ON THE ELUSIVE TRAIL OF ELIZA KEWARK
The Daily [Calcutta] Telegraph, India
June 20 2013
by SAMYABRATA RAY GOSWAMI
Katherine Scott Forbes or Kitty, the daughter of Theodore Forbes and
Eliza Kewark; and Prince William Surat, June 20: Prince William need
not come knocking to Surat; his folks do not live here any more.
The genetic needle that threaded his DNA to an Indian ancestor is
more or less lost in the haystack of history.
But if he takes a stroll around the old city, perhaps among the oldest
cosmopolitan pre-British urban centres in India, he might pick up a
few old threads to spin a yarn about his multi-cultural genealogy.
There are no Armenians in Surat any more. Residents of the old city,
largely small-scale textile traders, have long bought over their
properties and razed them to build newer houses and trading markets.
But it is in the alleys of old Surat’s Saudagarwada (borough of
merchants) that his mother’s Indian-Armenian ancestor, Eliza Kewark,
lived a lonely life after her Scottish husband deserted her and died
aboard a ship on his way back home to Aberdeenshire.
William’s mother Diana was a direct descendant of Kitty, daughter of
Eliza and Scotsman Theodore Forbes.
In a document written in 1937 and acquired by The Telegraph from St
Andrews Library in Surat, eminent Calcutta-based Armenian historian
Mesrovb Jacob Seth writes that Eliza, listed as Elizabeth Farbessian,
was one of the last seven Armenians in the city after Forbes’s death
in 1820. “Farbessian” was possibly an Armenian-style derivative of
“Forbes”, a historian suggested.
It’s unclear whether Eliza died in Surat – there are no graves in her
name in the city’s only Armenian cemetery in the Katargam Gate area.
Nor, if she migrated to Bombay where Forbes once worked, whether she
did so with their son Alexander, who stayed on in India after Forbes
sent Kitty away to Scotland in 1818.
The Bombay Armenian Cemetery has the tombstone of a Kevorg, a
derivative of Kevork. He was buried in 1927, according to the church
register. (Eliza’s father was Hakob Kevork or Kevorkian.)
“But no historian can say right now whether (Kevorg) was connected to
Elizabeth or Alexander. The links, if any, are buried in the sands
of time,” said Surat historian Mohan Meghani who has done extensive
research on the city’s Armenians.
Seth, the Armenian historian, writes: “The decline and dispersion of
the Armenians at Surat must have been very rapid…. During the last
two decades of the 18th century (1780-1800), there were 33 (Armenian)
merchants besides many others in the humbler walks of life…. Their
numbers dwindled down to only (seven) souls in 1820. Their names
were: Mrs Elizabeth Farbessian, Mrs Maishkhanoom Avietian, Mrs
Mariam Vardanian, Stephen Petrus, Minas Margarian, Gregore Agahian
and Arrathoon Balthazarian, the only well-to-do amongst them being
the lady mentioned first.”
The last name is that of Eliza’s brother-in-law and Forbes’s Armenian
agent, also known as Arrathoon Baldassarian.
“If he (Arrathoon) was married to her (Eliza’s) sister and they had a
daughter, Prince William may find some cousins in India,” said Meghani.
Eliza’s last name has so far been mentioned as Kewark by British
researchers based on her letters available with them.
“Kewark is a variation of Kevork after her Armenian father Hakob
Kevorkian. He seems to have died in 1811. His tomb, in which he is
called Gevorg – another variation of Kevork – was found in Surat’s
Armenian cemetery and is now in the city museum cellar,” said Bhamini
A. Mahida, chief curator of Surat’s Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Museum.
Eliza largely used Kewark as her surname in her communications with
her husband or, later, his family.
“According to Armenian tradition, a girl’s last name was a derivative
of either her father’s name or husband’s name,” Meghani said.
“That she did not sign her name as Forbes or Farbessian indicates she
did not have the legal sanction of a wife to use her husband’s name.
But after Theodore’s death in 1820, she might have felt emboldened
to use it in an Armenian way and call herself Elizabeth Farbessian.”
It may have helped that Forbes left her a tiny annuity in his will. He
left substantial allowances for his children, with his daughter Kitty
-Prince William’s ancestor – receiving the lion’s share.
“The allowance must have given Elizabeth some sort of social
recognition, and she may have started using Forbes’s name,” Meghani
said.
In perhaps an unwitting but cruel reminder of her status, Theodore
referred to her as his “housekeeper” in his will. “It could be his
way of avoiding public stigma for his family as Elizabeth had an
Indian mother,” Meghani said.
The mother
British researchers say some of Eliza’s earlier letters to Forbes
were written in Gujarati. Elizabeth’s Indian mother was likely to
have been Muslim.
“Because of the Armenians’ closeness to the Mughals, it’s a possibility
that she (Eliza’s mother) was a Muslim. Hindus would have been more
unlikely to marry outside their caste,” Mahida, the archaeologist
and museum curator, said.
Meghani said that marriages between Armenian men and Indian women
were uncommon but not unheard-of around the end of the 18th century.
“The community had been settled in India for over 500 years by then
and was seen as close to the Mughal throne and hence powerful. So,
intermarriages would not have been terribly frowned upon,” Meghani
said.
The tombstone of another Elizabeth in Surat’s Armenian cemetery appears
to bear this out. Her name is spelt “Eligabeth” in the epitaph –
a typical Indian phonetic variation of the “z” sound, explained Mahida.
This Elizabeth died in 1784, at least six-seven years before Eliza
Kewark would have been born. Her burial in the Armenian cemetery
suggests her father or husband was an Armenian, given the strong
patriarchal traditions of the community. Yet the name of neither is
mentioned in the epitaph, written in the classical Armenian script.
“The inscription on the tomb names her as Eligabeth and mentions her
as the daughter of Nazar Tilan, which is a Muslim woman’s name,” said
Mahida. The tombstone with the epitaph is in the cellar of the museum.
British researchers say that Eliza Kewark and Forbes married in an
Armenian church in Surat. Of the two churches the city once had,
the one in the cemetery survives but the one in the old city, used
mostly for weddings, does not.
Standing in its place are rows of ugly, four or five-storey buildings
owned by local traders who run establishments on the road level and
live and store their wares on the remaining floors.
The warehouse
Jahnubhai Patel, 62, who runs a zari business in the area, does
not remember any Armenians but says his ancestors bought the
home-cum-warehouse he owns from a Parsi businessman.
“There were many Parsis here then. The English Factory (a former East
India Company warehouse-cum-house where Forbes once worked and lived)
down the road was also owned by a Parsi businessman called Cooper
who bought it from the British,” Patel said.
“We know this because his last descendant, who lived in the massive
building all alone in the 1960s, was insane and broke down the place
using a bulldozer as he was tired of researchers from India and abroad
coming to his place regularly and requesting a tour of the premises,”
recounts Patel.
Meghani confirmed the building’s razing by its “insane” owner.
“Prince William better come and collect the remaining bricks on this
half-wall of the English Factory before the children of the adjoining
I.P. Mission school take them away to use them as wickets in cricket
matches on the school compound,” he said.
Called Saudagarwada even today, the area’s architectural character has
largely changed, but demographically it still remains a predominantly
merchant colony like it was when Forbes landed on the banks of the
Tapi in 1809.
“As a young officer of the East India Company, he would have sailed
in a boat down the Tapi from Suvalli, a British jetty near Surat,
and landed on the riverbanks in the old city,” Mahida said.
The warehouse of the East India Company, where Forbes would have
worked while in Surat, is a few furlongs from the Tapi’s banks. Today,
destitute people and immigrant workers catch their afternoon nap on the
river embankment by the English Factory, as the warehouse was called.
When The Telegraph visited the place, only a 12ft by 20ft, moss-laden,
rundown wall of the “factory” stood. The remnants were in effect
no more than a temporary boundary wall for an under-construction
residential high-rise coming up where the warehouse once stood.
Nothing else of it remains.
In Forbes’s time, the “factory” or warehouse was a two-storey structure
of bricks and timber, said Meghani, quoting from a research paper
on East India Company factories and facilities in Surat by Kyoto
University’s Haneda Masashi.
“Masashi based his research on old Surat Municipal Corporation records
before most of them were destroyed in a flood in 2006,” Meghani said.
While the ground floor was used as a godown, Forbes would have lived
in the comfortable staff quarters on the first floor.
About 500 yards down the same street would have stood the warehouses
of other European merchant companies, owned by the Portuguese, Dutch
and the French. The Armenian settlement where Eliza would have lived
began after that and the Armenian church would have been down the
same street.
“The entire area would have had a radius of one kilometre. It would
have been bordered by gardens, fountains and a red-light district from
the Mughal era that existed in the old city till about a decade ago.
Saudagarwada would have been a bustling place,” Meghani said.
The romance
In such a “happening” place, buzzing with pretty local girls and
dashing merchants and sailors, the romance of Forbes and Eliza would
have blossomed.
“And for what it is worth, the relationship seems to have been more
than a bond of convenience,” Meghani suggested.
Despite the accepted norm of keeping mistresses, did the 23-year-old
Forbes love a 19-year-old Eliza enough to make her his wife? “It
seems he tried,” Meghani said.
“If British researchers say he may have married her in the Armenian
church, it would have been a very honourable thing to do given that
if he had not, no one would have raised a finger,” Meghani said.
According to the records, Forbes, when posted to Yemen soon after,
took Eliza, pregnant with his daughter, along.
“When the child was delivered in Yemen, he named her Kitty after his
mother. By the time Eliza and Forbes returned to Surat, they had had
another baby, Alexander. Later, she delivered another son, Fraser,
who died after six months,” Meghani said.
“Although Forbes neglected the family after moving to Bombay, he
did send a close friend, Thomas Fraser, another Scotsman, to look up
Eliza in Surat. It was on Fraser’s suggestion that he sent Kitty to
Scotland. He even mentioned his children and Eliza in his will. Does
not seem like a scoundrel to me,” said Meghani.
From: A. Papazian
http://telegraphindia.com/1130621/jsp/frontpage/story_17032045.jsp#.UcOHiflQG8A