Masulipatnam: The Hub of Indo European History

Waheeda Bi khan

Masulipatnam: The Hub of Indo European History

The story of Indo-European settlements began at South Indian ports and Vasco da Gama's advent. After the Portuguese dominance of the Coromandel lands, the next arrivals were the Dutch, followed by the British and French. Today, the remnants of their history still echo from their silent, ruined forts, records, sites of old factories, and most significantly, their graves. One such flourishing port was Masulipatnam.

An illustration of Masulipatnam in 1676 Source: Wikimedia

The story of Indo-European settlements began at South Indian ports and Vasco da Gama's advent. After the Portuguese dominance of the Coromandel lands, the next arrivals were the Dutch, followed by the British and French. Today, the remnants of their history still echo from their silent, ruined forts, records, sites of old factories, and most significantly, their graves. One such flourishing port was Masulipatnam.

The history of Masulipatnam begins way before its mention in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. It is **one of the treasured ancient log books with records that have assisted historians all over the world in constructing the political, ethnological, and administrative details of all the lands, sea routes, and ports included in the sailing itinerary of the Greeks who authored it. The name mentioned in this logbook dating back to the mid of the first century, written in the Greek language, is Masalia. Even Ptolemy, the ancient mathematician-astronomer recorded the port town with the name of Maisolos during the Satavahana reign of the third century. The name seems to have originated owing to its most-in-demand trade of the Muslin cloth from this Coromandel coastal region by the Greeks. But, as per local folklore, the name is derived from the term machili or masuli in the local language, meaning “fish”, and patnam meaning “city.” The place is also known as Bandar, owing to the Arab traders (Bandar means “port” in the Arabic). Today, Machilipatnam or Bandar is part of the Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh. The coastal town lies at the mouth of the Krishna River before it joins the Bay of Bengal and has lost its glory days of sea trade after the cyclone of 1864 that devastated the entire region with waves as high as the faraway mountains.

Masulipatnam was always narrated as the hub of sea traders and one of the busiest ports in terms of traffic, but the real shift came with the advent of Europeans, each of whom wanted to monopolise the trade route and its products. The Dutch history on our subcontinent began the day a ship in the first decade of the seventeenth century got stranded in the seas near the Pulicat coast. It is said that the local Muslim expatriates rescued them and then agreed upon mutual trade arrangements. This established the Dutch East India Company with the permission of the contemporary queen of the Vijayanagara Empire. With the grants of lands for forts and factories, the Dutch traders soon established a stronghold on the market much to the chagrin of the Portuguese. Owing to the intermittent yet futile attacks from the Portuguese and the local support for the prospering trade of local textile products, the Dutch built their first garrison on the Coromandel coast and also a factory at Masulipatnam to facilitate easy transportation and storage of the goods with proper security. The major products the Dutch were interested in were indigo, cotton, rice, opium, and silk, apart from pepper and other spices. They took over the Portuguese business and forts at Ceylon, Madras, and also the Malabar coast.

The Dutch decline began with the Qutub Shahis overtaking the port of Masulipatnam. The Dutch Cemetery is unique for each of its huge tombstones inscribed with the names and clear details of the person resting in the grave underneath. The Dutch buried in this cemetery range from common sailors to army generals.

The Dutch-Indian heritage shared by the ancient port town of Machalipatnam could not be washed away by the high waves of the devastating cyclone. Though the British settlers abandoned the coast after it, the ruins of the Bandar Fort and the Dutch Cemetery have retained the tensile tales of their lives inscribed in the stones with their coat of arms. Today, the old port town has been brought back to life and reestablished as a thriving city. When the local administration decided to renovate the cemetery in 2020, they not just retained the history inscribed in the stones but also paid tribute to all the buried and lost poignant stories.

The fort testifies to their flourishing company on this coast. Though in ruins today and abandoned after the ravages of the cyclone, it had changed hands when the French temporarily overpowered the Dutch and then when the British came into power before its ultimate decommissioning. The Dutch East India Company brought Masulipatnam to its heights of traffic with home-bound ships supplying the gunpowder from the factory in Pulicat and later the VOC mint. The VOC enterprise was exceptional in its concept and was considered the world’s first global enterprise to initiate the pioneering corporate framework of business of issuing shares that is followed even today. They differed from the other European companies in their straightforward focus on just monopolising the market rather than having hidden agendas of colonising the regions gradually like the French and the British did. But, they defended their settlements valorously as evident by the Anglo-Dutch wars.

At one point in time, the Dutch East India Company was the largest private enterprise in the world, boasting 50,000 employees under its name, 150 commercial ships, 40 warships, and an army of 10,000 men.

The story of Machilipatnam Port is ingrained as the first Dutch settlement on the Coromandel coast, who then went to spread their base to Bengal and Surat in the north as well. Machilipatnam reached the greatest heights of its sea trade during the Qutub Shahi rule of the Golconda Sultanate and flourished until the great cyclone when the natural port was incapacitated by nature itself and no ships could dock on its shores anymore.