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Archiver > INDIA > 2001-04 > 0986751654


From: "megan mills" <>
Subject: [India-L] Germans
Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2001 13:42:22 -0400


Further to Ann's posting concerning folks from Alsace Lorraine etc, German
surnames often arrived with mercenaries of the 18th century including
ubiquitous Swiss Germans, Hessians and Austrians. When we keep in mind that
30,000, as a most conservative estimate, were in north India alone before
1800, it is clearer that a LOT of stray Europeans found their way to India
as much as we now tend to focus on the EIC, British India or perhaps formal
Portuguese or French colonies.

About the world, colonies were often heterogeneous places, as much as the
modern history of India tends to be written with a British and post1857
emphasis.

Walter Reinhardt was originally a butcher of Leipzig before reaching India
as a private in an EIC battallions. He deserted and reappeared as a
mercenary training officer to Amir kassim Ali Khan, then served Emperor Shah
Alam II who presented him with the jagir of Sardhana of Begum Sumru fame.

Col. Pohlmann of Hanover was a John Company serjeant who also excelled as a
soldier of fortune.

Should anyone ask, Maharaja Ranjit Singh's favourite physician was a
Hungarian of German origin, named Honigsberger/variants.

To the stew can be added occasional persons having connection to a Prussian
trading station at Bhadreshwar in Bengal.

Ditto, southern Irish folks recruited by the EIC including persons having
connection to Munster's Palatine German settlements. Thousands were planted
in Limerick c1709 and their descendants continue to give the
English-speaking world such Irish names as Switzer, Miller/Muller, Koch/Cook
and perhaps 100 others.

But back to the Mercs...
after a period of rummaging round UP and environs, happily preoccupied by
18th century persons belonging to assorted battlefields, I ran across a
fellow Canadian, Quebecois, bearing an elaborate German surname which he
explained was the bequest of a long ago Swiss mercenary in New France. It
was surprisingly difficult to convey in Frenglish just what I'd been
researching -- far from the shores of the St. Lawrence.

German box-wallahs certainly showed up.
The grandfather of a person known to Esther and I in Allahabad came to India
as a piano salesman in the 19th century, unaware of course that his kith and
kin would carry on in India.
In the 1930s, a friend's father, a German engineer, relocated his family to
the Chittagong hill tracts where he had found A JOB managing a lumbering
concern; no mean feat during the Depression. This man had German speaking
chums and business contacts in Chittagong, Dhaka and elsewhere into the
1960s.
NB also, Jewish refugees from German speaking countries who reached Rangoon
or Cal in the late 30s, most of whom went on to Israel or the UK after the
War.


Cheers
Megan


M.S. Mills PhD
Research & Media Services
Toronto, CDA M6J 3C3

416.532.7370



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