The Armenians of Madras: A Vanished Community and Its Church

Step off the noise of George Town's Armenian Street, through a plain gateway, and Chennai suddenly goes quiet. Inside a walled courtyard stand rows of weathered gravestones cut with Armenian script, and above them a belfry of six bells. This is the Armenian Church of the Holy Virgin Mary, and it is very nearly all that survives of a merchant community that once helped make Madras a trading city. The Armenians are gone now. The church is their memorial.

Traders from a network called Julfa

Armenian merchants began settling in Madras from the 17th century, drawn by the trade routes that ran through the Coromandel Coast. Many belonged to one of the most remarkable commercial networks of the early modern world: the Julfa network, named for New Julfa, the Armenian quarter of Isfahan in Persia. From that base, Armenian family firms ran long-distance trade across the Indian Ocean and into Southeast Asia, dealing in silk, gemstones, textiles and much else. They knew several languages, kept meticulous accounts, and moved credit and goods between ports through relatives and trusted partners. In Madras they were not a large community, but they were an influential one, respected enough by the East India Company that a street in the heart of the old Black Town still carries their name.

The church, the courtyard and the six bells

The present Church of the Holy Virgin Mary dates to 1712, though the Armenian presence at prayer in Madras is older still. It is a modest, whitewashed building, more a quiet enclosure than a grand cathedral, and much of its atmosphere comes from what surrounds it. The walled courtyard is a graveyard, holding the tombs of roughly 350 Armenians whose inscriptions record births in places like Isfahan, Julfa and other distant towns, a map in stone of where these traders came from. Overhead hangs the church's best-known feature: a belfry of six bells, of varying sizes and reckoned to be the largest in the city, cast over the 18th and 19th centuries. The oldest carries an Armenian inscription and the date 1754. On the days they are rung together, the sound still carries over the crowded lanes of George Town.

A world-first printed in Madras

The community's most lasting achievement was made not in trade but in print. In 1794, a Madras Armenian priest named Harutyun Shmavonian founded Azdarar, meaning "The Intelligencer" or "Monitor". It was the first journal ever published in the Armenian language anywhere in the world, and among the earliest periodicals printed in India in any language other than English. Fittingly for a merchant readership, its pages mixed community and political news with shipping timetables and commodity prices from the Madras port. Azdarar ran for about a year and a half, into 1796, producing eighteen issues before it closed. Shmavonian, remembered as a father of Armenian journalism, was buried in the very churchyard on Armenian Street, so the man who gave his people their first newspaper lies among the community he served. Over the following centuries that community thinned and then all but disappeared, until today the church stands as its memorial, tended and preserved but no longer serving a living congregation of Madras Armenians.