I was unable to accompany my classmates to Kolkata in January this year on what seems to have been an exceedingly enjoyable excursion. But the several conversations before and after the trip got me interested in the urban history of Kolkata and this is what I have attempted to pen here.

Urban history is the study of the processes of urbanisation as they happen over time, of historical changes and developments that take place in the life of any city. To study urban change, historians have to scrutinize various sources such as official records and statistical data of births, deaths, marriages, migration, etc., census figures, surveying maps, and the records of institutions such as municipalities. Any data can be manipulated or created for a particular purpose, so biases may enter the sources. The task of the historian is to analyse and study the data, each source of information against other sources, and with great caution to remove the biases and prejudices, and carve out a lucid history of a city. Before diving into Kolkata’s history, I would like to explore why Kolkata holds so much significance today. Kolkata is the state capital of West Bengal and is located in eastern India on the east bank of the River Hooghly. The city is known as the City of Joy, a name derived from the title of a book about the city by Dominique Lapierre. Lapierre’s book celebrates the resilience of Kolkata’s people in their struggle against poverty and despair. The city is also sometimes thought of as the Cultural Capital of India. It has a vibrant culture of art, language, literature, dance, music, food and sport, notably football and cricket. Kolkata has been the hometown of stalwarts such as Rammohun Roy, Rabindranath Tagore, Satyajit Ray and Mother Teresa.

Kolkata, named Calcutta by the British, was the capital of colonial India until 1911. For this reason, it also became a significant centre of our freedom struggle. A number of voluntary political associations, such as the Indian Association, sprang up in Calcutta and it was these associations of the different parts of India that eventually became the Indian National Congress. Since Kolkata served as the capital of a vast empire for about 150 years, its contribution to the tangible and intangible heritage of our country is immense. It is home to some of the finest buildings and sites such as the Victoria Memorial, Fort William, Indian Museum, the Eden Gardens, Park Street, Jorasanko Thakurbari, the Hooghly Bridge and the Belur Math.

Kolkata has a rich religious tradition as well. Shaktism (the worship of goddesses such as Durga and Kali) is widely known in Bengal. There are famous temples such as the Kalighat (200 years old) and the Dakshineshwar (built in 1855). It is also a hub for Indian classical music and modern dance. Illustrious musicians like Pundit Ravi Shankar and Ananda Shankar were from Kolkata. The film industry produced great directors such as Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak. This city also embraces the diversity of cuisine, with some foods originating from the lives of ordinary people. Puchka, rice and macher jhol (fish curry), mangsho (meat), Chicken rolls, Sandesh deserts, Chinese or Cantonese food (there is a China Town) and Western-style pastries and cakes are quite famous. Kolkata’s eateries are known to serve people from all kinds of income backgrounds. You will find lip-smacking food on the streets as well as on top of high buildings with a great view of the city.

Surely Kolkata is one of our cardinal cities. It is also a world-famous city. How did Kolkata emerge as such a magnificent city? The area dates back to the Mughal era because its reference is available in the Ain-i-Akbari as an ancient Gangetic region. The present city sprang up rapidly in the first half of the eighteenth century. In the period 1686- 1690, a war broke out between the Mughals and the British East India Company. The Company needed a strategic station which would be away from the Mughal capital, Murshidabad and its army head-quarters at Dhaka. Also, it wanted a place on the riverside that would aid in English trade and emerge as a garrison town. From a garrison town, Calcutta metamorphosed into a port town and then into an administrative centre.

There were constant conflicts between the Nawabi administration in Murshidabad and Hooghly and the Company’s administration in Calcutta. The Bengali Nawabs did not allow the Company to expand their territory. Till 1757, the Company was confined to three villages, namely Kalikata, Sutanati and Govindapur, that the Company had purchased in 1696 for Rs. 1,300 only. In the battle of Plassey, in 1757, the English East India Company defeated Sirajuddaullah, the Nawab of Bengal. Mir Jafar became the next Nawab and a puppet of the British. Consequently, the district of 24-Parganas was allotted to the Company as its zamindari. This victory opened the way for the Company’s political control over India and Calcutta became the crucial administrative centre of British territories. In 1772, the company declared Calcutta as the capital of India. In 1911, the capital was transferred to Delhi.

After triumphing over Sirajuddaullah, the English East India Company decided to build a new fort that could not be easily attacked. The Company cleared a site in the southernmost village of Govindapur and asked traders and weavers to evacuate the place. The deserted land around the new Fort William was called the Maidan or garer-math. The Maidan in front of the Fort was constructed to obtain a straight line of fire without any obstruction. The Company wanted to create possibilities of protection in the event of a revolt from the Indian town. Gradually the Company began establishing their settlements along the periphery of the Maidan and the town began taking shape.

In 1789, Lord Wellesley became the Governor General. He built a massive palace, Government House, for himself in Calcutta, magnificent enough to convey the authority of the colonial power. But he was concerned about the Indian part of the city that was crowded, filthy, and squalid, had dirty tanks and poor drainage, and stank. The British were concerned because the unhealthy conditions could be a source of contagious diseases. Creating more open spaces within the city was one way of making it clean and healthy. In 1803, therefore, Lord Wellesley wrote a Minute (an administrative order) on town planning. Various committees met and many bazaars, ghats, burial grounds and tanneries were cleared. From then on “public health” became an important reason for “town clearance” and town planning.

After Wellesley’s departure, the programme of town planning fell into the hands of the Lottery Committee, formed in 1817, with the help of the government. The Lottery Committee was named thus because funds were collected for town planning through public lotteries. The Lottery Committee commissioned a new map of the city to have a comprehensive picture of Calcutta. It began building roads in the Indian part of the city and it cleared the riverbank areas. The labouring poor and their huts were removed and pushed to the outskirts of the city. In 1817, cholera spread all over Calcutta and 1896 saw an outbreak of plague. Although medical science had not yet shown what caused the spread of disease, the government assumed that there was a direct correlation between the living conditions and the spread of diseases. Indian merchants such as Dwarkanath Tagore and Rustomjee Cowasjee, who felt the need for Calcutta to be a healthier city, supported the view of the government. Densely populated areas were seen as insanitary because the sunlight and the air were obstructed. To remove the filth, the huts and bustis of the working population (such as workers, hawkers, artisans, porters and the unemployed) were demolished and the workers were coerced to move to the distant parts of the city. Thatched roofs were banned in 1836 and tiled roofs were made mandatory.

By the late nineteenth century government intervention in city planning became more stringent. The government took over all the initiatives, including the funding, and removed several shanty structures. They developed the British portions of the town at the expense of the not-so-developed Indian sections. The existing racial divide, “White Town” and “Black Town” was reinforced by the new divide of “Healthy” and “Unhealthy”. This undemocratic and racial division faced much opposition from the Indian representatives in the municipality. People protested against this tactic of division and the feeling of anti- colonialism and nationalism arose among Indians.

By 1903, a large number of grievances had begun to accumulate and these led to the Swadeshi Movement. The people objected to the Partition of Bengal, carried out on religious lines. In 1905, the British separated the western half that was primarily Hindu from the eastern one that was primarily Muslim. The Swadeshi Movement of 1905 was led by the Moderates such as Surendranath Benerjea, K.K. Mitra, P.C. Ray and Dwijendra Tagore.

Unfortunately, they could not prevent the Partition from being implemented. But the movement expanded to a boycott of foreign goods especially cloth and institutions and to the revival of the indigenous industry by promoting swadeshi goods. Women, students and large sections of the rural and urban populations participated in the movement. Calcutta was full of nationalist agitation in 1905 and its stalwarts produced a number of short stories, novels, poems, essays and collections of folk tales in Bengali, fusing Bengali and Indian patriotisms.

To conclude this essay, I would like to compare the three colonial cities: Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. By the eighteenth century, Calcutta, Bombay and Madras had become important ports. All these cities lie in the coastal regions. Trade through sea routes at that time was efficient. The English created settlements along the sea and fortified the major towns to protect themselves from the other European competitors such as the French. They constructed forts in Bombay, and in Madras, and in Calcutta. In all these cities they separated the “Black Town” from the “White Town”. As the British took political power in their hands, racial distinctions, stemming from discrimination, sharpened. In all subsequent expansion, the British separated the “White” civil station from the cantonment and the native town, locating the civil and police lines within the civil station. We can see these distinctions in several Indian cities even today.

When the railways came to India, the trains connected the port cities and other nodal towns to the hinterland. Raw materials could be easily transported to these cities and plentiful cheap labour was available. Factories were set up and gradually different parts of India witnessed uneven, distorted industrialisation and the emergence of factory towns such as Bombay, Calcutta, Kanpur and Jamshedpur. The port cities were used to ship raw materials to industries in England.

Bombay and Calcutta saw the emergence of industry in cotton and jute respectively. But the three great port cities also developed on the strength of the tertiary sector that provided services such as banking and transportation and employed a large working population.

Bombay, Calcutta and Madras (or Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai), all these cities emerged due to modern economic forces such as capitalism and were set up by the colonial power as commercial and political hubs. Each headed a large presidency. The earliest universities were established in these cities, in all of them in 1857. All three cities witnessed the growth of English education, a certain colonial modernity, reform and nationalism. By the 1870s, a moderate nationalism, critical of the colonial power, had begun to radiate outwards from the great debating societies and discussion circles of Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai. Its early destinations were Lahore and Allahabad.

I do hope my classmates can correlate what they saw and felt in Kolkata and the modest history you have just read.