Leisure & Travel

The enduring charm of Kolkata and its environsFor the discerning Kolkata (aka Calcutta) remains a city with a glorious imperial past which retains its old-world flavour and Marxist coffee house cultureHowrah Bridge over the HooghlyIt‚s rare to encounter an informed individual who is neutral about Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), described as the ‚Ëœcity of dreadful night‚ by Rudyard Kipling, even before an estimated three million refugees from East Bengal flooded into the city after partition in 1947. With an officially estimated population of 14 million, Kolkata is India‚s most populous city and perhaps the most populous in the Commonwealth. Despite pervasive poverty and deprivation, its people are friendly and Bengali wit and intellect are renowned. Don‚t let the first impression of squalor put you off. There is a lot to be discovered in this city, and quite painlessly. The history of this justly famous metropolis stretches back to the 17th century ‚ to the time when the Mughal empire was in disarray and Europeans had arrived in the fabled east. In 1686, Job Charnock, chief of the East India Company‚s factory in Hooghly, looking for new sites, selected a group of three villages, Kalikata, Govindapur and Sutanuti ‚ where Armenian and Portuguese settlements were already established. A factory was constructed in Kalikata on August 24, 1690, and thus Calcutta was born. In 1698 a makeshift fort was built, which was easily stormed by Siraj ud Daula, the Nawab of Bengal in 1756. Most British inhabitants managed to escape but those captured were crammed into an underground cellar. Overnight, 113 of the 146 prisoners died of suffocation, and the tragedy went down in the history books as the infamous cruelty of the Black Hole of Calcutta. Early in 1757, the British recaptured Calcutta and made peace with the Nawab. A much stronger fort was built and the small factory site morphed into the capital of British India. By that time, the European population had swelled from a few hundred to 100,000 through the arrival of new ‚Ëœwriters‚, as East India Company employees were called, traders, soldiers, and what the administration termed “cargoes of females”.Things changed when Bengal became an important centre in the struggle for Indian independence, and the wary British moved the national capital to Delhi in 1911. With the partition of the Indian subcontinent, Calcutta was affected more than any other Indian city with significantly mixed Hindu and Muslim populations, and when the dividing line was drawn through them, the area was thrown into anarchy with thousands of refugees fleeing across the newly created borders. Calcutta, the centre of the jute-manufacturing and export industry became an apex without a base, whereas across the border in East Pakistan, jute grew in abundance, but without the infrastructure to process or export it. Fifty-seven years after partition, Kolkata is still suffering, presenting challenges that rival some of the world‚s most impover-ished cities. Up to 40 percent of the city‚s residents live in slums. Former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi declared Calcutta a lost cause…