Calcutta (5 page)

The Emperor Aurangzeb had long since deposed his father, Shah Jehan, and shifted his Imperial capital from Agra to Delhi; most of Charnock’s troubles, indeed, resulted from the change in ruler. Aurangzeb, however, was a calculating man and Charles Stewart probably accounts as well as anyone for what happened next. He writes that the Emperor, ‘being highly incensed against the English, had commanded them to be expelled from every part of his dominion; but as Aurangzeb ever made his passions subservient to his policy and was sensible that he derived a considerable aid to his revenue by the commerce carried on by the English; also, that their ships of war could much annoy his subjects … putting a stop to the pilgrims visiting Mecca … authorized his ministers to form a treaty with Messrs Weldon and Navarro, two English Commissioners who had been sent from Bombay by Sir John Child, the Director General of the Company’s settlements, to solicit peace.’ So a treaty was formed and Charnock sailed for Bengal again, but not before he had insisted on obtaining the Emperor’s firman, or personal licence, to trade on the most advantageous terms. Charnock was a
calculator
, too.

Thus we come – at 22° 33’ North 88° 23’ East, in the middle of the monsoon – to the foundation of Calcutta. In view of what was to follow from this landfall, the moment should have been recorded in something more memorable than Charnock’s blank prose. But he, after all, only knew that he was returning to his old anchorage at Sutanuti and probably didn’t expect his settlement
to last indefinitely anyway. He was rowed ashore, with an escort of 30 soldiers, to a village whose thatched huts had been
pillaged
and burned in the Nawab’s pursuit of three and a half years before and he logs this in characteristically deadpan style. ‘August 24, 1690. This day at Sankraal, I ordered Captain Brooke to come up with a vessel to Chuttanuty, where we arrived about noon, but found the place in a deplorable
condition
, nothing being left for our present accommodation, the rains falling day and night.’ And then he pitched his tents, and brought provisions from the boat, and it was left to Rudyard Kipling two centuries later to provide the serenade in some of his most thumping and ungainly verse:

At least Kipling could see which way Calcutta was heading by then. Charnock, with less than a couple of years to go before he died at the age of sixty-two, certainly couldn’t. He and his people were struggling for survival and a report from May 1691 suggests how difficult it was for them. They lived in a wild and unsettled condition at Chuttanuty, neither fortified houses, nor godowns,
*
only tents, huts and boats.’ The nicest thing left to him was probably the marriage of his daughter Mary to Charles Eyre, a future knight and Governor of the Bay, in Calcutta’s first English wedding.

The most vivid reporter of the early years was Captain
Alexander
Hamilton, whose ship was constantly sailing in and out of the Hooghly round the turn of the century. We get a picture of Charnock sitting under a large tree, smoking a hookah and
sipping arrak punch, clad in loose shirt and pyjamas; which, much floppier than Western fashion dictates nowadays, is still one of the most comfortable garments for Calcutta and, in white cotton, one of the most frequently worn. There he would receive his English and Indian merchants and talk with them till the light began to fade, when they would be dismissed so that they should get safely home before robbers and wild beasts appeared. Hamilton had no love for Charnock, who ‘reigned more absolute than a Raja’ and who had natives whipped near his dining room, so that he could hear their cries as he ate. It is not certain that the two ever met, for Hamilton’s
New
Account
of
the
East
Indies
was riot published until the first decade of the eighteenth century. So his stories must be taken with reservation; but at least they put some flesh on the bare bones of Company memoranda.

Hamilton was an early objector to the site. Mr Job Charnock, he writes, had chosen it for the sake of a large shady tree … though he could not have chosen a more unhealthful place in all the River; for three miles to the North-eastward is a Saltwater lake that overflows in September and October and then
prodigious
numbers of Fish resort thither, but in November and December, when the Floods are dissipated, those fishes are left dry and with them putrefaction affects the air with thick
stinking
vapours which the North-east winds bring with them to Fort William, that they cause a yearly Mortality. One year I was there and there were reckoned in August to be about 1,200 English, some military, some servants to the Company, some private
merchants
residing in the town and some seamen belonging to the Shipping at the town, and before the beginning of January there were 460 burials registered with the Clerk’s Book of Mortality.’ Such unpleasantness was of no great concern to the Company Directors, however, far away in Leadenhall Street; they were much more exercised over the chartering of a rival combination, though the two were happily united within a decade. And in spite of demonstrations on their doorstep by Spitalfields
silk-weavers
, angry at the importation of cheap Indian textiles, they were in expansive mood in Bengal. Fort William was started in
1696 out of brick dust, lime, molasses and cut hemp (‘as hard and tougher than firm stone or brick’ all the same, and known as pucca construction) and named after King William of Orange three years later. At the same time the Nawab was persuaded to sell the three villages ‘with rents, uncultivated lands, ponds, groves, rights over fishing and woodlands and dues from resident artisans, together with the lands appertaining thereto, bounded by the accustomed notorious and usual boundaries in exchange for the sum of Rs 1300 current coin of this time’.

Watching all this, Captain Hamilton is seeing a pattern emerge that is to repeat itself on an increasing scale in Calcutta for a long time to come. He remarks of Mr Weldon, who comes to the town as a Commissioner in 1709, that ‘His term of governing was very short and he took as short a way to be enriched by it by harassing the people to fill his coffers.’ A seaman’s wife, ‘a little inclined to lewdness in her husband’s absence’, entertains a couple of Armenians, and they quarrel over her; Weldon
reprimands
both but gives one man sole rights to the woman for Rs 500 cash. Life sounds even lustier just up the road. ‘Barnagul is the next village on the River’s side above Calcutta, where the Dutch have a house and garden; and the Town is famously infamous for a seminary of female Lewdness where Numbers of Girls are trained up for the Destruction of unwary Youths, who study more how to gratify their brutal passions than how to shun the evil consequences that attend their folly, not withstanding the daily Instances of Rottenness and Mortality that happen to those who most frequent those schools of Debauchery.’ The air of disapproval is so strong and the haphazard use of capital letters so pointed, that it is sometimes rather difficult to
remember
that this is a seadog writing. Possibly Captain Hamilton was a secret maritime evangelist, for he takes pains to note that ‘In Calcutta all Religions are tolerated but the Presbyterian, and that they browbeat.’ He also tells us that the Company has a good hospital here ‘where many go in to undergo the Penance of Physic, but few come out to give account of its operation’. And he observes that on the other side of the river from rising
Calcutta
, where the twin city of Howrah now is, there are docks for
repairing and fitting ships ‘bottoms, and a pretty good garden belonging to the Armenians. Note the precision – ‘ships’
bottoms
’, not just ‘ships’; this is a seadog after all.

The Armenians are a puzzle in the origins of Calcutta. The Dutch we know about; they had settled twenty-five miles
upstream
at Chinsurah in 1653 and they were to stay in their Fort Gustavus until they were ceded to William IV together with
£
100,000 in exchange for Sumatra. We had, of course, fought them in between. There was a bonny scrap in 1759 when a Dutch fleet of seven ships came up the Hooghly without pilots – either a marvellous or a lucky piece of navigation in that treacherous river – and attacked a handful of East Indiamen anchored below Melancholy Point. They were beaten off after they had shot the
Duke
of
Dorset
through and through, leaving ninety cannonballs in her hull, without even managing to kill one of her crew, because the Englishmen had lined their quarters with bags of saltpetre, a crazy fire risk to take. This was the occasion when Colonel Forde, observing Dutch soldiers put ashore, and knowing the two countries were nominally at peace, wrote to Robert Clive – no longer a depressed Company
bookkeeper
but a brilliant soldier and Governor – for an Order-
in-Council
to fight. And Clive, who was playing cards when the message came, wrote back in pencil; ‘Dear Forde – Fight them immediately and I will send you an Order-in-Council
tomorrow
.’

We know about the French, too. They had founded a colony at Chandernagore in 1673, a little way down the river from the Dutch, and not until Napoleon was out of the way did the British feel at ease in this proximity. Strong and flourishing under Dupleix, bombarded a little later by Admiral Watson, the story of the French on the river is one of recurring
dispossession
and retrieval. The longest period the tricolour was missing from the flagstaff of the Administrateur’s house was from 1794 to 1815. Indeed, it outlasted the Union Jack in Calcutta, in
Bengal
, in all India. The little colony remained in French hands until it was gracefully handed over after a referendum of its people in 1951. Nearly twenty years later, its singularity was almost
entirely
dissolved in the absorbing atmospheres of Bengal, leaving
only traces of the past among a few rotting tombstones, a sign outside a shop exclaiming ‘Wine!’ and ‘
Liberté, Fraternité, Egalité!
’ still faintly inscribed upon a decaying gatepost. And a Bengali poetry magazine circulating in Calcutta under the title
La
Poésie
, because its editor was educated in French
Chandernagore
.

We also know about the Danes, though they were not to found their mission station at Serampore for half a century yet. But the Armenians remain a problem to the student of Calcutta. They had probably been in India at least as long as the
Portuguese
and possibly before. The standard history of their
association
with the country asserts, a little vaguely, that they had come overland, by way of Persia, Afghanistan and Tibet, as commercial birds of passage before ‘any other Europeans’. They settled at the invitation of the Emperor Akbar, who made a Queen of the Armenian Mariam Zamani, and who allowed her kinsfolk to build a church at Agra in 1562. By 1690, so we read, ‘The
Armenians
were the most favoured subjects of the Delhi
Government
… and had been held in high esteem by the Mogul
Emperors
from the days of Akbar downwards for their loyalty and integrity.’ They did very well for themselves in Bengal, whenever it was they arrived, and they showed pleasure in their new masters when they got the chance. When George III had
recovered
from his madness in 1789, and the news reached
Calcutta
, ‘a general expression of joy was made by all the
inhabitants
’. But the most conspicuous and brilliant illuminations were displayed by an Armenian merchant by the name of Catchick Arrakiel. His loyalty did not escape the notice of Lord Cornwallis, who on interrogating him what particular interest he felt in the life of His Britannic Majesty, received this reply: ‘I have, my lord, lived under his Government for near thirty years, it has never injured me, but on the contrary has always afforded its protection and this, with industry, has enabled me to
accumulate
a very plentiful fortune.’ His son was so grateful for this protection that he raised and kept at his own expense a company of 100 Armenian volunteers to defend the industry of Britons and others when the regular Army was in the Deccan. And a British voice approvingly remarks at the start of the nineteenth
century that the Armenians are the most respectable and perhaps the most numerous body of foreign merchants in the capital. They trade with China to the East, Persia to the West, and most places in between. Their information from all sides is deemed the most accurate and minute of anyone’s in their profession. They are attentive, regular and diligent in business, and never do they think of departing from their lives and indulging in dissipation even after a competency has been acquired.

The question is, when did these worthy merchants arrive in the Hooghly? What were they doing between the building of a church at Agra in 1562 and the founding of a capital city at Sutanuti in 1690? Mesroub Jacob Seth, the author of the
Armenian
history, claims that the merchant Khojah Israel Sarhad, a favourite of the Bengal Nawab, came down from Delhi to
negotiate
on the Company’s behalf the sale of the three villages a few years after the foundation and Charnock’s death. This, together with Hamilton’s references, appears to be the earliest report of Armenians in the district.