– Joaquim Magalhães de Castro
By the turn of the 17th century, numerous references to a Christian community of considerable size, certainly of “Firingi” origin, appeared in Rangamati on the banks of Brahmaputra. A text dating from 1682 and written by the Augustinian monks living in Bandel (Hoogly) in Bengal devotes a few paragraphs to the Christian community of Rangamati, which at that time totaled 7,000 souls. Frey Sicardo, the Augustinian priest who was there attending to the spiritual needs of Catholics, refers to another place that the records refer to as Hossumpur (or Ossumpur), apparently in the vicinity of Rangamati, where another community of firingis would reside. Since then the missionaries of the Portuguese Padroado do Oriente would make frequent visits to Rangamati and Hossumpur.
These isolated Christians would merit the attention of a high dignitary of the Church, in this case the Jesuit Francisco Laynes, bishop of São Tome de Meliapore, who in 1714, accompanied by Father Barbier, would visit Rangamati as part of a tour of the parishes of Bengal. The Indo Portuguese Correspondence of September 30, 1865 recorded the event as follows: “Rangamati is a city located on the northern border of the Mughal Empire at 26 degrees North latitude. It was a saying at that time in Bengal that if two people visited Rangamati, at least one of them would die in that place. Such a belief, however, did not prevent the action of our Catholic missionaries, for they truly believed that the best thing that could happen to them was to die in the performance of their noble functions. It is recorded that our missionaries went up the rivers Megna and Brahmaputra, and on the fifth or sixth day they disembarked and stayed twenty-four hours in Hossompur, an exclusively Christian village where there was a church dedicated to St Nicholas of Tolentine. To the north of there the landscape is desert and the climate unhealthy. During the twenty-five days that he remained in Rangamati, Bishop Laynes took advantage of administering the chrism to over a thousand people.”
A more detailed note on the location and fortification of Rangamati was made years later, in 1764, by the famous British geographer James Rennel. He tells us that “Rangamatty is a small village in the immediate vicinity of a cluster of small hills that constitute the western bank of the Sunecoss (Sankosh) river about two and a half miles northwest of the Brahmaputra, with which it communicates. It has a small fort made of mud with some pieces of artillery. I watched about 50 guns weighing 2 to 4 pounds. The latitude of the place is 26 0 6 North and the longitude of Dhaka 0 0 20 West.” Rennel’s work, Memory of a Map of Hindustan or The Mughal Empire and its Atlas of Bengal, clearly marks Rangamati near Goalpara. This same map is included in Chapter IV of Jean Deloche’s book Journey on the Assam.
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