Hindostan (also Hindustan) was the term used in nineteenth-century Dutch and English colonial writing to denote the Indian subcontinent, and in particular the network of European factories — that is, trading posts — that the Dutch East India Company and its successors had maintained along the Coromandel and Malabar coasts, in Bengal and at Surat. In P. H. van der Kemp’s account of the Aceh agreement of 1819 and the long paper war that followed it, Nederlandsch Hindostan — the Dutch possessions in India — occupies a central place, because it was the principal counter with which the Netherlands bargained away the British presence on Sumatra in the treaty of 1824.
Van der Kemp introduces the Hindostan question in connection with the Anglo-Dutch disputes that arose after the Convention of London of 13 August 1814, by which Britain restored the Dutch colonial empire after the Napoleonic Wars. He notes that the Dutch return to Hindostan was viewed with displeasure by the British: “De Engelschen zagen ons met leede oogen terugkomen in Hindostan; terwijl van Benkoelen uit, Raffles tegen ons gezag op Sumatra en verder in den Archipel intrigeerde.” British Indian officials at Bengal suggested, in Van der Kemp’s words, “hoeveel verstandiger het zou zijn, dat we de factorijen prijsgaven voor eene compensatie in den Archipel” — how much wiser it would be for the Dutch to give up the factories in exchange for a compensation in the archipelago. The Dutch side was inclined to agree: “Over de waardeloosheid van de Hindostanische bezittingen waren het in 1814 Falck en Fagel reeds bij het sluiten van het toenmalig koloniaal tractaat eens.” The Hindostan factories were already in 1814 judged worthless by Falck and Fagel.
The practical upshot was that Commissioner-General Elout, in February 1817, recommended taking Bencoolen in exchange for those factories — a proposal that became the foundation of the revision of the 1814 convention. The Dutch negotiating position, as Van der Kemp reconstructs it from the archives, was that “wij zouden met de Nederlandsche factorijen in Hindostan met Malacca en met Singapore betalen” — that the Netherlands would pay with the factories in Hindostan, with Malacca and with Singapore (the last being, of course, the renunciation of Dutch claims on Raffles’s new settlement) — in exchange for the abandonment of all British claims on Sumatra. The formal treaty of 1824 ratified the exchange: Sumatra was to be exclusively Dutch; Malacca passed to Britain; the Dutch factories in India were ceded; and Britain renounced its treaty with Acheh.
The single mention of Hindostan in the appendix correspondence, however, gives the term a different resonance. In a letter of the Sultan of Aceh of 7 November 1786 to the Governor-General of Bengal, printed by Van der Kemp as Bijlage I, the Sultan styles his correspondent as “a valuable and noble friend, and who are known to Hindostan and Arabia.” Here Hindostan is used in its older, looser sense — meaning the Indian subcontinent generally, as a region of renown. The phrase is significant for what it tells us about the Sultan’s mental geography in the late eighteenth century: Hindostan was, to the Acehnese court, a known and important place, alongside Arabia, with which it shared religious and commercial ties.
The cession of Nederlandsch Hindostan in 1824 closed a chapter in the European presence in India that had begun with the Dutch East India Company in the early seventeenth century. From the perspective of Van der Kemp’s narrative, however, the cession was less an end than a beginning: it cleared the way for an exclusively Dutch Sumatra, which in turn set the stage for the long Aceh crisis of the 1870s. The Hindostan factories were thus a small price paid for what the Dutch hoped would be a free hand in Sumatra — a hope that the subsequent history of the island would only partially fulfil.
See Also
- Bencoolen
- Sumatra
- Malacca
- Singapore
- Treaty of London (1824)
- Bengal
- Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819
Source
Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819, by P. H. van der Kemp, in Bijdragen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië, 6e Volgr., Deel VII (1900), pp. 159-239. Universiteitsbibliotheek Vrije Universiteit, LS.08781.