Who ruled Kolkata?

Kolkata, known in English as Calcutta until 2001, lies on the east bank of the Hooghly, a distributary of the Ganges, about 150 kilometres upstream from the Bay of Bengal. The river gave seagoing ships access to Bengal, one of the richest and most densely populated regions of Asia, and to the trade of the whole Ganges plain. The city is defined by that position and by one company: it grew from three villages chosen by English merchants into the capital of British India, and then into the cultural centre of modern Bengal.

Bengal had a long urban history before Kolkata. It was ruled in turn by the Mauryas, the Guptas, the Buddhist Pala Empire, Muslim sultans and, from the late 1500s, the Mughal Empire. The site itself held only villages, Sutanuti, Gobindapur and Kalikata, near the old Kali shrine at Kalighat, while busier ports such as Satgaon and Hooghly lay upstream. Portuguese, Dutch, French and Danish traders were all active on the river. In August 1690 Job Charnock of the English East India Company, after years of conflict with the Mughal governor, settled at Sutanuti. In 1698 the Company acquired the rights to the three villages, and a fortified trading post, Fort William, was built by the river.

In 1756 the young Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah, angered by new fortifications, captured the town. A number of British prisoners died overnight in a cramped guardroom, an episode later magnified as the "Black Hole of Calcutta"; how many died is disputed. Robert Clive retook Calcutta in early 1757 and in June defeated the Nawab at Plassey. The Company became the real power in Bengal, built a new, much larger Fort William, and in 1772 made Calcutta the seat of its government. From 1773 its governor-general there oversaw all of Company India.

Calcutta was often called the second city of the British Empire after London, with grand classical buildings in the European quarter and dense Indian neighbourhoods to the north. It was the hub of trade in indigo, jute, tea and opium. It was also the birthplace of the Bengal Renaissance, a movement of social and religious reform and literary creativity associated with Ram Mohan Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and later Rabindranath Tagore, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. The University of Calcutta was founded in 1857. The city became a centre of Indian nationalism, especially after the partition of Bengal in 1905, and in 1911 the British moved the capital of India to Delhi.

The 1940s were catastrophic. The Bengal famine of 1943 drove starving villagers into the city's streets, and on 16 August 1946 Direct Action Day set off the Great Calcutta Killings, days of Hindu and Muslim violence in which thousands died. With the partition of India in 1947, Calcutta became part of the Indian state of West Bengal and lost much of its hinterland to East Pakistan, while huge numbers of refugees arrived, and more came during the 1971 war that created Bangladesh. Industry declined, and the city became known abroad for its poverty, partly through the work of Mother Teresa, who founded the Missionaries of Charity there in 1950. A Left Front government led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) ran the state from 1977 to 2011, and India's first underground railway opened in the city in 1984.

Kolkata today is the capital of West Bengal, with about 4.5 million people in the city proper and some 15 million in the metropolitan region, and it remains the main commercial and cultural centre of eastern India.