Kolkata, India

History

Kolkata is situated on the east bank of the Hooghly River and serves as an important global seaport. Located on a vast wetland, the small Bengali village of Kalikata was occupied sequentially by French, Portuguese, and British traders. In 1690, Kolkata became a trade settlement for the British East India Company. By 1698, the East India Company bought Kalikata and two adjoining villages from a local landlord and began developing Calcutta. In 1772, Calcutta became the capital of British India, and the Crown relocated all administrative offices to the new city. In 1912, after several nationalist uprisings, the British colonial government moved its capital to Delhi, which is still the capital of post-colonial India. Calcutta was the center of revolutionary politics during the movement for Indian independence, and it continues to have active leftist and trade union movements. The city is also home to the longest-running, freely elected communist government in the world. In 2001, the city was renamed “Kolkata” to break with colonial heritage and better reflect Bengali pronunciation.

Once the center of British opulence and oppression, Kolkata still provides a sensory overload for visitors. Kolkata is often described in the pejorative: a corrupt, dying, and decaying city. Thousands of people live in the streets, fixing their tarpaulin ceilings to the iron gates of colonial-era villas. Popular [Page 466]literary representations of the city, including those of Claude Levi-Strauss, Dominique Lapierre, and Günter Grass, describe Kolkata as an urban disaster, filled with street-dwelling, emaciated bodies teetering at the edge of survival. Kolkatans attribute the popularization of this negative stereotype not only to Western authors but also to the work of Mother Teresa and her Missions of Charity, whose Nobel Peace Prize brought global attention to the destitution of Kolkata. Despite the protests of many of Kolkata's residents, contemporary press accounts of life in Kolkata draw Western audiences’ attention to the poverty, chaos, and disease of the city.

In the mid-1800s, the areas surrounding Kolkata were described as jungle with a few intermittent villages. In 1855, the first Indian jute mill was founded in Kolkata, and by the early 1900s, Kolkata jute production surpassed European production. Since jute was used to make gunny sacks, burlap bags, and other packing materials, jute production in Kolkata expanded along with other British export enterprises such as opium and tea. The jute boom continued through World War I, after which additional industries such as tanneries, glassworks, ceramic factories, chemical plants, and textile mills began to dot Kolkata's periphery.

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