A City in the Making- Aspects of Calcutta's Early Growth

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When Job Charnock landed at Sutanati in 1690 the place was no more than an ordinary Bengal village on the banks of the Hooghly. Yet, by the middle of the nineteenth century, it was being described as the second city of the British Empire. With the help of archival records, this volume plots the various stages of the journey on the part of the three villages of Sutanati, Kalikata and Gobindapur which collectively came to be called Calcutta (renamed Kolkata).
The story is broken up into three sections the first of which deals with the unplanned growth of the place till the town fell to the forces led by the nawab, Shiraj-ud-Daula, in 1756. During this time the main effort on the part of the authorities was directed at cleaning up the place and setting up essential facilities such as a hospital, a jail, a mayor's court, strengthening the banks of the river, etc. The second period, which extended till the end of the eighteenth century, saw the expansion of Calcutta southward and eastward which kept the authorities busy with issues such as compensation for acquired land, the formation of today's Maidan, the building of the arterial Circular Road, the setting up of bazars, and improving the drainage system. The third period marked the advent of the town-planning era set in motion by Lord Wellesley. The volume takes the story to the point where the Lottery Committee was formed in 1817.

Ranabir Ray Choudhury (b. 1948) has been a journalist with The Statesman and The Hindu group of newspapers since 1970 till 2010. His interest in the past of Kolkata has led him to publish three compilations since 1978 - Glimpses of Old Calcutta 1835-1850, Calcutta a Hundred Years Ago, 1880-1890 and Early Calcutta Advertisements 1875-1925 - and a full-fledged account of the Government Houses of Kolkata since the days of Job Charnock- The Lord Sahib's House, Sites of Power: Government Houses of Calcutta 1690-1911. This is his fifth book.

This is a study of the physical growth of Calcutta (Kolkata) essentially the regulation of space from the last decade of the seventeenth century till the commencement of the work of the Lottery Committee in October 1817. The period, stretching for 127 years, covers just about half the history of British Calcutta, from the time Job Charnock set foot in it for the third time in 1690 till 1947 when India gained its Independence. Charnock's decision to make Calcutta the base of the East India Company's operations in the Bay area triggered the evolution of a hitherto nondescript village on the eastern bank of the river Hooghly into a bustling metropolis of the British empire which once came to be described as its 'second city'. The most important phase of the development work was done in the nineteenth century under the guidance of the Lottery Committee which made way for the Fever Hospital Committee in 1836. The basic contours of the physical shape in which we find Calcutta today is a direct product of this specific phase of the city's development, which may be cited as evidence of the lack of any fresh initiative (apart from the work done by the Calcutta Improvement Trust) on its further growth in the twentieth century. To take just one example amongst many that are available, it is only now that the city's splendid riverfront is being given a serious facelift which promises literally to catapult that part of the city from the early years of the nineteenth century directly to the twenty-first. The inference here is that, apart from the addition of memorials like the Prinsep's Ghat (1841) and the Gwalior monument (1847) and the erection of a string of warehouses later in the nineteenth century, the eastern bank of the river has remained basically unaltered for nearly two centuries following the development of Strand Road in the 1820s.
The Lottery Committee itself was the successor to the town development effort initiated by Lord Wellesley during his Governor Generalship (1798-1805) the first step being the setting up in 1803 of the Committee for the Improvement of the Town of Calcutta. Considering the growth of Calcutta from the earliest days till it became the centrepoint of the British empire in the East, the point can be made that it was Wellesley who first introduced the tool of planning in the efforts to develop the city which, within the next one hundred years, enabled the city to attain its coveted position in the subcontinent. The East India Company official John Shore (later Lord Teignmouth). Wellesley's immediate predecessor as Governor General (1793-1798), was essentially a staid and conservative revenue official, his life's work being to put the permanent settlement in place under Lord Cornwallis (whom he succeeded) during the latter's first stint as Governor-General from 1786 to 1793. Archival records indicate that in his time he did nothing epochal for the development of the rapidly expanding town. Whatever he achieved in this direction was not any the more special than what his predecessors had achieved since Robert Clive and Admiral Watson retook Calcutta from Shiraj ud-Daula in January 1757. Even so, the process of 'importing ideas and procedures relating to landed property that were not the same as those of the nawabs' had already begun which later became the basis of property rights in Calcutta and also of the regulation of space in the city (rules about public and private land, markets, encroachment, preservation of roads, ghats, etc)'. These new rules and regulations were meant to enhance the security of the Europeans, but it had a major effect on Indian inhabitants too’.