In a fluctuating, temperamental town, the English East India Company chose to anchor its factory in a house of ‘stone and excellent Timber….very strong, for that each Floor is half a Yard thick at least, of the best plastered Cement, which is very weighty’. The house had galleries, rooms for conferring, tanks, a hamam for washing, an open place for meals and a small chapel. Below stairs was a continual hurly-burly of banyans, ‘packers and warehouse-keepers, together with merchants bringing and receiving musters [samples], make a mere Billingsgate’. The lifestyle of the company president was said to resemble a Moghul Emperor or his representatives, such as the Surat governor. He dined off silver plates with trumpets ushering each course of the ‘choicest viands’ and moved about town on the shoulders of attendants in a palkhi emblazoned with the royal escutcheon, his council following in large coaches, drawn by stately oxen. Other European companies were equally profligate. The Dutch, like the English, built splendid tombs for their deceased presidents and indulged in drunken revelry while word about the French Company was that it was ‘better stored with Monsieurs than with cash, they live well, borrow money, and make a show’.
This was Surat, pride of the Moghuls, in the seventeenth century, at the height of its glory. Over the next hundred years, both the port and its rulers would be rendered insignificant in a series of dramatic shifts that put the country in foreign hands. The baffling particulars of how the English East India Company came to control India are not relevant to our story and a brief version will suffice. In 1707 the last great Moghul Emperor Aurangzeb died, leaving a power vacuum in which various regional powers asserted themselves. Surat, for instance, was repeatedly attacked by the Marathas, a rising guerrilla force in the Deccan. The European companies were no longer restricted to western India but had extended their presence along the Indian coast, setting up fortified bases close to textile manufacturing regions in Calcutta and Madras. The outbreak of the Seven Years’ War in 1756 pitted Great Britain against France, hostilities intensifying over the American Revolutionary War and the Napoleonic wars. The global contestation between the two powers spilled over to India over the course of the long uncertain eighteenth century, the early encounters taking place in the east and the south. Reckless, greedy officers of the companies fought each other with regional Indian powers as proxies or signed protection treaties, making vassals of local rulers across the land. The English East India Company emerged a winner, mopping up revenues countrywide and leading a local fighting force of two hundred thousand men. The Company took the Surat Fort in 1759 and the whole city in 1800.
The commercial class played a critical role in boosting the English East India Company’s prospects. The Company was backed wholeheartedly in Bengal by prominent bankers the Jagat Seths. In Surat, a section of vanias supported by Trawadi Arjunji Nathji, a Nagar Brahmin silk trader who supplied funds for the English East India Company’s military manoeuvres through his extensive banking network, campaigned for it to assume control of the port city. By then, Surat had declined. Political instability in the Indian Ocean region had led to a waning of trade. Ships left the once- glorious port for Persia and Arabia with half their previous loads. The jagat nakas or custom houses on the Tapi were deserted and officials were twiddling their thumbs. To add to the port’s woes, the Maratha attacks had triggered a state of lawlessness in which bands of thugs roamed the highways stalling the movement of goods and bullion and attacking traders. A foreign company with its private military force, its commercial processes and access to global funds, might have seemed like a saviour from anarchy. Though individual self-interest also played a role for many, vanias were allied to the Company and Trawadi Arjunji Nathji, as Lakshmi Subramanian points out in a profile of the banker-merchant, was an influential and reliable ally of the Company.
I wonder if the Sankalias were part of the group that campaigned for the English East India Company. In Nanavat, their neighbours were the Parakhs, a family with a long history of employment in the Company. Trawadi Arjunji Nathji had his office in a street running parallel to Nanavat. The possibility that the Sankalias supported Company rule is suggested by the fact that Mohanlal’s great-grandfather Gangadas was employed by the Company after it took charge of Surat in 1800. This is the only piece of early family lore I find and it claims that Gangadas was employed at the Surat Fort where the Company had moved its police and revenue departments. His designation was ‘Chief Officer’, though what this position implied or what the scope of his duties was is not known. How important the job was as a means of self-identification, however, can be seen from the fact that the family name changed at this point. Among vanias, the name ‘Killewala’ had a provenance as a ‘handler of the keys’ in a sahukar or moneylender’s operation, but an elderly Surat-based relative is emphatic that the name was a by-product of the job: ‘There were many Sankalias in town and people identified Gangadas as “the killa wala” meaning the one who worked at the Fort and the name stuck.’
source : The Print