A PILGRIMAGE TO CALCUTTA RECALLS ARMENIAN HISTORY
By Leonard M. Apcar
International Herald Tribune
a/calcutta.php
Nov 17 2008
France
CALCUTTA: Before there were call centers and Indian conglomerates,
before the East India Co. or the British Raj, there were Armenians who
made their way to India to trade and to escape religious persecution
from the Turks and, later, Persians.
Entrepreneurial and devout Christians, but familiar with the Islamic
ways of Mughal emperors, Armenians arrived in northeast India in
the early 1600s, some 60 years before British adventurers became
established traders here. They acquired gems, spices and silks,
and brought them back to Armenian enclaves in Persia such as Isfahan.
Eventually, some Persian Armenians – including my ancestors – left
and set up their own businesses and communities here, landing first
on India’s western flank in Surat and nearby Bombay, the present-day
Mumbai, and then moving to the river banks in northeast India that
led to Calcutta’s founding as a sprawling manufacturing and port city.
At its zenith, Calcutta was the British Empire’s "second city." Its
vast manufacturing centers rivaled the English Midlands, and wealth
flowed freely to Jews, Britons, Armenians and some Indians. They
in turn poured money into elaborate colonial mansions, Victorian
memorials and a luxurious Western way of life virtually transplanted
to the wilting jungle of West Bengal.
The British are gone now, of course, and that way of life is literally
crumbling in the dusty, clogged streets of Calcutta. All but gone,
too, are the Armenians who began leaving India long before the British.
But last week Armenians with Calcutta roots gathered here again from
around the world. More than 250 people came officially for the 300th
anniversary of the oldest church in Calcutta, a finely preserved
Holy Church of Nazareth tucked inside the narrow, winding alleys and
chaotic bazaars of the north section of this city.
But they also came to be together again and to honor an extraordinary
restoration effort of all five Armenian churches and assorted
graveyards in northeast India.
I came from Hong Kong, but many came from England, Iran, the United
States and Australia. We walked the cemeteries looking for graves of
grandparents and great-grandparents, toured the 187-year-old Armenian
school, admired the ambitious renovation work recently completed
on the churches and cemeteries and at the gleaming white church in
downtown Madras.
Armenians never amounted to more than a few thousand people in
Calcutta, but in the 18th and 19th centuries they ran trading
companies, shipping lines, coal mines, real estate developments
and hotels. A few served in the colonial government, and some had
sewn themselves so finely into the fabric of colonial India that
they were decorated with British titles and were leaders of private
English-only clubs.
"They ran Calcutta," one alumnus of the Armenian school, David
Alexander, said with a touch of exaggeration.
By the time the British left, and an independent India was on a
socialist and anti-colonial bent, the Armenians had mostly cleared
out. Wealthier, educated and more confident as entrepreneurs, they
left not for Armenia itself, then a Soviet-controlled postage stamp
of a state, but for London, where some Calcutta Armenians had second
lives, or new frontiers in Australia or the United States.
My great-grandparents left earlier; as a young couple they headed
for Japan in 1890, and their descendants ended up staying and trading
for 50 years.
Of the nine million Armenians in the world, only about a third are in
Armenia. The bulk are in Russia, the United States and France, with
a smattering along the trading routes of Asia. Armenian churches and
graveyards dot India in Agra, Delhi, Hyderabad, Madras, Mumbai, Surat
and, of course, Calcutta. But they are also in Dhaka, Bangladesh;
Yangon in Myanmar; on Penang Island off the coast of Malaysia;
Singapore; and parts of Indonesia – all places where Armenians settled,
traded and worshiped.
Worship is the social adhesive that binds Armenians together. Clannish
and wary of outsiders, the church has always been the focus of their
socialist and cultural lives. Given Armenia’s pride as the first state
to adopt Christianity as its religion, it was not surprising that last
week with the families came Karekin II, Catholicos of all Armenians,
as the leader of the Holy Armenian Apostolic Church is known, and a
choir of two dozen from the church’s seat in Etchmiadzin, Armenia.
But the real stars in Calcutta were its five churches. Only a few
years ago four of them were weed-infested snake pits looking like
Roman ruins. Now, in the midst of southeast Calcutta’s horrid slums,
on gritty, rutted roads, rises Holy Trinity Chapel in the Tangra
district with a new dome and a manicured graveyard. Inside, I found
the refurbished graves of my great-great grandparents, who in the
1880s lived in Calcutta and Rangoon, as Yangon was known then.
"These things had to be recreated," said Haik Sookias Jr., who helped
lead the reconstruction effort in Calcutta. "If we let our churches
go, then Armenians will never come back to India, and people will
walk by and say ‘the Armenians used to live here.’ But by renovating
these churches, Armenians will live here forever."
Richard Hovannisian, a historian and professor of Armenian studies at
the University of California at Los Angeles, said what distinguished
the Armenian diaspora in India was that the Armenians never accompanied
their trading ambitions with military force. Nor did they try to
enforce cultural supremacy. "They succeeded within the structure of
the adopted communities," he said.
At base, Armenians were survivors with a fortunate sense for sometimes
picking the right side when superpowers clashed. When it became clear
that the British were going to overpower other Europeans and Arabs
to take control of India, Armenians agreed to ship all their goods
to Europe and the Middle East exclusively with British ships instead
of the Arab fleets they had used before.
When the Dutch ruled what is now Indonesia, and their ships ran out
of money during long, storm-delayed sailings around the Cape of Good
Hope, the story goes that Armenians loaned money to the Dutch. It
wasn’t purely a banking transaction. It also ensured that Armenian
businesses might continue to prosper in the Java rice fields.
Over time, Armenian merchant princes were overpowered by the rise of
merchant banking institutions in Europe and the large international
companies they financed, Hovannisian said.
As Indians took control of their country, Armenians were looked on as
holdovers from a colonial past. Many large Armenian family enterprises
in India were either sold off or closed.
Today, there are only a few hundred Armenians in the entire Calcutta
region of about 15 million people. The Armenian school here has long
relied on students from abroad to fill its dormitories.
While the Armenian community in Calcutta has all but disappeared,
there is hardly a serious guidebook or history book of the city that
does not mention their influence, charities and churches.
That is a source of pride and communal strength reflected in last
week’s commemoration. "When the economic powers of Indian communities
weakened and waned, there were greater challenges to figure out how
to establish deep roots here," said Professor Hovannisian. "It drew
the Armenians closer."