How did Surat become the setting for an 18th-century French story?

In a coffee-house in 18th-century Surat, a group of men from various faiths and ethnicities are arguing about God. Each claims the superiority of his faith over the others – until finally, a “Chinaman” relates a tale that shows how God is universal, if varyingly perceived based on each man’s faith and place in the world.

This is, briefly, the story of Le Café de Surate (The Coffee-House of Surat), an 18th-century tale by French writer Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737-1814) evoking religious tolerance, pluralism and the nature of theosophical truth.

But what is fascinating is how “Surat”, an important mercantile hub and port city in the 18th century, became the setting for this story and also a literary trope of religious and cultural confluence in the colonial imagination.

Le Café de Surate (1790) is an important glimpse into Surat’s history as a cosmopolitan trade hub. It also shows how the literary trope of a vivid Surat served as a backdrop for the cultural movement of Romanticism, humanism and religious plurality, although mediated through colonial stereotypes.

The story

The men in Le Café de Surate include a Persian theologian with a “Kefir” (a slave), a Brahmin, a Jewish broker, an Italian missionary, a Protestant minister of the Danish Mission at Tranquebar, a Turkish customs officer, Tibetan Lamas, Arabs, Zoroastrians and a Chinaman who is a student of Confucius.

In the story, the men fall into dispute arguing about God as each claims supremacy for his religion over the other. Eventually, a silent Chinaman is invited to settle the matter. The Chinaman recounts the tale of a similar dispute that had arisen among his earlier fellow-travellers about the nature of the sun and its true location. Each traveller had a different account of where it rose and where it set. The Chinaman, then concludes that just as the sun cannot be contained in any one place but shines equally on everyone, so does God.

This simple parable of religious plurality with its colonial stereotypes reflects the scepticism of social structures and scientific thought as voiced by French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who advocated nature instead as the true custodian of human freedom and truth.

Saint-Pierre, a colonial traveller and Enlightenment reformer, drew from the intellectual traditions of Rousseau and French writer Voltaire. He was part of a society and polity in transition during the decades spanning the French Revolution in 1789. Saint-Pierre also travelled with the French East India Company, served in Mauritius and wrote of his encounters in India.

As a writer, Saint-Pierre used tropes, experiences and knowledge of other cultures, however perceived by him, as sites of critique for his own society. He became well-known as one of the first proponents of cultural primitivism, which advocated a return to “simpler” times, and French romanticism

As two scholars who analysed Saint-Pierre’s stories through a Persian perspective note, his tales endeavour to seek the truth and reach peace amid religious and theological disputes. This “truth”, they write, is not achieved merely by scientific advancement but is manifested in nature. It is also simplistic and free of any “conceited scientific and theological argument and it brings about indescribable peace for the seekers”.

Surat and its colonial encounters

Surat was a Mughal port city in decline that had already seen some of the first French colonial enterprises in Gujarat at the time Le Café de Surate was published in 1790. Surat had seen a century of cosmopolitan trade and had a diverse socio-ethnic composition alongside a mix of Hindu Banias and Muslim Bohras.

It was a centrally located entry and exit point for the North and the South and was considered a textile hub in the Mughal period. It served as an emporium to Western trade, to the Middle Eastern and European countries (along with Cambay and later Ahmedabad). It was also seen as a gateway to Mecca. The English chronicler John Ovington (1653-1731), in his A Voyage to Surat (1689), wrote that 100 ships of different countries could be found on the ports of Surat at any given time.

Trade involved retail and wholesale business of cotton textiles, often products known for the zari (golden laced) border. In order to accommodate merchants, the city also built rest-houses, pleasure parks among facilities for traders from all over the world. The coffee-house in the story reflects the city’s culture of merchant rest-houses which saw a multitude of merchants who traded in opium and textiles.

The story also reflects the perceptions of multiple ethnicities, races that were mediated earlier in the accounts of French travelers of 17th century Gujarat such as François Bernier (1620-1688). Bernier’s influential essay “Nouvelle division de la terre, par les différentes espèces ou races d'hommes qui l'habitent” (“New Division of the Earth by the Different Species or ‘Races’ of Man that Inhabit It”) has been called by scholars as “the beginning of modern racial thought”.

This essay was in turn, to have a great influence on French coffee-houses or the ‘Salons’ which were the social and intellectual gatherings central to the cultural development of France in the 17th and 18th centuries. The coffee-house in Surat was also linked to the salon in France.

Surat also had a robust banking system with Turkish officials in its customs house. The Kathiawad Seths and the Mahajans also developed an elaborate banking system in Surat for the exchange of currency. Money was exchanged through a “hundi” or a record of a deposit that was made at one place and which could be claimed in another part of the world. The credit system was based on trust as carrying cash during travel was risky. The Surat hundis were honoured in the markets from Cairo in Egypt, to Basra in Iraq and Antwerp in Belgium.

Saint-Pierre’s story shows the ways in which colonial cities and their mercantile contexts seeped into literary imagination. It throws light on how colonies were represented and the ways in which narratives around places and religions were mediated through trade and the trope of the cosmopolitan city.

However, by the end of the 17th century, Mughal rule declined and so did Surat as the Portuguese took control of sea routes.

By the 17th century, the Portuguese, Dutch and the English had already set up their factories in Surat, beginning with the period of Jahangir (1569-1627). A “factory” at this time was not a manufacturing unit but a “godown” to store Indian merchandise which was then exported abroad for trade. The first French factory was established in Surat as late as 1668 by Francois Caron (1600-1673), a French Huguenot refugee to the Netherlands who served not the French but the Dutch East India Company.

The French East India Company was set up in the 17th and 18th centuries to monitor French commerce in India and other colonies in eastern Africa, in the Indian Ocean and the East Indies and Pondicherry was eventually turned into the headquarters of the French settlements in India in the beginning of the 18th century.

Saint-Pierre’s cast of characters may have found some peace in their religious ponderings in Surat, but the city soon fell into decline.

In 1668, the British East India Company shifted its headquarters to Bombay and the resulting competition was one of the reasons for Surat’s decline. By 1750, the network of Indian traders broke down as European countries gained power. They secured concessions from local courts and gained monopoly. The Hundi system declined almost completely and local bankers saw bankruptcy. By 1720, the French had lost most of their settlements at Surat, Masulipatam and Bantam to the British East India Company.

Krupa Shah is Assistant Professor of English, National Institute of Technology, Puducherry.