Calcutta in Colonial Transition

Ranjit Sen

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429576119
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

This book brings home the story of how three clustered villages grew into a primate city, in which a garrison town, a port city and the capital of an empire merged into one entity—Calcutta. This and its companion volume Birth of a Colonial City examine the geopolitical factors that were significant in securing Calcutta's position in the light of growing influence of the East India Company and subsequently the British Empire.

A definitive history of Calcutta in its nascent years, this book discusses the challenges of city-planning, the de-industrialization at the hands of British imperialists, the catastrophic fall of the Union Bank, the advent of British capital, and the rise of the Bengali business enterprise in the colonial era. It also underlines how Calcutta facilitated the development of a political consciousness and the pivotal political and cultural role it played when the movement for independence took hold in the country.

This volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern South Asian history, British Studies, city and area studies.

1
Calcutta grows into a global city

Paradox of growth

Calcutta’s growth was set in a paradox. In the eighteenth century it did not grow into a full-fledged urban city – even after a hundred years of possessing the three villages that made up the territorial mass of the city itself. After more than three decades since the battle of Palasi (1757) its boundary was not settled and there was very little public funding to process the villages into a developed urban centre. Yet these shortcomings could not stop the city’s rise to power. It was almost an uninterrupted event. The process was complete before the century came to a close. It started coordinating the rise of the British Empire in India since it became a combined unit of three forms – a garrison city, a port town and the seat of an administration. All these three functional attributes of the town became a manifest unity immediately after the battle of Palasi. In the process of all these Calcutta became a global city – yet only half urbanized then.

A.K. Ray charts Calcutta’s growth since 1706.¹ It was certainly not a coveted zone for habitation then. There was only one masonry building on the bank of the Ganga: the cutchery of the jagirdar. Two roads ensured journey to this ancient Kalikshetra – the land of the goddess – Kali the Mother. One road moved eastward from the kutchery to the confluence of the Adi Ganga to Salt Water Lake at a place called Srigaldwipa. The other one, moving north to south, was the ancient pilgrim road that connected Kalighat in the south and Halisahar, another pilgrim spot in the north far away beyond the rim of the city into the district of the twenty-four Parganas.² The Calcutta part of the road the English termed as the ‘Broad Street.’ This was the road on which the future white town grew. All surrounding areas were jungle and waste. Out of 5076 bighas of land the English were allowed to purchase in 1698 only 840 bighas were inhabited in 1706.³ In a decade’s time two structures were raised: the fort and the church. When the Surman Embassy returned from Delhi in 1717 it saw that population had increased, trade had improved but no expansion of the town area had taken place. The English had made a little advance in the matter of their defence. Previously their defence consisted of a flotilla of boats lying on the river.⁴ Now they had a fort which served two purposes – their abode and their defence. A fort overlooking a port and providing defence and shelter was a marvellous achievement, however meagre it might be. Its dividend came in 1742 when the Maratha invasion started devastating the western part of Bengal. Calcutta guarded by the fort and protected by the river turned into a sanctuary for men fleeing from terror and devastation. Population rose by leaps and bounds in the city. This population was, however, a crowd in an emergency and hence could not be dispersed or resettled with ease. What suffered because of this was town planning. The Company’s primary aim at this time was revenue. Population led to habitation and habitation fetched revenue. Population was profitable to the Company and it provided the English the confidence of a stable settlement.

1740s: a scare-driven but a landmark period of Calcutta’s growth

The 1740s thus should be looked at as a landmark period in the history of the rise of Calcutta into a global town. Population dispelled the desolation of the English settlement. The scene of a wilderness was now gone. The demographic settlement of the city based on population segregation now began to take its final shape. People of native origin were concentrated in the north while the south was retained for the whites. The middle zone between the north and the south, termed by historians as a ‘grey zone,’ was occupied by a medley of mankind: the Portuguese, the Danes, the Dutch, the Armenians and Muslims of diverse origin. This was the buffer zone that in later years helped the white town maintain its character. The English success in defending the native population had far-reaching effect. For the first time the bond of trust between the English and their neighbours came to be forged. Those who were opposed to building a church a few decades ago were now reconciled with the aliens. Relying on the fort the English might could build a bridge of confidence with local people that served for the future the man-power base for a growing city. What happened during the years of 1740s, one may say, was to lay the foundation of the developments of the next few decades. The English developed their confidence in their own strength while the city grew famous as a sanctuary parallel of which there was none anywhere in Bengal.

The rush of crowd in the city gave the English a lesson in coexistence with natives. Since the northern part of the city was organized into a colony of natives, thatch and mud structures became rampant as dwellings in the north. This had delayed the process of urbanization in the city. The Maratha invasions were a decade-long phenomenon.⁵ Naturally population influx continued throughout the period and eventually turned out to be the most important phenomenon in the entire pre-Palasi phase of the city’s history. The freedom of entry into Calcutta was a two-way blessing. To the natives it gave a freedom from wealth-robbery and human abduction by brigands engaged in slave trade. The practice with the natives in the countryside was to bury their wealth beneath the soil in order to protect them from theft. As the door was now open for migration into the city many respectable people from the interior gradually shifted their family and wealth to the city. The process started in the 1740s and continued till the third or fourth decade of the nineteenth century when the financial institutions of the city, the Agency Houses, began to collapse leading particularly to the fall of the Union Bank in 1848. Because of this influx of wealth, the city benefited. It grew into a repository of treasure so much so that in 1823 Bhabani Charan Badyopadhyay, a representative of local intelligentsia, described the city as Kamalalaya – abode of Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth.⁶

On the Company’s side it was a boon in a double sense. Population influx gave the city the character of a bustling settlement. The Company’s revenue increased, and the Company got their first training in governance geared to crisis management. It had other benefits. Its arms were tested. Forty-six years ago in 1696 when the revolt of Shova Singh took place the English were outsiders and had no role to play in forestalling the insurrection at any stage of its growth. But in 1742 the situation was different. The English had been able to protect their own settlement, provide security to neighbours and help the faujdar of Hugli to defend his own station. The organization of arms and man-power strength at one point of time and in one incident was a massive exercise that gave a positive boost to the city’s morale. Calcutta was saved from Maratha incursions and there is no reference in contemporary literature that the society of merchants in the city, their largest trade mart, Burra Bazaar, and any stockpile of their commodities were plundered. This helped building the city’s image as a sanctuary.

So long the city had acted as a sanctuary for delinquents. Whoever committed an offence in the Nawabi territory fled to Calcutta in order to enjoy an exemption from the Mughal law. The Company’s authorities insisted that a resident of Calcutta would be tried by its own rules – the laws of the English. This was in the long run a claim of jurisdiction tantamount to an extraterritorial privilege which the Bengal Nawabs could not approve. Conflicts on this issue were rampant between the English and the Mughals and had strained relations between them since the time of Murshid Quli Khan. After 1740s situations changed in favour of the English. The Nawabi administration was battered by the twin scourge of Maratha invasion and the Afghan insurrection. When the state was in turmoil the city became a refuge not only for delinquents but also for dissidents. This was how the Kishnaballabh affair emerged in 1756. The quiet with which the English had accommodated the dissident son of Raja Rajballabh, the diwan of Dhaka, during the time of Siraj-ud-daullah, showed that they had acquired a mood of confidence which could only grow out of experience in a trying time. When Siraj-ud-daullah ascended the throne, the English did not show the courtesy of greeting the new Nawab. This was an outrage from the standpoint of the Nawab but certainly it was also from the English point of view an expression of self-assertion based on a mood of confidence recently acquired. What was significant for Calcutta in the immediate pre-Palasi days was this buoyancy in a mood of confidence that were not visible in any other contemporary town on the river bank.

The contours of the white town were figured out in the pre-Palasi days but certainly not with the same vigour as after the battle of Palasi. Chowringhee developed its rudiments between 1726 and 1737⁷ marking the settlers’ segregation from the natives. The process of clearing jungle had started but not to any great extent because there still stood a tiger infested jungle between Chowringhee and Govindapur.⁸ Felling of jungle was required because of two reasons: to provide land for habitation and to provide fuel-wood – to brick kilns. From the middle of the eighteenth-century construction of brick and masonry building in Calcutta gained momentum. Rats, white ants and fire were causing devastations to the city. For a growing town mud and thatch supported by wood seemed to be out of mode in a changing situation. The Company was enduring damage and native inhabitants suffered huge loss. Substitution of mud and thatch was the need of the time. But the Company was not in a position to indulge in any innovative construction lest it should attract the attention of the Nawabs. That was one reason why Chowringhee even after an initial start in the late twenties of the eighteenth century did not form into a formal residential hub before the battle of Palasi. After Palasi when Calcutta was in command of politics and power the English felt free to come out of their ‘convenient lodgings’ inside the fort and settle along the Chowringhee. A proper civil line was then created in Calcutta. In this sense the first mark of Calcutta’s elevation to a global city began after the battle of Palasi. But its town formation had already started. A.K. Ray observes, “Before the Mahratta invasion, then, Calcutta had become a town, not merely in name but also in appearance.”⁹

Pattern of pre-Palasi township

Calcutta was thus shaped long before the white civil line had assumed its formation. This happened on two different axes – the two roads that passed by the fort. One road moved north and south and was situated to the east of the fort and west of a park that was newly created then. It marked its way to the Great Bazar, later known as Burra Bazaar. The other one starting from the east gate of the fort moved to further east intersecting in its way the Broad Street¹⁰ of the city. The point of intersection was exactly where the present Chitpur Road and Bowbazar Street cross each other. Along these two thoroughfares the wealthy merchants of the Company and opulent natives built their garden houses.¹¹ Omichand, the Sikh¹² and Ramakrishna and Rashbehari Sett – millionaire merchants of Calcutta lived in this region.¹³

This was the beginning of a new trend in which one will find a clustered zone of upcoming residences around the fort. Individual garden houses¹⁴ which became a familiar fad with European officers in Calcutta in the eighteenth century¹⁵ and which rich natives were quick to adopt as their own style of living owed their origin in the pre-Palasi days when jungle was being cleared under pressure of population and land was available for habitation and thoroughfares. Yet before Palasi it was a localized event. A diffused area of construction was yet to grow. Unless prolific constructions could be in sight the picture of a global township would not be a reality. Calcutta was then a picture of a growing township but certainly with no pattern of planned growth. A perusal of some eighteenth and nineteenth century maps so cutely analysed by pioneers show that the town had dynamics of growth urged mostly by pressures of incre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the text
• Introduction
• 1 Calcutta grows into a global city
• 2 The global city in the making: the nineteenth century
• 3 Urbanization as a pattern: the nineteenth-century trend reviewed
• 4 The city assumes power: looking at the city from the perspective of power
• 5 Calcutta becomes a City of Palaces: looking at the city from the perspective of morphology
• 6 The city in decline: its history, heritage and identity
• 7 The economic milieu in which the city grew
• 8 De-industrialization, de-urbanization and the advent of British capital
• 9 The money culture of Calcutta: an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century profile
• 10 The fiscal face of Calcutta in the phase of its early growth
• 11 Did Calcutta grow industrially?
• 12 Bengali business enterprise in Calcutta in the early colonial era
• 13 Confronting radical changes: Calcutta in the Swadeshi years
• Bibliography
• Index