Page:History of the Armenians in India.djvu/12

 dark pages of the history of the Armenian nation for the past five hundred years. A lover of history, I have always taken a keen interest in the history of these once-flourishing colonies, about which there is, however, but very little on record. My favourite hobby has been the history of the various Armenian colonies in India and the Far East, fostered no doubt by the various narratives I have heard from my venerable father (now in his seventy-fifth year), to whom I am greatly indebted for having instilled into my youthful heart a taste for antiquarian knowledge and research and an ardent love for the rich classical Armenian literature.

Being anxious to gather further information regarding the Armenian colonists in India, I ransacked our modest ancestral library, which was rich in Armenian publi- cations, printed at Madras, where my grandfather had been a merchant for several years in the second half of the eighteenth century. I next turned my atten- tion to the numerous Armenian letters in my father's escretoirCy which were written to my great-grandfather (Mackertich Agazar Seth) at Julfa by my grandfather and other Armenian merchants, chiefly from Surat and Madras, during the last century, and some contained materials of historical value. These, with a number of other important documents and MSS., I brought from Julfa as valuable relics, intending some day to utilize them in a historical work. On arriving at Calcutta in