The City Of Joy

Kolkata is a daily celebration of life—simultaneously aristocratic and grubby, cultured and grimy—with the trails of its splendid decay enveloped within its modernist ambience. The 330-year-old metropolis is considered India’s intellectual, artistic and cultural capital.

- Sugato Mukherjee

The Beginning

The birth of Calcutta (as Kolkata was known for eons before getting rechristened in the late 1990s) was entirely due to the dogged determination of an administrator of the British East India Company—Job Charnock. He persuaded the reluctant council that Sutanuti (one of the three villages that constituted Calcutta in the last years of the 17th century, along with Gobindapur and Kalkatta) on the banks of the Hooghly was the ideal place to establish the headquarters in Bengal, because of its naturally fortified location protected by the Hooghly river to the west, a creek to the north and salt lakes to the east. The river, close to its confluence with the Bay of Bengal, also offered deep-water anchorage for the British fleet. Thus, on August 24, 1690, a city was born; to steadily flourish over the years; to be known as the city of cities; and eventually become the capital of British India in 1772.

A City Of Palaces

Richard Wellesley, the Governor-General over 1797–1805, was largely responsible for the development of the city and its public architecture, which led to the description of Kolkata as the ‘City of Palaces,’ dotted with majestic architectural monuments and sprawling palatial mansions belonging to wealthy Englishmen and native merchants. Kolkata still boasts of a cityscape adorned with an eclectic architectural fusion of Gothic, Baroque, Roman, Oriental and Indo-Islamic motifs. Most of these 18th and 19th century mansions are located in the wonderfully chaotic North Kolkata neighbourhoods, where hand-drawn rickshaws jostle with brightly painted yellow taxis to negotiate the labyrinthine network of narrow lanes. This was the playground of Kolkata’s urban rajas with their extravagant lifestyles and the grand mansions bear brilliant testimony of the rivalries between the families to outsmart one another.