Four centuries of the Netherlands and India

From the Dutch East India Company and the Hortus Malabaricus to today's ties.

The Dutch East India Company (VOC), founded in 1602, established itself on the Coromandel Coast in the first years of the seventeenth century, with Pulicat as its headquarters. Trading posts followed in Surat in Gujarat, in Bengal around Chinsurah and on the Malabar Coast, where the Dutch took Cochin from the Portuguese in 1663. They came for textiles, pepper, saltpetre and opium.

The finest legacy of that era is the Hortus Malabaricus: twelve volumes on the plants of Kerala, compiled under governor Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede with the help of local scholars and printed in Amsterdam between 1678 and 1693.

In 1741 the kingdom of Travancore defeated the VOC at Colachel, and in the eighteenth century British power took over. Under the Treaty of London of 1824 the Netherlands handed its last possessions in India to Great Britain. In 1920 the poet Rabindranath Tagore visited the Netherlands; since India's independence in 1947 the two countries have maintained diplomatic relations.

Useful links

• Nationaal Archief nationaalarchief.nl
  The archives of the VOC.
• Atlas of Mutual Heritage atlasofmutualheritage.nl
  Maps, drawings and plans of VOC settlements.
• Rijksmuseum rijksmuseum.nl
  Objects and paintings from the VOC era.