Drunkards Maybe, but not Mere Others
'Dutch Sources on South Asia c. 1600 - 1825' is the title of a guide, which is being compiled by Jos Gommans, Lennart Bes, and Gijs Kruijtzer. Its first volume deals with the paper legacy of drunkards and curious minds found in the National Archives, The Hague.
COURTESY OF ARA, VERZAMELING BUITENLANDSE KAARTEN, LEUPE (VEL)
1107.
The introduction of the 'Reel of Pouchon' in Bengal was long resisted
by the VOC, finding the method expensive, and local peasants, who detested
having one stage in the production of silk taken out of their hands. The
drawing (1774) symbolizes the last phase of the so-called Age of Partnership.
* By GIJS KRUIJTZER
'The colour of his beard, eyebrows, and eyelashes was [that] of the grapes that come from Ghazni, and his speech was like that of wild birds; it had no cerebrals. His complexion was that of a leper...' A description of a Dutchman in India? Not quite, this is the way an envoy from the Ghurid Turks is portrayed in the late twelfth-century Pritviraja Vijaya. Compare a Brahmin minister of Golkonda's words about a Dutchman, five centuries later: 'He is a man with no sense, but with mounting anger, and of a stubborn nature, also still young and a drunkard, not listening to reason from anybody.' While the first passage delimits a mere stereotype, an 'other', the second passage sets out a flesh and blood person with a character, suggesting much more familiarity.
The five centuries that elapsed after the victory and subsequent defeat of Prithviraja witnessed a massive influx of foreigners into South Asia. Like Turks, Afghans, and Persians, many Dutchmen quickly became a part of the cosmopolitan society that existed in the harbours and at the courts of rulers in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century India. A major difference was, of course, that the Dutch maintained their links abroad via an organization called the VOC.
In writing the first volume of Dutch Sources, which deals with the National Archives at The Hague and includes an extensive bibliography, we constantly kept in mind that the VOC personnel had one foot on the land and one foot in the sea. This two-fold legacy attracts two species of scholars: South Asianists and the VOC-wallahs. Catering to the needs of both presents a major challenge. As the sheer size of the National Archives' holdings hardly permits 'full' coverage - that is if full coverage were desirable at all - the Guide covers some parts of the archives down to individual pieces and documents, and others more generally. The bibliography of printed, edited and translated primary sources and of secondary works on the Dutch involvement with South Asia can be used independently.
Dutch Sources seeks to attend South Asia scholars to materials such as personal and family papers that are also in the National Archives, yet form no part of the VOC archives. An appendix to the Guide provides the first more or less proper inventory of the National Archives' documents in Indian languages. As is the case for these documents, over 90 per cent of the maps and drawings relating to South Asia are now also outside the VOC archives. Dutch Sources includes historical and historiographic introductions and various regional maps, which Lizette de Koning helped us sort through.
Still the VOC archives and especially the famous Overgekomen Brieven en Papieren series will remain the mainstay of most research in the field. To facilitate research in the Overgekomen Brieven en Papieren the Guide provides 'artificial series' of related documents that are in reality scattered throughout. The importance of the VOC archives is also reflected in the arrangement of Dutch Sources. It follows the VOC factory administration's late seventeenth-century division of South Asia into: Surat (Gujarat), Malabar, Ceylon, Coromandel, and Bengal.
Neither South Asian reality nor the lives of VOC personnel, however, fit the VOC administrative framework. The upper echelons of the VOC administration found it hard to stomach that VOC employees in the factories lived lives outside the VOC, in South Asia. Not only private trade was a permanent eyesore to Batavia and patria, the very fact that VOC people spent time on things bearing no relation to the VOC occasioned reproach. Herbert de Jager, for instance, felt compelled to defend his interest in 'curiosities' in the following way: 'How little the curiosities matter to me when more important matters are at hand, can be seen from the fact that even in passing Kanchipuram, Thiruvarur and other reputed places I did not spend more than a few hours, [whereas] a curious mind could spend whole months there.' *
- Gommans, Jos, Lennart Bes and Gijs Kruijtzer, Dutch Sources on South Asia c. 1600-1825, Volume I: Bibliography and Archival Guide to the National Archives at The Hague, Delhi: Manohar (2001), 425 pp., ISBN 81-7304-384-1, with maps.
Gijs Kruijtzer, MA is presently pursuing a PhD at the University of Arizona, focusing his research on group identities in seventeenth-century Golkonda.
E-mail: gkruijtz@email.arizona.edu