Kolkata

• 1. Introduction

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  Kolkata, known as Calcutta until its official name changed in 2001, is a city whose founder a court refused to name. In 2003, answering a public petition, the Calcutta High Court ruled that the city does not have a founder at all. That is a striking verdict for a place whose recorded history begins with a foreign trading company. Kolkata is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal, set on the eastern bank of the Hooghly River. About 4.5 million people live in the city proper, and more than 15 million in the wider metropolitan region. In its prime, Calcutta was the second largest city in the British Empire, after London. Then it spent decades being written off. In 1985 Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi called it a "dying city". Yet the city is also known as the City of Joy. How did three small villages become an imperial capital? Why did that capital leave? And what keeps a place battered by cyclones, partition and strikes so central to Indian culture?

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• 2. Three Villages

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  Chandraketugarh, 35 km north of Kolkata, has given archaeologists evidence that people have lived in this region for over two millennia. Its later literary history is tied to a single temple district. The poet Bipradas Pipilai mentioned the village of Kalikata in his Manasa Vijay in 1495. In that poem the merchant Chand Sadagar stops at Kalighat to worship the goddess Kali on his way to trade. Kalikata appears again in Mukundaram Chakrabarti's Chandimangal in 1594, in Todar Mal's tax list of 1596, and in Krishnaram Das's Kalikamangal of 1676-77. Kalighat was considered a safe place for businessmen, who traded along the Bhagirathi and sheltered there at night.

  Kôlikata, the Bengali name of the first village, has at least five proposed origins. One links it to Kalikkhetrô, or Kalikshetra, meaning the field of the goddess Kali. Another traces it to Kalighat itself. A third points to the Bengali word kilkila, meaning flat area. A fourth splits it into khal, a canal, and kaṭa, which may mean dug. The fifth says the area specialised in quicklime, called koli chun, and in coir, called kata. Whatever its source, the name has always been pronounced Kolkata or Kôlikata in Bengali.

  Three villages stood here before the British arrived: Kalikata, Gobindapur and Sutanuti. Kalikata was a fishing village, where a handful of merchants began their operations by building a factory. Sutanuti was a weavers' village on the river. Gobindapur was a trading post for Indian merchant princes. All three belonged to an estate held by the Sabarna Roy Choudhury family of zamindars. In 1698 that family sold the whole estate to the East India Company.

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• 3. Company Town

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  In 1690 the Nawab of Bengal, who ruled under Mughal suzerainty, granted the East India Company a trading licence. Job Charnock, who arrived with the Company, is often called the city's founder. The British finished building Fort William in 1712 on the east bank of the Hooghly to protect their trading factory. Skirmishes with French forces pushed the Company to strengthen its fortifications in 1756.

  Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah condemned that militarisation, and also accused the Company of tax evasion. His warning went unheeded, so he attacked. His capture of Fort William led to the killing of several Company officials in the Black Hole of Calcutta. The following year Robert Clive led Company soldiers, called sepoys, and British troops to retake the city. At the Battle of Plassey in 1757 the Nawab was defeated after his general Mir Jafar mutinied in support of the Company.

  The Treaty of Allahabad in 1765, signed after the battle of Buxar, made the Company imperial tax collector for the Mughal emperor in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. Mughal-appointed Nawabs still ruled the province on paper. By 1773 Calcutta, declared a presidency city, was the headquarters of the Company. In 1793 the Nawabs' ruling power was abolished and the Company took complete control of the city and the province.

  Richard Wellesley, Governor-General of the Presidency of Fort William between 1797 and 1805, was largely responsible for the city's growth and its public architecture. In the early 19th century the marshes around the city were drained, and the government area was laid out along the Hooghly. Through the late 18th and 19th centuries Calcutta was also a centre of the Company's opium trade.

  A census in 1837 counted 229,700 people in the city proper, and only 3,138 of them were British. Another 177,000 lived in the suburbs and neighbouring villages, which brought greater Calcutta to 406,700. By the 1850s the city had two zones. White Town was mainly British and centred on Chowringhee and Dalhousie Square. Black Town was mainly Indian and centred on North Calcutta. Rapid industrial growth began in the early 1850s, especially in textiles and jute, and British companies invested heavily in infrastructure such as telegraph connections. In 1856 the Bengal Government appointed George Turnbull to improve the city's sewerage, though his main job was building the East Indian Railway line of 541 miles from Howrah to Varanasi, then called Benares.

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• 4. The Bengal Renaissance

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  The Bengal Gazette began publishing in Calcutta in 1780, and it was the first newspaper in India. That same year Aliah University was founded as the Mohammedan College of Calcutta, and it is now the oldest post-secondary institution in the city. The Indian Museum followed in 1814, the nation's oldest museum. Calcutta Medical College, founded in 1835, was the first institution in Asia to teach modern medicine. The University of Calcutta, founded in 1857, was the first modern university in South Asia.

  The mixing of British and Indian culture produced a new class known as the babu. Its members were urbane Indians, often bureaucrats, professionals and newspaper readers, and many were Anglophiles from upper-caste Hindu communities. In the 19th century the Bengal Renaissance brought a new level of social and cultural sophistication to the city.

  Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Rabindranath Tagore, Kazi Nazrul Islam and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay modernised Bengali literature across the 19th and 20th centuries. Social reformers such as Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Swami Vivekananda worked alongside them. Many of the city's publishers still cluster around College Street, which one description calls "... a half-mile of bookshops and bookstalls spilling over onto the pavement".

  The Government College of Art and Craft, founded in 1864, trained artists including Abanindranath Tagore, Jamini Roy and Nandalal Bose. It was the birthplace of the Bengal school of art, an avant-garde and nationalist movement that pushed back against the academic art styles of the early 20th century. Earlier, in the 19th century, Kalighat painting had arisen in the city as a local style covering both mythology and everyday life.

  Science flourished as well. The physicists Satyendra Nath Bose, Meghnad Saha and Jagadish Chandra Bose studied or worked in Kolkata, as did the chemist Prafulla Chandra Ray and the statistician Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis. The Nobel laureate C. V. Raman did his groundbreaking work on the Raman effect at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science. Rabindranath Tagore and Amartya Sen are also counted among the city's Nobel laureates.

  In 1883 Calcutta hosted the first national conference of the Indian National Association. It was the first avowed nationalist organisation in India, and it marked the start of the city's role as a hotbed of the independence movement.

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• 5. Capital Lost, City Reborn

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  The partition of Bengal in 1905, drawn along religious lines, set off mass protests and made Calcutta a less welcoming place for the British. In 1911 the capital moved to New Delhi. Calcutta remained a centre for revolutionary organisations tied to the independence movement.

  Between 1942 and 1944, during World War II, Japanese aircraft bombed the city and its port several times. The Bengal famine of 1943, which struck at the same time, killed millions through a mix of military, administrative and natural factors. In 1946, demands for a Muslim state led to communal violence that killed over 4,000 people.

  The partition of India in 1947 caused further clashes and a demographic shift. Many Muslims left for East Bengal, later East Pakistan and now Bangladesh. Hundreds of thousands of Hindus fled into the city. These refugees transformed its landscape and shaped its politics. The government leased land to some of them in settlements called udbastu colonies.

  In the 1960s and 1970s, severe power shortages, strikes and a violent Marxist-Maoist movement led by groups known as the Naxalites damaged much of the city's infrastructure. Frequent strikes, backed by left-wing parties, accompanied a rise in militant trade-unionism. From the 1960s to the late 1990s, several factories closed and businesses relocated. During the mid-1980s Mumbai, then called Bombay, overtook Kolkata as India's most populous city.

  In 1971, during East Pakistan's war of independence, Kolkata housed the government-in-exile of Bangladesh. Refugees poured into West Bengal and strained the city's infrastructure. The Eastern Command of the Indian military, based in Fort William, played a pivotal role in the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971 and in securing the surrender of Pakistan.

  From 1977 to 2011 the Left Front, dominated by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), governed West Bengal from Kolkata. It was the world's longest-serving democratically elected communist government. The economy began to recover after the 1990s, when India instituted pro-market reforms. The city's information technology sector grew at 70% per annum in the late 1990s, twice the national average. In the 2011 West Bengal Legislative Assembly election, the Trinamool Congress succeeded the Left Front. In the 2000s, Sector 5 in Bidhannagar, a planned township north-east of the city, grew into a business hub for information technology and telecommunication companies.

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• 6. Paras, Addas and Plates

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  A para is a neighbourhood with a strong sense of community, and each one typically has its own community club. Some even have a playing field. Residents hold addas, which are leisurely chats that often turn into freestyle intellectual conversation. The city also has a tradition of political graffiti, ranging from outrageous slander to witty banter, limericks, caricatures and propaganda.

  Bengali Hindus form the majority of the population, with Marwaris, Biharis and Urdu-speaking Muslims making up large minorities. Smaller communities include Chinese, Tamils, Nepalis, Armenians, Greeks, Parsis and Tibetans. India's only Chinatown lies in eastern Kolkata. It was once home to 20,000 ethnic Chinese, and the number fell to around 2,000 after repatriation, denial of Indian citizenship following the 1962 Sino-Indian War, and emigration abroad. The Chinese community traditionally worked in the tanning industry and ran Chinese restaurants. The Jewish population was 5,000 during World War II, and later reports counted just 25.

  Mother Teresa won the Nobel Peace Prize for founding the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata. The award described it as an organisation "whose primary task was to love and care for those persons nobody was prepared to look after".

  Machher jhol, a fish curry served with rice, anchors Kolkata's cuisine. Desserts include roshogolla, sandesh and mishti dohi, a sweet yoghurt. Ilish is a favourite fish among Calcuttans. On the street, people eat beguni, which are slices of fried battered eggplant, along with kati rolls, phuchka and Indian Chinese dishes from Chinatown.

  Durga Puja, held in September-October, is the city's largest and most important festival. It is an occasion for glamorous celebrations and artistic decorations, and UNESCO recognises it for its importance to world heritage. The Bengali New Year, called Poila Boishak, and the harvest festival of Poush Parbon fall on other dates in the calendar.

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• 7. Wetland, Monsoon, Cyclone

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  Kolkata's elevation is only 1.5-9 m, because the city sits in the lower Ganges Delta. Much of it was originally wetland that was reclaimed over the decades for a growing population. The remaining undeveloped land, known as the East Kolkata Wetlands, was designated a "wetland of international importance" by the Ramsar Convention. Most of the city's refuse goes to dumping grounds at Dhapa, east of the town, where agriculture is encouraged to promote recycling of garbage and sewer water.

  Beneath the city lies the Bengal basin, with sediment nearly 7500 m thick above the crystalline basement. According to the Bureau of Indian Standards, Kolkata lies inside seismic zone III on a scale running from I to V in order of increasing earthquake susceptibility.

  The annual mean temperature is 26.8 C, and May is the hottest month, with daily temperatures from 27 to 37 C. The highest recorded temperature is 43.9 C and the lowest is 5 C. Between April and June, dusty squalls and thunderstorms called kal bôishakhi, or Nor'westers, cut through the humidity. The south-west monsoon then brings most of the city's annual rainfall of about 1850 mm between June and September. The highest monthly totals fall in July and August, when days of incessant rain can stall city life.

  Respirable suspended particulate matter levels in Kolkata are high and rose for five consecutive years in one assessment, causing smog and haze. The city's air pollution is linked to a rise in respiratory ailments, and a person born in the city has a life expectancy four years lower than someone born in the suburbs.

  A typhoon in 1864 killed about 60,000 people in the city, and a cyclone in 1737 also killed thousands. More recently Cyclone Aila in 2009 and Cyclone Amphan in 2020 caused widespread damage with catastrophic winds and torrential rainfall.

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• 8. Trams, Metro and Football

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  Kolkata is the only Indian city with a tram network. Three routes operate today: Tollygunge to Ballygunge, Gariahat to Esplanade, and Shyambazar to Esplanade. Trams are slow and caught in traffic, so they attract fewer passengers. Water-logging from heavy summer rains sometimes interrupts transport altogether.

  The Kolkata Metro has run since 1984 and is the oldest underground mass transit system in India. A 2013 survey by the International Association of Public Transport ranked Kolkata top among the six Indian cities it surveyed. In 2020 part of the east-west green line opened to connect the satellite cities of Salt Lake and Howrah. At street level, the city has 2,448 vehicles per kilometre of road, the highest car density in India. Almost all of its yellow taxis are antiquated Hindustan Ambassadors, and hand-pulled rickshaws still carry people on short trips in parts of the city.

  The Port of Kolkata, established in 1870, is India's oldest operating port and its only major river port. Ferries link Kolkata with its twin city of Howrah across the Hooghly.

  The Calcutta Football League, started in 1898, is the oldest football league in Asia. Mohun Bagan AC is the only organisation dubbed the "National Club of India". Matches between Mohun Bagan and East Bengal, called the Kolkata Derby, draw large crowds. During the 2017 FIFA U-17 World Cup, Kolkata accounted for 45% of total attendance, with an average of 55,345 spectators.

  Eden Gardens, with a capacity of 80,000, hosted the final of the 1987 Cricket World Cup. The Royal Calcutta Golf Club was the first golf club built outside the United Kingdom. The Calcutta Racket Club was founded in 1793, and the city gives its name to the Calcutta Cup, the oldest international tournament in rugby union. The Beighton Cup, first played in 1895, is India's oldest field hockey tournament. It is usually held on the Mohun Bagan Ground of the Maidan, the open field called the "lungs of Kolkata".

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