Ignored Dutch archives hold key to understanding colonial history of Kerala

The curious case of Dutch presence in India

In our popular understanding of modern Indian history, the relationship with the British is established fairly clearly. The British we know, had ruled over us and thereby left behind a strong imprint upon the ways of life in Indian society. The Portuguese and the French too had their small empires in India. The position of the Dutch who were active in India in the 17th and 18th centuries, however, is rather unclear.

They were in essence traders in India, hardly interested in establishing a political dominance in the region. Yet one can say for sure that they were in a position of influence. “They built forts, they left languages and they left archives,” says Ananya Jahanara Kabir, professor of English Literature in King’s College London and expert on Creole India. “But it is hard to describe their position in India. This elusiveness of the relationship between the Dutch and post-colonial India is very fascinating,” she adds.

At the same time, it is important to note that the Dutch were operating on hugely different terms in different parts of South Asia. Gommans in his book, ‘The Unseen World: The Netherlands and India from 1550’ (2018) notes that “in its northern bases in Gujarat and Bengal the Dutch East India Company (VOC) had to deal, from the outset, with the Mughal Empire.” The first attempt at establishing trading contracts in Surat in fact happened even before the VOC was established. In 1602, two Dutch merchants, Hans de Wolff and a certain Lafer, attempted to do business with Surat from their Indonesian base in Aceh. This interaction though was short-lived since a year later the two men were captured by the Portuguese and hanged in Goa. It was only in 1618 that the VOC received permission from the Mughals to do business from a trading post in Surat.

But the story of the VOC in India actually begins from the Coromandel Coast. Here they established themselves in the trading base of Pulicat and carried out business in Indian textiles in exchange for spices from the Indonesian archipelago.

It was in the Malabar region, though, where the VOC’s role took on a whole new colour. The trading posts located here were beyond the sphere of influence of the Mughal Empire. “Here the VOC followed the footsteps of the Portuguese, even setting up a territorial administration,” writes Gommans.

The geographical conditions in the Malabar region made it fertile for the growth of some of the most lucrative trading items such as cardamon, areca, cinnamon, ginger, sandalwood, and of course the most important of all, pepper (often referred to as the bride around which everything dances). Malabar’s pepper had for centuries attracted traders from across the world, including the Arabs, Jews, Armenians and most recently the Portuguese who landed there in 1498. By 1683, through a series of campaigns, the Dutch ousted the Portuguese from their territory and established themselves in Fort Cochin which was built by the Portuguese.

The battle between the Dutch and the Portuguese in December 1661. (Wikimedia Commons)

Although the Dutch had followed in the footsteps of the Portuguese in the Malabar region, there was a big difference in the way the two European powers operated there. “When the Portuguese reached the shores of India, they wanted the local people to obey their Catholic Pope and their King Manuel I,” says Bauke van der Pol, historian and author of the book, ‘The Dutch East India Company in India’ (2014). “The Dutch were Protestants and had a different point of view on religion. They never asked the local people to take on their religion,” he adds.

As a result, Portuguese impact on the society and culture of the Malabar region is a lot more prominent till date than that of the Dutch. “One easily comes across a lot of Portuguese food in the households and restaurants of Fort Cochin even today,” says van der Pol. “Similarly, it is common to come across a large number of Catholics in the Malabar region, most of whom trace their history to the time of the Portuguese.

Van der Pol explains that the Dutch maintained a more isolated existence in India. If at all they married outside their community, it was mainly with women who had a Portuguese-Indian origin. “They maintained a strict distance from the local people. They lived their own life in a close society in their forts and practised their own form of religion,” he says. “The only time they would venture out to intermingle with the local people was for the purpose of trade.”

But that is not to say that the Dutch had no influence on Malabar at all. “There is a huge architectural imprint that the Dutch left behind in Fort Cochin. The roofs and facades of the houses are very similar to those in the Netherlands or even in other parts of the world like South America and Suriname where the Dutch were active,” says Kabir. One can also find remnants of Dutch town-planning and street names.

When it comes to language, we do see the influence of Dutch in the Malayalam language, even though it is far more limited in comparison to that of the Portuguese. For instance, the Malayalam word for toilet, kakkoos is a corruption of the Dutch word kakhuis. Then there is also the sweet and buttery local bread that the locals remember as coming from the Dutch breudher. “Interestingly, you will see versions of the bread in other parts of South East Asia and Sri Lanka where the Dutch had a presence,” says Kabir.

Dutch Palace in Mattancherry (Wikimedia Commons)

But apart from these small bits and pieces, there is very little else from the Dutch that seems to have remained in popular memory and culture of the region. As Kabir explains, “it is almost as if once the Dutch had ousted the Portuguese, they made very few changes in the influence left behind by them. Although they did benefit a lot from the structural changes already made by the Portuguese.”

The other way to explain the conspicuous absence of the Dutch from the popular memory of the region is the way the British systematically wiped away Dutch remnants to frame their own presence in the region. The British took control of Fort Cochin in 1795 after ‘defeating’ the Dutch and remained there until the Independence of India in 1947. “By the 1780s it was quite clear that the British were going to focus on occupying India and the Dutch would colonise Indonesia,” says Singh. “Although Fort Cochin was the strongest and perhaps the most beautiful among the European forts in India it was completely destroyed by the British. All fortifications were raised to the ground!,” she adds. There was a fear that after a few years if the Dutch regained their military and naval strength they might want to regain their presence in Malabar and ceylon. The fort was therefore systematically destroyed to avert the Dutch from coming back. “This explains why there is no fort in Fort Cochin!” she quips.

A unique way of archiving Indian society and politics

Among the many forgotten remnants of Dutch presence in India is their unique way of observing and recording Indian society. The archive, which the Netherlands government has been trying to make accessible to historians in India, is known to contain thousands of pages stretching out over a 100 metres, and is currently spread out across the Hague in Netherlands, Chennai in Tamil Nadu and Ernakulam in Kerala.

W H Moreland, a British civil servant and economic historian of Mughal India, writing in 1923, had suggested that the VOC archive was indispensable to any student seriously interested in studying the Mughal period. This, he notes, was due to the fact that following the supremacy of the Dutch in seaborne trade, they contained an enormous amount of information on Indian commerce and seaborne trade. Secondly, the Dutch accounts of the markets in cities like Agra and Golconda were far richer in detail than anything found in English so far.

VOC commander Hendrik Adriaan van Reede tot Drakenstein and the Malabar physician Itti Achudan working on the Hortus Malabaricus (Kerala Museum, Edapally (Kochi), photo Jos Gommans)

Van der Pol says “the Dutch were very good at mapping the sea around the coasts of India and recording the change of currents and seasons because it was important for the merchants to come and go.” Consequently, in the Dutch archive one can find a large number of maps of Indian territories such as Surat, Fort Cochin, Nagapattinam and their surrounding areas.

The Dutch also had a distinctive way of recording daily events in the social and political life of the local community in the form of daily registers or what they called ‘Dagh-registers’.

Gommans, in a three-volume guide to the archive that he has co-authored, explains that the significance of the Dagh-registers lay in the fact that they “delineated the day-to-day working of institutions too familiar for indigenous chroniclers to describe.” They also contained information on the administrative procedures, types of punishment, methods of levying local taxes, detailed affairs of churches and temples, and a lot more that is critical material for any historian wanting to study the region.

Van der Pol explains that the Dutch also had a tradition of filing detailed reports of the region every five or six years when the commander of a settlement changed hands. “It carried information on several things like what was the relationship with the local king like, what was the profit from pepper, how the population of the settlement was changing, how many were slaves and so on,” he says. These reports were then filed in three forms. One was sent to the Netherlands, one to the capital of the VOC in Batavia (now Jakarta) and the third one to the new commander.

In Malabar, the Dutch had an early colonial empire and so, their records of the society there are the richest in comparison to those in other settlements like Surat and Bengal where they merely had trading factories. “Even for the smallest of swaroopams (principality in medieval Kerala) like Thekkumkur, one can find thousands of pages of records on what was happening in the court there,” says Gommans. “When two swaroopams, for instance, competed for the patronage of a temple, the Dutch reported it in detail,” he adds.

The records from Kerala are also interesting because of the many international religious communities residing there such as Syrian Christians, Catholics, Muslims, and Jews. Still anxious about the Catholic mission, the Protestant Dutch patronised many of these Christian communities. They also cooperated closely with Jewish trading groups that became suddenly linked to their fellow believers in Amsterdam. Consequently, the Dutch archives carry a lot of information on each of these communities as they started to rethink their past and identity.

The VOC-archive in the Tamil Nadu Archives Chennai before and after the Dutch Record Project TNA of 2010-2011 which aimed at preservation and digitization (Photographs Lennart Bes).

Gommans explains that even though Kerala also had a rich tradition of history writing, and a lot of information does exist in the vernacular records of the time, there is a problem in accessing them. “Much of the vernacular archives are with temple authorities which makes it difficult for historians to access them,” he says. Moreover, much of the other material are either lost or in local family collections and so it’s hard to have an overview of the sources that are available. “It is also important to note that the Dutch, being outsiders, have a distant, down-to-earth perspective about what is happening in the courts which I think is very unique,” Gommans says.

Given that the Dutch archives carry a significant amount of information on Kerala’s history, it is puzzling why they have been ignored in much of the history written about the region. “The Dutch archive became accessible to Indians only in the last five years or so. Before that anyone interested would have to travel to the Hague to access them,” says Mahmood Kooria, post-doctoral fellow at Leiden University and visiting professor of History at Ashoka University. “The second dimension is that of language. We in India grew up with English so it’s easier for us to access archives in English. These archives are in old Dutch so to access them one would require special training,” explains Kooria.

However, there were a couple of historians who in the early decades of the 20th century had used the Dutch archives for writing the history of Kerala. The most prominent among them was K M Panikkar who in the 1920s and 30s wrote a large number of books on the history of India and the Malabar region. There was also M O Koshy who in 1989 had published the book, ‘The Dutch in Kerala : 1729-1758’. Barring them, there was hardly any other historian who had made use of the Dutch archives for studying Kerala.

It is only in more recent times and through collaborative efforts of the Dutch and Indian governments that a number of scholars turned their attention to the ignored Dutch records. Binu John Mailaparambil, who along with Anjana Singh was part of the first project initiated by the Dutch government, TANAP (2003), has produced a detailed account of the Ali Rajas of Cannanore titled, ‘Lords of the Sea: The Ali Rajas of Cannanore and the Political Economy of Malabar (1663-1723)’ published in 2012.

Kooria who was part of the Cosmopolis program of the Dutch government in 2012 was trained in Old Dutch at Leiden University and has used the archives to work on the Dutch and Muslim interactions in the port town of Ponnani which he says is frequently referred to as ‘little Mecca’ because of its significance to the Muslim community of the region. “The other dimension I am working on is the engagement between the matrilineal Muslim community of Kannur with the Dutch community,” Kooria says.

Then there is Ghulam Nadri who has been using the Dutch sources to study 18th century Gujarat, and Murari Kumar Jha who has worked on trade along the Ganga. Vyapti Sur is currently using the archives to work on a project on corruption among officials of the VOC, while Archisman Chaudhuri is working on Aurangzeb’s expedition to the Coromandel coast.

Wicher Slagter, First Secretary at the Netherlands Embassy in New Delhi, explains that the efforts of the Dutch government to make these archives accessible is also to understand their own colonial history better. “In recent years there has been a lot of debate in the Netherlands about their historical responsibility in slave trade. Just last year, the Dutch government officially apologised for the Netherlands’ role in the slave trade,” says Slagter. “This is a shameful chapter of our history and we hope that these projects to open up the archive to Indian historians can help us understand more about it.”

Further reading:

Jos J L Gommans, The Unseen World: The Netherlands and India from 1550, Rijks Museum, 2018

Anjana Singh, Fort Cochin in Kerala, 1750-1830: The Social Condition of the Dutch Community in an Indian Mileu, Brill Publishers, 2010

Bauke van der Pol, The Dutch East India Company in India:A Heritage Tour Through Gujarat, Malabar, Coromandel and Bengal, Parragon Books, 2014

Jos Gommans, Lennart Best, Gijs Kruijtzer, Dutch Sources on South Asia c. 1600-1825, Manohar, 2001