse based on the experiences at Chandernagor that were principally different from the British one’ (27–28), and that there is, therefore ‘the need to recognize the different trajectories that modernities in British India and French Chandernagor took’ (30–31) and to understand ‘the evolution of a colonial policy entirely different from the mainstream British one that dominated contemporary politics in the Indian subcontinent, and to this day, dictates the academic discourse on the same’ (31). And, that is precisely the objective of a study like the current one on ‘polycoloniality’—to go beyond the staid mononational understanding of colonialism and nationalism that traditional colonial historiography, commonsensical postcolonial presumptions, and contemporary nationalistic politics profess, and instead look at the pluralities and

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the fissures therein—to prepare us to embrace and critique our history as one that is always already multinational and multicultural, always already ‘poly’. Further, the moot point that emerges from the above contrast between the experiences of English and French colonialism in Bengal (and which can be extended to all the other non-English colonial experiences too, I suppose) is that traditional nationalist historiography of the colonial period, rooted as it has itself primarily in its reaction to the English model of colonisation, has led the resultant postcolonial commonsense tend to look at colonialism and even cultural projects within the same in fairly contrarian terms, almost dualistic and Manichaean in nature. However, as has been argued in this book, the plural polycolonial encounters, and especially the plural linguistic, literary and cultural transactions within them, have often proved to be very productive, and often led to the very discourses that could potentially lead towards the colony’s undoing. Thus, what one must underscore in conclusion is that, rather than the commonsense victimology of the colonial encounter being seen as a bitter saga of nonhybridising1 and unidirectional exploitation as most ‘monocolonial’ histories tend to do, the pluralities in the polycolony, the resultant proliferation of cosmopolitanism and of diverse cultural transactions and publications, proved extremely productive for, in this particular case, Bengali language, literature and identity, as we understand them today. And herein probably lies one of the most important rationales of a book like the current one: an introduction to ‘polycoloniality’ as a means to move beyond some of our staid ‘postcolonial’ commonsense. What emerges from the point above, and leads to an even more significant conclusion that this book wishes to arrive at is that if the objective of doing history is to learn from the past, make emerge fruitful ways of thinking the present, and strive for a better future to come, it is imperative that we look at our colonial past polycolonially, through the 1

I t is not that there is no talk of ‘hybridisation’ within canonical postcolonial theory, but the assertion here is that the degree of hybridisation in the colonies—‘polycolonial’ as they have been, with multiple European nations simultaneously at work and play—has been much greater and much more plural and multifarious, and of a much wider reach than it has usually been made out to be. In fact, a polycolonial history of colonisation would project hybridisation as the norm, rather than the exception, or an incidental by-product.

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lens of the pluralities therein. Much of the attempts within traditional ‘postcolonialism’, which ends up looking at colonial encounters in mononational terms, seems redundant or with deeply problematic consequences in today’s world on two counts. First, contemporary newimperialism is intrinsically multinational, where glocalising modes of hybridisation in a multinational or even transnational context have become the very means to the consolidation of the new normative world order, while ‘postcolonialism’, mononationally conceived as it is, and with whose tools we pretend to contend with this new imperial order, does not even have the requisite vocabulary to understand imperialism from a multinational perspective. Second, and more problematically, the rise in sectarianism, identitarianism, and communal fascism all over the world today, which is threatening us with impending annihilation of the very fabric of our ever having been human, is also the result of a certain discourse of presumed victimisation in the past that needs retributive reaction now, couched further in the discourse of nationalism, which also can be seen as products of the Manichaean postcolonial commonsense. Contemporary new-imperialism can only be contended with if we have appropriate critical tools to understand how colonial projects can be multinational, and this contention can be given a truly radical form, not through the reactionary rhetoric of a counter mononationalism, but through the development of a plural and hospitable politics based on an understanding of our massively hybridised and shared past. It is on both these counts that an understanding of our colonial past as ‘polycolonial’ scores, and thus one of the objectives of this book has also been to set the agenda for a more other-regarding, hospitable, cosmopolitical cultural politics, rather than the binary us–them paradigm and the notion of a monologic master who has to be contended with the rhetoric of a counter monology of hatred, which may have come to constitute the commonsense of both academic postcolonialism and the real reactionary political order surrounding us today. A final question that still remains is whether this theorisation of polycoloniality, based as it is on the experiences of Bengal alone, which ultimately is a small and not too significant, I daresay, part of our big wide world, can be made a template for understanding

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colonialism and neo-colonialism all over the world, as my last point almost precociously laid claim to. Well, the easy answer would be in the negative; one should not generalise the experiences of one part of the world for the whole of it; every part of the world has its own unique history; all totalising discourses are potentially quasi-fascist in themselves, etc. However, should one really be content with the ‘easy’ option, or should one chart—without taking recourse to obvious universalisms and generalities of course (which ‘polycoloniality’ being rooted in the idea of the plural, I presume is already relatively immune from)—the difficult route of trying to read resonances and homologies of polycoloniality in other parts of the world as well? I would strongly suggest the latter, and this is what I have myself attempted elsewhere, by taking on the theory of polycoloniality as it would have emerged from my study of the Bengal experience, but make it a template to understand, in a somewhat different context, the ambiguities of the England–Spain relations in early modern Europe, as evidenced in the drama of the times, and which I have called ‘polycolonial angst’. To quote myself: […] the representation of Spain in early modern English drama, especially during the years of the Anglo-Spanish War (1585– 1604), does not demonstrate mere Hispanophobia, as would be commonsensically expected of it, but shows rather ambivalent and often even Hispanophilic attitudes. This can be explained through what I have identified as a dual polycolonial angst, whereby the English, in an extension of their rivalry with the Spanish in the emerging game of global imperialism, also held secret admiration for what the Spanish had managed to do and what the English aspired to do – namely, not only expand their hold over distal colonies in America and Asia, but also successfully annex and control their proximal colonies of Ireland and Scotland, much as the Spanish would have annexed Portugal, leading to the Iberian union of 1580. (2018, 158–159)

I am not saying that this is the only way forward, but the above example shows that the template of ‘polycoloniality’ that I provisionally propose in this book on the basis of my limited study of the experiences of colonisation in Bengal alone, can possibly be extended towards an understanding of imperialisms elsewhere, and even in our times.

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After all, what is the harm in attempting to globalise an idea, when what it is to be deployed to contend with—both new-imperialism and new-fascism—are global in themselves? In conclusion, this book—a study of the phenomenon of what I call ‘polycoloniality’—has had certain objectives. First, it sought to point out that most commonsensical understandings of European colonisation in Bengal, which presume that Bengal was colonised by the English alone, are factually wrong. Second, it sought to address the related and even graver commonsensical error that lies in the presumption that it is to the English, primarily if not alone, that the ushering in of colonial modernity in Bengal is to be credited. The book sought to address these two commonsensical and factually wrong presumptions by presenting information about the activities of the other European colonisers in Bengal—the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, the Danish, the ‘Germans’, the Swedes and the Greek (with a brief reference to three non-European settler communities: the Armenians, the Chinese and the Jews too)—which really forms the whole of the book. While these two are the more empirically evident objectives of the book, there have been two incipient theoretical objectives too. Third, the book intended to call out the tendentious and selective myopia of the bulk of traditional nationalist historiography of the colonial era in Bengal, which deliberately elides the existence of the multiple European powers and their contribution, because it does not fit their dominant narrative, as also it does not the mononational and Manichaean postcolonial commonsense that emerges therefrom. And fourth, and finally, this book wanted to evolve an alternate template of understanding colonialism, which further would be relevant in understanding and contending with contemporary multinational newimperialism and sectarian new-fascism. The one-word outcome in this book of all these objectives is ‘polycoloniality’. This is thus not its conclusion, but as it runs proverbially (and as a bit of a cliché), just the beginning: the beginning of an invitation to everyone to start looking at their respective imperial histories, both of the past and the present, from a plural, participatory, hybrid, multicultural and multinational, ‘polycolonial’ perspective.

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Index A Aalund, Flemming, 148 Abram, David, 164 Adrichem, Dirk van, 89 Aishwarya Tipnis Architects, 135 Akbar, 9, 43, 47, 58–59, 61 Akbarnama, 58 Alam, Dhrubo, 105 Alam, Shah, 89, 95 Alban, Donald Jr., 191 Ali, Hyder, 96, 152, 162 Aliah University, 177 Alipore Bomb Case (1908), 201 American War of Independence, 96 Andaman Islands, 8, 19, 26, 147 Anglocentric colonial history of Bengal, 1 Anglo-Dutch alliance, 96 Anglo-Dutch conflicts, 11, 91–95 Anglo-Dutch relations, 91, 96 Anglo-Dutch Treaty (1814), 98 Anglo-Dutch Treaty (1824), 83, 99 Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London, 11 Anglo-French war, 12, 127, 130 Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604), 217 Annadamangal, 205 Anthony, Hensman, 194, 207–208 Anti-Slavery Act, 196 Antwerp Company, 152, 185 architectural traces of the Greek, 166 Argyree, Hadjee Alexios, 164 ‘armed neutrality’, policy of, 146 Armenians in Bengal, 169 Asiatisk Kompagni (Danish Asiatic Company), 143

Ataturk, Kemal, 168 Aurangzeb, 6, 12, 89–90, 123, 122, 125 Austrian East India Company, 149, 152–153 Azad Hind Fauj. See Indian National Army Azam Shah, 89 Azim-us-Shan, Sultan, 142

B Badger, George Percy, 31n4, 32 Badshahnama, 58 Bagchi, Annadaprasad, 192 Bahadur Shah I, 89 Bandel, 1, 10, 16, 56, 59–66, 73, 76, 102, 174–176, 195, 212 Bandel Church, 63–64, 76, 176 Bandyopadhyay, Bamapada, 192 Bandyopadhyay, Rakhal Das, 58 Banerjee, Sudeshna, 169 Banerjee, Sumanta, 125, 193, 196, 200, 202, 207–208 Bangal Gezeti (newspaper), 189 Bankibazar, 149–153 Baranagar, 6, 11, 85–86, 90n3, 94–96, 98, 104–105, 107, 174 Barbosa, Duarte, 8, 25, 35–37, 39–41, 46–47, 52 description of Bengala, 37, 39 Barretto, Joseph, 78 Barry, Madame du, 203–204 Basu, Ramram, 189 Battuta, Ibn, 24 Bay of Bengal, 14, 22, 51, 70, 83, 88, 141

229

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230

Index

Bedara, Battle of, 11, 93–95, 108 Bengal Company of Emden, 14, 155–157 Bengal Directorate, 83 Bengal Gazette, 186, 189–190 Bengal Government Act, 179 Bengal Pilot Service, 5 Bengal Renaissance, 17, 193, 204, 206, 208, 210 colonial historiography of, 173 Bengala, City of, 32–33, 37–40, 46–47, 69 Bengali Prize, 141 Bernier, François, 65, 87, 123 Betor, 6, 9, 56–57, 62, 174 Betts, Vanessa, 164 Bhaduri, Saugata, 2, 217 Bharatchandra, 205 Bhattacharya, Ganga Kishore, 189 bigha, 62n6 Birch, Richard, 97, 133 Bischopinck, Bernhard, 183 Bishop’s College, 178 Biswas, Nabakumar, 192 Blanc, Vincent le, 110, 112–114, 116–117, 205 Bolts, Willem, 14, 15, 152–153, 160, 185 Book of Duarte Barbosa, 8, 25, 35 Bose, Arghya, 123, 196–201, 213–214 Bose, P.N., 190, Bose, Rash Behari, 201 Bose, Subhash Chandra, 201 Bou-Mashtarer Dal, 194 Bowrey, Thomas, 66, 84, 100, 141 Braam, F.A. Van, 98 Brahman-Roman-Catholic Sambad, 75, 181, 183 Bredsdorff, Asta, 140 ‘Buffetania’, 29

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Bunyan, John, 189 Bushnell, Amy Turner, 2n3 Bustamante, João de, 182 Buxar, Battle of (1764), 95

C Calcutta Art Studio, 192 Calcutta Chronicle, 187 ‘Calcutta Free School’, 177 Calcutta Gazette, 188 Calcutta Review, 60 Calcutta School Book Society, 190 Calendar for the year of our Lord MDCCLXXVIII, 186 Camões, Luis Vaz de, 51, 67 Campos, J.J.A., 51, 53–54, 58, 60–61, 64–65, 67–69, 72–75, 141, 176, 180, 195, 207, 209 Cape of Good Hope, 32 Carey, Felix, 190 Carey, William, 146, 179, 188–189 Carlyle, Thomas, 158 Carthila e Lingoa Tamul e Portugues, 182 Catalani, Jordanus, 8, 24 Census of India, 7, 155 Cernove, 27, 28, 34, 73 Chakrabarti, Kaustav, 170 Chakraborti, Manish, 83–84 Chakravarti, Monmohan, 56–58, 60, 63, 84, 94, 100, 102, 107, 123, 126–128, 131, 133, 139–143, 145–147, 149–150, 152, 157–158 Chakravarty, Ipsita, 169 Chandernagore, 12–13, 15–16, 66, 93–95, 102–103, 107, 123–136, 142–144, 152, 155, 157, 168, 174, 191, 193–202, 207–208, 212–214 Chandernagore (Merger) Act, 1954, 134

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Index Chandernagore Museum, 135 Charles XII, King of Sweden, 160 Charnock, Job, 6, 57, 77 Chatterjee, Anjali, 90, 105 Chatterjee, Hiren, 202 Chattopadhyay, Sunitikumar, 181 Chaudhuri, Sukanta, 185, 187–188, 190 Chen, Jack, 2n3 China Illustrata, 184 Chinese in Bengal, 169 Chinsurah, 11–12, 16, 77, 78, 85–88, 92–107, 123, 124, 126, 132, 144, 174, 177–178, 182, 185, 189, 191, 212 Chittagong, 6, 9–10, 12, 24, 29, 32, 37, 41, 46, 48, 53–56, 62, 66–74, 81, 89, 110, 112, 116–117, 126, 203–204 Chorbagan Art Studio, 192 Choudhury, Sabarna Roy, 7 Christian VI, King of Denmark, 143 Chronicles of Bohemia, 24 Church of Our Lady of Dolours, 78 Church of the Assumption, 77 Clavell, Walter, 124 Clive, Robert, 7, 93, 127 Code of Gentoo Laws, The, 186 Coelho, João, 9, 53 Collection of Hindustani and Bengali Arias, A, 205 colonial historiography, 3, 17, 173, 213–214 colonial modern sensibility, 78 colonial modernity, 15–17, 23, 57, 78–79, 170, 173–174, 178, 196, 198–199, 204, 212–213, 218 Commissaire of Pondicherry, 12, 124 commonsensical postcolonial presumptions, 214 communal fascism, 4, 216 Communist movement, 202

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231

Company Press, 187 Concordia, 103 contemporary nationalistic politics, 214 Conti, Nicolo, 8, 24–32 Convention of London, 98, 178 Cornwallis, Lord, 98, 131 Correa, João, 55–56 cosmopolitan multiculturalism, 174 cosmopolitan spaces, 56, 174 cosmopolitan stage, 60, 174 cosmopolitanism, 16, 79, 120, 173–174, 204, 212 proliferation of, 215 cosmopolitical cultural politics, 216 Cotton, H.E.A., 164–165, 169 Courtin, Jacques Ignace, 128 Cowper, William, 65 Crappe, Robert, 13, 139–140 Crepar Xaxtrer Orth, Bhed, 183 Cunha, Nuno da, 54–55

D Da Cruz, Father João, 63 da Gama, Vasco, 9, 51 Dames, Longworth, 36–39, 46, 52 Dames, Mansel, 37 Danes in Bengal, 139–149 Dangereux, 131 Danish Asiatic Company, 143 Danish East India Company, 13, 139, 143 Danish Royal Charter of 1827, 179 Das, Soumitra, 148–149 Dasgupta, KumKum, 148 Datta, Kalikinkar, 83, 85–87, 91–99, 107 Datta, Rangan, 169 de Mello, Affonso, 54–56 de Rozario, Dom Antonio, 75, 77, 181, 183

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Index

de Souza, Anthony, 188 De Souza, Father Dominic, 181 Denmark Tavern Hotel, 14, 145, 147–148 Derozio, Henry Louis Vivian, 17, 209 Deslandes, André, 12, 124 Dhaka, 6, 10–12, 15, 28, 66, 72, 74–75, 77, 86–87, 95–96, 98, 105–106, 124, 126, 128, 164–168, 183 Diang Pahar, 69 Dianga, 10, 68–69, 71, 73, 89 Dias, Father Peter, 76 Digdarshan (monthly magazine), 189 Dinemār, 13, 139 ‘Dinemardanga’, 142 Disguise, The, 205 Douglas, H., 97 Duke of Richelieu (Cardinal Richelieu), 122 Duncan, Jonathan, 187 Dupleix, Joseph François, 12, 126 Duplessis, 12, 123–124 ‘Dutch Bengal’ school of painting, 108 Dutch Cemetery, 103 Dutch in Bengal, 81–109 settlements, 96, 98 came to Dhaka as diplomatic mission, 105 colonial and mercantile exploitation, 107 colonial settlements of, 106 colonisation in Bengal, 99 silk factory of Rajshahi, 107 strength of in Bengal, 88 Dutch East India Company (VOC), 10, 83, 84n1 Dutta, Kanailal, 200 Dyche, Thomas, 183

Polycoloniality Saugata Bhaduri.indd 232

E East Friesia, Prussian annexation of, 153 Eldred, John, 42 Elizabeth I, Queen, 42 Embden Company, 157–158 Emden, Asiatic Company of, 154, 156 Empoli, Giovanni de, 52 England–Spain relations, ambiguities of the, 217 English East India Company, 5, 65, 84n1, 91, 153, 145, 199 English Wars (1801–1814), 146 Englishman, The, 190 Estado da India, 71 European academic realism, 192 Extensive Vocabulary Bengalese and English, An, 187 Eyre, Sir Charles, 7

F Fabricius, Johann Phillip, 183 Farāshi, 110 farman, 6, 9, 11–13, 58n3, 59, 62, 64–65, 76, 84–85, 89, 122, 125, 141, 143, 145, 179 Federici, Cesare of Venice, 56–57, 70 Feldbæk, Ole, 141 Fihl, Esther, 140 firingi, 9n4, 17, 51, 181 ‘First Octroi’ or the ‘First Concession’, 161 Fitch, Ralph, 5, 8, 25, 28, 41n5, 58–59, 74, 205 Fort D’Orleans, 12, 125, 128 Fort Gustavus, 11, 100–102, 107 Fort William College, 177, 188 ‘Fourth Octroi’, 161

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Index France, revolution in, 131–132, 202 Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, 14, 153 Frederick V, King of Denmark, 13, 143 Frederick VI, King of Denmark, 178–179 Freire, Nuno Fernandez, 55–67 French East India Company, 12, 122, 125, 130 French in Bengal, 110–138 French Revolution, 12, 17, 131, 136, 153, 197, 199, 203 Friend of India, 190 Froideveaux, Henri, 121–122 fundamentalism, 4

G Gadar Party, 201 Gandhi, Mahatma, 201 ‘Gangaridae’, 111 Ganges, 8, 24, 28–30, 32–33, 36–39, 46, 52, 81, 87, 93, 100–101, 105, 110–111, 114–115, 120, 125, 127, 145, 158 Gaur, 9, 28, 32–33, 37–39, 41, 43, 52, 54–56, 60 General Advertiser, 187 Geography of Ptolemy, 111 Germain, George, 64 ‘German’ colonies in Bengal, 149–160 Ghiyasuddin Mahmud Shah, 54 Ghose, Aurobindo, 200 Gomes, Frei José de S. Agostinho, 65 Gomes, James, 176 Gonsalves Tibau, fall of, 72 Goswami, Narendranath, 200 Grammar of the Bengal Language, A, 187 Grammar of the Pure and Mixed East Indian Dialects, 205

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233

Greeks in Bengal, 163–168 Greek Church, establishment of, 165 Greek revolution, 167 Grieve, George, 203 Guide to the English Language, A, 183 Gundert, Hermann (‘father’ of modern Malayalam printing), 183 Gupta, Abhijit, 203–204 Gustav II Adolf, King of Sweden, 160

H Halhed, Nathaniel Brassey, 185 Halvatzakes-Velladios, Father, 166 Hamilton, Alexander, 73, 102, 142 Hardinge, Lord, failed assassination, 201 hārmād, 67n8 Hastings, Warren, 98, 165, 169 Hem, Shashikumar, 192 Henderson, W.O., 156, 159 Hill, S.C., 128–129 Hindu College (Presidency University), 178 History of Friedrich II of Prussia, 158 History of the Portuguese in Bengal, 51 Hitopadesh, 189 Hogg Factory, 104 ‘Holy Name of Jesus’, 76 Hooghly, 5–7, 9–11, 14, 16, 28, 45, 55–56, 58–63, 65–67, 73, 76, 81, 84–85, 87–89, 91–93, 95, 98–99, 102–103, 107–108, 123–124, 126–127, 131, 133, 135, 140, 142, 150–152, 157, 174, 176–178, 185–187, 189, 212 Hooghly College, 11, 108, 177–178 Hooghly Gazette, 56, 58, 123 Hooghly–Bandel belt, 73

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Index

Hosten, Rev. H., 58, 60, 63 Humayun, 55 Hunter, W.W., 149–150, 154–156, 161 Huysman, Martinus, 90 hybridisation, 3, 175, 215–216 hybridity, 4, 16, 79, 173, 175, 208, 210

I identitarianism, 4, 216 Impartial Review of the East Indian Brahminical System of Sacred Rites and Customs, An, 205 Imperial Company of Trieste, 153 Imperial East India Company, Belgian, 153 imperial farman, 13, 141, 144 Imperial Gazetteer, The, 150–151 imperialism, 3–4, 216–217 Impey Code, 187 Indian Empire: Its People, History, and Products, The, 150 Indian Independence League, 201 Indian National Army, 102 Indo-Danish Heritage Buildings of Serampore, 148 Inside the Cultural Revolution, 2n3 inter-colonial warfare, 91 Itihasmala, 189 Itinerario, 10, 61, 81 Itinerary of Ludovico di Varthema of Bologna from 1502 to 1508, The, 31

J Jackson, A.V. Williams, 117 Jafar, Nawab Mir, 93 Jahangir, 61 James II, King of England, 6 Jews in Bengal, 169–170 Jodrell, Richard, 205

Polycoloniality Saugata Bhaduri.indd 234

St John the Baptist Church, 77 Jones, John Winter, 31 Journey beyond the Three Seas, A, 25 Jyotiṣa o Golodhyāya, 190

K kabigaan, or ‘poetry-singing’, 207 Kail, Owen C., 85, 90 Kansaripara Art Studio, 192 Karim, Abdul, 90 Karl VI (Charles VI), Emperor of Austria, 14, 149 Karmakar, Panchanan, 187, 189, 191 Kasimbazar, 5, 11–12, 86–87, 90, 92, 95–96, 98, 104, 106–107, 124, 126, 128, 130, 143, 169 Keay, John, 151 Keith, George, 154 Kesavan, B.S., 183 Kew Letters (Circular Note of Kew), 97 Khan, Alivardi, 13, 143, 156 Khan, Ibrahim, 6, 12, 123 Khan, Isha, 47 Khan, Kasim, 61 Khan, Kublai (Grand Khan), 19–20 Khan, M. Siddiq, 185–188 Khan, Muhammad Azim, 63 Khan, Murshid Quli, Nawab of Bengal, 14, 90, 149–150 Khan, Nawab Ali Vardi, 91, 152 Khan, Shaista, 6, 10, 72–73, 89, 142 Kiernander, Johann Zacharias, 15, 163, 186 Kimiyā Vidyāsāra, 190 Kircher, Athanasius, 184 Kongsbakke, Eskild Anderson, 141 Koninckx, C., 161–162 Kripār Śāstrer Arthabhed, 75, 183 Krista Purana, 41n5, 182 Kunst, Jan Cornelisz, 11, 84

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Index

L Laha, Bhabanicharan, 192 Language Movement, 167 languid climate of Bengal, 114 Lauriston, Jean Law de, 128, 130 Laval, François Pyrard de, 12, 110, 117–122 Lebedev, Gerasim Stepanovich, 17, 188, 193, 204–206 Leedes, William, 42 Lethbridge, E., 28 Levant Company, 42 Linschoten, Jan Huyghen Van, 10, 81–82, 88 literature polycolonial influence on, 180 sadhu bangla, 181 Lopes, Diego, 53 Louis XV, King of France, 203 Love Is the Best Doctor, 205 Lucena, Martin, 52 Lusiads, The, 51, 67 Luso-Indian lineage, 207

M ‘Maarazia’, 26 Machado, Andre, 176 Mack, John, 190 MAEBAR. See Upper India Magellan, Ferdinand, 36 Mahabharata, 189 Mahishadal, Raja of, 74 Mahmud Shah, Sultan Ghiyasuddin, 9, 67 Major, R.H., 26 Malik, Hardit Singh, 133 Mandeville, John, 8, 25, 41 Manichean model of coloniality, 3 Manrique, Fray Sebastião, 61, 72

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235

Manucci, Niccolao, 65 Marignolli, Giovanni de, 8, 24 Marshman, John Clark, 179, 190 Marshman, Joshua, 146, 179, 188 Martin, François, 12, 123–124 Master, Streynsham, 86, 100, 104, 124, 141 Mathew Rachita Mission Samachar, 189 Mathew, Gospel of, 189 Mello, Martim Affonso de, 54 Milburn, William, 161 Mir Qasim, 95 Mirabilia, 24 Miran, Mir, 93–94 Mishra, P.K., 52 Mitford Medical College, 166 Mogs of Arakan, 46 Monte Corvino, John of, 8, 21–23 Moreno, H.W.B., 190 Mughal miniature techniques, 192 Muhammad Shah, 13, 142 Mukherjee, Rila, 70–71 Mukhopadhyay, Yogendranath, 192 Mukunda Deva (king of Odisha), 58 multiculturalism, 10, 16, 56, 67, 76, 78–79, 173–174

N Napoleonic wars, 96, 133, 146 National Museum of Denmark, 148 Navigationi et Viaggi, 38 neo-colonialism, 217 neutrality, 91–93, 129 Newberie, John, 42 new-fascism, 4, 218 new-imperialism, 4, 216, 218 Nicholson, Admiral, 6 Nicobar Islands, 8, 14, 19, 146–147, 152 Nicolau, Fr. João de S., 64

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Index

Nikitin, Afanasy, 8, 24 nishan, 85n2, 89 Norris, Paul Byron, 164–165 Nurjahan, 61

O Odisha, 12, 13, 36, 52, 58, 73, 74, 84, 86, 126, 141 St Olav’s Church, 147–148 Old Company, 83 Olondāj, 10n5 O’Malley, L.S.S., 56–58, 60, 63, 84, 94, 100, 102, 107, 123, 126–128, 131, 133, 139–143, 145–147, 149–150, 152, 157–158 opium, exclusive right of trade, 91 Os Lusíadas, 51 Ostend Company, 14, 149–152, 158, 160–161

P Padārtha Vidyāsāra, 190 Padrishibpur, 77 Pal, Krishnachandra, 192 Paradisi, Sister Nectaria, 15, 164, 168 parwana, 62, 64, 90–91, 127, 141 ‘passport’, 89 Pego, 35 Pereira, Ruy Vaz, 54 performing arts, 16, 193–194, 212 Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, 111 Pilgrim’s Progress, The, 189 Pipli, 13, 52, 73–74, 84–86, 89, 104, 140, 141 Plassey, Battle of, 7, 93, 127 Plütschau, Heinrich, 183 political reforms, 16, 173, 196–199, 204, 212 Polo, Marco, 7–8, 19–21, 23, 25, 32 ‘polycolonial angst’, 217

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polygamy, 40 Porto Grande, 9–10, 46, 56, 66–67, 72–73, 117 Porto Novo, 162, 163 Porto Pequeno, 9, 45, 56, 73, 81, 117 Portuguese in Bengal, 51–80 administration of Hooghly, 60 church in Dhaka, 74, 77 church of Calcutta, 78 contribution to Bengali language, 195 diplomatic victories, 54 establishment at Betor, 57 interventions in Chittagong, 53–54, 62, 67, 72 mercantile expedition, 53 mission led by Rafael Prestelo, 54 multiculturalism in Bengal, 66, 78 presence in Bengal, 36, 78, 174 second colony of Hooghly, 59 postcolonial commonsense, 1, 3, 17, 41, 215–216, 218 postcolonial theory, 4, 215n1 postcolonialism, 1, 4–5, 216 Prabartak Sangha, 201 Prakash, Om, 83–85, 89 Pratapaditya Charit, 189 Pre-Bengal School art, 192 Prestelo, Rafael, 54 printing activities at Serampore Press, 147, 188–191 Bengali font, 185 devanagari type-fonts, 182 first Indian printing press in Goa, 184 print media in Bengal, 184 print revolution, 11, 188, 191 printing presses, 182 revolution in Bengal, 11, 15 in Tamil, 182

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Index Prussian Asiatic Company, 14 Prussian Gardens, 15, 155, 158

R Rai, Kandarpanaraian, 75 Rai, Kedar, 68, 75 Raichak–Diamond Harbour belt, 73 Rajshahi, 11, 86, 106–107 Ramayana, 189 Ramusio, Giovanni Battista, 38 Rastén, Simon, 148 Ray, Aniruddha, 28 Raychaudhuri, Tapan, 83 Reinel, Diego, 53 Renaissance, 17, 173, 193, 195, 204, 206, 208, 210 Rodrigues, B., 176 Rishra, 2n2, 15, 164 Roman Catholic Cathedral Kolkata, 77–78 Roxburgh, William, 23 Roy, Motilal, 201 Roy, Subhajoy, 133 Royal Charter of Incorporation, 178–179 royal charter, 5, 154 Royal Prussian Asiatic Company, 154 Royal Prussian Bengal Company, 155, 158 Royal Standards of England, 6 Rubiés, Joan-Pau, 31n4 Ryan, James D., 21 Ryley, J. Horton, 44

S Sahni, Kalpana, 206 Saint-Germain, Renault de, 130 Samachar Darpan (Bengali weekly), 189–190 Sandwip, 10, 46, 48, 68–73, 89, 112, 126

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Sanskrit College (The Sanskrit College and University), 178 Sarkar, Jadunath, 75–76 Satgaon, 9, 12, 28, 32, 37–38, 41, 43, 45–46, 55–56, 58–59, 60, 63, 73, 110, 113, 116–117, 174 sati abolition of, 16, 196, 212 prevalence of, 30 Schouten, Gautier, 100 Schui, Florian, 154–155 Second Anglo-Mysore War, 162n4 ‘Second Octroi’, 161 Second World War, 201 sectarianism, 4, 216 Sen, Dinesh Chandra, 207 Sen, Phanibhushan, 192 Sen, Sailendra Nath, 125, 130–131 Sen, Surendranath, 74, 184 Serampore, 13–15, 47, 77–78, 132, 143, 144–149, 164, 174, 178–179, 182, 188–191 Serampore College, 146–147, 178–179 ‘The Serampore Initiative’, 147–148 Serampore Mission (1800–1845), 188, 191 Serampore Press, 15, 146, 189–190. See also printing Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), 96, 158–159 Shah, Jahandar, 89 Shah, Manasi, 164, 166, 168 Shah, Sikandar, 28 Shahjahan, 10, 61–65, 84–85 Shahryar, 61 Sher Shah, 55–56, 67 Shore, Sir John, 65 Shrimani, Shyamacharan, 192 Shuja, Shah, 62, 64–65 Singh, Abhay Kumar, 162

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Index

Sinha, Arvind, 162–163 Siraj-ud-daula, 7, 64, 91–93, 127, 144. See also Plassey, Battle of Siu Simmoncota, doubtful location, 23 slave-trade (slavery), 9, 21, 67, 71, 115, 120, 175 abolition of, 16, 196, 212 social reforms, 13, 16, 212 Society of the Friends, 167 Sommario de Regni, Città et Popoli Orientali, 38 Statesman, The, 190 Statistical Account of Hooghly, 63 Stavorinus, John Splinter, 100–101, 103–106, 144–145 Stephens, Thomas, 41n5, 42, 182 Sultan, Tipu, 96 Swedish East India Company (Svenska Ostindiska Companiet or SOIC), 2n1, 15, 161–163 Swedish in Bengal, 160–163

T Tagore, Rabindranath, 136 Tamluk–Hijli belt, 66 Tavares, Gonçalo, 54 Tavares, Manoel, 61 Tavares, Pedro, 58–59 Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste, 74, 87, 100, 106 Teacher–Student Centre, 166 Ten Years of Peace 1746–1756, The, 158 The Bengal Catholic Herald, 63 ‘Third Octroi’, 161 Third Republic, 197–199 Thomas, Edward, 28 Thomas, John, 189 Three Frenchmen in Bengal (1903), 128

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Tibau, Gonsalves, 68–69, 71 Toynbee, George, 65 ‘Transfiguration of the Saviour’, 164 Travels of Friar Odoric, The, 24 Travels of Ludovico di Varthema, The, 8, 31 Travels of Marco Polo the Venetian, The, 8, 19 Travels of Nicolo Conti, The, 8 Travels of Sir John Mandeville, The, 25 Treaty of Amiens, 132–133 Treaty of Kiel, 139n1 Treaty of London, 99 Treaty of Paris (1763), 12, 128 Treaty of Versailles, 96, 131 Treaty of Vienna, Second, 151 Trieste, Asiatic Company of, 152 Turko-Russian War of 1774, 165

U Ulysses in the Raj, 164 Unesco Asia-Pacific Awards for Cultural Heritage Conservation, 148 United East India Company, 10, 83 University Grants Commission, 179 University of Calcutta, 178–179 Upper India, 22 Usselincx, Willem, 160

V Varma, Raja Ravi, 192. See also printing Varthema, Ludovico di, 8, 24–25, 31–32, 34, 37, 51 description of the city of Bengala, 37 travelogue, 37 Vassiliadis, Dimitrios, 165–168 Vaz, Father Antony, 76

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Index

239

Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC). See Dutch East India Company (VOC) Vidyāhāravalī, 190 Vidyasagar, Iswarchandra, 136 Villalobos, João de, 55 Vink, Marcus, 84, 86, 89 Vocabolario em idioma Bengalla e Portugues, 183 Voyage en Inde du Comte de Modave 1773–6, 130 Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval, The, 12, 110 Voyages to the East Indies, 100

Wellesley, Lord, 98 West Bengal Heritage Commission, 148 Westmacott, E. Vesey, 28 Wilkins, Charles, 186 Willem, Gustaaf, 101 Winius, George D., 84, 86, 89 Wolff, Bente, 148 World Surveyed, The, 12, 110 Wygbert, Wilke, 141–142

W

Z

War of American Independence, 96 War of Austrian succession, 96 War of Independence, 1971, 167 Ward, William, 146, 179n1, 188

Zamor, 17, 175, 202–204 Zelabdim Echebar, 42n6, 43, 47. See also Akbar Ziegenbalg, Bartholomäus, 183

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Y Yates, William, 190 Yeats, Susanna Anna Maria, 102

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About the Author Saugata Bhaduri is Professor at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. His areas of research interest are contemporary literary and cultural theory, popular culture studies, the theory and practice of translation, and comparative literature, in all of which he has taught, published and conducted research extensively. His previous books include Transcultural Negotiations of Gender: Studies in (Be)Longing (2015), Literary Theory: An Introductory Reader (2010), Perspectives on Comparative Literature and Culture in the Age of Globalization (2010), Translating Power (2008) and Negotiating ‘Glocalization’: Views from Language Literature and Culture Studies (2008).

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