Kolkata was Britain’s Indian capital before New Delhi rose
West Bengal’s capital on the Hooghly counts about four point five million in the city proper and over fifteen million across its metro. Known as Calcutta until two thousand one, it served as de facto capital of India under Company and Crown rule until nineteen eleven.
Three villages—Kalikata, Sutanuti, and Gobindapur—sat under the Nawab of Bengal when the East India Company won a trading licence in 1690 and built Fort William. Job Charnock is often called founder, yet a 2003 High Court ruling denied any single founder. Siraj ud-Daulah seized the fort in 1756; defeat at Plassey in 1757, aided by Mir Jafar’s mutiny, opened Company dominance. By 1773 Calcutta headed Company power in India; after 1793 Nawabi authority ended. Mid-nineteenth-century jute and textiles, White Town at Chowringhee and Black Town in the north, and the Bengal Renaissance made it the empire’s second city after London.
Etymology theories range from Kali’s field to Kalighat, flat kilkila land, dug canals, or lime-and-coir crafts. Bengali speakers always said Kolkata; English officialdom kept Calcutta until the 2001 rename. Chandraketugarh thirty-five kilometres north shows two millennia of regional habitation; Manasa Vijay (1495) already mentions Kalikata. A census in 1837 listed about two hundred thirty thousand in the city proper. Howrah Bridge, the Victoria Memorial, India’s only Chinatown, and institutions from the Asiatic Society to the University of Calcutta—South Asia’s first modern university—still frame the cultural-capital claim.
Partition in 1947 flooded the city with East Bengali refugees and decades of political strife before rebound; Mumbai overtook it as India’s largest city. Four Nobel laureates and two Memorial Prize winners link to Kolkata, Tollywood films, football passion, and UNESCO-recognised Durga Puja pageantry. Paras neighbourhoods and adda conversation culture keep social texture intimate even as the Hooghly gateway still opens toward northeastern India—an imperial capital that remade itself as Bengal’s restless metropolis.
Source: Kolkata
