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Cultural Heritage Cultural Heritage Cultural Heritage in IndiaHISTORYCommercial contacts between The Netherlands and India on a regular basis go back to the early years of the seventeenth century. The Dutch East India Company, chartered in 1602 and the largest multinational of its time, began operations in coastal south-eastern India in the early 17th century. The geographical range of its operations in the subcontinent soon came to embrace Gujarat (especially Surat), Bengal (Chinsurah, Hooghly river), as well as the Coromandel and Malabar coasts (centres were Cochin and Chennai). For a full century and a half, the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie – VOC) conducted more trade with India than any other European trading company. It was only in the second half of the eighteenth century that, following the conquest of Bengal, the English East India Company overtook its Dutch counterpart. The Dutch East India Company’s presence in India formally came to an end in 1825 when their possessions were transferred to the English. Many monuments from that period (old buildings, cemeteries), written sources (books, archives) as well as other cultural heritage objects keep the memory of the history of the Dutch in India and their influence on Indian society alive. In order to preserve ancient monuments, the Embassy has supported restoration projects in cooperation with local authorities, owners, non-governmental organisations and the Archaeological Survey of India. Many historical documents relating to the VOC, mostly drafted by its officials, are to be found in the Tamil Nadu Archives in Chennai. These records are of the utmost importance for the (economic) history of India and of South East Asia as a whole ( One major contribution of the Dutch to Indian culture is the book Hortus Malabaricus. It is a rare record of the medicinal plant wealth and traditional medical practices of India, Ayurveda. Composed and published by Adriaan van Reede van Drakestein (1636-1691), the monumental work written in Latin and published in Amsterdam in 12 volumes between 1678 and 1693 was the result of about 30 years of compiling and editing by a team of local specialists working under the guidance of Rheede. The University of Kerala has published an English translation of Hortus Malabaricus. For much of its two centuries of existence (1602 until 1799), the VOC, the Dutch East India Company was the largest trading company in the world. Although the VOC was established to operate primarily as a trading company, it soon also came to play a prominent military, diplomatic and political role on the Asian stage and eventually it laid the foundations of the Dutch colonial empire in the Indonesian archipelago. For anyone interested in exploring the activities of the VOC and its history, the Next to the many Dutch books, which were written on the VOC one Indian author is worth mentioning as he contributed to the research and publication on the VOC period in India, professor Om Prakash. Many of his books can be found in India as well as in The Netherlands. The following books by Prof. Om Prakash are good resource materials for history lovers.
Another noteworthy study is "The Political Economy of Commerce Southern India 1500-1650” by Sanjay Subrahmanyam. . This historian has extensively used the archival resources at the Nationaal Archief in The Hague, The Netherlands. “The Dutch Overseas, An Architecural Survey” by C. L. Temminck Groll is another interesting source material for people interested in architectural heritage. The books mentioned above are not an exhaustive list but just an introduction to the vast body of work available on the VOC. A more elaborate bibliography can be found on the website of the Related websites:
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