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| Introduction
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| The Capital of
West Bengal, Calcutta, lies on the Hooghly distributary of
the Ganges. Its close proximity to river and sea, and hence
its connection to the outside world and historical trade routes,
has meant that it has developed as a major commercial centre.
The city of Calcutta, unlike Banaras, Delhi or Jaipur, does
not have a heritage which stretches back into the distant
past. It is a parvenu city, which grew with the development
of British power in Bengal. In the 17th century, the English
East India Company received a royal charter to trade in Asian
waters. In the process of establishing their trading network
in India, British traders set up their outposts, which were
called, in the parlance of the day, “Factories”.
In eastern India, in the early 17th century,
one such Factory was located at Hooghly, some 30 miles upriver
from present-day Calcutta.
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In the late 1680s, the representative of the
Mughal Emperor in Bengal evicted the British from Hooghly
following a local dispute. Job Charnock, the Company’s
chief agent in Hooghly, was forced to retreat downriver with
the entire British population. Charnock, as an alternative,
chose the village of Sutanati which, together with the neighboring
villages of Govindapur and Kalighat, came to form the core
of Calcutta.
Thus, Charnock, who is buried in St John’s Chapel,
is hailed as the founder of the city-although sone observers
acknowledge the Armenians as arriving prior to Charnock. Sutanati,
where Charnock landed, was a mart for cotton piece goods.
The British set up just south of this village, around the
area of the present General Post Office. This eventually became
the original site of Fort William, which was moved to the
Maidan a little later. The expansion of this tiny settlement
left behind by Charnock took place after the Battle of Plassey. |
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