Kolkata

A guide to the city of Calcutta and the nearby urban areas.

The history of Kolkata is bound up with the British East India Company. The Company built the outpost of Fort William at the end of the 17th century as their main base in India. The city grew around it, and from 1772 until 1911, Kolkata (or Calcutta as it was then known) was the capital of British India.




These was constant tension with the Nawab of Bengal, the local ruler, which led to the legendary incident of the "Black Hole of Calcutta" in 1756, when British prisoners, held in one of the Nawab's dungeons, were suffocated from heat and overcroeding.


Kolkata is the cultural heart of modern India and has a long tradition of producing great writers, artists, musicians and political thinkers. In the 19th century it became the centre for the Indian Nationalist Movement seeking independence from colonial rule.




Today it is still renowned for its artistic and intellectual life as well as being the centre of the Bengali film industry. Kolkata is the main business, commercial and financial hub of eastern India and the northeastern states.

It is home to the Calcutta Stock Exchange — India's second-largest bourse. It is also a major commercial and military port, and the only city in the region to have an international airport.

Once India's leading city and Capital, Kolkata experienced a steady economic decline in the years following India's independence due to the prevalent unstabilised political condition and rise in trade-unionism. Between the 1960s to the mid 1990s, flight of capital was enormous as many large factories were closed or downsized and businesses relocated.



The lack of capital and resources coupled with a worldwide glut in demand in the city's traditional industries (e.g. jute) added to the depressed state of the city's economy. The liberalisation of the Indian economy in the 1990s has resulted in the improvement of the city's fortunes.

A traveller's first impressions of Kolkata are ones of utter confusion. The familiarity of English street names and Victorian architecture is immediately reassuring but the noise, traffic and squalor swamp you with sensory overload - roads packed with cars, cows, handcarts, rickshaws, pariah dogs and people all competing for space.

By the time you catch your first glimpse of a corpse floating down the River Hooghly, you are too numb to absorb it as anything abnormal - and so you adjust to this compelling place, called the "City of Joy".

Give yourself time explore the tall, narrow side streets, where the canopies of the trees meet to cast dappled pools of shade, and begin to feel something of the animated soul of this enigmatic, ramshackle city, the city of the great Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore:"I shall be born in India again and again. With all her poverty, misery and wretchedness, I love India best.

Love it or hate it, you can never ignore it’s enticing allure.