From pioneering Jesuits to supplying Indian royalty with beautiful Saint Lambert glassware and chandeliers, Belgium’s Indian footprints prolonged from Malabar to Bengal, and from weapons to linguistics. Immediately the connection is encrusted with commerce in diamonds between Surat and Antwerp.
As an impartial democracy, Belgium is sort of 200 years outdated. Very like India, it was dominated by different kingdoms earlier than it achieved independence following the Belgian Revolution in 1830. Immediately, it contains two major linguistic teams: those that communicate Dutch and those that communicate French. That is carefully adopted by some who communicate German.
Whereas the Belgians had been late entrants within the imperialist conquest of the world, their exploitation of the Central and East African nations is well-known, significantly within the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Ruanda Urundi (current day Rwanda and Burundi). King Leopold II’s fief-like rule over the Congo Free State noticed an estimated 10 million Congolese perish (roughly half the inhabitants, as a part of punishments for failing to satisfy quotas included beatings, mutilation (resembling slicing off arms), and the destruction of villages. This prompted the world’s first main worldwide human rights motion.
From the sixteenth century onward, the territories that represent present-day Belgium had been successively dominated by the Spanish Habsburgs (1556-1714), the Austrian Habsburgs (1714-1794), and Revolutionary France (1794-1815). Located on the crossroads of main European powers, the area turned a frequent theatre of warfare, incomes the later moniker of the Battlefield of Europe. It was underneath Austrian Habsburg rule within the 18th century, significantly in the course of the interval of the Austrian Netherlands, that the foundations of extra sustained relations between the Indian subcontinent and the territories of present-day Belgium started to emerge.
From Ostend to Bankibazaar
By the mid-18th century, European imperialist ventures just like the Dutch, French, English and Portuguese buying and selling firms had established a number of posts, and enclaves in India, from Bombay and Malabar on the western coast to the Coromandel, all the best way as much as Bengal, the place the Nawabs had granted permissions to the Dutch VOC, and their opponents the French, and English buying and selling firms.
The Ostend was one such enterprise. It was a chartered buying and selling firm from the Austrian Netherlands (or what contains modern-day Belgium) and was established in 1722 to commerce with the East and West Indies. It took its title from the Flemish port metropolis of Ostend. In keeping with historian Michael Wanner, “Flemish retailers promptly availed themselves of recent alternatives and with their new masters’ patents they began penetrating the Indian Ocean and China, establishing commerce contacts and new factories. In addition to Coblon’s (additionally Cobelon, or Kovilam) base on the Coromandel Coast based on seventh Might 1719, there was additionally a base in Bankibazar, Bengal.”
He writes of the arrival of two enterprising former English East India Firm captains in Bengal in 1721,and their reception by a Bengal nawab—Jafar Khan (1695-1765 CE), who assured them that they might be capable of commerce there, “underneath the identical circumstances as different nations, and so they had been additionally promised to be given the chance to construct a manufacturing facility in Balasore”.
Reacting to this information, the Viennese Court docket instantly empowered Marquis de Prie, who was a plenipotentiary of a prince in Austrian Netherlands, to pick out somebody to barter related circumstances for establishing a manufacturing facility with the nawab. Lieutenant Normal Jacques Andre Cobbe was chosen for this, arriving in Bengal in 1723. He was to barter for “authorized exterritoriality for the Ostend colony” in addition to “the fitting to freely profess the Catholic faith”, writes Wanner.
Siege of Bankibazar
Cobbe’s mission thus marked the start of a critical Austrian try to ascertain a industrial presence in Bengal by means of the Ostend Firm. Though he secured permission to ascertain a settlement at Bankibazar, located between the British settlement of Calcutta and the French settlement of Chandernagore, the corporate’s place remained precarious. Its rising commerce threatened the established pursuits of the English and Dutch East India Firms, each of which sought to restrict Ostend industrial exercise and tried to steer the Nawab to limit its operations. The Ostenders additionally confronted tensions with native authorities over their claims to industrial privileges and spiritual freedom. Cobbe was killed in 1724 throughout combating at Danemarnagore (Danemarksnagore close to Chandannagar), after which Alexander Hume assumed a number one position and pursued the event of Bankibazar as a small however energetic buying and selling settlement. Regardless of these difficulties, the Ostend Firm’s commerce in Bengal and elsewhere in Asia confirmed appreciable promise, significantly in textiles resembling chintz and different invaluable commodities, and its industrial success demonstrated the potential of Austrian participation within the Asian commerce.
The success of the Ostend Firm, nonetheless, created a critical diplomatic drawback for Austria. Britain and the Dutch Republic regarded it as a harmful competitor and pressured Emperor Charles VI to suppress the corporate. In response, Charles VI suspended its constitution in 1727, though buying and selling continued for some years. Underneath the Second Treaty of Vienna in 1731, Austria agreed to its last abolition. Thus, regardless of its beginnings in Bengal and the institution of Bankibazar, the Ostend Firm was finally sacrificed to Austria’s broader diplomatic pursuits in Europe.
Bankibazar apart, Wanner notes that the Ostend Firm additionally “held smaller (colonies) in Kasimbazar and Dhaka and had brokers unfold in a variety of Bengal localities.” In 1744, Mir Jafar laid siege with over 10,000 troops after the ‘Germans’ (as Ostenders had been then identified regionally) launched an assault on the Hoogly fort in response to the oppressive taxes laid by the Nawabs as a result of they suspected the chief of the corporate Francois de Schonamille of aiding Maratha invaders. Very swiftly the corporate’s settlement was razed and its workers fled for his or her lives. In 1919, the British opened a gun manufacturing facility and renamed the city to Ichapore or Ishapore, .303 rifles utilized by a number of state police forces nonetheless carry the insignia of RFI or Rifle Manufacturing facility Ishapore. The fort at Kovilam finally turned the inspiration of the Taj hospitality group’s resort within the well-known seaside city.
Belgian Jesuits post-Ostend
Greater than a century after the Ostend ships ceased crusing to India, Belgium’s relationship with the nation was renewed by means of a really totally different establishment: the Society of Jesus. In 1859, Peter Jan Beckx, the Belgian Superior Normal of the Jesuits, entrusted the Belgian Jesuit Province with establishing a university for Catholics in West Bengal. This initiative would go on to go away a long-lasting mark on India’s mental and academic panorama.
St. Xavier’s School in Calcutta, now Kolkata, quickly emerged as considered one of India’s foremost academic establishments. One in every of its most influential personalities was Eugène Lafont, a physicist from Mons who performed a pioneering position in advancing scientific training in India. Amongst his college students was Jagadish Chandra Bose, considered one of India’s nice scientific pioneers. Lafont’s contribution earned him the excellence of being remembered because the Father of Science in India.
One other exceptional Belgian who devoted his life to India was Camille Bulcke. Arriving in India in 1935, the Belgian Jesuit turned a distinguished scholar of Hindi literature and an authority on Indian language and tradition. His deep dedication to India was recognised with one of many nation’s highest civilian honours, and he continues to be remembered with nice admiration. Within the early twentieth century enterprising Jain households from Palanpur in Gujarat, set base in Antwerp. Immediately, whereas Surat stays the world’s largest diamond slicing and sprucing centre, Antwerp is the largest commerce hub, India-Belgium gems and jewelry commerce reportedly stood at round $3.5 billion in 2025-26.
Lastly, the sacrifices of over 9,000 Indian troopers combating for the British in Flanders (Dutch talking area in north Belgium) throughout World Warfare I type one other enduring chapter within the lengthy historical past of Belgium–India relations. Their braveness on Flanders’ battlefields created a bond of remembrance that continues to attach India and Belgium to this present day.
HistoriCity is a column by writer Valay Singh that narrates the story of a metropolis that’s within the information, by going again to its documented historical past, mythology and archaeological digs. The views expressed are private.