I kept saying ‘Covelong’ and the ‘roving’ Belgian Ambassador kept saying ‘Cabelon’. It took me a while to realise that we were talking of the same port on the Coromandel, my ‘v’ his ‘b’. Once we were on the same wavelength, we reminded each other of the several Belgian connections with India, I remembering the past and he more recent times.

Belgium, for the record, became an independent nation only in 1830. Before the revolt of 1813, it was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and it was Charles VI, its emperor, noting Dutch, British and French trading success in India, who asked the merchants of Antwerp, Ghent and Ostend to explore the possibilities of trade with the Orient. Two ships sailed for the East in 1715, the Saint Mathieu for Surat and the Prince Eugene for the Bay of Bengal and they successfully returned to Ostend with spices, textiles and saltpetre. Over the next seven years, 34 Ostend ships sailed to Indian ports and their successful voyages owed no little to the Ostenders establishing a factory (a fortified trading post) in Covelong, the Cabelon of the Belgians.

It was on August 13, 1719 that Captain Godefroid de la Merveille of the good ship Charles VI declared himself the commander of the factory he had been allowed to raise after successful negotiations with Nawab Sadatullah, the Governor of the Carnatic. Like the British in Madras, he then brought in weavers and dyers and made Cabelon a centre of export for cotton textiles. The other major exports from the area were ashlars, square-cut stones for construction work.

Ostend, before long, was not happy with just establishing a factory. Seeking more, it sought and received from Charles VI a charter to establish the Ostend East India Company; this was achieved in December 1722, the merchants of Antwerp, Ghent and Ostend having subscribed to the capital of six million guilders. The next year, the Ostend Company began negotiating for territory in Bengal and by 1727 had established factories in Banquibazar and Cossimbazar, near Chandernagore. But despite the success of the three Ostend factories in India, they were closed in 1731; for reasons I’m not very clear about, the settlements in India of the ancestors of today’s Belgians came to an end.

A whole lot of new connections opened up between the two countries not long after Belgium became independent. The Belgian Jesuits played a significant role in education in Eastern India. Beginning with St. Xavier’s College opening its doors in Calcutta in 1859, several other institutions with the same Saint’s name were opened. Perhaps best known in Madras is XLRI in Jamshedpur; the Xavier Labour Relations Institute has a whole heap of graduates in Madras industry. Xavier institutes in Social Service, Management and Development Studies also supply a steady stream of graduates to the South.

In Tamil Nadu, there are two areas in which the Belgians have been involved for many years. Dr. Frans Hemerijckz (1902-69) who had worked with leprosy patients in the Congo for 25 years was sent out to work on leprosy eradication in India. Arriving in 1955, he went to work at a small research centre set up in 1937 in Polambakkam near Chingleput. Today, he and his successor, Dr. Claire Vellut, have made it a leading training centre in the country. Dr. Vellut went on to establish the Damien Foundation India Trust in 1992 with the Damien Foundation in Belgium and, today, it works with local health authorities all over India in the area of tuberculosis and leprosy control.

Still further south, at Land’s End (Kanyakumari) Fr. Pierre Gillet, who was a trained industrial engineer, began in September 1973 to build trawlers for the fishermen. But when he discovered how disastrous trawling was for the resource, he switched to traditional craft with a number of improvements and that is what many a Kanyakumari fisherman is using today for near-shore fishing. And that’s a technological message that he has now spread to Kerala too.

To which list, the Ambassador added all those Belgian glass chandeliers and crystal artefacts to be found in the palaces and mansions in the South.

Yet, when those who look back on India’s connections with Europe, there are few who remember that India’s, indeed, the Coromandel’s connection with what is now Belgium is 300 years old this year.

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How old is Madras medical education?

Even as I hear with regret that the Mairie in Pondicherry that collapsed in the rains not so long ago is unlikely to be re-built if bureaucracy has its way, I’m delighted to hear that Madras Medical College is hoping to restore, with its alumni, ‘The Red Fort’, its famed Anatomy Block, and create in it a first rate medical museum. But while announcing this, the College talked of itself as only the second oldest medical college in the country. I wonder why it is being bashful of its origins as the oldest medical training institution in South Asia. This is unlike the College of Engineering, Guindy, which makes no bones about its antiquity. Roorkee may claim to be the oldest modern engineering college in Asia, but the roots of the College of Engineering, Guindy, are in the oldest technical school, the Survey School, and its successor, the Civil Engineering School, which are decades older than Roorkee. What those schools taught was not very different from what Roorkee taught as a civil engineering college.

In rather like fashion, Madras began training paramedics, Europeans, Eurasians, and Indians, in 1772 in the hospital. That hospital sank roots in Fort St. George in 1664, 25 years before Job Charnock had even thought of Calcutta. This training scheme was institutionalised in 1820 and became the Military Medical School in 1835, the institution that grew into Madras Medical College. The apothecaries and dressers trained in these institutions were also taught diagnostic and aftercare skills and with the shortage of British doctors in much of South India these paramedics had to act as doctors. The ‘compounders’ of a later era — many benefitting from India’s first diploma class in Pharmacology started at Madras Medical circa. 1870 — were the all-purpose medicare-givers in many a rural area in the South.

When medical education was formalised by the Government of India in 1847, the Madras Medical School was the first to follow the recommendations made by the medical education committee appointed by Governor General Lord William Bentinck. In 1852, it was renamed the Madras Medical College and received recognition from the Royal College of Surgeons, London, in 1856, even before it become affiliated to the University of Madras in 1863. Obviously, there was in those years little difference between ‘school’ and ‘college’ in professional education. Which is why I tend to hold Madras Medical as the first medicare-training institution in India, nay, Asia.

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When the postman knocked…

* With reference to Nattukottai Chettiar aviators ( >Miscellany, March 9), who were pioneering pilots in Madras, Dr. N. Sreedharan sends me a bit of information that he’s found in a privately-circulated book. Apparently ‘Spain’ Veerappa Chettiar of Puduvayal village in Chettinad had piloted a fighter plane during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). I had heard of Veerappa Chettiar having fought in the Spanish Civil War (on which side, no one was sure), but his fighter pilot role is news to me. No source is cited, so I’d be glad to hear more about this.

* The tradition of physically unveiling a portrait or releasing a book is a thing of the past, I am told by a senior citizen committed to heritage who attended a recent public event featuring both activities. What he found was the Chief Guest pressing a couple of buttons on a computer and pictures appearing on the screen of curtains being pulled back to reveal the portrait and the cover of the book respectively. He couldn’t quite figure out whether he should clap or wait for technology to ensure that too.