Ghosts of the past must have crowded in on the US Consul General, Henry V Jardine (whose name has a commercial resonance from here to Hong Kong, but that may be coincidence), and Ramesh Bajpai, executive director of the American Chamber of Commerce, recently when they launched the chamber's Kolkata chapter.
The diligence with which the invisible Deepa Datta of whatever the old USIS is called nowadays sped the glad tidings to hacks like me would have caused wry amusement to William Duane, to whom India's press owes a debt in this age of Right to Freedom of Information assertiveness.
When researching my book Waiting for America: India and the US in the New Millennium, I came upon many Americans like Duane -- some admirably listed by my friend, M V Kamath -- who blazed a trail here. I also realised that, historically, the British tried their best to keep them out of Calcutta.
The Left Front didn't want them out: it wanted them here, but humiliated. Hence Harrington Street, where Jardine's consulate stands, became Ho Chi Minh Sarani in the 1960s. But from the Front's revolutionary ranks could also be heard the old Vietnam cry, "Yankee go home, but take me with you!"
One man the Brits accepted was American-born David Ochterlony who brought India the Terai and whose numerous Indian spouses, each on her own elephant, testified to his egalitarianism.
The Left Front's cut-cost Shahid Minar is the old Ochterlony Monument. Benjamin Joy was not as lucky as Ochterlony. Far from acknowledging his sweeping remit (which might make Jardine envious!) as George Washington's consul-general in Calcutta and to "other ports and places on the coast of India and Asia," the British wouldn't even recognise this first American representative in India in 1792. He had to be content with being a mere commercial agent.
Jealousy of America's rising power gave his chance to an outstanding Bengali, Ramdoolal Dey, who rose to fame and fortune because nobody would touch the Americans with a bargepole.
Ramdoolal must have chuckled into his shawl as Jardine declared that the new chamber "reflects the growing presence and interest of US businesses in eastern India". For the grandson of a cook for one of the Company's rich Bengali banyans, Ramdoolal stepped in when British agents and trading houses refused to handle American cargo.
He "also generously advanced them (the Americans) money to carry back the choicest wares -- spices, silks, fine cobweb muslins, gunny bags, perfumes, tea, sugar, carnelian necklaces and indigo."
Catering to growing American interest, "the traders also carried home with them Sanskrit books on Indian philosophy and religion. Some of these texts found their way to Yale University and became the springboard to its Sanskrit studies programme initiated by Edward Elbridge Salisbury, an early Sanskrit scholar."
Ramdoolal became the trusted confidante of New England businessmen. His heirs squandered his immense wealth after he died in 1825, but a painting of George Washington that 35 American merchants commissioned from Gilbert Stuart, a celebrated painter, in 1801 as a mark of their "esteem and affection" for the Bengali probably now hangs in the US embassy in Delhi. The grateful Americans also named a ship after Ramdoolal.
The news that 25 American business entities currently operate in West Bengal would have prompted Frederic Tudor to reflect that history does, indeed, run round in circles. He was the pioneer who had ice cut from the rivers and ponds of New England, wrapped in felt and sweet-smelling pine sawdust and shipped to India.
The first consignment reached Calcutta on board the SS Tuscany on September 6, 1833, with almost two-thirds intact. "Thus it appears," reflected Henry David Thoreau, "that the sweltering inhabitants of . . . Madras and Bombay and Calcutta drink at my well" and that while he bathed "in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, the pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges."
Back to Duane. An Irish Catholic from New York, he arrived in Calcutta in the 1780s, worked for four years for the East India Company and then launched a paper called The World devoted to the admirable idea that "all subjects whatever, ought, of right, to be publicly, openly and undoubtedly discussed."
Its editor was "a servant of the public -- whose good shall be his grand object." But being also aware of the limits of colonial tolerance, the canny American promised to "studiously and rigidly" avoid "political interference with the measures of government as well as subjects tending to invade the domestic threshold, or in any respect, bordering on the nature of libel."
The British were not to be fobbed off. Governments the world over -- including the Company's heirs in Writers Buildings -- must envy the swift efficiency with which they acted. Before you could say Yankee Doodle, Duane had been tried for publishing "offensive and injurious" remarks about an Indian potentate, convicted, arrested and deported, and his property confiscated.
And to think that Jardine's consulate was all set to pull out of Calcutta a few years ago. They stayed on only because the British begged the US not to leave them alone.
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