[BITList] Fwd: [INDIA-BRITISH-RAJ] Bangladesh's Last Armenian

[John Feltham]

27 February 2009

Bangladesh's Last Armenian Prays For Unlikely Future

http://armeniansinasia.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/bangladeshs-last-armenian-prays-for-unlikely-future/

--- Harshawardhan_Bosham Nimkhedkar

Quote

Michael Joseph Martin is guarded about his exact age
and reluctant to accept he will be the last in a long line
of Armenians to make a major contribution to the history
of Bangladesh. Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, was
once home to thousands of migrants from the former
Soviet republic who grew to dominate the city's trade
and business life. But Martin, aged in his 70s, is now
the only one left.

"When I die, maybe one of my three daughters will fly
in from Canada to keep our presence here alive,"
Martin said hopefully, speaking broken Bengali with
a thick accent.. "Or perhaps other Armenians will
come from somewhere else."

Martin came to Dhaka in 1942 during World War II,
following in the footsteps of his father who had settled
in the region decades earlier. They joined an Armenian
community in Bangladesh dating back to the 16th
century, but now Martin worries about who will look
after the large Armenian church in the city's old quarter.

"This is a blessed place and God won't leave it
unprotected and uncared for," he said of the Church
of Holy Resurrection, which was built in 1781 in the
Armanitola, or Armenian district.

Martin - whose full name is Mikel Housep Martirossian
- looks after the church and its graveyard where 400
of his countrymen are buried, including his wife who
died three years ago. When their children, all Bangladeshi
passport-holders, left the country along, Martin became
the sole remaining Armenian here. He now lives alone
in an enormous mansion in the church grounds.

"When I walk, sometimes I feel spirits moving around.
These are the spirits of my ancestors. They were noble
men and women, now resting in peace," said Martin,
who is stooped and frail but retains a detailed knowledge
of the Armenian history in Dhaka.

Marble tombstones display family names such as Sarkies,
Manook and Aratoon from a time when Armenians were
Dhaka's wealthiest merchants with palatial homes who
traded jute, spices, indigo and leather. Among the dead
are M. David Alexander, the biggest jute trader of the
late 19th century, and Nicholas Peter Poghose who
set up Bangladesh's first private school in the 1830s
and died in 1876.

Martin, himself a former trader, said the Armenians,
persecuted by Turks and Persians, were embraced
in what is now Bangladesh first by the Mughals in
the 16th and 17th centuries and then by the British
colonial empire. Fluent in Persian - the court language
of the Mughals and the first half of the British empire
in India - Armenians were commonly lawyers, merchants
and officials holding senior public positions.

They were also devout Christians who built some of
the most beautiful churches in the Indian subcontinent.
"Their numbers fluctuated with the prospects in trading
in Dhaka," said Muntasir Mamun, a historian at Dhaka
University.

"Sometimes there were several thousand Armenians
trading in the Bengal region. They were always an
important community in Dhaka and dominated the
country's trading. They were the who's who in town.
They celebrated all their religious festivals with pomp
and style."

The decline came gradually after the British left India
and the subcontinent was partitioned in 1947 with
Dhaka becoming the capital of East Pakistan and
then of Bangladesh after it gained independence
in 1971.

These days, the Armenian Church holds only occasional
services on important dates in the Orthodox Christian
calendar, with a Catholic priest from a nearby seminary
coming in to lead prayers at Christmas. Martin said the
once-busy social scene came to a halt after the last
Orthodox priest left in the late 1960s, but he is determined
to ensure the church's legacy endures.

"Every Sunday was a day of festival for us. Almost every
Armenian would attend the service, no matter how big he
was in social position. The church was the centre of all
activities," he said.

"I've seen bad days before, but we always bounced back.
I am sure Armenians will come back here for trade and
business. I will then rest in peace beside my wife."

Unquote



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Bad typists of the word, untie.