Kolkata

est. 1690 — the long account

Kolkata was a trading post that became an empire's capital. In 1690 Job Charnock of the East India Company settled at Sutanuti on the Hooghly; in 1698 the Company bought the rights to three villages — Kalikata among them — and built Fort William. The Company's Bengal trade in silk and muslin grew so rich, and its interference so bold, that in 1756 the Nawab of Bengal sacked the settlement; Robert Clive retook it early the next year and won at Plassey that June, and with Bengal's revenues in hand the Company ceased to be a merchant and became a state. Calcutta was its seat, formally capital of British India from 1772.

The colonial city was grand — Chowringhee's palaces, the Maidan, a Government House modeled on Kedleston — but its most consequential product was argument. From the 1820s the printing presses of College Street fueled what came to be called the Bengal Renaissance: Rammohun Roy's reform campaigns, Vidyasagar's widows' cause, and later Tagore, Bose and two generations of revolutionaries. Bengali wealth built its own answer to the white town — the mansions of North Kolkata, the Durga Puja that became the city's public art. Calcutta became the place where the empire was first systematically argued against.

The capital moved to Delhi in 1911; Partition in 1947 cut the city's mills off from their jute fields and poured in refugees, and the middle decades were hard. But the fabric held: the trams, the book market, the Coffee House arguments, the idol-makers of Kumartuli. Kolkata wears its history less as monument than as habit — the institutions of 1814 and 1828 are, remarkably, still at their desks.

Kolkata · Hooghly