The Mausoleum of Job Charnock

Mr. Job Charnock Esq. was the man who founded the city of Calcutta, but not according to the High Court of West Bengal. In an odious piece of spiteful revisionism in 2003 the Court, led by a submission from a team of nationalist historians, ruled, to its great discredit, that Calcutta was a major trading port prior to Charnock and that all references to Mr. Charnock as founder of the city were to be erased in perpetuity from the official documents, records and school history books. This was part of the post-colonial tantrum that led to the trivial name change from the Angloform “Calcutta” to the more indigenous sounding but hardly more informative “Kolkata”.

The case of Job Charnock is a singular instance of the type of petty and juvenile revisionism with which post-colonial intellectuals and activists concern themselves. In this instance they do so against the evidence of the known facts. The simple truth is that prior to Job Charnock this salubrious location on the Hoogley River consisted of three villages and a jungle and not much else. The location, marked especially by the Kali temple at Kalighat, was mentioned in earlier documents, to be sure, but it nevertheless consisted of three villages and jungle and not much else. It was indeed Mr. Charnock, an officer of the British East India Company, who proposed it as the location for a trading base that subsequently became Fort William. And it was through the vision of Mr. Charnock that the location was developed by the East India Company, and later the Raj, as the ‘London of the East’, a great prosperous city of Hindoostan, a safe port just up river from the Bay of Bengal. Dress it up how they may, the resentful and small-minded Anglophobes who engineered the rewriting of the city’s history cannot defy the plain truth of the matter. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2008 edition, sets the record straight:

It is mostly due to Charnock's imagination, his vision, and his commitment to what he considered was right that the English transformed three small villages on an inhospitable tract of riverbank into what was to become the premier city in India ... Of all the great cities of modern India, Calcutta it is that owes its existence to the vision and commitment of one man.

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The mausoleum of Job Charnock is now in the grounds of the historic St. John’s Church near Delhousie Square in what was once the centre of Calcutta city. It is built of a local mineral named after him, Charnockite and houses the earliest European graves in Calcutta, considerably older than those graves found in the old cemetery at the south end of Park Road. (See previous post.)

The tomb of Mr. Charnock himself is marked in a beautiful Latin inscription, as follows:

D.O.M. Jobus Charnock, Armiger Anglus et nup. in hoc regno. Bengalensi dignissimum Anglorum Agens Mortalitatis suae exuvias sub hoc marmore deposuit, ut in spe beatae resurrectionis ad Christi judicis adventum obdormirent. Qui postquam in solo non-suo peregrinatus esset diu reversus est domum suae aeternitatis decimo die 10th Januarii 1692. Pariter Jacet Maria, Iobi Primogenita, Carole Eyre Anglorum hicci Praefecti. Conjux charissima. Quae Obiit 19 die Februarii A.D. 1696–97.

Translation:

In the hands of God Almighty, Job Charnock, English knight and recently the most worthy agent of the English in this Kingdom of Bengal, left his mortal remains under this marble so that he might sleep in the hope of a blessed resurrection at the coming of Christ the Judge. After he had journeyed onto foreign soil he returned after a little while to his eternal home on the 10th day of January 1692. By his side lies Mary, first-born daughter of Job, and dearest wife of Charles Eyre, the English prefect in these parts. She died on 19 February AD 1696–7.

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The mausoleum also includes the notable grave of William Hamilton, the British surgeon who, famously, cured the Mughal Emperor Farrukseer of swelling in the groin. The emperor had been due to marry a princess from Jodhpur; it was Hamilton’s cure that permitted the marriage to proceed. Farrukseer was delighted. Hamilton was handsomely rewarded. The East India Company was given the right to trade duty-free out of Calcutta and Hamilton received an elephant, a horse, five thousand rupees in money, two diamond rings, a jewelled aigrette, a set of gold buttons, and models of all his instruments in gold. His plaque includes an inscription in Persian:

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More intriguing than these notable graves are those marked in the paving around the mausoleum. In many cases they are so worn that the names, dates and inscriptions cannot be made out. These too are early graves of the men and women of the East India Company who first created a fort and trading post on the Hoogley River near the Bay of Bengal. What makes these graves intriguing is that most of them display the skull and cross bones. As with the graves in the Park Road cemetery there are no indications of Christian piety, and least of all crucifixes. Instead, in these cases, the conspicuous iconography is of the skull and crossed bones. Here are some samples:

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black