History of Kolkata

Name and origins

The rent-roll of Akbar, a sixteenth-century Mughal emperor, and the work of a Bengali poet, Bipradaas, of the late fifteenth century, both make mention of the city's early name being Kolikata, from which Kolkata/Calcutta are said to derive (1).

There is lot of discussion on how the city got its name. There are different views on the issue. The more popular one is that the city got its name from the Hindu goddess Kali. See also: Calicut

The city High Court recently gave a ruling that Job Charnock, a Briton earlier believed to be the founder of the city is not the founder of the city and Calcutta has no birthday. According to the Court, the city owes its genesis in the Maurya and Gupta period and it was an established trading post long before the Slave Dynasty of the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughals, the Portuguese, the French or the British established a modern township there. References to the existence of an ancient riverine port (named Kalikata) exist in the travel journals of Chinese scholars and Persian merchants dating from centuries BCE. The Hindu epic Mahabharata, lists the King of “Vanga”, as having fought alongside the Kauravas in the great war.

In spite of the High Court ruling, it is a fact that one of the earliest modern settlement in the city took place when in 1690, Job Charnock, an agent of the English East India Company chose the place for a trade settlement. In 1698, the East India Company bought three villages (Sutanuti, Kolikata and Gobindapur) from a local landlord. The next year, the company began developing the city as a Presidency City. In 1727, as per the order of King George I, a civil court was setup in the city. The Calcutta municipal corporation (recently renamed as 'Kolkata Municipal Corporation') was formed and the city had its first mayor.

Journey from British rule to independence

The three villages, in particular Kalikata, where Calcutta is located, came into the possession of the British East India Company in 1690 and some scholars like to date its beginnings as a major city from the construction of Fort William by the British in 1698, though this is debated (see the court ruling in "Name and origins" above). From 1858 to 1912, Calcutta was the capital of British India. From 1912 to India's Independence in 1947, it was the capital of all of Bengal. After Independence, Calcutta remained the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal.

Wars with Siraj and the French

The three major British trade centres in India were Calcutta, Bombay (currently Mumbai) and Madras (currently known as Chennai). Their biggest competitor for the Indian empire was their archrival, the French. The biggest centre of French rule was Pondicherry. Inevitably, a war broke of between the British and the French with the direct concern being the throne of the Carnatic (now called Karnataka) and Hyderabad. Immediately, the British set out to strengthen their forces by building a fort in Calcutta. They were also motivated by the fact that Madras was very close to Pondicherry and could easily be taken by the French, and it was taken by the French General Dupleix. Though Dupleix was forced to return Madras because of a pact signed between Great Britain and France in Europe, the British could never be comfortable with the idea that Dupleix was plotting against them. However, Nawab of Bengal Siraj (who for various reasons always had a strained relationship with the British, not the least of them being his arrogance) ordered them to stop building a fort. The British East India Company continued construction of Fort William (used now as a military barracks). Enraged, Siraj attacked and captured Kashimbajar and Calcutta (20th June, 1756). It is said that he brutally murdered 123 Britons in the Black Hole of Calcutta after his victory, but recent evidence calls into question the veracity of this incident. He renamed Calcutta to Alinagar after his previous Nawab and maternal grandfather Aliwardy Khan. Having installed Manikchand as the ruler of Alinagar, Siraj returned to Murshidabad. Soon (on 2 January 1757) Watson and Robert Clive retook Calcutta with their Navy. Hearing the news, Siraj moved to attack Calcutta, but fearing an attack from Ahmed Shah Abdali, after a few days of war he signed the Pact of Alinagar with the East India Company, giving them the right to build the fort.

Alhough Siraj conceeded temporary defeat in the Pact of Alinagar, he started schemeing with the French against the British. Meanwhile, the Third Carnatic War was starting in the south. Also at this time, nobles like Jagat Sheth, Mir Jafar, Rai Durlav, Omichand and Rajballav were plotting against Siraj (once again a main reason being Siraj's arrogance) and they invited Clive to take part in their plans. Clive seized on this plan to get rid of two enemies at once. Citing non-existent reasons, he attacked Murshidabad. On the fateful day of 23 June 1757, 23 miles away from Murshidabad in the mango groves of Palashi, the armies met at the Battle of Plassey. The British army consisted of 800 European soldiers and 2,200 Indian soldiers, while the Indian army was made of 18,000 cavalry and 50,000 infantry. At the start of this seemingly impossible battle, generals like Mir Jafar, Rai Durlav and Iar Latif held their armies together, but the remaining army led by Mirmadan and Mohanlal was defeated. Siraj escaped but was later caught and killed by Miran, the son of Mir Jafar. Mir Jafar was made the new Nawab, and the British had effectively seized control of Bengal. In 1764, after defeating the next Nawab, Mir Qasim, in the Battle of Baxar, there was no one to stand in the way of the British and they begun their siege of India. Thus, British imperialism started in India with the conquest of Bengal, a game in which a main pawn was the great city of Calcutta.

Calcutta also had an indirect but important influence on the battles of the Carnatic Wars. When Madras fell to Dupleix, the British could still direct the war from another of their strongholds, Calcutta. They also used the wealth of Bengal to defeat the French. As Dr. R. C. Majumdar stated in An Advanced History of India, "The Battle of Plassey may be truly said to have decided the fate of the French in India."

In 1772, Calcutta became the capital of British India, a decision made by Governor General Warren Hastings. In 1779, Hickey's Bengal Gazette or the Calcutta General Advertiser became the first newspaper to be printed in India.

Contribution to the independence movement of India

Historically, Calcutta was the epicentre of activity in the early stages of the national movement of independence. Exactly a hundred years after the fall of Bengal in the Battle of Palashi, Calcutta saw the beginning of what is often called the First Independence Movement of India. It should be noted here that it is also just as often not referred to as as a War Of Independence, and as one historian put it, "The so called First National War of Independence was neither First, nor National, nor a War of Independence". In the suburbs of Calcutta, at the Barrackpore military barracks, sepoy Mangal Pandey sparked off a huge revolt that shook the foundations of the British Empire. This movement is sometimes also called the Indian Mutiny, although recent evidence goes against using this name and suggests the Revolt of 1857 as better and less controversial choice. The Indian National Congress was born here, as also were many contemporary societies like the Hindu Mela and revolutionary societies like the Jugantar and the Anushilan groups. Among early nationalist leaders, the most prominent were Sri Aurobindo, Indiradevi Chaudhurani, Bipin Chandra Pal. The early nationalists were inspired by Swami Vivekananda, the foremost disciple of the Hindu mystic Sri Ramakrishna and helped by Sister Nivedita, disciple of the former. The first native president of the Indian National Congress Sir Womesh Chunder Bonnerjee and the first Congress president to advocate self rule by Indians, Sir Surendra Nath Banerjea (referred to by the British as "Surrender Not") were early eminent Calcuttans, who provoked and influenced nationalist thinking in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The rousing cry that awakened India's soul was penned by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, now the national song of the nation, an ode to the land of Bharat (India) as the Divine Mother, Vande Mataram. The Elgin Road residence of Subhash Chandra Bose in Calcutta was the place from where he escaped the British to reach Germany during the Second World War. He was the co-founder of the Indian National Army and the Head of State of the Arzi Hukumate Azad Hind, formed to counter and combat the British Raj in India and was renamed Netaji by poet laureate Rabindranath Tagore. He is regarded by many as perhaps the most prominent and influential freedom fighter in Indian history and is venerated in many Bengali households even today.

Growth

The centre of Company control over the whole of Bengal from 1757, Calcutta underwent rapid industrial growth from the 1850s, especially in the textile sector, despite the poverty of the surrounding region. Despite being almost totally destroyed by a cyclone, in which 60,000 died, on 5 October 1864, Calcutta grew, mostly in an unplanned way, in the next 150 years from 117,000 to 1,098,000 inhabitants (including suburbs), and now has a metropolitan population of approximately 13.2 million.

Calcutta was the most populous city in India until the 1980s, when it was overtaken by Bombay. The population increased further with the partition of India, in August 1947, when it attracted Hindus refugees and other uprooted people and cross border infiltrators from the eastern part of the province of the formerly undivided Bengal, first included in Pakistan, later declaring independence to form the republic of Bangladesh in 1971.

The Baboo/Babu Culture and the Bengal Renaissance

During the bygone days of the British, as the capital of undivided India Calcutta was regarded as the second city of the British Empire (after London) and was aptly renamed "City of Palaces" and the Great Eastern Hotel was regarded as the "Jewel of the East". During that bygone era, Calcutta was famous for its "Baboo Culture" --- incidentally a cross -fertilization of English Liberalism, European fin de siecle decadence, Mughal conservatism and indigenous revivalism inculcating aspects of socio-moral and political change. This culture was fostered in its wake by the Zamindari System, the Daebhaga System the Hindu Joint Family System, the Mitakshara System, the Muslim Zenana System , the Protestant spirit of free capitalist enterprise, the Mughal inspired feudal system and the Nautch. This also fostered the Bengal Renaissance, literally an awakening of modern liberal thinking in 19th century Bengal, and which gradually percolated to the rest of India. Like the Italian Renaissance, it challenged orthodox social convention to usher in an era of humanistic idealism.

The Age of De(con)struction

Calcutta remained in the forefront of Indian prosperity up to independence and for some more years afterwards before the population pressure on infrastructure and political disturbances led to a gradual decline. A violent and bloody Marxist Maoist movement known as the Naxal movement(after Naxalbari, the place where it first started) in the 1970s and left the city badly bruised. Since 1977, a coalition of communist and Marxist parties has continuously ruled the state with various allegations of electoral malpractices being common. The Municipal Corporation of Calcutta however is presently controlled by a combine of parties opposed to them.

Contemporary Kolkata / Calcutta

Tha Baboo culture and the left rule had taken its toll, and by the early 1990s, there was a gradual realisation that things needed to change. This led to wooing of foreign investment and control over the trade-union activism by the ruling Left establishement. Today, Kolkata is fast developing into a modern infotech city with various private sector setting up shop here. The landscape of the city is also fast changing with flyovers, gardens and newer commercial establishments. The Kolkata city itself has expanded into its suburbs, with the Greater Kolkata stretching from Kalyani (in Nadia District) in North to Diamond Harbour in South (in the South 24 Parganas District).

The New Metro city is characterised by popular spots like Inox Multiplexes, Nandan, Tantra, Barista Coffee Shops, Sourav's Pavilion and Science City.

See also: History of Kolkata, 1690, 1698, 1727, 1757, 1764, 1772, 1779, 1850s, 1858