Calcutta
Capital of West Bengal state, former capital (1773–1912) of British India, Calcutta (in Bengali, Kalikata) is India's largest metropolitan area and a major port. Founded in 1690 by Job Charnock, a British merchant, the area included three villages. The British East India Company gained proprietary rights to them in 1698 under the Mughals. By 1727, shipping in Calcutta totaled 10,000 tons: silks and muslins from Dhaka, cotton fabrics from Bengal, salt-peter from Bihar, rice, sesame oil, and sugar all had a ready export market. The population grew from 12,000 in 1710 to 100,000 in 1735.
In 1756, the nabob of Bengal sacked Calcutta and imprisoned British soldiers in what became known, after many prisoners had suffocated, as "the Black Hole of Calcutta." The British recaptured the city in 1757, and the Regulating Act (1773) gave the governor of Bengal the position of governor-general of British-controlled India. During the governorships of Warren Hastings (1773–1785) and Richard Colley Wellesley (1798–1805), the European enclave assumed an elegant look: Lord Wellesley wanted India to be governed from an impressive palace rather than a mercantile office. The Indian town, however, was filled with bazaars and slums.
A "Bengal Renaissance" produced such figures as Rammohan Roy (1772–1833) and Sir Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), a Nobel-laureate poet, along with an accent on intellectual freedom, a monotheistic version of Hinduism, and a moral code suited to an educated middle class. A powerful spiritual movement led by Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and Swami Vivekanada in the late nineteenth century, followed by a nationalist upsurge, conferred unique leadership status on the city. Despite Rudyard Kipling's negative focus in City of Dreadful Night, many citizens were proud of the British empire's largest city after London.
The 1943 famine, wartime anxieties, the 1946 riots, the partition of Bengal in 1947, the postwar population explosion, and declining industry since the 1960s, along with widespread poverty and chronic labor unrest, have increasingly put the city in crisis. The work of Mother Teresa's Calcutta mission focused worldwide attention on the city's squalor, starvation, and disease. Calcutta continues, however, a major financial, cultural, and educational center, catering to a cosmopolitan population speaking Bengali, English, Hindi, and Urdu. The Calcutta moviemakers produce commercial gems, and Dominique Lapierre's book City of Joy may outweigh Kipling's view of the city.
Further Reading
Chaudhuri, Sukanta, ed. (1995) Calcutta, The Living City. 2 vols. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.
Fernandes, Leela. (1997) Producing Workers: The Politics of Gender, Class, and Culture in the Calcutta Jute Mills. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Hutnyk, John. (1996) The Rumour of Calcutta: Tourism, Charity, and the Poverty of Representation. London: Zed Books.
Ray, Amalendu. (1990) Calcutta: An Annotated Bibliography. Columbia, MO: South Asia Books.
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