The eventual rise of the English East India Company and the shift towards Bombay as the ‘Gateway of India,’ brought the decline of Surat. It is here that the English merchants, arriving to India in the early 17th century, saw with grave concern that the Armenians – the pioneers of foreign trade in India – were well established in the country. Historic Surat was the port city linking East and West. In each, they built communities with schools, churches, printing presses, cultural institutions, and, ultimately, cemeteries. They established first in the royal capital of Agra then spread throughout commercial centres: Surat, Calcutta, and Madras. In the 16th century, Akbar the Great, learning of the global network of the Armenian trade, induced the merchant princes to settle their sojourn in his dominions.
Since the days of remote antiquity, Armenian merchants travelled from snow-clad mountains to the tropics of India searching for spices, muslin, and precious stones – birds of passage who found favour in the court of Mughal Emperors.
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