(Portuguese, 2nd part)
After 1579, the Portuguese settlement at Hughli began to take definite shape in contrast to their seasonal settlement at Bettore. Abul Fazl's description of the visit of Pratab Bar Feringhi to the court of akbar would suggest that Satgaon had remained under the control of the Mughals, although Abul Fazl had stated categorically that both Satgaon and Hughli ports had remained under the Portuguese. The building at Satgaon mentioned by Abdul Hamid Lahori, seen by the contemporary French traveller Vincent Le blance, must have been demolished sometime after. It is plausible that more water was flowing through the Hughli once the silting of the Saraswati had begun. Despite the growth of the Hughli, Van Linschoten (end of 16th century) had found the Portuguese living 'like wild men and untamed horses', where 'every man is Lord'.
On the eastern coast, the Portuguese buccaneers often helped their supporter to victory. In 1586, Tripura wrested Chittagong from the Arakanese with Portuguese help, but soon they shifted their support towards Arakan, whose king Sikandar Shah finally wrested it in 1588. Chittagong continued for nearly a century in the possession of Arakan.
The Portuguese, who captured Sandwip under Antonio de Sousa Godinho in 1590, did not like the growing power of the Arakanese. Their hold over Sandwip was temporary. Pierre Du Jarric, who compiled the history of this region in the seventeenth century, tells us that KEDAR RAI of vikramapura wrested it from Godinho, possibly with the help of another set of Portuguese mercenaries. After the defeat and untimely death of Kedar Rai, the island passed to Domingo Carvalho, who has been made immortal in later Bengali literature. The rising of the non-Portuguese population of Sandwip was brutally suppressed and Carvalho, sharing power with another Portuguese, was ennobled by the king of Portugal for reasons not clear.
Once again the Portuguese ascendancy was temporary. Although Carvalho could defeat an Arakan invasion, he and his like-minded Portuguese had to leave the island. They found employment, with jaigirs and lucrative trading opportunities, as artillerymen and naval crew in the semi-autonomous coastal kingdoms of Sripur, Bakla and Jessore. Carvalho was however wounded in an encounter with the Mughals and had to leave for Hughli, where he recuperated from his wounds.
Reverend james long had stated that the Portuguese had built a fort at Hughli with four bastions and a ditch. Father Hosten denied the existence of any such fort. Khafi Khan however mentioned a fort although the contemporary travellers remained silent. According to Pierre Du Jarric, Carvalho had seized a fort constructed by the Mughals on the opposite side of the river. At Chittagong, the Arakanese had constructed a fort and had allowed the Portuguese to settle around.
The Portuguese had also settled in the inland areas of western Bengal. The letters of the visiting Jesuit Fathers at the end of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries spoke of such settlements on the mouth of the Hughli River. Reverend Long had referred to a Portuguese settlement at Diamond Harbour on the basis of a map no longer extant. Portuguese settlements in eastern Bengal at the turn of the century were referred to by the Jesuit Fathers, particularly at Sripur and Jessore, where Carvalho along with other Portuguese were imprisoned by the zamindar of Jessore, pratapaditya. It seems that the Portuguese settled between Ishwaripur and Dhumghat, which had created tension within Jessore society, leading to the murder of the Portuguese police chief. The Jesuits later ransomed some of the imprisoned Portuguese.
One of the reason of the hatred of the local people towards the Portuguese, apart from their unrestrained style of living, was the enslavement of coastal people by some Portuguese pirates operating jointly with Arakanese moving in fast boats. The account of Shihabuddin Talish contains such information. Francois bernier had referred to one Bastian Gonsalves (Sebastian Gonslaves Tibeau) as chief of the pirates. The attitude of sheer hostility of the coastal zamindars towards the Portuguese as well as towards the Jesuits developed particularly after 1605 from an earlier attitude of warm reception with permission to build churches and to convert, could only be explained against the background of such piracy and slave-trading.
After the departure of Carvalho, Manoel de Mattoo controlled Sandwip. With his death, Fateh Khan took over after killing the Portuguese. Gonsalves Tibeau who also killed the entire male Muslim population there killed him in turn. But Tibeau, being a trader earlier, developed Sandwip as a commercial mart, particularly for salt, which attracted merchants from Bengal and the Coromandel. Tibeau then seized Dakshin Shabazpur to be free from Bakla under which he was operating till then.
While the Mughals were advancing towards the cost, Tibeau married the daughter of the fugitive king of Arakan, Anuporam (sister according to some version) and allying with the king of Arakan seized Bhulua. But the Mughals managed to get Tibeau out of the alliance and routed the Arakanese, whose ships were seized by Tibeau. In 1615, Tibeau, who had left Arakan, proposed to Goa to seize Arakan. Goa's fleet of sixteen ships was defeated by the Dutch squadron supporting Arakan and Tibeau had to fall back to Sandwip to be defeated by Arakan in 1616.
The reason of the anarchical nature of the Portuguese settlements on the eastern coast, in contrast to that of the western, perhaps lies in the fact that the Portuguese colonies on the eastern coast did not legally form part of the dominion of the Portuguese King. These were the settlements of the Portuguese private merchants and adventures, often with blurred distinctions, paying taxes to local authorities and enjoying certain privileges. These were different from other European factories established in Bengal since the mid-seventeenth century.
By 1580, some Portuguese traders had settled at Dhaka and Sripur, from where they had begun to export muslin, cotton and silk goods to Europe and Southeast Asia. The establishments in the inland areas did not have forts and from evangelical documents one finds the Portuguese settlements doing well till the early eighteenth century, often with Churches set up by the Portuguese Augustine Fathers. These could be seen in the districts of Dhaka, Barisal, Noakhali and particularly at Lorical, 28 miles south of Dhaka, where the Augustinians had built a church at the end of the sixteenth century.
There were rich Portuguese merchants like Nicolo de Paiva at the end of the seventeenth century. At Bhulua there were many converts made by the Portuguese. In Tamluk, the Portuguese settlement had a church built in 1635. The flourishing slave market at Tamluk in the seventeenth century was mentioned by Shihabuddin Talish. In 1724, Valintine had mentioned the wax trade at Tamluk, while Carreri in 1695 had found Tamluk under Portuguese control.
With Chittagong passing into Arakanese hands, the principal Portuguese settlement was at Hughli, to which the Portuguese historian Cabral paid rich tribute. He referred to the payment of one lakh rupees annually as customs duty to the Mughals by the Portuguese for the salt trade, but the figure seems to be exaggerated. Despite the flourishing trade at Hughli, the Portuguese Empire, annexed to Spain by the third decade of the seventeenth century, was on the road to decline. The Portuguese governor of Ceylon, who was losing one possession after another to the Dutch, governed the Portuguese east. The Portuguese did not have either any funds or any systematic policy.
The King of Portugal nominated the captain of the Portuguese settlement of Hughli. There were four administrative assistants to the captain annually elected by the Portuguese inhabitants - all of them nominally under the governor of Ceylon. Inside Hughli town, the rich Portuguese, as in Goa, usually led the life of a rich Muslim with a harem. Below them, the numerous half-breeds (mesticos) supervised the menial work of the slaves and the Indian peasants. The Portuguese priests formed the top layer of the social order, although there is no evidence of any inquisition as seen at Goa in the seventeenth century. The Bengali artisans and labourers (Garibos in Portuguese) stood apart and had no interest in sustaining Portuguese rule.
In 1632, the Mughals appeared before Hughli to drive the Portuguese away from the Hughli River. The accounts of Mirza Nathan and Shihabuddin Talish describe the piratical activities of the Portuguese and Magh raiders, which resulted in Hughli turning into a flourishing slave market. Cabral, however, opined that it was because the Portuguese fleet had deserted shahjahan in his hour of need that the Mughals were provoked to attack.
The Mughals captured Hughli on 13 September 1632, thanks to the total desertion of the Bengali families living in the suburbs and to the support given to the Mughals by Martin Alfonso de Mello. Some Portuguese escaped to Sagar Island. Cabral mentions that one hundred Portuguese were killed in the Mughal cannonade, which seems to be accurate. Later English and Dutch documents speak of the return of the Portuguese to Hughli. European documents of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century refer to a farman of Shahjahan, now not extant, giving 777 bighas of land to the Portuguese at Hughli. The charge of the settlement, particularly at Bandel, was given to a Father of the Bandel church, which seems to be confirmed by a parwana of the subahdar shah shuja in 1641. The Augustine priests, who had built a church at Bandel in 1600, almost at the same time as the church at Jessore was built, had worked out a peace formula with the Jesuits of Goa in 1632.
In 1660 Nicolao manucci had found many rich Portuguese merchants at Hughli enjoying a monopoly in the salt trade. A few years later, Bernier was not so enthusiastic and mentioned nine thousand Portuguese and mesticos living in poverty in Bengal. In 1670, Thomas Bowrey found ten thousand Portuguese mainly working in the ships at Hughli, out of twenty thousand in the whole of Bengal. Some of these rich Portuguese paid handsome donations to the Church as could be seen in the rebuilding of Bandel church in 1761 by a rich Portuguese.
Even after the departure of Gonsalves Tibeau, the coastal area of Chittagong had remained open to the piratical activities of the Portuguese, often in alliance with Arakanese, with the base at Sandwip. As usual the Portuguese-Arakanese alliance was a temporary one and the Mughals could capture Chittagong the 26 January 1666, largely due to the help of other Portuguese. They also supported the Mughals in 1681 when the Arakanese were driven away from Sandwip, which reduced coastal piracy to a great extent. Manucci's statement that, after the conquest, shaista khan killed many of the Portuguese and sent many of them to be settled around Dhaka cannot be confirmed. By the end of the eighteenth century some of the Portuguese had become important traders, as we can gauge from references to one Cosmo Gomes flourished from the end of the seventeenth century to the third decade of the 18th century. The Portuguese inhabitants of Bandel had also earned the gratitude of the Mughal authorities when they successfully resisted the passage of the rebels, sobha sing and rahim khan, on their way to Hughli through Bandel. By the early eighteenth century, the Potuguese settlements on the southeastern coast were located at Dianga, Feringhee Bazar in Chittagong district and in the municipal ward of Jamal Khan in Chittagong.
With the growth of French commerce, the Portuguese merchants had moved from Hughli to Chandernagore (chandannagar) under the French. Chandernagore municipal records of the eighteenth century show a large number of rich Portuguese merchants living in their own houses with slaves. Although some of the Portuguese had settled at Calcutta, the English in 1733 ordered their servants not to deal with the Portuguese. Yet Hughli was not abandoned, as we find the arrival of a Portuguese ship there in 1740. By then the Portuguese had lost their ambition and resources to dabble in politics. Some of the mesticos were employed in the army of the nawabs at a small salary. However, it was in the field of culture that the Portuguese left a lasting impression.
The Portuguese brought exotic fruits, flowers and plants, which became part of Bengali civilization and culture. The potato, cashew nut, papaya, pineapple, kamranga (Averrhoa carambola), guava and the Alfonso mango, among others were brought by them, showing their zeal for agri-horticulture and became part of Bengali life. Even the Krishnakali (Mirabilis jalapa) plant, with its varied colours, is a gift of the Portuguese.
From the early days of their arrival, the Portuguese did not object to marrying local women, although the top jobs were reserved for white Portuguese men from Portugal. As a result, many Portuguese words like chabi, balti, perek, alpin, toalia have come into the Bengali vocabulary. This process was perhaps facilitated by the Portuguese interest in the Bengali language. The first printed book in prose in Bengali was by a Portuguese, as was the first Bengali grammar and dictionary. In 1599, Father Sosa translated a religious tract into Bengali, which is not extant now. But another religious work in Bengali was written by a Bengali Prince of Jessore, who was enslaved and then converted into Christianity with a new name, dom antonio. His superior, Mansel de Rozario, wrote a dialogue in Bengali along with a Bengali grammar and a dictionary, which was printed in Lisbon in 1743. Although the Portuguese set up the first printing Press at Goa in 1556, they could not follow it up in Bengal due to the unstable nature of their establishments in Bengal. [Aniruddha Ray]
After 1579, the Portuguese settlement at Hughli began to take definite shape in contrast to their seasonal settlement at Bettore. Abul Fazl's description of the visit of Pratab Bar Feringhi to the court of akbar would suggest that Satgaon had remained under the control of the Mughals, although Abul Fazl had stated categorically that both Satgaon and Hughli ports had remained under the Portuguese. The building at Satgaon mentioned by Abdul Hamid Lahori, seen by the contemporary French traveller Vincent Le blance, must have been demolished sometime after. It is plausible that more water was flowing through the Hughli once the silting of the Saraswati had begun. Despite the growth of the Hughli, Van Linschoten (end of 16th century) had found the Portuguese living 'like wild men and untamed horses', where 'every man is Lord'.
On the eastern coast, the Portuguese buccaneers often helped their supporter to victory. In 1586, Tripura wrested Chittagong from the Arakanese with Portuguese help, but soon they shifted their support towards Arakan, whose king Sikandar Shah finally wrested it in 1588. Chittagong continued for nearly a century in the possession of Arakan.
The Portuguese, who captured Sandwip under Antonio de Sousa Godinho in 1590, did not like the growing power of the Arakanese. Their hold over Sandwip was temporary. Pierre Du Jarric, who compiled the history of this region in the seventeenth century, tells us that KEDAR RAI of vikramapura wrested it from Godinho, possibly with the help of another set of Portuguese mercenaries. After the defeat and untimely death of Kedar Rai, the island passed to Domingo Carvalho, who has been made immortal in later Bengali literature. The rising of the non-Portuguese population of Sandwip was brutally suppressed and Carvalho, sharing power with another Portuguese, was ennobled by the king of Portugal for reasons not clear.
Once again the Portuguese ascendancy was temporary. Although Carvalho could defeat an Arakan invasion, he and his like-minded Portuguese had to leave the island. They found employment, with jaigirs and lucrative trading opportunities, as artillerymen and naval crew in the semi-autonomous coastal kingdoms of Sripur, Bakla and Jessore. Carvalho was however wounded in an encounter with the Mughals and had to leave for Hughli, where he recuperated from his wounds.
Reverend james long had stated that the Portuguese had built a fort at Hughli with four bastions and a ditch. Father Hosten denied the existence of any such fort. Khafi Khan however mentioned a fort although the contemporary travellers remained silent. According to Pierre Du Jarric, Carvalho had seized a fort constructed by the Mughals on the opposite side of the river. At Chittagong, the Arakanese had constructed a fort and had allowed the Portuguese to settle around.
The Portuguese had also settled in the inland areas of western Bengal. The letters of the visiting Jesuit Fathers at the end of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries spoke of such settlements on the mouth of the Hughli River. Reverend Long had referred to a Portuguese settlement at Diamond Harbour on the basis of a map no longer extant. Portuguese settlements in eastern Bengal at the turn of the century were referred to by the Jesuit Fathers, particularly at Sripur and Jessore, where Carvalho along with other Portuguese were imprisoned by the zamindar of Jessore, pratapaditya. It seems that the Portuguese settled between Ishwaripur and Dhumghat, which had created tension within Jessore society, leading to the murder of the Portuguese police chief. The Jesuits later ransomed some of the imprisoned Portuguese.
One of the reason of the hatred of the local people towards the Portuguese, apart from their unrestrained style of living, was the enslavement of coastal people by some Portuguese pirates operating jointly with Arakanese moving in fast boats. The account of Shihabuddin Talish contains such information. Francois bernier had referred to one Bastian Gonsalves (Sebastian Gonslaves Tibeau) as chief of the pirates. The attitude of sheer hostility of the coastal zamindars towards the Portuguese as well as towards the Jesuits developed particularly after 1605 from an earlier attitude of warm reception with permission to build churches and to convert, could only be explained against the background of such piracy and slave-trading.
After the departure of Carvalho, Manoel de Mattoo controlled Sandwip. With his death, Fateh Khan took over after killing the Portuguese. Gonsalves Tibeau who also killed the entire male Muslim population there killed him in turn. But Tibeau, being a trader earlier, developed Sandwip as a commercial mart, particularly for salt, which attracted merchants from Bengal and the Coromandel. Tibeau then seized Dakshin Shabazpur to be free from Bakla under which he was operating till then.
While the Mughals were advancing towards the cost, Tibeau married the daughter of the fugitive king of Arakan, Anuporam (sister according to some version) and allying with the king of Arakan seized Bhulua. But the Mughals managed to get Tibeau out of the alliance and routed the Arakanese, whose ships were seized by Tibeau. In 1615, Tibeau, who had left Arakan, proposed to Goa to seize Arakan. Goa's fleet of sixteen ships was defeated by the Dutch squadron supporting Arakan and Tibeau had to fall back to Sandwip to be defeated by Arakan in 1616.
The reason of the anarchical nature of the Portuguese settlements on the eastern coast, in contrast to that of the western, perhaps lies in the fact that the Portuguese colonies on the eastern coast did not legally form part of the dominion of the Portuguese King. These were the settlements of the Portuguese private merchants and adventures, often with blurred distinctions, paying taxes to local authorities and enjoying certain privileges. These were different from other European factories established in Bengal since the mid-seventeenth century.
By 1580, some Portuguese traders had settled at Dhaka and Sripur, from where they had begun to export muslin, cotton and silk goods to Europe and Southeast Asia. The establishments in the inland areas did not have forts and from evangelical documents one finds the Portuguese settlements doing well till the early eighteenth century, often with Churches set up by the Portuguese Augustine Fathers. These could be seen in the districts of Dhaka, Barisal, Noakhali and particularly at Lorical, 28 miles south of Dhaka, where the Augustinians had built a church at the end of the sixteenth century.
There were rich Portuguese merchants like Nicolo de Paiva at the end of the seventeenth century. At Bhulua there were many converts made by the Portuguese. In Tamluk, the Portuguese settlement had a church built in 1635. The flourishing slave market at Tamluk in the seventeenth century was mentioned by Shihabuddin Talish. In 1724, Valintine had mentioned the wax trade at Tamluk, while Carreri in 1695 had found Tamluk under Portuguese control.
With Chittagong passing into Arakanese hands, the principal Portuguese settlement was at Hughli, to which the Portuguese historian Cabral paid rich tribute. He referred to the payment of one lakh rupees annually as customs duty to the Mughals by the Portuguese for the salt trade, but the figure seems to be exaggerated. Despite the flourishing trade at Hughli, the Portuguese Empire, annexed to Spain by the third decade of the seventeenth century, was on the road to decline. The Portuguese governor of Ceylon, who was losing one possession after another to the Dutch, governed the Portuguese east. The Portuguese did not have either any funds or any systematic policy.
The King of Portugal nominated the captain of the Portuguese settlement of Hughli. There were four administrative assistants to the captain annually elected by the Portuguese inhabitants - all of them nominally under the governor of Ceylon. Inside Hughli town, the rich Portuguese, as in Goa, usually led the life of a rich Muslim with a harem. Below them, the numerous half-breeds (mesticos) supervised the menial work of the slaves and the Indian peasants. The Portuguese priests formed the top layer of the social order, although there is no evidence of any inquisition as seen at Goa in the seventeenth century. The Bengali artisans and labourers (Garibos in Portuguese) stood apart and had no interest in sustaining Portuguese rule.
In 1632, the Mughals appeared before Hughli to drive the Portuguese away from the Hughli River. The accounts of Mirza Nathan and Shihabuddin Talish describe the piratical activities of the Portuguese and Magh raiders, which resulted in Hughli turning into a flourishing slave market. Cabral, however, opined that it was because the Portuguese fleet had deserted shahjahan in his hour of need that the Mughals were provoked to attack.
The Mughals captured Hughli on 13 September 1632, thanks to the total desertion of the Bengali families living in the suburbs and to the support given to the Mughals by Martin Alfonso de Mello. Some Portuguese escaped to Sagar Island. Cabral mentions that one hundred Portuguese were killed in the Mughal cannonade, which seems to be accurate. Later English and Dutch documents speak of the return of the Portuguese to Hughli. European documents of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century refer to a farman of Shahjahan, now not extant, giving 777 bighas of land to the Portuguese at Hughli. The charge of the settlement, particularly at Bandel, was given to a Father of the Bandel church, which seems to be confirmed by a parwana of the subahdar shah shuja in 1641. The Augustine priests, who had built a church at Bandel in 1600, almost at the same time as the church at Jessore was built, had worked out a peace formula with the Jesuits of Goa in 1632.
In 1660 Nicolao manucci had found many rich Portuguese merchants at Hughli enjoying a monopoly in the salt trade. A few years later, Bernier was not so enthusiastic and mentioned nine thousand Portuguese and mesticos living in poverty in Bengal. In 1670, Thomas Bowrey found ten thousand Portuguese mainly working in the ships at Hughli, out of twenty thousand in the whole of Bengal. Some of these rich Portuguese paid handsome donations to the Church as could be seen in the rebuilding of Bandel church in 1761 by a rich Portuguese.
Even after the departure of Gonsalves Tibeau, the coastal area of Chittagong had remained open to the piratical activities of the Portuguese, often in alliance with Arakanese, with the base at Sandwip. As usual the Portuguese-Arakanese alliance was a temporary one and the Mughals could capture Chittagong the 26 January 1666, largely due to the help of other Portuguese. They also supported the Mughals in 1681 when the Arakanese were driven away from Sandwip, which reduced coastal piracy to a great extent. Manucci's statement that, after the conquest, shaista khan killed many of the Portuguese and sent many of them to be settled around Dhaka cannot be confirmed. By the end of the eighteenth century some of the Portuguese had become important traders, as we can gauge from references to one Cosmo Gomes flourished from the end of the seventeenth century to the third decade of the 18th century. The Portuguese inhabitants of Bandel had also earned the gratitude of the Mughal authorities when they successfully resisted the passage of the rebels, sobha sing and rahim khan, on their way to Hughli through Bandel. By the early eighteenth century, the Potuguese settlements on the southeastern coast were located at Dianga, Feringhee Bazar in Chittagong district and in the municipal ward of Jamal Khan in Chittagong.
With the growth of French commerce, the Portuguese merchants had moved from Hughli to Chandernagore (chandannagar) under the French. Chandernagore municipal records of the eighteenth century show a large number of rich Portuguese merchants living in their own houses with slaves. Although some of the Portuguese had settled at Calcutta, the English in 1733 ordered their servants not to deal with the Portuguese. Yet Hughli was not abandoned, as we find the arrival of a Portuguese ship there in 1740. By then the Portuguese had lost their ambition and resources to dabble in politics. Some of the mesticos were employed in the army of the nawabs at a small salary. However, it was in the field of culture that the Portuguese left a lasting impression.
The Portuguese brought exotic fruits, flowers and plants, which became part of Bengali civilization and culture. The potato, cashew nut, papaya, pineapple, kamranga (Averrhoa carambola), guava and the Alfonso mango, among others were brought by them, showing their zeal for agri-horticulture and became part of Bengali life. Even the Krishnakali (Mirabilis jalapa) plant, with its varied colours, is a gift of the Portuguese.
From the early days of their arrival, the Portuguese did not object to marrying local women, although the top jobs were reserved for white Portuguese men from Portugal. As a result, many Portuguese words like chabi, balti, perek, alpin, toalia have come into the Bengali vocabulary. This process was perhaps facilitated by the Portuguese interest in the Bengali language. The first printed book in prose in Bengali was by a Portuguese, as was the first Bengali grammar and dictionary. In 1599, Father Sosa translated a religious tract into Bengali, which is not extant now. But another religious work in Bengali was written by a Bengali Prince of Jessore, who was enslaved and then converted into Christianity with a new name, dom antonio. His superior, Mansel de Rozario, wrote a dialogue in Bengali along with a Bengali grammar and a dictionary, which was printed in Lisbon in 1743. Although the Portuguese set up the first printing Press at Goa in 1556, they could not follow it up in Bengal due to the unstable nature of their establishments in Bengal. [Aniruddha Ray]
No comments:
Post a Comment