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. |
