The Road Less Travelled: Journeying Through Little Europe in West Bengal

The road less travelled: journeying through little Europe in West Bengal

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley 1818

It’s the year 2022. My husband Jozef and I are still alive and well. Both Australian and Indian governments have lifted restrictions on international travel. Once again, we are free to visit family and friends in India, celebrate major festivals with them and continue exploring this vast country, revelling in its amazing history, art, architecture and scenic beauty.

India being one of the great foodie nations of the world, we are always keen to keep exploring its diverse food cultures. We never tire of telling our Western friends there is much more to Indian cuisine than butter chicken or chicken tikka masala and are always on the lookout for something new.

We begin in our usual way with a short stop in Delhi to check on my apartment and connect with family and long-term friends,  before flying on to Barasat, West Bengal (Bengal in pre-British times) to celebrate the festival of the mother goddess (Durga Puja) with my favourite aunt, her son and his wife. The festival is a colourful, exuberant, four-day smorgasbord of rituals, food, and cultural and social activities for all.

Festivities over, my cousin, who shares our interest in local histories, suggests we might like to explore ‘Little Europe’. This is a small stretch of land, barely forty kilometres long, on the banks of the River Hooghly, a major distributary of the mighty River Ganges. Once it housed a host of European traders and colonisers—notably the Portuguese, Danish, French and Dutch—attracted by Bengal’s fabled textiles, sugar and indigo. The colonisers have gone, but the remnants of their settlements remain.

We decide to eschew the Portuguese settlements, partly due to time constraints, partly because we have already been to Goa where the Portuguese remained in control until they were evicted by the Indian Army in 1961. We have never visited any of the Danish, French and Dutch trading posts, so these become our focus for this trip.

Our explorations begin with the Danish settlement at Serampore. This was once a centre of global trade, now reduced to a small, commercial town renamed Srirampur. The Danes settled there around 1755 after they signed a treaty with the local Mughal Governor (the Mughal dynasty still being the ruling Indian power at the time). The Danes undertook to  refrain from piracy, plundering local ships and selling the crew as slaves. They were expected to restrict their activities to trade and to exercise due diligence by paying their taxes and maintaining law and order.

The Danes seemed to have kept their word and more, with a great focus on promoting education and cross-cultural relations. Our first stop is at the Serampore College, the oldest degree college in Asia, which survives through support from the Indian Government. Sadly, there are no relics of the famous Serampore Press, which printed thousands of books, including Bengali translations of the Bible and the sacred texts of the Hindus, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, as well as two newspapers—Friends of India in English and Samachar Darpan in Bengali. The declining fortunes of the Danish government and trading companies led to the closure of the Press in 1837 though it is still mentioned in local accounts of the history of Serampore.

The Danes disappeared from Serampore after their debt-ridden government sold the trading post to the British East India Company. There has been a recent resurgence of interest in Denmark about their sojourn in Serampore and to our delight, we find that has led to their restoring the Denmark Tavern. Once reserved for Europeans, it now entertains Indian guests from Serampore, Kolkata and the neighbouring cities, who come to experience the historical atmosphere of the house. A good place to have lunch we think.

The Denmark Tavern is situated in a charming building. The ambience inside and the friendly staff complement the outside appearance. To our disappointment the Danish specialities on the menu, comprising Danish sausages, Danish roast chicken and Danish pastry with vanilla ice-cream, aren’t available. However, there are plenty of other cuisines to meet our various dietary requirements (my husband is gluten intolerant), with Bengali, North Indian, Chinese and Indo-English dishes to choose from. We settle for a mix of grilled sandwiches, French fries (the Indian term for chips) and Bengali dishes, all of which are excellent.

The next day we move on to the French settlement of Chandannagar. Unlike the Danes, the French survived the onslaughts by the British. Chandannagar was returned to the Indians without bloodshed or acrimony in 1950. After a quick walk along the Strand located on the Hooghly River, admiring the beautiful French buildings, we visit the Sacred Heart Church, which is famous for its stained-glass windows. Visitors are free to wander around when there is no mass or other activity. We sit quietly on one of the pews before heading to our foodie adventure for the day.

Sadly, there is no French equivalent of the Denmark Tavern in Chandannagar.  We are advised there are some French-style bakeries somewhere in the town, but we know they don’t usually cater for those who are gluten intolerant. Instead, we opt for Joloshree, a floating boat restaurant established by Bengalis.

The natural background of the Hooghly River, with its tree-lined banks and the sight of some young boys paddling around in a canoe and having fun, as young people will, create a lovely ambience. We decide to focus on Bengali delicacies for this meal and begin with a fresh green mango drink followed by mouth-watering fish and vegetarian dishes (all gluten free). Dessert is the only French-inspired item on the menu—caramel custard, which nicely complements the main meal.

From Chandannagar we move on to Chinsurah or Holland on the Hooghly. The town has a tumultuous history, changing hands between the British and the Dutch many times during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1825, the Dutch ceded their Indian colonies in exchange for the British possessions in Sumatra.

We have allocated only the afternoon for Chinsurah as we are aware the battles with the British resulted in the destruction of many of the purely Dutch buildings. There are a few notable buildings displaying a mix of Dutch, British and Indian influences but no landmark restaurants.

To us the most interesting relic of the Dutch colonisers is not the houses for the living but the dwellings of the dead. It takes us a while navigating the narrow streets of Chinsurah to find the Dutch cemetery. The cemetery is spread over 7,400-odd square metres and has an assortment of graves, dating from 1743 to the end of the nineteenth century and is reportedly the biggest non-British European cemetery in West Bengal. 

The Dutch Cemetery is now a protected heritage site managed by the Archaeological Survey of India, with trees and well-planned narrow walkways on which we could walk to look at the tombs. The monuments are mostly of a pinkish brick, with black or white marble headstones and epitaphs. Several of them are extremely large, reflecting the wealth of the people buried in them. The epitaphs are difficult to read and some have even been removed. Those that are legible provide a sobering reminder about how many in those days died young. There are graves for a five-day old baby, several children, and many young people under 20. The oldest grave is of a man named Sir Cornelius Jonge, who died in 1743, aged 56—fairly old for those days, though not today.

There are no other humans besides us except for a man who appears to have taken up residence in one of the mausoleums. Some of the trees are also dead but have huge creepers clinging on to them. We marvel at this evidence of life and death cohabiting in harmony.

We are coming to the end of the day, too late to visit the tomb with the most interesting story, which isn’t in the cemetery but on the outskirts of the town. A helpful website advised us this is the resting place of the legendary Susanna Ana Maria who is reputed to have married seven husbands. Each husband disappeared under mysterious circumstances. There are no historical facts to support this story but it has inspired a short story by Indian writer Ruskin Bond called ‘Susanna’s Seven Husbands’, which was later expanded from four pages to a full book and turned into a Bollywood movie.

The Dutch don’t seem to have left any imprint at all on local food culture. The Dutch Government has been more focused on supporting ‘digital archives of memories’ to record Dutch colonial history in India. The website http://dutchcemeterychinsura.com/  which was an initiative by scholars of the Presidency University in Kolkata and funded by the Embassy of the Netherlands provides a map, a digital database and other useful information.

The visit to the Dutch cemetery concludes our exploration of settlements of bygone European traders and invaders. As we leave, I recall the concluding lines from Ozymandias, the famous poem by nineteenth-century British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, about a once-powerful monarch whose memories are reduced to blocks of stone. Just like the tombstones of the Dutch Cemetery.

But we don’t despair. Emperors and empires come and go, but ordinary people carry on, forging new alliances and new ways to record shared histories.

Inside the floating restaurant, Chandannagar

The Danish Tavern, Srirampur

Living resident of the Dutch cemetery, Chinsurah

This article was first published in Sparx, Issue 8, 2023, Anthology of writing by the Society of Women Writers Victoria.