The Indian Seal of Sir Francis Sykes

The Indian Seal of Sir Francis Sykes – A Tale of Two Families

By Sir John Sykes

In this case study, project associate Sir John Sykes situates the Indian seal of his ancestor, Sir Francis Sykes, first baronet (1730-1804) within the context of both East India Company and family history in England and on the subcontinent. The story of the Sykes seal is both transnational and inter-generational.

You can read this case study as a whole (including full references to primary and secondary sources) by downloading the PDF version. Or you can read the online version below, either sequentially – by clicking on the image of each section to access the text – or selectively – by clicking on the image of the section that is of most interest to you.

	The Sykes Seal This section describes the Sykes seal as a material object and translates its inscription. It explains how and why such seals were used by Company officials and Indian banians (men of business) in the eighteenth century.
	The Owner This section introduces one of the case study’s two central protagonists, Sir Francis Sykes. A close associate of first Robert Clive and then Warren Hastings, Sykes combined his political and administrative duties with extensive private trade in Bengal at Cossimbazar. Wealth accumulated in India in the 1750s allowed Sykes to purchase an estate in Yorkshire; his service and private trade as Resident at Murshidabad in the 1760s substantially augmented this fortune.
	The Banian Sykes’s ability to combine administrative duties with private trade hinged upon his business partnership with the Indian banian Krishna Kanta Nandy (known as Cantoo Baboo, c. 1720-1794). A successful silk merchant who had previously served as banian to Warren Hastings, Cantoo Baboo was instrumental in promoting Sykes’s trading activities both during his tenure as a Company official and after his return to England. They remained correspondents for decades.
	The Cossimbazar Raj This section of the case study traces the fortunes of Cantoo Baboo’s business and family in Cossimbazar from the era of Sir Francis Sykes into the twentieth century. Building on the wealth accumulated in the Company era, descendants of the family emerged as leading zemindars, proponents of industrialisation and philanthropists in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By the twentieth century, the Cossimbazar estate had evolved into a thriving industrial and commercial business, not least through the intervention of the entrepreneur and historian Maharajkumar Somendra Chandra Nandy (Dr S.C. Nandy, b. 1928).
	The Sykes Family Sir Francis Sykes returned to England with an Indian fortune rumoured to be second only to that of Robert Clive. His purchase of Basildon Park, Berkshire and the Gillingham estate in Dorset, as well as his election as an MP, rested on this fortune. Successive generations, however, saw this wealth dissipate, and Basildon Park was sold by the family in 1838. Links with India continued in the twentieth century: the 9^th baronet worked as a tea-planter in Darjeeling prior to World War II.
	The Reunion After an interval of over two centuries, the families of Cantoo Baboo and Sir Francis Sykes met again. The Sykes seal of 1765, kept in the possession of Cantoo Baboo’s descendants for generations, was presented to the 9^th Baronet by Dr Nandy in 1993, a fitting token of the two families’ intertwined histories, which continue to the present day.
	The Seal as Witness Material objects such as the Sykes seal speak at multiple levels to the cross-cultural encounters engendered by East India Company trade and politics. By situating objects such as the Sykes seal in their extended historical contexts, we can begin to write connected histories of the full spectrum of Company families.