Matteo Ripa (1682–1746), an Augustinian cleric from southern Italy, embarked for the China missions in 1707, only to be waylaid by scurvy off Sumatra and subsequently diverted to Bengal. He reached the mouth of the Ganges on 1 February 1709. After navigating sandbanks and tides, he anchored “before the English Factory” on the riverbank. His arrival coincided with a lull in shipping bound to East Asia, compelling him (by papal instruction) to proceed to China via the Philippine Islands, following a fortnight’s sojourn among the fledgling colonial settlements.
Ripa’s account was translated by Father Hosten and published in Bengal Past and Present (1914). Hosten’s lengthy notes clarify local toponyms (e.g., Golicatan for Calcutta) and geography, but also highlight Ripa’s occasional errors (for instance, his description of a “hill” near the landing‑place, uncorroborated by later surveys).
Calcutta’s Urban Expanse and Built Environment
Ripa characterizes Calcutta as “a very primitive sort of place” roughly 275 years prior, “when an Italian spelt its name Golicatan” and the mud‑rampart (“remidian”) extended from Fort William only as far as the Portuguese Church at Murghihat, rather than the Botanical Gardens’ banyan tree—contrary to later English pride in that specimen.
He notes the English Factory itself was “built in the shape of a fortress and defended by big cannon,” a description corroborated by contemporaneous maps showing bastioned walls and artillery emplacements at what is now Dalhousie Square. Hosten’s commentary situates this “fortress” on the site of latter day Calcutta’s General Post Office and Custom House, skirting Fairlie Place and Koila Ghat Street.
The town’s vertical profile was low: most indigenous dwellings “consist[ed] of earth, straw, and planks, being low and constructed without order.” The only masonry buildings Ripa mentions are the Portuguese Church and pyramid‑like Catholic graves in its adjacent garden—“the best buildings of the country” amidst pervasive vernacular simplicity.
Botanical Landscape and Symbolism
Ripa’s narrative repeatedly juxtaposes Calcutta’s primitive architecture with its remarkable vegetation. He chides future historians: “the great botanical wonder was not the banyan‑tree of the Botanical Gardens, but the tamarind‑tree of the English cemetery.” This exotic tree, famed in London travelogues of the era, became a landmark for ships ascending the Hooghly. Hosten suggests this may have been Charnock’s preferred tree and possibly his burial site—though later tradition misattributes this to a peepul at Baithakhana (removed in 1820).
Such botanical details serve Ripa’s broader providential theme—God’s provision of “cows, pigs, goats, fowls, rice, fresh fish…all fresh and in abundance” at Balasore —and underline the region’s agricultural bounty despite its urban underdevelopment.
Colonial Commerce and Cross‑Cultural Encounters
Ripa’s chronicle traces Calcutta’s emerging role as a hub for European trading interests. He describes how French, Dutch, and English Factors maintained factories nearby, artillery‑guarded and serving the “enormous power of the Grand Seignior of the Great Mogol.” He recounts interacting with English officials—one half‑cast Portuguese “Topas” who identified himself as a Catholic Roman despite serving the English. This was a testament to the fluidity of cultural affiliations under the East India Company’s aegis.
Markets (bazars) recur along every river‑halt—Balasore, Calcutta, then downstream to Chandernagore and Bandel—often held daily but shifting location to accommodate tides and commerce. Ripa marvels at “the concourse of the country‑folk” and even encounters intrusive “troupes of singers and musicians” whose “hideous” music the Captain orders silenced.
Religious Pluralism and Missionary Practice
True to his vocation, Ripa foregrounds Calcutta’s religious heterogeneity. He notes roughly five hundred Catholic natives at Balasore, “very much scandalised by our Europeans, especially by the Dutch,” who impeded conversions inland. In Calcutta itself, he found an Augustinian hospice (“hospice of the Augustinian Fathers”) adjacent to the factory, guarded by soldiers who ultimately recognized him (despite his secular disguise) as a “Padre.”
Bathing customs along the Ganges illustrate deeper religio‑cultural logics: entire families (men and women alike) bathed naked in the river to purge sins, believing in the Ganges’ purificatory power. Ripa’s Capuchin informant explains this ritual as “a cleansing of soul and body” akin to sacramental absolution.
Meanwhile, Ripa’s text offers a lengthy digression on Hindu sects, transmigration, cow‑worship, self‑flagellation penances, and anti‑Christian polemics—useful ethnography, yet peripheral to an urban portrait. These sections attest to the missionary’s impulse to catalogue “errors” while underscoring the need for “zealous Evangelical labourers,” closing with a critique of indiscriminate recruitment of novices in Goa.
Narrative Indispensability
Ripa’s narrative remains indispensable for reconstructing early Calcutta’s material and social dimensions, yet it demands critical intervention. Ripa reads events providentially—divine deliverance from scurvy, miraculous hospitality, and semantic insistence on Catholic propriety. His account privileges missionary concerns over a systematic urban topography. His reference to a “hill” en route to Fort William has no basis in contemporary surveys; Hosten suggests Ripa exaggerated minor rises in terrain, suggestive of geographical inaccuracies. Further, while botanical and religious practices receive lengthy treatment, Ripa omits indigenous urban governance, craft production, house‑building techniques, or demographic composition beyond European factors and Catholic converts. Also, his emphasis on European institutions (factories, churches, cannon) conveys the nascent colonial city as a European enclave in a “primitive” hinterland, marginalizing local agency and architecture.
Father Ripa’s early eighteenth‑century account sketches Calcutta as a fledgling European fortified factory town, ensconced within a vibrant riverine ecology and interlaced with diverse religious practices. His vivid botanical and socio‑religious observations enrich our understanding of the proto‑urban milieu, even as his missionary agenda and occasional topographical errors counsel careful cross‑reference with archaeological and indigenous sources. As one of the scant contemporary testimonies—“so few missionary accounts of Bengal in those early days that we cannot value Abbate Ripa’s too highly”—it remains a cornerstone for Calcutta’s historiography, provided it is read with an eye to both its descriptive richness and its inherent fallibilities.
Source: P. Thankappan Nair’s Calcutta in the 18th Century (1984).
Arup K. Chatterjee 