Indian History Quiz: Advent of the Europeans

The correct answer is C, 1505. A Portuguese fleet under Lourenco de Almeida, son of the first Portuguese Governor in India, was driven to the coast of Ceylon in 1505, and the Portuguese soon made a treaty with the ruler of Kotte and built a fort at Colombo. The date sits neatly beside two other Portuguese landmarks, the arrival of Vasco da Gama at Calicut in 1498 and the capture of Goa by Albuquerque in 1510, and examiners test the three together. Option A, 1545, is far too late and belongs to no Portuguese landing. Option B, 1678, falls in the period when the Dutch, not the Portuguese, controlled the Ceylon coast, having taken it from Portugal in the 1650s. Option D, 1670, is equally within the Dutch period. Remembering that the entire Portuguese advance in the Indian Ocean happened in the first decade of the sixteenth century makes the answer easy.

The correct answer is C, Machilipatnam. Machilipatnam, also written as Masulipatnam, was the first Dutch factory in India, opened in 1605, and the English and the French also traded there; it was never a Portuguese possession. Option A, Bombay, was Portuguese until 1661, when it was given to Charles II of England as part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza and passed to the East India Company in 1668. Option B, Hooghly, was a Portuguese settlement in Bengal from the sixteenth century until Shah Jahan expelled them in 1632 for piracy and slave trading. Option D, Chaul, on the Konkan coast south of Bombay, was one of the early Portuguese ports and the site of a famous naval battle with the Egyptian fleet in 1508. Reading a settlement as Dutch when it is on the Coromandel coast is a reliable short cut in such questions.

The correct answer is C, Baroque and Manueline. The churches and convents of Old Goa, built after Albuquerque took the city in 1510 and inscribed on the World Heritage list, follow the styles that Portugal itself was using: the ornate late Gothic Manueline manner and, from the late sixteenth century, the Baroque. The Basilica of Bom Jesus, which holds the remains of St Francis Xavier, is the best known Baroque example, and the Se Cathedral carries Manueline and Tuscan features. Option A, Indo-Saracenic, is a nineteenth century British style that mixed Mughal and Gothic elements in buildings such as the Madras High Court. Option B, Mughal, belongs to the northern imperial tradition of Agra, Delhi and Lahore. Option D, Gothic Revival, is also a nineteenth century European movement seen in Bombay buildings such as the Victoria Terminus, long after Old Goa was built.

The correct answer is C, 1765. After the Battle of Buxar in October 1764, Robert Clive concluded the Treaty of Allahabad with the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II in 1765, and the emperor granted the Company the Diwani, the right to collect the revenue of Bengal, Bihar and Odisha. The arrangement created the dual system of government in Bengal, under which the Company held the purse while the Nawab kept the duty of administration and policing. Option A, 1773, is the year of the Regulating Act, the first attempt by the British Parliament to control the Company. Option B, 1791, falls in the period of Cornwallis, who was preparing the Permanent Settlement of 1793. Option D, 1782, is the year of the Treaty of Salbai that ended the First Anglo-Maratha War. Linking Buxar in 1764 with the Diwani in 1765 keeps the pair in order.

The correct answer is B, Francisco de Almeida. He reached India in 1505 as the first Portuguese Governor and held the office until 1509. His policy, remembered as the Blue Water Policy or Policy of Cartaz, was to make Portugal supreme on the sea rather than to conquer land, and he destroyed a combined Egyptian and Gujarati fleet at Diu in 1509. Option A, Albuquerque, succeeded him from 1509 to 1515 and is called the real founder of Portuguese power in India because he captured Goa in 1510, but he was the second Governor. Option C, Nino da Cunha, governed from 1529 and is remembered for moving the capital from Cochin to Goa in 1530 and for acquiring Bassein and Diu. Option D, Vasco da Gama, opened the sea route in 1498 and returned in 1524 as Viceroy, dying at Cochin the same year, so he was never the first Governor.

The correct answer is B, 1602. The Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, usually called the Dutch East India Company, was created in 1602 when the States General of the Netherlands merged several competing trading ventures and gave the new body a monopoly of eastern trade. Its first Indian factory was opened at Masulipatnam in 1605 and Pulicat became its chief settlement on the Coromandel coast. Option A, 1600, is the year in which Queen Elizabeth I chartered the English East India Company, two years earlier than the Dutch. Option C, 1616, is the year the Danish East India Company was formed, and the Danes set up Tranquebar in 1620. Option D, 1664, is the year Colbert founded the French East India Company under Louis XIV. Keeping the sequence 1600, 1602, 1616 and 1664 in mind answers a whole family of questions.

The correct answer is B, Francois Martin. He obtained the site from the ruler of Bijapur and founded Pondicherry in 1674, and it became the headquarters of the French in India, holding that position until 1954. Option A, Francois Caron, headed the first French factory in India, set up at Surat in 1668, and he also opened Masulipatnam in 1669, but Pondicherry was not his work. Option C, Dupleix, was Governor General of the French possessions from 1742 and the driving force behind the First and Second Carnatic Wars; he was recalled to France in 1754, seventy years after Pondicherry was founded. Option D, La Bourdonnais, was the French Governor of Mauritius who captured Madras during the First Carnatic War in 1746. Only Martin belongs to the founding of the town itself.

The correct answer is C, Queen Elizabeth I. She granted the charter on 31 December 1600 to a body formally called the Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies, giving it an exclusive right for fifteen years to trade east of the Cape of Good Hope. Option A, James I, succeeded Elizabeth and is remembered in this chapter for sending Sir Thomas Roe as his ambassador to the court of Jahangir between 1615 and 1619, not for the charter. Option B, Charles II, received Bombay in 1661 as part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza and leased it to the Company in 1668 for ten pounds a year, again a later event. Option D, Oliver Cromwell, ruled during the Commonwealth in the 1650s and renewed the Company's privileges, but the original charter is fifty years older than his rule.

The correct answer is B, the English and the French. Wandiwash, fought in January 1760 during the Third Carnatic War, saw Sir Eyre Coote defeat the Comte de Lally, and the French never recovered their position in India. Pondicherry fell the next year, and the Treaty of Paris of 1763 returned the French settlements but forbade them to fortify the towns or keep troops, reducing them to trading posts. Option A is wrong because the English broke Dutch power at the Battle of Bedara in 1759, a different battle in Bengal. Option C is wrong because the decisive English victory over the Portuguese was at Swally in 1612, near Surat. Option D describes a clash that never took place in India. Remembering Bedara in 1759 against the Dutch and Wandiwash in 1760 against the French keeps the two years apart.

The correct answer is B. Portugal gave Bombay to Charles II of England in 1661 as part of the dowry when he married the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza, and in 1668 the King transferred the islands to the East India Company on an annual rent of ten pounds. Gerald Aungier, who governed from 1669, developed the port and drew weavers and merchants to it, and the Company's western headquarters moved there from Surat in 1687. Option A is wrong because no fighting was involved; the transfer was a marriage settlement. Option C is wrong because Bombay was never a Mughal possession, the islands having been held by Gujarat and then by Portugal. Option D is wrong because the Zamorin ruled Calicut on the Malabar coast and had no authority over Bombay, although he was the first Indian ruler the Portuguese dealt with in 1498.

The correct answer is B, Sir Thomas Roe. He reached India in 1615 as the accredited ambassador of James I and stayed until 1619, travelling with the Mughal court and obtaining a farman that allowed the English to trade and to set up factories in several parts of the empire. Option A, William Hawkins, arrived earlier, in 1608, carrying a letter from James I, and Jahangir received him kindly and gave him a mansab, but he came as a Company servant and not as an ambassador, which is exactly the distinction examiners test. Option C, Job Charnock, was the Company agent who settled at Sutanuti in 1690, the beginning of Calcutta. Option D, Francis Day, obtained the site of Madras in 1639 from the ruler of Chandragiri and built Fort St George there, so both belong to a later generation.

The correct answer is A, Frederiknagore. The Danes acquired Serampore on the Hooghly in 1755 and named it after their king, and the town later became famous as the base of the Baptist missionaries William Carey, Joshua Marshman and William Ward, who printed books in many Indian languages there. Option B, Tranquebar, was the earlier Danish settlement on the Coromandel coast, founded in 1620 with the fort of Dansborg, so it is Danish but it is not Serampore. Option C, Chinsura, a few miles from Serampore on the same river, was the Dutch settlement in Bengal and passed to the English in 1825. Option D, Chandernagore, also on the Hooghly, was the French settlement founded in 1690 and remained French until the middle of the twentieth century. The Danes sold all their Indian possessions to the English in 1845.