The Victoria Memorial in Calcutta, ‘the city of joy’, West Bengal. Opened in 1921 beside the River Hooghly, the memorial was founded with a mixture of public and private money as a place “to which all the resident population, European and Native, will flock, where all classes will learn the lessons of history”.
Part 1 of 2
THE East India Company’s muslin, silk and saltpetre factories in Dacca and Hooghly were reluctantly closed down in 1685, owing to burdensome regulations laid upon non-Muslims by the Nawab of Bengal, and its agents withdrew to Madras.*
The Company returned to Hooghly when conditions eased, but was once again driven out in 1686, after a foolish attempt by Sir John Child to overthrow the Mughal Emperor, Aurangzeb.* Job Charnock, the Company’s agent, stopped the Mughal army’s advance at Sutanuti near the mouth of the River Hooghly, but instead of fortifying Sutanuti as Job recommended, the Company made another ill-advised military manoeuvre, trying and failing to take Chittagong by force.*
Aurangzeb was wiser. Seeing his tax revenue fall without the Company’s commercial activity, he extracted an apology and then granted them Sutanuti and two neighbouring villages, Govindpur and Kalikat, as a base of operations. A delighted Job Charnock arrived there on August 24th, 1690, and immediately set about erecting a warehouse and some housing.
Bengal’s colonial merchants were not just British: At this time, Hooghly was primarily Portuguese and Dutch.
This sudden militarism was the result of the accession of King James II in 1685. The former Duke of York was a major shareholder in the Company, and turned it into a state-backed military power to protect his investment.
From Kalikat we derive Calcutta and now Kolkata; Sutanuti is now a central suburb of Calcutta; Govindpur a little higher up the river was where Fort William was erected in 1696. The three villages were held by the Sabarna Ray Chaudhury family on behalf of the Mughal Emperors; on November 10th 1698 the land was leased instead to the East India Company.
Précis
In the 1680s, the East India Company’s attempt to establish a presence in Bengal was frustrated by a mixture of the Nawab’s over-regulation and their own belligerence. Happily, Emperor Aurangzeb invited them to take possession of three small villages on the River Hooghly, a dream come true for their top agent, Job Charnock. (53 / 60 words)
Part Two
Eden Gardens cricket ground in Calcutta, with the River Hooghly and the Howrah Bridge beyond – a far cry from Job Charnock’s solitary warehouse in 1690. The iconic stadium was founded in 1864, and is now home to international cricket matches and to IPL franchise Kolkata Knight Riders. One suspects that in the company of his Indian wife and their three daughters, Job, who dressed Indian fashion, spoke fluent Persian, and took an interest in Indian astronomy, would have enjoyed the IPL’s colourful and rowdy blend of British and Indian culture rather more than some of his colleagues.
JOB Charnock had been in India since 1659, and knew Bengal like no other Englishman. He had run a factory up in Patna for twenty years; he spoke and dressed like an Indian, and had married a local girl.* It was Job who chose Sutanuti over Hooghly, and commerce over sabre-rattling as the way to Aurangzeb’s good opinion.
In just six months, Job’s warehouse had blossomed into a bustling river port named Calcutta. Aurangzeb awarded it an imperial charter on February 10th, 1691, and a year later Charnock’s operations were granted independence by Company headquarters in Madras. Records repeatedly show that the Company rated him their best agent.
Yet when he died on January 10th, 1692, he had amassed no personal fortune in over thirty years of service, and his blunt opinions and unflinching integrity had made him few friends. Job kept his respect for the people and customs of India, and coveted only Calcutta’s prosperity. And in that sense, he died a wealthy man.*
Sir Edward Littleton, the Company’s President in Bengal, wrote that she was a poor woman of low caste, and that Job and the Company had endured a great deal of trouble on her account, both at Patna and at Cossimbazar. The rumour that she was a runaway bride who had stolen her husband’s jewellery, and that Job had been run out of Patna after buying off the Nawab, was circulated by William Hedges, a rival at Hooghly whose underlings ripped off local traders. The rumour that she was a fifteen-year-old Brahmin princess rescued from her husband’s funeral pyre was started by Alexander Hamilton, a veteran teller of tall tales.
In 2003, the High Court in Kolkata officially stripped Job of his role as city Founder, on the grounds that Sutanuti, Govindpur and Kalikat were already inhabited. A sovereign nation may of course do as she pleases, but on that logic David did not found Jerusalem (formerly a city of the Jebusites), Emperor Constantine did not found Constantinople (formerly Byzantium) and Tsar Peter the Great did not found St Petersburg (formerly Nyenskans, a century-old Swedish colony).
Précis
Job’s settlement on the Hooghly grew rapidly from a single warehouse to a bustling river port he called Calcutta, and was officially recognised by Aurangzeb in 1691. Unlike many of his contemporaries, the scrupulous Job made little personal profit, and he was consequently not especially popular, but he left a legacy to Bengal beyond price. (54 / 60 words)
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