Abstract
This fine study of eighteenth-century Cochin is an important book in more than one way. First and foremost, it corrects a geographical imbalance in Dutch overseas social history, which still tends to pay little attention to India. Second, it draws attention to how a Dutch community grew roots in Asia through intense miscegenation and the acquisition of land in ways that are often believed to be more typical of Portuguese expansion. Third, it offers a detailed picture of the social fabric of an early modern Indian port city through Dutch sources. Finally, it endeavours to study the transition from one colonial regime to another. All this is achieved through a sound scrutiny of archival sources, most notably the Cochin Dutch papers now extant in the Tamil Nadu State Archives in Chennai, other Dutch sources in the Nationaal Archief at The Hague, as well as English records at Chennai and the Maharashtra State Archive in Mumbai.
Chapter 1 offers a detailed description of the physical and social space of Cochin, and this is where the first and only serious criticism of the book arises: there is not a single map or view of the town other than the pale background image from the Vingboons Atlas printed on the dust cover and a sketchy overview of present-day Cochin. Be that as it may, this chapter introduces the important leitmotiv of Dutch ‘localisation’ (p. 38) in Cochin, arguing that many Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC, the Dutch East India Company) servants were locally born and recruited. Although there was a ‘conscious attempt to create a “Dutch Society”’ in India, most of its members never saw the Netherlands.
In Chapter 2 Singh goes over to a diachronic analysis of the ‘metamorphosis’ of the Malabar command between 1750 and 1784. Here the author takes issue with the prevalent view that Dutch power in India was essentially aimed at the control of trade, and that once this control faded, the VOC declined. The chapter opens with a surprising quote from 1761 by Commander Casparus de Jong: ‘Income from land is the source from which the state exists’ (p. 45). Singh does not contest that trade in Indian pepper was at the centre of VOC strategies in the region for many years, nor that it declined in the late eighteenth century. She does however argue that the Dutch in Cochin were able to cope with the crisis rather well: first, by diversifying into textile and sugar trade, and second, more significantly, by shifting their attention ‘from black pepper to brown soil’, thus transforming the Command into a major landlord (p. 72). Most of this was achieved through negotiations with local communities such as the Payancheri Nayars, who allowed the VOC to collect taxes. This often brought along other administrative and judicial duties. The territorial stance was further consolidated by De Jong’s successor Godefridus Weyerman (1761–1764) who had served in Cannanore before. Weyerman explored the VOC’s right to protect groups such as the Roman Catholics in Pappinivattam. He also forced his way into lands controlled by the rajas of Cranganur and Airur, and consolidated the VOC’s stance on Vaipin island at Cochin. Perhaps Singh could have gone a step further in analysing the exact means—arguably a combination of juridical arguments with commercial and military threats and diplomatic chutzpah—by which the VOC achieved effective control, but this is a complex matter that probably deserves a separate study.
Singh shows that the local logic of expanding the control over lands and creating ‘a new colonial model’ (p. 89) remained unbroken through the 1770s–1790s. From here it is only one step to ask how the social conditions of Fort Cochin were transformed. A substantial part of Chapter 3 is a deliberately static analysis of the social groups and institutions functioning in and around the fort. The author places emphasis on the importance of local recruitment. By 1785, over 40 per cent of recruits were locals, the proportion growing to 70 per cent among the qualified personnel, mostly in the commercial sphere. As early as 1698, it was remarked that Dutch servants married local women and ‘wished to continue living at Cochin’ (p. 113). By the late-eighteenth century, many of the company’s servants’ family ties would not extend beyond the ‘Ceylon–Malabar–Surat network’ (ibid.) What is not entirely clear, is how the official categories of VOC servants related exactly to the perceived social status of people living in and around Cochin, that is, how matters of position, wealth, privilege, blood, religion and perhaps caste interacted in practice. Yet Singh makes some interesting points concerning the cooper-ation across communal and institutional borders, namely when it comes to Jewish merchants.
The question arises about how conflictive all this was, and to what extent there was ethnic or religious segregation. Despite all the mingling, intermarriage was mostly limited to unions between Roman Catholics and Dutch Reformed. Most of the institutions analysed (Court of Justice, Church, School, Orphanage) essentially served VOC servants, and the Diaconate even followed a ‘strict policy of exclusion of non-VOC people’ (p. 145). Only the Court was extensively used by other religious groups. One is left to conclude that the miscegenation referred to earlier in the chapter did not dissolve the notion that the Company’s servants, together with the free burghers and some others, formed a relatively coherent group.
Chapter 4 describes the increasing English pressure on the Malabar Command and the 1795 takeover. Chapter 5 then analyses life after the Dutch defeat, taking as a starting point the fact that all Christians who had been under the Company’s protection came under British jurisdiction, and that a majority of VOC servants decided to remain in Cochin. The transition is further discussed in Chapter 6. Despite the evident frictions, Singh seems to suggest that there was a relatively positive outcome, though in the end what remained of the Dutch presence were essentially memories. Malabar as such, with its long tradition of receiving foreign traders and integrating them into its social and economic fabric, certainly played a role in the relative smoothness of the transitions from one colonial rule to the next, as Singh cautiously suggests. What remains to be shown is how diverse the strategies of survival were.
Anjana Singh’s study changes our perception of the Dutch presence in India whilst leaving space for much further research into the specific dynamics of single institutions and, perhaps more interestingly, the histories of families and individuals who, being confronted with changes in the wider world, remained attached to what they considered to be their true and only home, a cosmopolitan port city in South India.