Place · Coromandel port · India

Machilipatnam / Masulipatnam / Bandar

Also known as Masulipatnam, Machilipatnam, Bandar, Bander, Machilibandar, Masulipatam, Bandar-e-Masulipatnam

Function

Trade & production

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

16.170, 81.130

Connections (9)

• Trade routeSurat

  Surat on the Gujarat coast and Masulipatnam on the Coromandel were the two great Indian ports of the seventeenth century, serving the Mughal empire and Golconda respectively, and the English, Dutch and French all had factories at both. Surat handled the Hajj traffic and the western trade; Masulipatnam sent painted cottons to Persia and Southeast Asia. Both were ruined within a century — Surat by Maratha raids and the rise of Bombay, Masulipatnam by silting and by Madras.

• Craft tradition ofŚrīkālahasti kalamkari

  Masulipatnam's export trade was built on painted and printed cotton — kalamkari — drawn with a pen or blocked and fixed with natural mordants, and shipped to Persia, Burma and the Indonesian islands in quantities that made it the single most valuable Indian textile export of the seventeenth century. The temple-cloth tradition at Srikalahasti and the export tradition at Machilipatnam developed separately, with different designs for different markets.

• Trade routeKondapalli toys

  The Kondapalli hills sit behind the Krishna delta and the old Coromandel port at Machilipatnam, and the toy-carving families belong to the same craft economy as the kalamkari printers at Pedana a short distance away — a coastal district that exported painted cotton to Persia and Southeast Asia and made carved wood for the inland festivals. Both trades ran on the same river-and-port geography and both contracted when the harbour silted.

• Power passed toPuducherry (Pondicherry)

  The Northern Circars were France's largest Indian acquisition, granted to Bussy in 1751 by Nizam Salabat Jung in return for the French troops that had put him in Hyderabad. Forde's victory at Chandurti and the storming of Masulipatnam in 1759 transferred the whole grant to the Company, which held the districts until 1947 — the French client system inherited entire.

• Trade routeYanam

  Yanam and Masulipatnam are the two French positions on the northern Coromandel, forty leagues apart, both there for painted cotton. When the Company took Masulipatnam in 1759 it left Yanam as a loge with no hinterland — a customs house, a flagstaff and a handful of staff, which is what most of French India actually looked like after 1763.

• Trade routeBalasore (Baleshwar)

  Masulipatnam and Balasore were the Danish company's two northern factories, established in 1625 and about 1636, and they bracket the Bay's textile coast. Neither was fortified and neither was defended; when the Danish company went bankrupt in 1650 both were simply left, and a reconstituted company had to negotiate its way back in decades later.

• Trade routeMalacca (Melaka)

  Malacca ran on Indian cloth. Coromandel painted cottons and Gujarati prints were what Southeast Asian spice growers would accept, which is why European companies bought textiles in India before they could buy pepper in the Indies. The Dutch built their entire Asian system on this triangle, and Masulipatnam's weavers worked to Javanese and Malay pattern preferences.

• Craft tradition ofCoromandel chintz, Machilipatnam

  Machilipatnam's kalamkari was painted rather than block-printed, drawn freehand with a kalam pen in iron and alum mordants and dyed in madder and indigo, and it was made to Persian and Southeast Asian taste rather than Indian. The port and the craft are the same economy: the town's weavers and painters worked to orders brought in by the ships in its roads.

• AnalogueVisakhapatnam / Vizag

  Two Andhra ports with opposite fates. Masulipatnam was the great Coromandel textile port of the Dutch and English companies and silted into a fishing town; Visakhapatnam had no harbour works at all but a natural deep-water bay, and became the shipyard and naval command. The surf-boats that loaded ships in the Visakhapatnam roads were called masula boats, after the port that lost.

On these journeys

• Early modern ports & companies
• Jean-Baptiste Tavernier — six voyages for stones (1630–68)
• The Indian Ocean World — the whole rim
• Indian port cities — the coast itself
• French India — 1664 to 1962
• Danish India — 1620 to 1868

Sources

Dutch and English factory records

• Wikipedia