From SohajPedia, the daily world briefing
Kolkata
Kolkata is a city that has been several things at once: a trading post licensed in 1690, the capital of British India, the second city of an empire, and — after hard decades — a metropolis of more than 15 million people that still runs on trams, adda and argument. It sits on the eastern bank of the Hooghly River, about 80 kilometres west of the Bangladesh border, and it remains the cultural and commercial heart of eastern India.
Kolkata in numbers
From trading post to capital
The modern story starts in 1690, when the East India Company obtained a trading licence and set up a factory on the river. After the Battle of Plassey in 1757, Company rule spread from Bengal across India, and Kolkata — then Calcutta — became the de facto capital of British India, a status it kept until the capital moved to Delhi in 1911. By the nineteenth century it was said to be the second city of the British Empire after London, rich on jute, tea and trade, and home to a Bengali renaissance in literature, science and reform movements whose names — Tagore above all — are still on the street signs.
The city today
The city proper holds about 4.5 million people, and the metropolitan region more than 15 million, making it India's third-largest urban area. Partition in 1947 cut Kolkata off from much of its hinterland in what became East Pakistan and later Bangladesh, and the later twentieth century brought industrial decline and a reputation for stagnation. The economy today runs on services, IT parks in Salt Lake and New Town, the port, and one of Asia's oldest stock exchanges' worth of trading habit — plus the informal economy of a very large, very dense city.
Landmarks
Two structures bookend the postcards. The Howrah Bridge, opened in 1943, carries a river of traffic across the Hooghly on a cantilever of steel — for decades it was the city's defining image. On the Maidan, the vast green at the city's centre (visible in the photograph above), stands the Victoria Memorial, a white marble monument completed in 1921 that now houses a museum. Add the Indian Museum, College Street's bookstalls, the potters' quarter of Kumartuli where Durga idols are made by hand, and the last tram network still running in India, and the sightseeing writes itself.
Character
Ask Kolkatans what their city is for and the answer is rarely business. It is football — the Mohun Bagan–East Bengal rivalry divides families — literature, cinema, sweets (the rosogolla was born in this argument), and conversation. The city wears its age openly, crumbling mansions and all, and that is precisely the appeal its residents defend: Kolkata was India's capital of ideas long after it stopped being the capital of anything else.
Frequently asked questions
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References
Photograph: the Kolkata skyline and Maidan, via Wikimedia Commons.