The Armenians in Chennai

Article by: Sanchia de Souza, November 2005

Armenian Street, like the rest of George Town, is a dusty swirl of activity on this sunny afternoon. This was once the most famous address in Chennai's old business district, at a time when there were still Armenian merchants trading here, and their power and contribution to the area as well as the city as a whole was great enough to name the road after them.

We cross the road with trepidation, and I momentarily wonder what some of those Armenian merchants would have done, faced with the disorderly traffic. The first of their ilk came overland, through Persia, Afghanistan and over the mountains of Tibet to enter India in the 12th century, risking the journey in order to take back spices, muslin and precious stones to Europe and the Middle East. I still suspect that they might not have liked Chennai traffic very much. It is a relief to get to the other side, and climb the few steps leading up to 60 Armenian Street, where a uniformed watchman stands before the huge Burma teak doors through which we enter the only Armenian building that still remains in Chennai - the Church of the Holy Virgin Mary.

Walking in, it comes as a shock to discover that the huge doors do not open right into the church, but rather into a short dim corridor that leads into the churchyard. The walls facing the street were high enough to prevent us from seeing what lay behind them, so I had assumed that the church grounds had been lost over the years to the city, or had never existed at all. The churchyard stands before us, and as the great doors behind close with a faint squeaking sound, they shut out also all the din and clatter of the street. We are alone, in the silence of the Armenians, the silence, perhaps, of a tomb.

The sunshine plays on the warm stone columns in the porch, the colour of sand on the Marina Beach

The eyes linger on the beautiful free-standing square-based domed belfry, before we turn our attention to the church to its right. Small, and unimpressive in height, it breaks with Armenian Orthodox tradition in possessing a flat roof, rather than a pitched one and its three largest domes are flattened, but the cross rises from a typical cone-topped tower. The sunshine plays on the warm stone columns of the porch, the colour of sand on the Marina Beach, as we try in vain to read the tombstones that pave its floor, all inscribed in Armenian.

The church seems to be closed, but we are reluctant to leave this quietness. We read newspaper reports about the church that are posted on noticeboards at the eastern end of the porch, and then begin to read entries in the battered guestbook that lies there. The trees that form a canopy over the graveyard behind the belfry rustle - a faint breeze blows through. In the distance, it seems that someone is playing loud music; muffled sounds penetrate into the peace of this place. I decide to climb into the belfry and nearly trip over a sleeping sari-clad woman who presumably does the cleaning. She waves me on, and I climb up the one flight of stairs, where I crouch low to pass below the bellropes. Six huge bells hang there, the lowest two marked with the name of Thomas Mears of London, and the date 1772.

The first church built by the Armenians was within the ramparts of Fort St. George, a wooden structure completed in about 1668, when a community large enough to require a church had settled there. By 1712, a new, more permanent building had been built, but it was demolished by the French when they wrested Fort St. George from the British for a short while. 60 years later, the present church was consecrated, built on a plot that had housed the private chapel and cemetery of the wealthy Shawmier family. Its fortress-like walls shut out the fear of destruction and desecration, but they also shut out the world.

The porch of the long building that looks out onto the street, to the right of those great doors, is a modest picture gallery. There are painstaking charcoal drawings of Christ, of the Virgin Mary, of the Armenian Holy See at Echmiadzin, each one neatly framed and carefully hung. The lovebirds in a cage at the far end twitter as I walk along, stopping to read the beautifully calligraphed words of the Armenian-American writer, William Saroyan.

"I should like to see any power of the world destroy this rare, small tribe of unimportant people, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, literature is unread, music is unheard, and prayers are no more answered. Go ahead, destroy Armenia. See if you can do it. Send them into the desert without bread or water. Burn their houses and churches. Then see if they will not laugh, sing and pray again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia."

A few steps later, Christ is in agony in Gethsemane, the lovebirds fall silent, and the psalmist's plaint echoes down the centuries, "Out of the depths I cry to thee, O Lord..." The pictures on the walls are the work of the former caretaker of the church, George Gregorian, who died last year at the age of 89. Gregorian grew up in India, before leaving for England after the end of British rule. Twenty years later, he returned to Madras, and was appointed caretaker of the then dilapidated Armenian Church. There remained only a dozen Armenians in Madras at the time, and it took years of work for Gregorian to restore and repair the church, as well as work through piles of paperwork and litigation.

The walls facing the street were high enough to prevent us from seeing what lay behind them

Ten years ago, he was the last Armenian left in Chennai. He was the Keeper and Custodian of the Faith, and he was utterly, completely alone. His wife was an Anglo-Indian woman, and it seems that as age overtook him, her company was not enough - and certainly not enough to build a New Armenia. His misery was that no one knew how to speak in Armenian anymore; no one, except the 350 tombstones among which he lived. There he must have sat after the day's tasks were done, in that dimly lit porch, looking over the pictures on the walls, wondering if his prayers would ever be answered.

Out of the shadows, we stand near the belfry and talk to Michael Stephen, who came down from Bangalore and took over as caretaker from Gregorian in 1995. Stephen tells us of the history of the Armenians in Chennai - we talk of how it was Armenian merchants who discovered the tomb of St. Thomas the Apostle here and led the Portuguese to it; of Khojah Petrus Woskan whose 46 houses were confiscated by the French, and how he refused to shift loyalties to retrieve them, but politely told the French to give the proceeds of his property to the poor, as France would certainly not be so impoverished as to require his assets to bolster her own; of the bridge he built across the river Adyar to Saidapet, a bridge which is still in use; of the first Armenian journal that was published in Madras in 1794 by Fr. Haruthian Shmavonian; of the dreams of statehood that inspired the "Madras Group" which was a contemporary of the revolutions in France and America.

We talk of how the Armenians of Calcutta had until recently a rugby team that was highly respected in Asia

Stephen takes us into the church, its modest wooden altar gleaming with the colours of a series of paintings of the life of Christ and a few small icons under lamplight. Coming out again, we talk then of the Baghdadi Jews and the Parsis, two more dwindling communities who left their philanthropic and historic marks on urban India, who cling to their cultural and religious heritage just as the Armenians do. We talk of how the Armenians of Calcutta had until recently a rugby team that was highly respected in Asia and of how the descendents of these mercantile migrants comprised almost the entire Indian national team. We talk of how emigration to North America, Europe and Australia, in search of better opportunities, has whittled the Armenian community in India to a mere half-dozen in Bombay, two in Chennai, ten in Bangalore and about a hundred and fifty in Calcutta, of whom most are old and feeble. He tells us how he rings the 6200-kilo bells every Sunday morning to keep the church alive, and that when services are held, two or three times a year, the priest and congregation have to be brought down from Calcutta.

And so we come to the future. Four families from Armenia are expected to migrate by the end of this year to India, coaxed by the diaspora to swell their numbers. The church is soon to be restored, after restoration of the Calcutta Armenian Church is completed. And, most significantly, more than a hundred children, all orphans or from underprivileged families in Armenia, are presently in Calcutta, studying at the Armenian Humanitarian Academy, a school for the community. The children will live here for ten years, and it is hoped that after their stay here, some of them will decide against returning to Armenia. Already they are learning to like Indian food, and their English is improving. It is a pity that Gregorian did not live to see his prayers answered - there came a flock of children, as if sent from heaven, who could speak nothing but Armenian.

Posted 02 March 2004