Place · French colonial town · India
Chandernagore
The former French East India Company settlement at Chandannagar (Chandernagore) on the Hooghly river in West Bengal, 35 kilometres north of Kolkata — the French commercial-and-administrative centre of Bengal from 1673 (purchase from Mughal subahdar Ibrahim Khan) to 1950. The 1757 Siege of Chandannagar by Robert Clive and Admiral Charles Watson preceded Plassey; the Treaty of Paris (1763) returned it to France. Chandannagar sheltered Bengali nationalists under French protection — Aurobindo Ghose fled British prosecution to Chandannagar in 1910 before moving on to Pondicherry; Bagha Jatin, Rash Behari Bose and other revolutionaries used the French enclave as a safe house. The 1950 plebiscite (97% vote for India) returned Chandannagar to West Bengal on 2 October 1954. The Strand, the French Institute and the 1726 Our Lady of Fatima church preserve the heritage.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 22.870, 88.370
Connections (2)
- CampaignPlassey (Palāśī)
Clive and Watson took Chandernagore in March 1757, three months before Plassey, to remove the one European force that could have reinforced Siraj ud-Daulah. The Nawab had permitted the attack on a neutral settlement in his own territory; stripping him of the French alliance was the precondition for the defection that decided the battle at the mango grove in June.
- Site adjacencySerampore & the Mission Press
Danish Serampore and French Chandernagore face each other across the Hooghly, four miles apart, and both did for Bengal what neutral ground does anywhere: what British law forbade on one bank was legal on the other. The Serampore press printed what Calcutta censored in 1823; Chandernagore sheltered revolutionaries in 1908. Small enclaves are useful in inverse proportion to their size.
On these journeys
- French India — 1664 to 1962
- Decolonisation, partition and integration
- Bengal before partition — the delta as one landscape
Sources
Wikipedia, “Chandannagar”. Jean Deloche, Le vieux Pondichéry; the Institut Français de Pondichéry publications; French India treaty texts.
Open Chandernagore in the repository →