Description
In the preface to his Bengali-English dictionary of 1834, the Calcutta entrepreneur and litterateur Ramkamal Sen related the following anecdote. In the seventeenth century, an English East India Company ship proceeded from the Bay of Bengal up the Hooghly River, before anchoring near the future site of the city of Calcutta. The vessel’s commander sent ashore to the leading local businessmen, and requested the assistance of a “dubash.” This word, in the environs of the Company’s southern entrepot of Madras, referred to a mediator, often a power-broker (literally, “one with two languages”). In riverine Bengal, however, where the Company was still a newcomer, the utterance more readily called to mind a dhoba, or washerman. Thus, the local magnates appointed such a man to tender his services to the foreign merchants. The dhoba timidly approached the Indiaman in a dinghy, bearing the customary gifts of “plantains, pumplemusses and sugarcandy,” or the like. To his pleasant bewilderment, he was received on deck with a salute, and presented not with bags of soiled laundry, but “with bags of gold and other precious articles.” Thenceforth, the dhoba was employed as “one of the principal native servants of the Company.” And over time, he acquired the learning and status he had been assumed to possess already. For Ramkamal, “He may be considered the first English scholar among the natives of Calcutta.