ARMENIAN LANDMARK IN CALCUTTA DESTROYED BY FIRE

2010/03/29 | 16:54

Diaspora

The following article is culled from today’s Hindustan Times. Dealing
with the legacy of one famous Armenian, Arathoon Stephen, in dovetails
well with the article on Liz Chater and the Armenian community in
India, elsewhere in today’s Hetq.

"Yet Another Colonial Hangover" by Pratik Kanjilal

Life on Kolkata’s Park Street will not be the same after the
devastating fire in Stephen Court. The hub of social life and
entertainment almost since the city was founded, the street has
recently been trying to recover from its decline during Marxist rule.

Now, its regeneration could falter. Kolkata is an old-style city with
a sense of public decency. The tragedy will be mourned for years
to come and going out for a bit of fun on the street where so many
people died needlessly could feel unnatural.

People are also mourning the destruction of a landmark of the
colonial skyline. Interestingly, though Stephen Court was a Raj
period building, it was not built by a colonial. In fact, much of the
remarkable heritage architecture of the Presidency towns is of Asian
provenance. The English mainly built government institutions to rule
from, educational institutions to generate manpower, and barracks
for the military that kept them in power. They built an astonishing
number of barracks. In fact, one of Kolkata’s satellite towns is
called Barrackpore. Ironically, that’s where the 1857 rising started,
precipitated by the court martial of the turbulent sepoy Mangal Pandey.

Stephen Court was built by the Isfahani Armenian Arathoon Stephen
(1861-1927), who arrived in Kolkata dirt-poor and became a real
estate baron. His impoverished refugee origin may be an exaggeration,
since his family was perhaps already in India when Pandey was turning
up the heat. But he was certainly a merchant prince committed to
institution-building. His most remarkable property was a Chowringhee
boarding house he took over from a Mrs Monk and turned into the iconic
Grand Hotel. When business declined in 1938 following Kolkata’s great
cholera epidemic, it was bought on the cheap by a certain Mohinder
Singh Oberoi. The Oberoi Grand was a lucky buy, minting money during
the war years when thousands of Allied soldiers were billeted there and
partied with single-minded determination as they waited to be shipped
out to fight the Japanese. It became the seed of the transnational
Oberoi chain of hotels.

The British did not exclusively build the colonial skyline, as we
imagine. Mercantile Asians, notably the Armenians, also invested in
building modern India. Armenians were trading with the Malabar Coast
from the 8th century and the seed of the British Empire, the Mughal
firman allowing the East India Company to set up shop in Bengal, was
brokered by an Armenian named Khoja Sarhad. By the time of Stephen,
about 30,000 Armenians were settled in India. And when Armenia was
under Soviet rule, this nation persecuted throughout history valued
India as a safe haven for its church.

In 2003, the Calcutta High Court ruled that the Company functionary
Job Charnock could not be identified as the founder of Kolkata. The
evidence against him included mention of the town in Abul Fazl’s
Ain-i-Akbari and the popular medieval text Manasa Mangal. But the court
neglected the most damning evidence: the oldest Christian gravestone in
India, in Kolkata’s Armenian Church. It is that of an Armenian woman
named "Rezabibi, wife of the late charitable Sookias, who departed
from this world to life eternal" in 1630. At the time, Charnock was a
suckling babe in London. So much for the British creating modern India!