Calcutta

Queen Victoria Memorial (1921)

Kolkata or Calcutta, city in eastern India and capital of Bangla State, situated on the banks of the Hugli River (Hooghly)(a tributary of the Ganges River). Kolkata lies about 100 km (about 60 mi) north of the Bay of Bengal and about 70 km (about 45 mi) west of Bangladesh. It is the hub of India’s second most populous metropolitan area (after Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay) and is the chief commercial, financial, and manufacturing center of eastern India.

statue of Queen Victoria in front of building

Kolkata was founded by the English East India Company in the late 1600s and named for Kalikata, a local rice-growing village with a temple of the goddess Kali. It served as the capital of British India from 1773 through 1911. During the British era, administrative offices and a British-style university, the University of Kolkata, were established. Jute mills and other industries along the Hugli River both north and south of the city also contributed to Kolkata’s growth and eventually gave rise to major urban development, creating the Kolkata metropolitan area.

transport on the Hugli river

The city of Kolkata covers an area of 185 sq km (71 sq mi). It lies near the southern third of the metropolitan area, which is known as the Kolkata Metropolitan District (KMD). The CMD covers an area of 1246 sq km (481 sq mi) and is comprised of nearly 500 units of local government, including three municipal corporations and 29 municipalities. Roads and railways make up the main traffic arteries, and a bypass road has been built east of the city to facilitate through traffic. The Hugli River runs through the CMD. As during colonial times, industries are located on both banks of the Hugli and along railroad lines. Financial, administrative, and trade activities are concentrated in the city’s Central Business District (CBD), which lies just east of the Hugli River, and its immediate surroundings. The center of the CBD covers an area that includes Kolkata’s major landmark, the Maidân, which is a large park containing many fine drives, a golf course, a racecourse, cricket grounds, several soccer fields, and the historic new Fort William (completed in 1781) of the English East India Company. The residential settlements follow a linear pattern along highlands provided by Hugli River levees and on the intervening levees of old, dried up rivers. Between and beyond the levees to the east and west of the Hugli are the lowlands, which are prone to flooding during the rainy months; parts of the lowlands have been filled or drained for additional settlements. Low-income settlements are located in the lowlands. Such slums are found all over, but with a concentration at the fringes of the urban areas. Slum structures are characterized by flimsy materials, lack of underground sewerage, unsanitary conditions, and tenements of one-room apartments.

river transport

Architectural monuments in Kolkata date mostly from colonial times. After an attack on the old Fort William (situated east of Dalhousie Square) in 1756 by Siraj-ud-Dawlah, the Muslim ruler of Bengal, a new, sturdier Fort William was built about 1.5 km (about 1 mi) south of the old site near the Hugli River in the Maidân. At the heart of the CBD lies BBD Bagh or the former Dalhousie Square. On the north side of the square is the Writers’ Building (1880), which houses the state government ministries. To the west of the square is the General Post Office, which features a high reinforced concrete dome. Two blocks southwest of the square is the Gothic-style High Court (1872), with a 55-m (180-ft) high tower that is modeled after the Cloth Hall of Ieper, Belgium. The massive Victoria Memorial, completed in 1921, sits at the southern end of the Maidân; it is built in a Renaissance design with Indian influences. Dakshineswar Temple, built in the 19th century, is north of the city limits on the Hugli River; its design is influenced by the thatched bamboo huts of southern Bengal. A building of similar design located just north of Kolkata on the river is Belur Math, which houses a monastery and the headquarters of the Ramkrishna Mission. Parasnath Jain Temple (1867), Marble Palace (1835), and Nakhoda Mosque (1926) are other architectural landmarks in the Kolkata area.

Sitambara Jain temple

Other places of interest in Kolkata are the fashionable Jawaharlal Nehru (formerly Chowringhee) Road, the city’s main thoroughfare; the Raj Bhavan (1802; formerly called the Government House), the state governor’s residence; the Indian Museum (1875), which contains noted displays on archaeology and natural history; and the Birla Industrial and Technological Museum. The Botanical Gardens (1786) in Hâora (or Howrah), Kolkata’s twin city, features many tropical plants in addition to a famous banyan tree, the branches of which spread 381 m (1250 ft) in circumference.

interior of Jain temple

 
As the capital of British India and home to the fertile agricultural and mineral-rich land of eastern India, Kolkata was one of the first areas of India to develop industrially. The first jute and paper mills of India were started in the Kolkata area in the 1800s. By 1921 nearly 35 percent of India’s industrial workers were located in Kolkata. However, Kolkata began to lose its industrial leadership after India gained its independence in 1947. One cause was the loss of Kolkata’s raw jute supply when Bengal was divided into Bangla and East Bengal, with East Bengal becoming part of Pakistan. Competition in jute manufacturing from East Bengal (later East Pakistan, now Bangladesh) further hurt Kolkata’s jute industry. Competition and slow growth also hit other traditional manufacturing areas, such as heavy engineering, rubber, and paper.

founder of the temple gardens

 
According to the 1991 census, Kolkata had a population of 4,309,819, with an extremely high population density of 23,720 persons per sq km (61,970 persons per sq mi). The metropolitan area had a population of 11 million and a density of 8761 persons per sq km (22,661 persons per sq mi). The growth rate of the metropolitan area population was 18.7 percent between 1981 and 1991, down from the 1971 to 1981 growth rate of 23.9 percent. The population of the city of Kolkata grew more slowly than the CMD. Since India’s first census in 1872, Kolkata has generally been India’s largest city, although in 1991 it lost that status to Mumbai. Of the total population of Kolkata’s metropolitan area in 1981, more than 30 percent lived in slums; many other Kolkata residents are so-called pavement dwellers (homeless). Mother Teresa, a Roman Catholic nun who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950 to help the poorest of the poor in Kolkata and all over the world.

shaping a female goddess image with the earth material

 Kolkata is the home of the University of Kolkata (founded in 1857) and Jadavpur University (1955). Rabindra Bharati University (1962), devoted to fine arts, is housed at the former residence of Bengali poet and Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore. Part of the Tagore residence is now a museum. Another Nobel laureate, Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, who received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1930 for his discovery of the Raman effect on light, worked and researched in Kolkata for a long period. Sarat Chandra Chatterjee, a highly regarded Bengali fiction writer of the early 20th century, lived in nearby Hâora. Ram Mohan Roy, sometimes called the father of modern India, began his social reform for abolition of suttee (burning to death of a wife with her deceased husband) in Kolkata. He also founded Brahmo Samaj, a modern Hindu religious sect, in the city in 1828. More than 70 percent of Kolkata’s population were literate in 1991. The literacy rate is higher for men, who generally receive more education than women; for every three men only two women are literate. Several languages are spoken in Kolkata, including English. Bengali speakers constitute 60 percent of the city’s population, and there are Hindi (23 percent), Urdu (11 percent), and Oriya (1.3 percent) speakers as well. After British India was partitioned into India and Muslim Pakistan in 1947, a large number of Muslim residents migrated from Kolkata to East Pakistan, while many Hindu refugees arrived in the city from East Pakistan. Today Hindus constitute 83 percent of the city’s population while Muslims make up 14 percent; the rest of the population is comprised of small groups such as Christians, Jains, and Sikhs.

straw figure reinforcement

Modern Kolkata was founded in 1690 by British trader Job Charnock as a trading post of the English East India Company. In the mid-17th century the Portuguese had a trading outpost in the area at Sutanuti, followed by the Dutch, who constructed a diversion canal at the bank of the Hugli River, near the present Central Business District. The old Fort William was built to protect the English post in 1696. The city became famous in 1756, in England particularly, when Siraj-ud-Dawlah, a Bengal ruler, captured the fort and, according to British historians, stifled to death 43 British residents in a small guardroom called the Black Hole of Kolkata. The city was recaptured by the British under Robert Clive in 1757. The English initially built an intricate transport network through the Hugli-Ganges water system, but it was the railroads, introduced in the 1850s, that successfully established connections with the hinterland and the rest of India. The city eventually had the largest concentration of trading establishments in India, and a Western-style business district evolved by the end of the 19th century. The colonial city maintained a strict division between the crowded and ill-planned native quarters to the east and north of the Central Business District, and the spacious and well-planned quarters where the Europeans lived in the south and southeastern parts of the old city. After independence, the former European quarters were either turned into residences of the Indian rich or, as in the Park Street area, into commercial areas.

completed festival figures

With the dominance of leftist political parties in the Bangla state government in the late 1960s, Kolkata’s municipal government also came to be controlled by Communists. Corruption and bureaucratic inefficiencies caused city services to deteriorate under this government, and today Kolkata is one of the most ill-serviced and chaotic metropolises of the world.

Contributed By: Ashok K. Dutt for Microsoft Encarta

in festival costume