Continuing our series on India’s merchant classes, this week’s column turns to the Armenians, who arrived during the reign of the Great Mughals. Scattered at first, they later anchored themselves in Calcutta and Madras, then the twin capitals of British India’s trade. A small community remains in Calcutta, but most departed around Independence, to Britain, Australia and later Armenia after 1991.

Your columnist, while at school in Asansol, remembers a few Armenian classmates, pale-skinned and brown-haired boarders from Calcutta, who spoke Bengali and Hindi with ease and were as Indian as the rest of the lads. Like the Chinese of Tangra, they were as Indian as the rest of the lads

These essays aim to trace how such merchant communities, foreign in origin but Indian in spirit, shaped the country’s commercial and architectural fabric.