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Job Charnock (; –1692/1693) was an English people administrator with the East India Company. He is widely regarded by historians as the founder of the city of Calcutta (Kolkata); however, this view was challenged in court, and in 2003 the Calcutta High Court ruled that he ought not to be regarded as the sole founder.
Charnock was described as a silent, morose man, not popular among his contemporaries, but as "always a faithful man to the Company", which rated his services very highly.3 January 1694, Diary of William Hedges, 2.293. In addition to his business acumen, he won the Company's esteem by stamping out smuggling among his less scrupulous colleagues. His zeal in this regard made him enemies who throughout his life spread malicious gossip to discredit him.I. B. Watson, Charnock, Job (c. 1630–1693), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, September 2004; online edition, January 2008, accessed 29 August 2008.
Charnock took a Hinduism common-law wife. Historian P. Thankappan Nair places the event in 1678 or a little earlier. A Company servant, Alexander Hamilton, later wrote that she had been a sati and that Charnock, smitten by her beauty, had rescued her from her husband's funeral pyre by the Ganges in Bihar,Alexander Hamilton, A New Account of the East Indies (1727), ed. William Foster, 2 vols (London: Argonaut, 1930), Vol. II, pp. 8–9. but Nair dismisses Hamilton's statement as fiction. She was said to be a fifteen-year-old Rajput princess. Charnock named her Maria, and soon after he was accused of secretly converting to Hinduism. Though he remained a devout Christian, the story of his conversion and moral laxity was so widely believed that it became a cautionary tale in a later more Victorian era.'The Englishman in India', The Times (25 October 1867), p. 4, col. E.
Charnock was promoted to the rank of senior merchant by 1666, and became third in the Bengal hierarchy in 1676. He was now the Company's longest-serving servant in Bengal, and applied for a transfer to a more senior post. After some haggling due to difficulties with resentful colleagues who hoped to see him sent away to Madras, on 3 January 1679 the directors promoted him to the position of head at Cossimbazar, second in charge of the Company's operations in Bengal.
On Hedges' arrival at Hooghly, Charnock found him to be an officious neophyte. The rivalry between the Company's two most senior servants in Bengal was aggravated by the intrigues of Company servants and interlopers keen to undermine Charnock's authority and resume their smuggling operations on the side. Charnock was further irritated by the fact that members of Hedges' staff from Hooghly were regularly sabotaging their colleagues' work in Cossimbazar by poaching the local commodities. In 1684 the exasperated directors restored supervisory control over Bengal to the new president at Madras, William Gyfford, and replaced Hedges in Bengal with John Beard, the elder.
Finding himself again besieged at Hooghly, Charnock put the Company's goods and servants on board his light vessels. Pursued by the nawab's troops, on 20 December 1686 he dropped down the river to Sutanuti, then "a low swampy village of scattered huts",Bhabani Bhattacharya, 'City of Cities is now callous', The Times (26 January 1962), xxi. but a place well chosen for the purpose of defence.
It was probably during this interlude at Sutanuti that Charnock suffered a personal loss in the death of his wife Maria. They had been together for some twenty-five years. They had one son (who would predecease his father), and three surviving daughters who were later baptised in Madras. Although Maria was buried like a Christian, and not cremated as a Hindu,Grant, 'Origin and Progress of English Connexion with India', Calcutta Review, No. XIII, Vol. VII (January–June 1847), p. 260. Charnock was said to sacrifice a Rooster over her grave each year on the anniversary of her death, "after the Paganism". University librarian Prabodh Biswas writes that the ritual resembles the Sufi worship of the panch peer or "five saints", a custom which Charnock "is said to have adopted". He was also said to have built his garden house at Barrackpore so as to be near her grave.
Even though Charnock had married a native woman, he had a certain animosity towards the natives due to his sufferings at the hands of the native rulers. Captain Hamilton had said, "the Governor (Charnock) at the hour of dinner and near his dining room had delinquents (native) punished that he might satiate himself with their cries."
Accordingly, in September 1688 the largest naval force the Company had ever assembled swept into the bay, with orders to blockade the ports and arrest the ships of the Aurangzeb, and, if this did not bring satisfaction, to take the town of Chittagong. Beard being dead, authority devolved to a reluctant Charnock as commander-in-chief. As he anticipated, Chittagong proved remote and unviable. Sutanuti had in the meantime been razed by the nawab's troops, therefore the squadron sailed for Madras, arriving on 7 March 1689.
In March 1690, the Company received permission from Aurangzeb in Delhi to re-establish a factory in Bengal, and on 24 August 1690 Charnock returned to set up headquarters in the place he called Calcutta; the appointment of a new nawab ensured this agreement was honoured, and on 10 February 1691 an imperial grant was issued for the English to "contentedly continue their trade".Charles Robert Wilson, ed., The Early Annals of the English in Bengal, 2 vols. in 3 pts (1895–1911), vol. 1: The Diary of William Hedges (1681–1687), ed. R. Barlow and H. Yule, 3 vols., Hakluyt Society, 74–75, 78 (1887–89).
The directors showed their approval of Charnock's initiative by making his agency independent of Madras on 22 January 1692. Thereafter "Calcutta grew steadily till it became India's 'city of cities' and capital".
A mausoleum was erected in 1695 over Charnock's simple grave by Eyre, his son-in-law and successor. It can still be seen in the graveyard of St. John's Church, the second oldest Protestant church in Calcutta after John Zacharias Kiernander's Old Mission Church (1770), and is now regarded as a national monument.'St. John's, Calcutta,' The Times (20 September 1955), p. 10, col. E. Forgotten founder lies unsung The stone for the mausoleum was brought from the St. Thomas Mount, Madras. Later in 1893 geogologist T. H. Holland found it to be a different form of granite and named it Charnockite after Job Charnock.
Translation:
The inscription omits any mention of Charnock's Hindu wife Maria. Eyre may have hoped to make the public image of his predecessors and in-laws seem more respectable to the growing Anglican community in Calcutta.H. B. Hyde, 'Notes on the Mausoleum of Job Charnock and the Bones Recently Discovered within It', Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Vol. XXIX (March 1893), pp. 79–80. Even so, the monument was built by Bengali craftsmen, and its incorporation of Indo-Islamic design reflects the intersection of two cultures which their union personified.
Other historical authorities reject such revisionism:
Rivalry with William Hedges
Cossimbazar was notorious as a smugglers' den, and when Charnock assumed his new post on Christmas Day 1680 it was over the objections of Streynsham Master, president at Madras, who oversaw the Company's operations in the whole Bay of Bengal. The directors reprimanded Master for his interference, but although they agreed to free Bengal from oversight by the Madras presidency, Charnock's hopes of promotion to the top Bengal post at Hooghly River were dashed when in 1681 the directors sent out one of their own, William Hedges, as agent of the bay and governor of Bengal.
Chief agent in Bengal
When Beard died on 28 August 1685, Charnock finally assumed the position of agent and chief in the Bay of Bengal.'The Imperial Gazetteer of India', The Times (26 May 1881), p. 5, col. C. By this time a crisis had arisen over restrictions on trade, and in particular the Mughal Empire nawab's imposition of a customs duty of 3½ per cent, which the English refused to pay on the grounds that it was in breach of the original firman which exempted them from customs.'The Early History of the English in Bengal', The Times (31 August 1889), p. 11 col. D. Relations with the nawab deteriorated into violent conflict. When Charnock received word of his promotion, Cossimbazar was under siege, and he could not leave to take up his responsibilities at Hooghly until April 1686. On his arrival he continued to resist what he saw as extortion, by force or persuasion, and when these did not serve, by taking the Company's business elsewhere.
(2025). 9789388271417, Bloomsbury. ISBN 9789388271417 From Sutanuti he moved on to Hijli Kingdom in February 1687, where he was again besieged from March to June 1687. After negotiating a truce and safe passage, he transferred the factory back to Sutanuti in November 1687.
Chittagong expedition
By 1686 the secret committee of the court of directors in London had decided the Company should establish a fortified settlement in Bengal, to resist what they regarded as arbitrary exactions and violent harassment by Mughal officials:
Calcutta
In Madras Charnock persuaded the reluctant council, over the objections of its president, his old opponent William Hedges, that Sutanuti was the best place to establish the headquarters in Bengal, because of its defensible position and its deep-water anchorage for the fleet. The selection of the future capital of India was entirely due to his stubborn resolution.
Mausoleum
Charnock died in Calcutta on 10 January 1692 (or 1693 according to an exhibition at the Victoria Memorial which points out that the 1692 date on his gravestone refers to an old calendar system by which the new year began in March), shortly after the death of his son. His three surviving daughters all remained in Calcutta: Mary ( d. 19 February 1697), Elizabeth ( d. August 1753), and Katherine ( d. 21 January 1701); all found wealthy English husbands. Mary married the President and Governor of Fort William, Sir Charles Eyre.Mentz, Søren. The English Gentleman Merchant at Work: Madras and the City of London 1660–1740 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2005), p. 134.
It is inscribed with the Latin epitaph:
Assessment
In the verdict of Scottish historian Sir Henry Yule:
Ruling of Calcutta High Court
A Calcutta High Court ruling on 16 May 2003, based on a report from a committee found that a "highly civilised society" and "an important trading centre" had existed on the site of Calcutta long before Charnock established his settlement. They also found the place then called Kalikatah was an important religious centre due to the existence of the Kali temple in the adjacent village of Kalighat. The first literary reference to the site is found in Bipradas Pipilai's magnum opus Manasa Mangala which dates back to 1495. Abul Fazl's Ain-I-Akbari dating 1596 also mentions the place. The Sabarna Roy Choudhury family was granted the Jagirdari of Kalikatah by Emperor Jehangir in 1608. The report added that there are multiple founders: Charnock, Eyre and Goldsborough, Lakshmikanta Majumdar, the Sett Bysack families, Gobindapur and Sabarna Choudhuries (who sold land to the English). Job Charnock not Kolkata's Founder: Expert committee, Times of India (31 January 2003). Accessed 1 September 2008. The court argued that Charnock ought not to be regarded as the sole founder of Calcutta, and ordered government authorities to purge his name from all textbooks and official documents containing the history of the founding story of the city.Bangiya Sabarna Katha Kalishetra Kalikatah by Bhabani Roy Choudhury, Manna Publication.
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