History of Kolkata

The English name Calcutta is the anglicised form of Kolikata, a place name already recorded in Bengali texts of the late fifteenth century and in Mughal revenue rolls. One explanation links it to Kalikshetra, “the field of Kali”, and the Kalighat temple, which by tradition stands where a part of the goddess Sati's body fell; other theories exist. Archaeological finds at Chandraketugarh, about 35 km to the north, show that the region has been inhabited for over two thousand years.

Before the British, the river villages of Sutanuti, Kalikata and Gobindapur already had foreign traders: the earliest headstone in the Armenian burial ground, where the Armenian Church now stands, is dated 1630.

In the nineteenth century the city became the centre of what is called the Bengal Renaissance, a wave of social reform, literature and religious thought. Its traces are in North Kolkata's old mansions, at Dakshineswar, where Ramakrishna served for some thirty years, and in the work of Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Calcutta was also a centre of Indian nationalism: in 1883 Surendranath Banerjee organised a national conference, the first of its kind in nineteenth-century India. The partition of Bengal in 1905 along religious lines led to mass protests. In 1911 the capital of India was moved to Delhi; Calcutta remained the capital of Bengal until 1947.

Japan bombed the city and its port several times between 1942 and 1944; Howrah Bridge opened in the middle of it, in 1943. In the Bengal famine of 1943 an estimated 0.8 to 3.8 million people died across Bengal; historians point to a combination of military, administrative and natural factors.

On 16 August 1946 the Muslim League called Direct Action Day, a general strike to press its demand for a separate Muslim homeland. It was followed by several days of violence between Hindus and Muslims in the city, known as the Great Calcutta Killings; estimates of the dead range from about 4,000 to 10,000. At Partition in 1947 Calcutta became part of the Indian state of West Bengal. Many Muslims left for East Pakistan, and hundreds of thousands of Hindu refugees arrived from the east.

In the 1960s and 1970s the Naxalite movement, a militant Maoist insurgency, together with power shortages and strikes, hit the city's economy, and in 1971 the Bangladesh war sent another wave of refugees into West Bengal. In 1969 the Ochterlony Monument on the Maidan was rededicated as the Shaheed Minar, to the martyrs of the freedom movement, and in 1984 Calcutta opened India's first metro. In 1985 Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi called it a “dying city”. Economic recovery gathered pace after the reforms of the mid-1990s, and since 2000 IT services have revived the economy. In 2001 the official name was changed from Calcutta to Kolkata.

• The Company's city: St John's Church (1787) with Job Charnock's mausoleum and the Black Hole memorial; the Armenian Church; Metcalfe Hall's gallery of old maps in BBD Bagh; South Park Street Cemetery, opened in 1767.
• The imperial capital: Victoria Memorial, the Indian Museum and the Maidan with the Shaheed Minar.
• The Renaissance: Jorasanko Thakurbari, the Marble Palace and the Kumartuli potters' lanes, where the craft of clay images has been passed down for three centuries.
• The freedom movement: the Alipore Jail Museum and Netaji Bhawan.

More on planning visits: museums in Kolkata.