AS EARLY AS THE SEVENTEENTH century, the French,  Dutch,  and English set up factories (trading stations) at Cossimbazar, which is beside the Hooghly River in the north part of West Bengal.  It existed before what is now Murshidabad became capital of Bengal. Today, what was once an important trading centre, where European merchants acquired goods to bring from India to Europe, is now no more than a rustic village.

 

Cossimbazar is home to a small cemetery, the Old English Cemetery, which contains the graves of  about 30 Brits who died between 1730 and  about 1800.  Within this small graveyard, which is maintained by the Archaeological Survey of India,  there is one above the burial place of Mary Hastings and her young daughter Elizabeth. The gravestone has been restored and is legible.

 

Mary, who died in 1759  (as did her daughter), was the first wife of Warren Hastings (1732-1818). He was a senior British East India Company administrator: the first governor of the Presidency of Fort William (Bengal), the head of the Supreme Council of Bengal, and so the first governor-general of Bengal in 1772–1785. He lived in Cossimbazar for a short time.

 

While reading about the Old English Cemetery,  I discovered that it contains the grave of a successful Jewish merchant from London: Lyon Prager  (died at Cossimbazar). Born in 1746, he died suddenly in May 1793. In brief, as an article (www.telegraphindia.com/culture/diamonds-and-dust-the-backstory-of-a-forgotten-grave-in-murshidabad/cid/1889965) revealed:

“Prager had come to Calcutta in 1786 on behalf of a London firm of Israel Levin Salomons, an Ashkenazi Jew. Diamonds were just one of the things Salomons traded in his India business; pearls and drugs were others.”

Stones cut in Benares by experts from Gujarat  were sent down the Ganges to merchants and traders at Cossimbazar and other places further down the Hooghly. Most probably when Lyon Prager took ill at Cossimbazar  he was there for undertaking business dealings.

 

Unlike Mary Hastings’s gravestone, the writing on Prager’s is now illegible. I have seen a photograph of his monument that is surmounted by an obelisk,  which was taken when the grave was still identifiable.  Without knowing that it was Prager’s grave, I  photographed it when we visited the cemetery in January 2025.

 

When I was researching my book about Jewish migration to South Africa, I learned that the Dutch East India Company did not permit Jewish people to travel to their trading stations in the Cape of Good Hope and elsewhere unless they had converted to Christianity. The presence in India of a Jewish trader, such as Lyon Prager   suggests that in the eighteenth century, Jews were not barred from joining trading expeditions by the British East India Company.