The Dutch East India Company, formed in 1602, arrived at Pulicat in 1606 and stayed there till 1690, establishing a flourishing maritime trade with the Southeast Asian countries. Pulicat Lake, as a natural harbour, was their international seaport. Tapan Raychaudhuri, in his Jan Company in Coromandel, his doctoral dissertation to the University of Oxford, published in 1962, devoted the last chapter to the administration and social life of the Dutch at Pulicat. This article is a summary of that chapter. His aim in portraying their social life, he said, was “to give a glimpse of the complex human reality, interwoven with primarily economic efforts.”

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Within seven years of their arrival at Pulicat, the first achievement of the Dutch was to construct Fort Geldria, which some criticised as being one “maintained at great expense, but to little profit!”

All the top administrators, like the Governor, chief factors, factors, miscellaneous employees like surgeons, a priest, and a school teacher, who needed high security, were all accommodated within the fort. A garrison of Dutch and Indian soldiers also was maintained under a captain within Fort Geldria.

Private Dutch housing colonies, despite constraints, came up in the Pulicat town. Nearly one-quarter of the town was inhabited by the Dutch, perhaps the present Big Street, across the main road, in front (south) of the Dutch fort. This was necessitated because widows and children of the deceased Dutch employees, besides the retired Dutch employees of the Company, were allowed to stay on in Pulicat. Also, with marriages of the Dutch to local women increasing, there was a need for such settlements outside the fort. Huge private houses were built in the Dutch style in Pulicat, and there was even an avenue with three parallel rows of trees. The company had a ‘club house’ in the middle of a garden on the outskirts of the town, to which the factors used to retire in times of extreme heat.

The Dutch on the Coromandel adopted some of Indian practices, like gargling their mouths after every meal, chewing betel leaves, and taking a siesta. Their usual drink at midday and in the afternoons was a mixture of water, beer and sugar, boiled together. Occasionally, some Spanish wine or rum was added. Shiraz wine from Persia and Indian arak were also popular. Tea-drinking was a habit by the Dutch developed in India, and they preferred Chinese tea. Dutch women, more than the men, were said to be fond of tea, but boiled it with sugar-candy. Green tea leaves were used as salad on board Dutch ships.

The company’s policy of permitting mixed marriages was adopted in 1614, but the only condition laid down was that the prospective local bride must first accept Christianity before marriage to a Dutchman. In 1614 itself, a number of Dutch soldiers got married to Indian women. Then, in 1622, when the practice of keeping Indian concubines was prohibited by order of Batavia (Djakartha, today) their headquarters, 38 Dutch men got married to their Indian mistresses at Pulicat in one day, and the Governor himself arranged a grand wedding feast to celebrate the nuptials.

The policy of Dutch-Indian mixed marriages was highly commended by the then Governor, Wemmer van Berchem, who wrote, “This is the only means where we must hold and maintain our power in India, as the Portuguese have done before us.” Married Dutch soldiers were treated with special favour by the company, and were allowed to live inside the fort, at least during the rainy season. In the latter decades of the 17th Century, a large proportion of the population at the Pulicat Town consisted of mestizos and castizos (quadroons), who were all the children of such mixed Dutch-Indian marriages. Women from a particular caste, “Thiola” (not traceable today), were said to frequently marry the Dutch men at Pulicat. Coromandel, in the opinion of a Dutch Governor, “was more a prey to Bacchus and Venus (wine and women), than any other place, in India”!

Marriages between Dutch men and Dutch women were also not infrequent in Pulicat. Coromandel factors were a very good marriage market for Dutch maidens. In 1615, six girls for Holland stopped over at Pulicat, on their way to Batavia, but five of them got engaged to local Dutch employees. Such Dutch employees married to Dutch women were given an additional monetary allowance but, unfortunately, soon after they received such an allowance, they got rid of their wives! Hence, in 1619, the then Governor, Hans de Haze recommended that only a few selective Dutch-Dutch marriages should be allowed in Pulicat in the future.

There was a small church within Fort Geldria, and a Dutch minister (priest) used to preach there every day. As the Portuguese language was widely understood, he preached both in Dutch as well as in Portuguese. The priest conducted burial services in the Dutch cemetery. Some clergymen worked hard to spread the Protestant faith to the Catholic Christians of San Thomé and baptised 40 of their children in 1615-1616. Some clergy took an interest in the Tamil language and in Hindu mythology and wrote about them.

The Dutch maintained an excellent rapport with the Indian rulers, chiefly as a strategy for success in their trade and, hence, the Dutch were treated cordially when they visited the nayaks to whom they took presents brought from Europe. In turn, when dignitaries like Qutub Shah of Masulipatam visited Pulicat in 1676, the Dutch organised a pleasure trip for him to go to sea in a special boat with a throne on it! They organised songs and music and even a mock battle at sea for his entertainment. The king seemed to have attended a church service in Fort Geldria and showed great respect for the Bible.

Local rulers used to gift some villages to the Company. Following the local procedures, the Company, in turn, used to collect five-eighths of the crops as taxes, either in coin or in grain. Annual capitation tax was payable by everybody, excepting the Brahmins and prostitutes! Even in those days, the Northeast monsoon every year, and the periodic but severe and extended famines, as the one of 1630, were a great handicap for living, tax collection, navigation, trade and communications for the Dutch traders.

The Indian partners in the Dutch textile trade gave the Company the right to arrest and punish any local weavers or painters who failed to carry out their contracts.

A Council of Justice for the coast was created by the Dutch headquarters in Batavia and it was vested with powers to judge and punish erring Company employees. Accordingly, the Coromandel government had powers of life and death over Company employees, and there have been some verdicts for execution pronounced by this Council of Justice. Increasing ­illegal trade and other forms of corruption in Pulicat forced the Company to appoint a Superintendent in 1684, with extraordinary powers of supervision, enquiry and punishment. ­Corruption was so rampant that even a clergyman was recalled to Holland for his scandalous ways of life in Pulicat. Another priest was sent back to Batavia.

Raychaudhuri sums up, “The administrative organisation… and the social life of the Dutch community had hardly any impact on the society or economics of the (Indian) region. They were significant only so far as they provided the immediate social and administrative framework for a unit of commercial expansion, in an alien setting.” The Dutch had to be highly adaptive to the host country, chiefly for the sole objective of economic success in international trade.