Calcutta, Belize: Indian Settlement History and Origins

The nineteenth century was, in many ways, an age of rapid political upheaval. Across the world, maps were being redrawn as empires weakened, nations emerged, and rebellions, wars, and technological shifts altered long-standing orders. Some of the era’s strangest outcomes were born from this turbulence: freed African American slaves founding a republic on the coast of West Africa, Belgium privately ruling the Congo, Indian soldiers serving in police forces as far away as Shanghai, more than ninety percent of Paraguay’s male population perishing during the War of the Triple Alliance, and Algeria being absorbed directly into France. Global politics was volatile, and because empires and societies were not as interconnected as they are today, such anomalies did not appear unusual at the time. This post examines one such peculiar nineteenth-century outcome that continues to exist today: the settlement of CALCUTTA in BELIZE.

At first glance, it seems odd for Belize to carry the name of an Indian city, but a closer look makes the connection clearer. The Kingdom of England established the Crown Colony of Jamaica and its Dependencies in 1655, a colonial structure that expanded westward to include British Honduras by around 1670—territory that largely corresponds to present-day Belize. The same administrative network later extended to the Cayman Islands and the Turks and Caicos Islands, both of which remain British Overseas Territories even today. Until 1884, British Honduras was governed directly from Jamaica, and it was during these decades of Jamaican control that an unexpected Indian dimension entered the region’s history. While the wider system of indentured labour had already begun transporting Indians to overseas colonies, it was the aftermath of the 1857 Indian Rebellion that decisively altered British imperial policy.

After the rebellion was suppressed in 1858, many Indian revolutionaries were officially classified as convicts by the British state. Along with their families, they were deported across the empire to distant colonies including Mauritius, Singapore, the Andaman Islands, Hong Kong, Burma, Ceylon, the Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca, Aden, Fiji, Trinidad, and Guyana. In the same period, several hundred Indians were transported to the narrow northern coastal stretch of British Honduras, where they were settled at the Corozal Plantation. This estate lay at the extreme northern edge of the colony, close to what is today the Mexico–Belize border, barely ten to eleven kilometres away. The sugar estate came to be known as 'Calcutta', largely because Calcutta was the Indian port from which many of these individuals had been shipped.

This means that a place named Calcutta exists today barely eleven kilometres from Mexico.

This movement marked only the first phase of Indian settlement in the region. A second wave arrived in 1872, when indentured labourers were transferred from Jamaica to this small settlement under promises of improved living conditions. A third group arrived from neighbouring Guatemala, where Indians had previously been employed on coffee plantations in the Cuchumatanes, often referred to locally as the Café Mountains. Notably, unlike most Caribbean sugar colonies dominated by European planters, several of the sugar estates in this region were operated by American owners. Calcutta was also not the only site of Indian settlement; communities expanded into nearby estates such as San Andrés, San Antonio, Estrella, Carolina, and Ranchito, as documented by researchers Sylvia Gilharry Perez and Kumar Mahabir.

Over time, the settlement grew and Indian cultural influences initially spread through food practices, domestic customs, and community life. Today, only a small percentage of Corozal’s Calcutta village identifies as East Indian. The town of Corozal itself has an earlier origin, founded by the Cruzo’ob Maya—refugees who fled south from Yucatán during the Caste War of 1848. Within the span of just over a decade, two very different displaced communities settled within minutes of each other: Maya refugees from Mexico and Indians transported from South Asia. Unlike many other Indian diaspora settlements, however, Calcutta’s residents no longer speak Indian languages. Spanish, Creole, and regional tongues dominate daily life, while Awadhi, Bhojpuri, and Hindi appear to have disappeared within a few generations. Even so, individuals of East Indian descent later entered government service, education, transport, and local politics, and a handful of family-run businesses and restaurants continue to reflect this heritage.

The settlement’s name has remained unchanged. Today, Calcutta appears clearly on maps, with the Philip Goldson Highway running through it. It lies between Xaibe and Ranchito to the north and San Joaquin to the south, roughly four kilometres from the coastline of Corozal Bay, which opens into the Caribbean Sea. The New River flows a short distance to the south, marking the closest major waterway. Below are two maps: one showing the present-day settlement of Calcutta, and another drawn from an 1857 map of British Honduras, based on the work of Henry Darwin Rogers and Alexander Keith.

Lake Chimay Myth: The Lake That Never Existed

The phase between the 1200s and the mid-1800s saw Mediterranean seafaring Europeans, followed by Renaissance and early-modern cartographers from France, England, Holland, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Italian kingdoms, begin mapping what they considered the 'unexplored' regions of Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Australia. In the process, they introduced several inaccuracies and errors: California was shown as an island, an imaginary southern continent was marked as Terra Australis Incognita, and the Japanese islands were depicted as distorted, oversized landmasses. One such enduring error was Lake Chimay—an imaginary lake placed around today’s Assam region, in the valley of China’s Yunnan province. It was believed that several rivers of northeast India, northern Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Yunnan originated from a single water body called Lake Chimay. First appearing in 1554, the lake continued to be reproduced on maps until the early 19th century, when it was finally understood to be nothing more than a cartographic myth.

Yunnan province borders the northern reaches of Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam and lies roughly 200 kilometres from India’s closest village in Arunachal Pradesh. Rivers such as the Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Dharla, Mekong, Red River, Chao Phraya, along with several others in the Upper Assam valley and Myanmar’s Kachin State, all flow through this broader region. For centuries, it was believed that this vast imagined lake was the source of all these rivers. The first cartographer to map it was Giacomo Gastaldi in 1554—an Italian cartographer who worked with Ptolemaic traditions and relied heavily on accounts from European and Asian travellers. The practice continued, with successive maps reproducing this fictitious lake and adding towns and river names that appear almost comical in today’s context. A map dated 1705 by Guillaume de L’Isle marks rivers named Laquia, Caipoumo, Casa, and Asa. While it is difficult to identify these precisely today, the Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Dharla, and Chao Phraya were believed to originate from this lake. The Brahmaputra, or Tsangpo, rises from the Angsi Glacier near Lake Mansarovar and Mount Kailash in Tibet; the Irrawaddy originates in Myanmar’s Kachin State and drains into the Andaman Sea; the Dharla flows from the foothills of Sikkim and joins the Brahmaputra in northern Bangladesh as the Jamuna; and the Chao Phraya flows from Nakhon Sawan in Thailand and empties into the Gulf of Thailand. European cartographers had not traversed or mapped the Himalayas or the regions east of them and therefore made this erroneous assumption. In reality, none of these river sources are even remotely close to one another, making the eventual collapse of the Lake Chimay myth inevitable.

The reality behind Lake Chimay began to emerge through 17th-century Jesuit missionaries during their journeys to spread Christian teachings in China and Macau. In 1685, when Aurangzeb ruled Mughal India, the Kangxi Emperor (Shengzu of Qing) ruled Qing China, and King Narai ruled Ayutthaya in present-day Thailand, a French Jesuit missionary, Father Guy Tachard, discovered that the size and position of Siam were not as European cartographers had assumed. Mapmakers had placed Siam about 24 degrees too far east—a displacement of nearly 2,500 kilometres. When Tachard reached Siam, he realised that Asia was significantly smaller than it appeared on European maps. This revelation made it impossible to reconcile the supposed position of Lake Chimay, and although Tachard did not explicitly deny the lake’s existence, it no longer fit within his geographical understanding. Earlier Jesuits, such as Martino Martini and others, had already noted multiple variations in the lake’s supposed outlets and argued that rivers like the Red River and the Chao Phraya had different sources. Such observations began to sow doubt among Europeans about the lake’s existence and accuracy, though it continued to appear on maps with conflicting information about the rivers flowing from it.

Guillaume de L’Isle was among the first to seriously question the authenticity of Lake Chimay in the early 1700s, though he continued to depict it on his maps. By the 1730s, however, Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville—another French cartographer—accurately mapped Tibet, Yunnan, and the entire river system of the region, leaving no place for Lake Chimay. By the early 19th century, the lake had disappeared entirely from European maps. The mythical lake had a long and curious life—imagined by Europeans and ultimately dismissed by them. Below is a recreation of Guillaume de L’Isle’s 1705 map depicting Lake Chimay.

Sachin State: The Forgotten Muslim Gujarati State in the Bombay Presidency

The Bombay Presidency, during the late 19th to early 20th centuries, was divided into six major ‘agencies’ - Kathiawar, Gujarat States, Rewa Kantha, Mahi Kantha, Palanpur and Surat. While there were several smaller agencies and political charges such as Thana, Kolaba, Bijapur, Sawantwadi, Aundh, Bhor and Phaltan. This post shall talk about one tiny princely state of one of the major agencies, which has a peculiar name and a very interesting history behind it. Among the various smaller states under Surat Agency, there existed one name called the Sachin State. What is more mind-boggling is that it was a Muslim state even though its name has a full-fledged Sanskritised Hindu origin.

Sachin—as millions resonate with the God of cricket, Sachin Tendulkar. Then we have one of the pioneers of music in cinema, Sachin Dev Burman (1906–1975), giving some exceptionally good chartbusters especially in the 1970s. Then what is the origin of this name and how come it became a Muslim Gujarati state, that too having an African origin? Well, at least the word's origin is formed from Sanskrit, meaning epithet of Lord Indra and is applicable sometimes to Lord Shiva. It means that 'the one who is endowed with truth/pure existence' and on similar grounds. But then how it became a Muslim state is the premise of this post. 

The answer goes back to 1791. The Janjira State on the Konkan coast had a three-centuries-old dynasty of Siddis of East African (Habshi/Zanj coast) origin—later described in Indian sources as Abyssinian—originating from the Zanj coast around today’s Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique. Another entity that is important here is to mention that the term ‘Abyssinian’ or ‘Ethiopian’ was a major African realm back in the days. For Indian rulers, it was an umbrella term for Ethiopians or Bantus or anyone coming from African realms, and they called them ‘Habashi’ (belonging from Abyssinia or Al-Habash). Under the Gujarat Sultanate (1407‑1573), these Siddis were made naval commanders for ports such as Broach (Bharuch), Surat, Diu, Cambay (Khambhat) etc., but their base had always been Janjira. In fact, even after the dismantling of the Gujarat Sultanate, the heat between the Siddis and the newly emerging Marathas continued for the next centuries. The conflict was costly and inconclusive, with the Siddis retaining naval superiority. It began in 1657 and continued in various forms until 1818. But in between these times, shortly before 1818, a significant shift took place in the history of Siddis.

As every empire’s collapse is caused because of internal rivalries and disruptions in smooth succession of power, the Siddis were no different. Both Marathas and Siddis started to decline in the 18th century, and in 1733 a treaty was signed between Baji Rao I and Siddi Yakut Khan—the Peshwa and the Sultan. The treaty was the Maratha recognition of Janjira’s autonomy and a cessation of hostile naval actions against Maratha shipping; large-scale hostilities ceased after 1733, though minor skirmishes persisted until 1818. In between this, the political misalignment of Siddis in Janjira had increased and meanwhile the rampant takeover of smaller territories across Konkan and Gujarat by the British had tossed the administration of western India. The Siddis, sandwiched between their internal turmoil and external British threats, sought a stable inland revenue settlement for a cadet branch of the ruling house, and so they turned northwards into Gujarat. While Janjira remained the Siddis’ base, a tiny Rajput agrarian land near Surat was granted through a diplomatic settlement. This region, away from the coast, inland and quiet from the mayhem, was Sachin. Politically, it was not a loss for the British to have another Siddi region on the coast of Gujarat, close to Surat, also because they had themselves shifted from Surat to Bombay and continued developing the latter. Hence, Sachin State, formed in 1791, was a tiny Siddi princely state, which years later was clubbed under Surat Agency and annexed to the larger Gujarat States group of princely states. Shortly, in 1829, the British took over all the administrative and political power from the Sultan but retained his title, thus assimilating it under the British rule formally. 

Today, the dying Siddi legacy can still be seen in Sachin’s heritage. Sachin Fort was constructed sometime after the state was founded in 1791 and served as the Nawab’s residence and seat of authority. While exact construction dates are not documented, most accounts place its construction in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. The fort’s design does not showcase overtly African motifs; instead, it blends Mughal and European architectural influences typical of western India. Its cultural significance comes from its association with the Siddi dynasty—an African‑origin ruling family—rather than from specific structural elements. In other words, the fort’s African aspect lies in the identity of its builders and occupants, not in the architecture itself. Although much of the state’s heritage has faded into the fabric of modern Surat, Sachin Fort endures as a quiet witness to this unique history.