Place · botanic garden · India
Calcutta Botanic Garden
The 273-acre Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden at Shibpur, Howrah district, West Bengal, on the west bank of the Hooghly across from Kolkata — founded in 1787 by Colonel Robert Kyd as the Honourable East India Company's Botanic Garden to acclimatise economic plants from across the empire. The Garden became a node in global plant collection, acclimatisation and taxonomy under successive directors William Roxburgh (1793-1813, authored Flora Indica), Nathaniel Wallich (1815-46) and George King (1871-98). The 250-year-old Great Banyan tree (now 1.5 hectares, 3,772 aerial roots after 1925 and 1950 cyclones killed the central trunk) is the garden's icon. Renamed in 2009 after J.C. Bose; now under the Botanical Survey of India.
- Date
- 1787–2026
- Function
- Science & medicine
- Patron dynasty
- Company / British Raj
- Condition
- living institution
- River basin
- Ganga delta
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 22.560, 88.290
Connections (4)
- Monastic foundationJagadish Chandra Bose
Bose demonstrated millimetre-wave radio at Calcutta in 1895, transmitting through walls to ring a bell and fire a charge in another room, and published the work in the Royal Society's proceedings the following year. He declined to patent it. He founded the Bose Institute in 1917 to do fundamental research in India rather than sending students abroad, and ran it on the argument that colonial science had no monopoly on original work.
- TransmissionCinchona plantations, Mungpoo
Cinchona seed taken from Peru and Bolivia was raised at Kew, shipped to Calcutta, acclimatised in the botanic garden and distributed to the Nilgiris and to Mungpoo. The garden also handled the Chinese tea plants and the Brazilian rubber seedlings on their way to Malaya. Three of the nineteenth century's great plant transfers passed through one nursery.
- Patronage networkAssam tea, Jorhat
The Assam Company's first plantings used both wild Assam stock and China seed raised in the Calcutta garden, and the garden's superintendents sat on the Tea Committee that decided the experiment. The Brahmaputra valley's tea economy, and the indentured migration from Chotanagpur that staffed it, begin as a botanical trial in a Calcutta nursery bed.
- Site withinKolkata
Calcutta Botanic Garden lies within Kolkata — the two sites sit about 8 km apart, well inside the city's historical boundary and part of the same urban or peri-urban landscape. Calcutta Botanic Garden is one of the specific sites that give Kolkata its layered character, and reads differently when seen as a stop within the larger city rather than as an isolated monument on an open map. The surrounding neighbourhoods, roads and other heritage ensembles belong to the same single urban fabric.
Sources
Botanical Survey of India institutional history; colonial botanical garden records.
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