Ask most Indian Masons who the first Indian Freemason was and you will hear about Bombay in 1843. It is a good story. It is also sixty-seven years too late.
The first Indian to be made a Freemason was initiated at Trichinopoly in 1776. His name was Umdat-ul-Umara. He was the eldest son of the Nawab of the Carnatic and he later succeeded to that title himself. A handful of Muslim noblemen followed him into the Craft over the years after.
That is very nearly the whole of what I can tell you.
The difficulty
I set out to write a full article about him and I could not. There is a name, a place, a year and a line in the histories saying he was the first Indian to see Masonic light. There is no minute I can quote. There is nothing about what he made of it, whether he attended after his initiation, what the brethren of that lodge thought they were doing or what he thought they were doing.
Compare that with Manockjee Cursetjee, initiated sixty-six years later, about whom we know a great deal: who refused him, where he went instead, whom he found on his return, what he built and what it cost him.
The difference is not that one man mattered more. The difference is who was keeping records and what they thought worth recording.
Why the gap matters
Two facts sit oddly together. An Indian nobleman was initiated in the south in 1776. Yet in western India no Indian was admitted until 1843. Even then it required a purpose-built lodge under a different constitution to make it possible.
Freemasonry in India did not move steadily from exclusion towards openness. It opened in one place, at one moment, for one man of very high rank. In another presidency it stayed shut for another two generations. Umdat-ul-Umara was not the beginning of a process. He was an exception granted to a prince.
That is worth saying plainly, because the comfortable version of our history describes a straight line and there wasn’t one.
What this means for a lodge in the south
We meet in Bengaluru. Trichinopoly, now Tiruchirappalli, is a few hours away. The first Indian Freemason was made in our part of the country, before Bombay, before the Rising Star, before the arguments in the west had even begun.
I would like to know more about him and suspect somebody does. The records of the eighteenth century English lodges in the Madras Presidency exist somewhere, in Chennai or in London. If any brother reading this has access to them or knows who does, I would be glad to hear from you. An article that ends with a question is not a failure. It is an invitation.
A note on how this was written
Everything above rests on a small number of secondary sources that agree with one another, which is not the same as being independently verified. The name is spelled several ways across them. I have not seen a primary record. If you find one that corrects any of this, tell me and I will correct the article rather than quietly leave it.
That seems the right standard for a lodge that puts truth somewhere near the centre of what it teaches.
Historical detail draws on the History of Scottish Freemasonry in India prepared by Bro. Bomi S. Mehta, Rt. Wor. District Grand Master of the District Grand Lodge of India 1997 to 2007, published on the website of the District Grand Lodge of India (Scottish Constitution).