By David Petrosyan
The historical ties of Armenians with India are very ancient and date back to the 4th century B.C. Then, in 327 B.C. Armenians first appeared in India with the army of Alexander the Great. Documents indicate that Armenians traveled to India in the 5th – 4th centuries B.C. and were well aware of the land routes to reach India, as well as the political, socio-cultural environment, and economic life. The point is that both peoples have known each other well for a long time. The presence in India of Armenians (mostly subjects of the Persian Empire), called the “Merchant Princes of India,” over several centuries, starting from the 16th – 17th centuries, led to the emergence of a number of large and small Armenian settlements in various places in India, including Agra, Surat, Mumbai, Chinsurah, Chandernagore, Calcutta, Madras, Saidabad and some other places in modern India.
The earliest discovered Armenian monument in India is a khachkar (cross-stone) from 1611, preserved in the Armenian cemetery in Agra. Akbar I the Great invited Armenians to settle in Agra in the 16th century and by the mid-19th century, Agra had a significant Armenian population. According to the royal decree, Armenian merchants were exempt from paying taxes on goods imported and exported by them. They were also able to move around the Mughal Empire while other foreigners were prohibited from entering. In 1562, an Armenian church was built in Agra.
For a long time, the British East India Company could not enter India, because all trade was carried out by Armenian merchants. The company tried to achieve trade privileges by force, but lost (Child’s War, 1686 – 1690), and was forced to ask the Great Mogul for mercy. Armenian merchants played the role of intermediaries here. In 1690, the East India Company settlement was founded in Calcutta, after appropriate permission from the Great Mogul. Thus, the British East India Company entered India with the assistance of Armenian merchants.
However, in the future, relations between the Armenians and the British in India did not work out. In Bengal (in the Bengal Nabab), the actual leader of this territory/Nabab) in 1761 – 1763 was a representative of the small Armenian family Gorgin – Khan (Grigor Harutyunyan). He organized stubborn resistance to the British and it was he and his comrades (Margar Hovhannisyan, Grigor Ayvazyan, Hakob Grigoryan, Mkrtich Zakaryan and others) who won the first victory over the British in 1761. The British were unable to achieve military success against the troops of Gorgin Khan in 1762-1763. But in August 1763 they organized a successful assassination attempt on him. After this, the uprising was brutally suppressed by the British, who brutally dealt with its leaders, especially the Armenians. After these events, the decision of the British House of Commons abolished the right of Armenians to free trade in all British colonies, as “an ungrateful people.”
After Indian independence in 1947, most of the Armenian community in India migrated to Australia, the United States and other countries. Indian President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan visited Soviet Armenia in 1964, and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi visited Soviet Armenia in 1976.
