Bankipur was an ancient village on the Hugli river located in what is now

West Bengal West Bengal (, Bengali: ''Poshchim Bongo'', , abbr. WB) is a state in the eastern portion of India. It is situated along the Bay of Bengal, along with a population of over 91 million inhabitants within an area of . West Bengal is the fou ...

, north of

Barrackpore Barrackpore (also known as Barrackpur) is a city and a municipality of urban Kolkata of North 24 Parganas district in the Indian state of West Bengal. It is also a part of the area covered by Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority (K ...

, a little north of Ishapore. It is now a suburb of Barrackpore and is not to be confused with Bankipur (Khejuri), a village located on the coast (at ).

History

Bankipur was famous as the principal settlement of the

Ostend Company The Ostend Company ( nl, Oostendse Compagnie, french: Compagnie d'Ostende), officially the General Company Established in the Austrian Netherlands for Commerce and Navigation in the Indies () was a chartered trading company in the Austrian Netherl ...

, the one great effort made by the

Austrian Empire The Austrian Empire (german: link=no, Kaiserthum Oesterreich, modern spelling , ) was a Central- Eastern European multinational great power from 1804 to 1867, created by proclamation out of the realms of the Habsburgs. During its existence, ...

to secure a foothold in

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area, the List of countries and dependencies by population, second-most populous ...

. The Ostend Company was formed in 1722–1723, and with a capital of less than a million sterling founded two settlements, one at Coblom (

Covelong Kovalam (Covelong) is a fishing village in Chennai, India, 40 kilometres south of Chennai, on the East Coast Road en route to Mahabalipuram. Covelong (Cabelon in French = Kovalam) was a port town developed in the 1720s by the Ostend Company on ...

) on the

Madras Chennai (, ), formerly known as Madras ( the official name until 1996), is the capital city of Tamil Nadu, the southernmost Indian state. The largest city of the state in area and population, Chennai is located on the Coromandel Coast of th ...

coast between the British company at Madras and the Dutch one at

Sadras Sadras is a fortress town located on India's Coromandel Coast in Chengalpattu district, 70 km south of Chennai in Tamil Nadu state. ''Sadras'' is the anglicised form of the ancient town of ''Saduranga pattinam''. History and Etymology An ...

, and the other on the Hugli between the British company at

Calcutta Kolkata (, or , ; also known as Calcutta , the official name until 2001) is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal, on the eastern bank of the Hooghly River west of the border with Bangladesh. It is the primary business, commer ...

and the Dutch Chinsura. Both the British and Dutch were offended and in 1727, in order to obtain the European guarantee for the Pragmatic Sanction, the court of

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

resolved to sacrifice the Company and suspended its charter. It became

bankrupt Bankruptcy is a legal process through which people or other entities who cannot repay debts to creditors may seek relief from some or all of their debts. In most jurisdictions, bankruptcy is imposed by a court order, often initiated by the debtor ...

in 1784 and ceased to exist in 1793. But in the meantime in 1733 the British and Dutch convinced the Mughal general at Hugli to attack Bankipur. He attacked Bankipur and the garrison of only fourteen soldiers escaped and set sail for Europe. Thus imperial Austrian interests disappeared from India.

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References

* ;Attribution *

History

Footnotes

References

Further reading