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Kolkata is on the threshold of its tercentenary. This 300-Year span has witnessed its development into one of the world's most densely peopled metropolises.
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Job Charnock arrived in Sutanuti village in 1686 with the intention of opening a factory.
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An old canal is known to have flowed from here to the heart of the city and which further plunged into a massive salt-lake in the east. Large boats sailed down this sinuous stream, navigated by merchants from East Bengal and Portuguese and Armenian traders who came to hawk their wares.
And from distant Sutanuti traveled job Charnock, boating across the canal and stopping to rest his oars under a shady tree, which was fascinatingly called the baithakhana (a leisurely nook). Beneath this tree sat Charnock smoking tobacco and merrily indulging in his merchanting pre-occupations. Upjohn's Kolkata map of 1794 lent credence to the existence of the legendary tree as late as the end of the 18th century long after the canal had ceased to flow.
Roots of the city's English settlement are traced to the period when Job Charnock Permanently moved to Kolkata then consisted of three contiguous villages namely Sutanuti, Govindpur and Kalikatta. Dotting the remaining terrain were paddy fields, vegetable and tobacco farms, ponds and muddy roads. The British, who had bought the three villages for a measly Rs. 16,000-in 1698, were now the irrepressible monarchs.
The construction of a fort in 1698 and the fortified haven it created opened the floodgates to hordes of immigrants. Virtually every Indian wormed his way into businesses run by foreigners. Those with guile and competence were employed as clerks or wakils (lawyers). The hapless eked out a living as palanquin, chata, and hukkka bearers or as khansamas (cooks),
Mingled in this motley milieu of master and subjects were barbers, priests, launderers, masons, moneylenders, tutors and brokers. In the market place of grocers and tobacconists cropped up two licensed ganja (opium) shops and a couple of arrack (a potent liquor) retailers named Bibi Demingo and Gobind Suri. A collector governed the city's affairs with the help of a law-keeper, the kotwal.
Bribery, an accepted practice by then became rampant after the British war machinery placidity succumbed to this degenerate social system during the Battle of Plassey in 1757. The epidemics of fever, cholera and smallpox soon descended upon the city. The only hospital, strictly for the white man, was a veritable deathtrap. And when an isolated courthouse issued verdicts, the condemned were banished across the Hooghly to be marooned in Howrah. Amusingly the city till then was devoid of a jailhouse. In 1727 a farmaan (decree) from Delhi's Badshah Farookshiyar cleared the way for the setting up of Kolkata's Mayor's Court.
When Warren Hastings arrived in Kolkata as Governor General in1773, the city had begun to shake off its primitive trappings. Notwithstanding colonial rule the century ushered in by the Hastings era witnessed Kolkata's most remarkable eventful years. Postal services in 1774, printing of Bengali books and the Hicky's Gazette'sin 1780 and ratting horse-carriages by the end of the 18th century were a common sight. By the first decades of the 20th century Kolkata had leapt from palanquins to gleaming jalopies which honked through the cobbled streets.
Educational institutions like pathsalas and madrasas were brushed aside by formalized schools and colleges such as Native Female School, Sanskrit College, Medical College and Hospital and the famous Presidency College.
From the frenetic city building activities, which catapulted Kolkata to the doorsteps of the brave new world, emanated a maze of roads, subterranean water pipelines and a meshwork of telephones and telegraphs, which shattered communication barriers. The mid-19th century horse-drawn tramcars and street-side gas lamps faded out only to surface long afterwards in a caricaturist's sketches.
In stark contrast today contemporary Kolkata is the epitome of urbanization at its peak. Gone forever is a tranquil Chowringhee Square. A place where (even upto the 1950s and '60s) Kolkatans strolled and shopped unhurriedly or spent their evenings on the Maidan (sprawling lawns) across the street. Yesteryears' 'City of Palaces' today is an awesome spectacle of looming skyscrapers and has a labyrinthine transport network that squirms under its weight. It is also an ocean of seething humans who in their frenzied haste have little time to look back.
Nonetheless, three hundred years into the future, if the 23rd century's biographer trains his looking-glass on history again it is this metropolis' battle with these staggering complexities which will rekindle his imagination.
Courtesy : Discover India
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