History of Kolkata

In December 1644, the daughter of the Emperor was severely burnt and a doctor named Gabriel Boughton,[1] formerly the surgeon of the East Indiaman Hopewell,[2] was sent from Surat for her treatment.

He was able to successfully treat her burns and in reward the Emperor allowed the company to establish factory at Pipili, Odisha, and for the first time English ships arrived at an eastern port.

Enraged with this situation and determined to establish their authority, the company requested King James II in 1685 to permit the use of force against the Emperor's army to settle the matter.

It was assumed that the governor would abandon the city and then a peace treaty would be offered which would guarantee free trade and other economic benefits for the company and he would give up the territory of Dhaka and Chittagong.

However, Shaista Khan upon hearing this ordered the closing and confiscation of all their factories and properties in Bengal and sent a large force to drive out the English from Hooghly.

In this situation they considered that they would be extremely fortunate if they could hold their current position instead of their desires on Chittagong and for this matter they decided to ask forgiveness from the Emperor and requested to reinstate the previously obtained Firman.

Peace treaty was again offered by the governor at the end of December 1686 but it was mainly to buy out time for attack and by February 1687 a large troop of Shaista Khan's army arrived at Hooghly to drive the Company out of Bengal.

Emperor Aurangzeb wanted to reconcile with the company to ensure uninterrupted voyage of pilgrims to Mecca and asked his governors to make terms with them.

At the same time, when the news of failure of Nicholson reached England, it was decided that until a fort was built on the bank of the river, the English would never be able to do business with ease and would always be on the mercy of the forces of the governor.

However, in the absence of specific orders the permission to defend their property was taken as a permit to build fortress and construction began immediately overnight with all available manpower.

The site was carefully selected, being protected by the Hooghly River on the west, a creek to the north, and by salt lakes about two and a half miles to the east.

When the Seven Years' War broke out, owing to their constant rivalry with the French, and the fall of Madras to the forces of Dupleix, early in 1756 the British authorities in Calcutta began repairs to the fortifications of old Fort William, which were extremely decayed.

Enraged still further when the British granted asylum to one Krishnaballav, who had embezzled money from the dewani of Dhaka, Siraj ud-Daula first attacked and captured Cossimbazar (taking as hostage William Watts and Begum Johnson), and then Calcutta, which fell after a short siege on 20 June 1756, during which the governor and many other officials escaped down the Hooghly River, leaving the remainder of the garrison and the Eurasian population of Calcutta to their fate.

It is said that 123 Britons later died in the Black Hole of Calcutta after his victory, but recent evidence calls into question the numbers involved, and suggests that the Nawab himself was probably unaware of what transpired.

Also at this time, nobles such as Jagat Seth, Mir Jafar, Rai Durlav, Omichand and Rajballav were plotting against Siraj ud-Daula (a principal reason being the Nawab's arrogance, well attested to in contemporary sources)[9] and they invited Clive to take part in their plans.

[14] Warren Hastings and Sir Elijah Impey, the Chief Justice, were both impeached, and were accused by Edmund Burke and afterwards by Thomas Babington Macaulay of committing a judicial murder.

[15] Five years after this incident, in 1780, relations between Warren Hastings and Philip Francis deteriorated to such an extent that the two fought a duel in the grounds of Belvedere (now the National Library) on the road to the suburb of Alipore.

Contemporary memoirs such as those of William Hickey record the consumption of enormous meals, washed down by copious quantities of claret, port, madeira and other wines, followed by the smoking of Hookahs.

Calcutta's intellectual life received a great boost in 1784 with the foundation of the Asiatic Society of Bengal by Sir William Jones, with the encouragement of Warren Hastings, himself no mean Oriental scholar.

Many distinguished scholars, English and Bengali, such as Henry Thomas Colebrooke, James Prinsep and Pandit Radhakanta Sarman would grace the society's meetings and publications over the following century, vastly enriching knowledge of India's culture and past.

[22] Calcutta at that time was famous for its "Baboo culture", a mixture of English liberalism, European fin de siècle decadence, Mughal conservatism, and indigenous revivalism, inculcating aspects of socio-moral and political change.

[23] 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.

[24] 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 14.6 million.

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.

The Elgin Road residence of Subhas 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.

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.

Muslims were also involved in the nationalist movement, most notably Fazl Huq who from Calcutta in the 1930s attempted to organise a non-communal peasant party to agitate against the British and the wealthy Indian landowning class.

[25] The intense violence caused during the partition of India led to a shift in demographics in Bengal, and especially Kolkata; large numbers of Muslims left for East Pakistan, while hundreds of thousands of Hindus arrived to take their place.

[27][28] Over the 1960s and 1970s, severe power shortages, strife in labour relations (including strikes by workers and lockouts by employers) and a militant Marxist-Maoist movement who sometimes used violence and property destruction as tactics of protest – the Naxalites – damaged some of the industrial infrastructure, leading to some economic stagnation.