Oil, Empire, Salazar, and the Indo-Portuguese Museum

I stumbled upon the Indo-Portuguese Museum while wandering through the streets of Fort Kochi during a recent trip. It hadn’t been on my itinerary, but as a self-confessed history nerd, I couldn’t resist stepping in. Despite its prominence on tourist maps, the museum is tucked away at the bend of a quiet road, easy to miss at first glance.

It was the welcome board that stopped me. Among the credits was “The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation” - a name that seemed out of place in this corner of the world. A cursory Google search revealed that it was named after an early 20th century Armenian oil tycoon. My bewilderment only increased: what connection could there possibly be between an Armenian magnate and this quaint museum of Roman Catholic relics in Kerala?

Mr Five Percent

Calouste Gulbenkian was arguably the richest and most influential man most people have never heard of. Born in 1869 to an elite Armenian family in Constantinople, he came of age in a world that was rapidly globalizing, with the unrestrained movement of people and capital across national and imperial borders. His father, Sarkis Gulbenkian, owned several oil fields in the Caucasus and supplied petroleum to the Ottoman Empire, positioning the family at the frontier of what was to become the world’s most precious resource.¹ The anti-Armenian pogroms of the late nineteenth century - a prelude to the Armenian Genocide of 1915 - forced the Gulbenkians to seek refuge in London, where Calouste studied petroleum engineering at King’s College, determined to follow in his father’s footsteps.

The shrewd negotiation skills for which Gulbenkian would be remembered emerged on the world stage in 1907 when he brokered the merger between the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company and the British firm Shell, laying the foundations for what would become the Royal Dutch Shell Company (now known as Shell). In the process, he secured a lucrative personal stake - a practice that would define his method for the decades to come.

Gulbenkian’s career-defining moment came in 1928 when he used his famed negotiation skills to establish the Turkish Petroleum Company and draw up the Red Line Agreement between British, American, and French oil interests to exploit oil in the former Ottoman Empire, in which he fought tooth and nail to secure a 5% stake for his firm Partex, and soon thereafter in all major oil companies operating in the Middle East - earning him the moniker “Mr. Five Percent”.²

Gulbenkian’s involvement in global politics didn’t stop at seeking oil concessions; in 1920, he was granted diplomatic immunity after being appointed as the Commercial Advisor to the Empire of Persia in France, having spent most of his time in either Britain or France.³ It was around then that Gulbenkian embarked on a massive spree of procuring artworks and historical relics, in the process becoming one of the most prolific art collectors of his time. ⁴

In 1942, after the fall of France during the Second World War, Gulbenkian followed the Nazi collaborationist French government to Vichy to serve as the minister for Persia, leading to his proscription by the UK. When Persia entered the Allied side in the same year, he could no longer stay in France and fled to Portugal for its neutral stance, low taxes, and position on the Atlantic coast, where he would spend the rest of his life at the Aviz Hotel in Lisbon till his death in 1955.⁵

Estado Novo

When Gulbenkian settled in Portugal, the country was under the rule of António de Oliveira Salazar, architect of the authoritarian Estado Novo regime. The contrast could not be more striking. Salazar’s Estado Novo was corporatist, nationalist, deeply Catholic, isolationist, and wary of foreign entanglements. Gulbenkian, by contrast, embodied the cosmopolitan capitalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: an Armenian born in the Ottoman Empire, educated in Britain, naturalized as a British citizen, negotiating oil concessions across the Middle East, and serving as Persia’s commercial representative in France. The struggle between the two forces would come to define the troubles that the Gulbenkian Foundation was to face.

The Foundation

By the time of his death in 1955, Gulbenkian was among the wealthiest men in the world and one of its largest private art collectors, with more than 6,000 pieces that spanned several continents from ancient Egypt and Greece to the modern age.⁶ Before he died, he drew up a will in which he took a philanthropic turn, establishing The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, naming three trustees of the charity: his son-in-law Kevork Essayan, his friend Cyril Radcliffe (of the “Radcliffe line”), and the odd one out, his lawyer José de Azeredo Perdigao, one of the leading lawyers of Lisbon.⁷ Despite his extensive support to charities for Armenian refugees and his involvement in Armenian diaspora politics, Gulbenkian made clear that his vision for the Foundation was a universal one, meant for all of humanity, not just Armenia or Portugal.

After his death, the question of his immense fortune and massive art collection took on national significance in Portugal, where the Salazar regime, presiding over a stagnant economy, would fight for control over the estate. The regime was ready to grant charitable tax exempt status to the Foundation only on the condition that the Board have a majority of Portuguese nationals. Radcliffe resigned in protest of the Salazar regime’s imposition, followed by Essayan, leaving behind Perdigao, who had publicly pushed for more Portuguese control, and in private, was corresponding with Salazar and future Prime Minister Marcello Caetano.

In 1956, Perdigao formalized this “Portuguese capture” of the Foundation, becoming its first president. Under his tenure, which lasted until his death in 1993, Gulbenkian’s universalism was abandoned as Perdigao increasingly associated the Foundation and himself with the Salazar regime and its conservative social values. Its funds were frequently diverted to “plug holes” in Portugal’s welfare budget, fund charitable activities across the country, and also fund Roman Catholic missionary activities in the colonies. The share of grants distributed in Portugal rose from an initial 42% to an overwhelming 85% - leaving only 15% to serve Gulbenkian’s transnational vision.

In 1974, the Carnation Revolution deposed the Salazar regime and several Board members fell victim to its purges. When the Foundation was threatened with nationalization under the new state, Perdigao, by supreme irony, resorted to the defense of Gulbenkian’s universal humanism, arguing that the Foundation was intended for all of humanity, not just for Portugal.

The Foundation survived the purges of the Revolution, and now stands today as one of the wealthiest private charitable foundations in the world, with a total endowment of €3.72 billion. ⁸

The Bishop

Until 1952, the Diocese of Cochin had been administered by Portuguese bishops. By a papal bull that same year, the diocese of Alleppey was created, splitting the old Cochin diocese, which now fell under its first indigenous bishop - Dr. Alexander Edezhath, who was succeeded by Dr. Joseph Kureethra in 1975.⁹

Kureethra presided over a number of significant events in Malayali Roman Catholicism during his tenure. Most notably, in 1984, the Santa Cruz Cathedral at Fort Kochi was elevated to the status of Santa Cruz Basilica.¹⁰ According to the Diocese of Cochin, Kureethra was a polyglot, fluent in English, Malayalam, Portuguese, among others. He was also a historian who helped establish the Historical Archives of the Cochin Diocese and the Padroado Museum, for which he was awarded the Order of the Knight Commander of Prince Henry the Navigator by the Portuguese President Dr. Mario Soares.

The idea for the Indo-Portuguese Museum was proposed by Kureethra himself, with the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The Foundation assisted in collecting the relics and planning the general layout of the museum. Bishop Kureethra passed away in 1999, before the museum he had helped envision could be realized. In 2000, the museum was opened to the public.

Looking Back

What began as a flicker of curiosity soon unfolded into a meditation on the unchecked global circulation of capital in the long nineteenth century, and the cosmopolitan values espoused by its biggest cheerleaders. Gulbenkian’s fortune was amassed in a world where oil, contracts, and influence flowed across imperial borders, seemingly untethered from nation or creed, much like ours today - a world in which his rootless cosmopolitanism became an anachronism amid nationalism, xenophobia on the right, and opposition to unchecked capitalism on the left.¹¹

Gulbenkian arguably pioneered the idea of a transnational philanthropic businessman, one whose commitment was to all of humanity rather than a single nation-state. In this regard, he can be considered a predecessor to the Gates Foundation, which successfully implemented a model of philanthropy that operates parallel to, and very often, beyond the traditional frameworks of national governments.

Standing in the Indo-Portuguese Museum in Fort Kochi, I was encountering the residue of a long struggle between Gulbenkian’s borderless vision of philanthropy and the parochial conservatism of Perdigao. And yet, for all the compromises and transformations along the way, the museum exists — and I, an accidental visitor, am its beneficiary.

P.S.: Looks like Benicio Del Toro’s character in Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme was partly inspired by Calouste Gulbenkian. ¹² Who knew!