The Dutch Factory in Hooghly-Chinsurah, Bengal

Entry

This large bird’s-eye view of the factory, or trading station, of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and its immediate surroundings at Hooghly-Chinsurah in Bengal (just north of present-day Kolkata) provides a wealth of information about the Dutch commercial activities in Asia in the seventeenth century. Hendrik van Schuylenburgh clearly delighted in depicting narrative details, but was unconvincing in his rendering of buildings, figures and nature. This is the work of a geographer rather than a professional landscape painter. For example, the composition and perspective closely resemble the drawings of other Bengal factories made by the surgeon and amateur draughtsman Nicolaus de Graaff only a few years later.³ The basis of the present picture is a rough underdrawing, still visible in many places, outlining the landscape and structures.

The central part of the composition is occupied by the factory, which includes gardens, storage buildings, offices and stables inside its gate, and has the Dutch tricolour fluttering prominently from a pole in the lower left corner. The depiction largely corresponds to contemporary plans of the trading station and its surroundings. A detailed map of 1695 in the Atlas Isaak de Graaf shows a bakery, a forge and a weaving mill within the walls which Van Schuylenburgh omitted, though it is possible that they had not yet been built in 1665 (fig. a).⁴ In his painting Dutchmen and Indians are mainly involved in activities related to the production and transportation of silk and other fabrics, and the maintenance of the garden. On the left is the Hooghly river, a distributary of the Ganges, with a Dutch merchant ship at anchor and another one approaching from upstream. VOC officials are being rowed ashore in an Indian proa with a drummer in the bows setting the pace for the oarsmen.

Van Schuylenburgh depicted numerous individual scenes relating to striking local events or to the Dutch presence in Bengal in the grounds around the factory. He inserted a wealth of indigenous details throughout, such as palm trees, elephants, camels and Indian oxen. Clockwise from the small boatyard to the left of the Dutch flag one sees storage tents for the transportation of bales of silk, a ‘cottage of pleasure’ surrounded by palms, and a rectangular tangh for washing horses. To the right of this pond, on the path, a trumpeter is announcing the arrival of a VOC official and his assistant, who are being borne in a palanquin and accompanied by a procession of Indians on foot and Dutchmen on horseback. They are probably being taken to the encampment on the right, which has an Indian dignitary waiting in a pavilion decked with gold-embroidered carpets. Some religious rituals are taking place: close to the brothel a crowd of Indians and three Dutchmen witness the burning of a deceased woman on a pyre near the river, and beside the two distant structures right of the path an Indian is swinging in the air as a form of self-punishment.

The factory at Hooghly-Chinsurah was the headquarters of the VOC in Bengal. It had a staff of some 80 Dutchmen and over 100 Indians, who were mainly occupied with the trade in silk, textiles, opium and saltpetre.⁵ In 1664 the surgeon and traveller Wouter Schouten compared it to ‘a proud castle’ rather than ‘a factory’. According to him it was ‘situated on a distinguished plaza a gunshot from the great river Ganges, so that it cannot be washed away by floods’.⁶ Such a deluge, which had necessitated the rebuilding of the complex, had actually taken place in 1656.⁷ The original station was constructed in Hooghly in the 1630s, the new one of 1656 was located a kilometre and a half to the south at Chinsurah.⁸ It was fully operational again by the time Van Schuylenburgh made his preparatory sketch or sketches. It has been suggested that he visited Bengal some time between 1661, when his name is missing from the guild records for a few years, and 1665, the date of the painting. However, an earlier date has to be considered as well.

The man who probably commissioned the work was Pieter Sterthemius from Middelburg who directed the VOC’s Bengal activities from 1655 to October 1658.⁹ The combined coat of arms of his family and that of his wife Maria Calandrini is depicted above the pedestal in the right foreground.¹⁰ It seems plausible that the artist’s stay in Bengal partly coincided with that of his patron. Sterthemius returned to the Dutch Republic in 1659. As Van Schuylenburgh’s name is also absent from the guild books from 1653 to 1659, it is quite possible that he sailed home with him.

Erlend de Groot, 2024

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