THE BEGINNING

As I stepped off the busy roads of Govt Place in Central Calcutta and into the well-tended garden and walked up the red brick dust laden path that leads on to the celebrated St John’s Church of Calcutta, I was overcome with a dual sense of euphoria and ecstasy. As I walked on and the sounds of modern traffic faded away, as the smell of well-tended grass cloaked the stench of petrol of and smog outside the gates of what is the city’s oldest surviving Anglican Church – for the first time in two years I felt at peace.

With every step I took, the tall and imposing structure of the stone spire came into clearer view and I was doubly affirmed that I could not have chosen a better spot for embarking on the project that I had given myself – to tell a chronological and cultural history of the city which will try to connect all the pieces in this giant tapestry of a jigsaw puzzle. My gut had told me that this is where it all had started and none the less so because here was buried the person who had been credited – up until two decades ago – as the founder of the City, Job Charnock.

There was a ruling in 2003 by the Hon’ble Calcutta High Court that Job Charnock cannot be credited as the founder of the city since there did exist an inhabitation and trading hub in the region which would later become Calcutta before his arrival in 1690. The court is quite accurate historically – there are mentions the family of Sabarna Roy Chowdhury being granted the jagirdari of a place called Kalikhata in the Ain-i-Akbari and even references dating back to the 15^th Century in Bipradas Piplai’s Manasa Mangal stating the place as Kalikhata. Of course, both of these references pertain to the village of Kalikata and not to the other two villages-Sutanuti and Gobindapur – which resulted in the formation of the city.

It can be supposed - as per popular theory, though not entirely accurately - that the city got its name from the Kali Temple which had existed for centuries as a Shakti Pith in the present area of Kali Ghat (in fact, the area was originally named as Kalikshetra, or Kali Khetro in Bengali from which it became Kalikhata over time) and based on these views, it seems to be a factual error to credit Charnock with founding the city (in fairness, the naming of the city is mired in as much debate, if not more, as to who founded it and we will touch upon this later).If anything, he can be named as one of the many who were responsible for the development of the area into a city, such as Sir John Goldborough and Charles Eyre (Charnock's son-in-law) and the Sabarna Roy Chowdhury family, to name a few. The fact that Charnock died only two years after his arrival in Kolkata also does not give him brownie points as the founder of Calcutta. The early days of Calcutta are, at best, shrouded in hearsay rather than historically recorded facts and quite frankly, I feel that this is quite representative of a city which takes pride in eclecticism and disorganization.

I have mentioned that Abul Fazl’s Ain-i-Akbari states that the land of Kalikhata was given as a jagir to the Sabarna Roy Chowdhury family. Since Abul Fazl was murdered on the orders of Jahangir before Akbar had died and the Ain-i-Akbari was completed in the year 1590, fifteen years before the death of Akabr in 1605, it is quite unclear as to how the Sabarna Roy Chowdhury family actually acquired the land designated as Kalikhata in the treatise. The lack of clarity arises due to a mismatch of dates concerned with the award of the Jagir.

The family history of the Sabarna Roy Chowdhurys has maintained that the land was given in jagir to their ancestor Lakshmikanta Roy Chowdhury or Lakshmikanta Seth or Lakshmikanta Majumdar, who was the revenue minister of Pratapaditya – one of the celebrated Baro Bhuinyas of Bengal and who later became one of the torchbearer figures of

our national freedom movement. Pratapaditya, along with his 11 colleagues was a vassal of the Mughal Empire in Bengal. He held dominion over the district of Jessore , with the help of Lakshmikanta, made the area prosper. He did however nurture the ambition to be an independent ruler and revolted against the Mughal Empire while Akbar was still on the throne, ignoring Lakshmikanta’s advice to the contrary. Lakshmikanta, disillusioned with the way Pratapaditya was running things, left his service. The emperor waged several campaigns against the Vassal, but none proved successful. In the midst of this, his service and returned to his birthplace Kalikshetra.

Emperor Akbar passed away in 1605 after installing Jahangir on the throne, who ordered Raja Man Singh – the governor of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa to finally put an end to what he saw as the menace of Pratapaditya in Bengal. After marching into Jessore and following his emperor’s orders, Raja Man Singh was faced with the problem of whom to appoint as the administrator of this huge region and to fill the power vacuum left by Pratapaditya’s defeat. His first choice was Lakshmikanta, who declined the offer, having grown tired of politics and intrigue. However, Man Singh awarded him eight Jagirs completely tax free of a region that extended from modern day Halisahar in the North to present Diamond Harbour in the South, lying on the East bank of the river Hooghly and the titles of Roy and Chowdhury. On the other hand, Bhavanand Majumdar was installed on the throne of Jessore by Raja Man Singh after Pratapaditya’s death – apparently by suicide. Bhavanand had been in the service of Pratapaditya and went on to be the founder of Nadia Raj Family – another illustrious Zamindar family of Bengal which spawned the legendary ruler Raja Krishna Chandra of Krishna Nagar who is still remembered fondly in Bengali children’s folk tales featuring his courtier Gopal Bhaar and who was one of the secret conspirators against Siraj-Ud-Daulah in the buildup to the Battle of Plassey.

But I digress too much. The main point behind the recounting the entire episode was to state there is room for debate with regard to how long the Sabarna Roy Chowdhury’s held the Jagir of Kalikhata from a purely historical perspective, but there can be no doubt that by the time they had to sell their Jagir to the British, the Sabarna Roy Chowdhury’s were well-established landlords and zamindars of the area. In fact, it can be argued that the family was quite reluctant to sell their jagir to the foreigners but had to do so under pressure from the Mughal Court. This attitude of the family is quite understandable especially when we take into consideration that they have been loyal to the Mughal Throne since the days of Humayun (Panchu Shakti Khan or Panchanan Gangopadhyay was one of the closest associates of the emperor) and all the effort that their ancestor Lakshmikanta Roy Chowdhury had put into the development of the region.

It must be remembered that much of the land given in Jagir to Lakshmikanta Roy Chowdhury was a veritable wasteland and an uninhabitable jungle. It was due to the efforts of this man that the place became inhabitable. In fact, Lakshmikanta is credited with building the first pucca road from Halisahor to Barisha, and even a two storied office building where the present-day Writer’s Building stands. In addition to this, he can also be given the credit of being the first social reform of Kolkata when the Bengal Renaissance was a distant dream as he fought against the Devibara and abolished polygamy under his reign. He also developed the Sutanuti area into a veritable trading post for the Armenians, the Dutch and the Portuguese.

The history of Calcutta, I reiterate, is shrouded and hides more than it reveals. Once again, we find ourselves at a crossroads of historical anomaly and like the previous instance, this anomaly has again to do with dates. We have just stated that Lakshmikanta Roy Chowdhury, who ruled from 1610 to 1649 was responsible for setting up Sutanuti as a trading post for the foreigners, but there is another group which can also lay claim to being responsible for the development of Sutanuti – The Basaks and the Setts of Saptagram (Satgaon). But before we venture further into the claims made by these families who had migrated to Gobindapur, we must make clear the topography of the region around Hooghly and the three villages which would go on to make present day Calcutta.

Bengal has always been a riverine land and much of its prosperity is owed to this fact since in the days before the steam engine, waterways were a necessity if one were to trade. Hence, Bengal became one of the richest – if not The Richest­- province in India. Out of the many rivers shaping the destiny of Bengal, none has been more influential than the Saraswati River. Not to be confused with the Saraswati river referred to in Ancient Indian texts, this river was a distributary of the Bhagirathi river formed at the Tribeni near Bandel where the Bhagirathi (the present-day Hooghly river, also known colloquially as Ganga, although it is a distributary of the Ganges from which it splits near Murshidabad) split into the Saraswati and the Jamuna (again, not to be confused with its North Indian namesake).

The course and condition of the Saraswati has played an important role in the development and decline of river port towns in Bengal. Initially, the major port town was Tamralipta or present day Tamluk, after the decline of which Saptagram rose and became the great centre of commerce from the 9^th or 10^th century right until theyear 1530, when the drying up of the Saraswati finally began to make its effects felt in the great hub. Previously, when the river was in full flow, the seafaring ships could sail right up to the Saptagram port and unload their goods not far from the market, but now only small boats could go on to the port while the ships had to dock near present day Garden Reach, post which the waters became shallow and the traders – especially the Portuguese were not keen on risking their gallises in the shallow waters.

The sole reason for any development or decline in human history is economics and it can be easily assumed that the added cost and the sacrifice of convenience that was being made by having to load the cargo onto small country boats so that the same can be sent to Saptagram market, not to mention the time lost in navigating the waterways to the market and back again to the ship for loading the second batch of cargo resulted in the surging unpopularity of Saptagram as a trading hub. It was at this time that a roaring market for trading with foreigners sprang up on the west bank of the Hooghly at Betor, close to present day Shibpur in Howrah district, which attracted both native merchants and foreign ones to the spot.

But Betor’s good fortunes were not long to last. Five opulent merchant families – four Basaks and one Sett - decided to move upriver from the rapidly declining Saptagram and set up their business there anew. They arrived at the site of Gobindapur and having cleared the area of jungles, built houses, excavated tanks and even constructed a shrine to their tutelary deity – Govindjee, in commemoration of whom they named the settlement Govindpur. They also established a trading centre at Sutanuti called Sutanuti Haat – a cloth market for sale of skeins of thread and woven cloth – a market which gave the village of Sutanuti its name. It was here that the Basaks and the Setts did business with the Portuguese, and gradually, with the latter moving higher up the river, the whole of the trade between the natives and the Portuguese was transferred from Betor to Sutanuti.

Why the Basaks and Setts decided to shift their business to the Godforsaken Jungle of Gobindapur is not known for sure, but one can assume their motivations behind choosing the spot. With the silting of the Saraswati River in Saptagram, they were probably looking for a spot where the area would be more or less habitable and where the river would not silt for a long time and the Sutanuti Gobindapur region fitted the bill perfectly, It was a mostly sparsely populated area, not occupied by any businessmen and hence the Basaks and Setts had the first mover advantage, while the spot was quite upriver from the erstwhile trading post of Saptagram and from the new trading post of Betor which would mean that the river would be navigable for generations. Historically, the Basaks and the Setts were the first parties to put Sutanuti and Gobindapur on the map.

But I have digressed enough and it is time to get back to the historical anomaly. We get the history of the Basak’s and the Sett’s settlement in Gobindapur from two sources – the account of C.R. Wilson, a celebrated 19^th Century English historian and through the recounting of Gaur Das Bysack, a scion of Basak family who wrote in 1891 of his family’s migration to Gobindapur, stating that it took place 425 years ago – which puts the date at around 1466, which is before the Mughals came to power, let alone the jagirdari of Lakshmikanta Roy Chowdhury. C.R. Wilson puts the date much more plausibly around 1530, which is the time around which the decline of Saptagram reached its peak. But even this is 80 years before the time of Lakshmikanta Roy Chowdhury. So, the question arises, who did actually develop the Sutanuti market and the Gobindapur area?

Whoever might have been responsible for the development of Gobindapur and Sutanuti, by the time Job Charnock arrived in Sutanuti – for the third time in his time in India – it was a market for thread and finished cloth and Gobindapur was already a busy place in its own right. However, one must not think that Gobindapur and Sutanuti were vast trading posts comparable to Saptagram or Hooghly. In fact, some accounts state that, with the exception of a few settlements, the entire area of Sutanuti and Gobindapur were largely forests, open marshy lands interspersed with small pieces of arable land. In fact, before the arrival of Charnock, Sutanuti, Gobindapur and Kalikata were not mentioned once in the British records of travel and business or in East India Company correspondences. For all intents and purposes, Sutanuti, Gobindapur and Kalikata were just three villages on the riverbank. What an irony that these three villages would later on be the heart of the British Empire in India. But that is a story for next time.

Sources:

1. A City in the Making By Ranabir Ray Choudhury, Niyogi Books

2. The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple, Bloomsbury Publishing

3. Purono Kolkatar Itibritto, Binoy Ghosh, Deep Prakashan

4. Bangiya Sabarna Katha Kalishetra Kalikatah by Bhabani Roy Choudhury, Manna Publication.

5. Itihaser Dui Mukh- Pratapaditya o Laksmikanta, Dr. Sonali Mukhapadhyay, Bartaman Sunday Supplementary, 28.12.2008

6. Laksmikanta – A Chapter in the Social History of Bengal By A.K Ray, Godhulia Press, Benaras, 1928