Place · colonial capital city · India

Kolkata: Fort William & the Maidan

Date

1690 · capital 1772–1911

Function

Authority & administration

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

22.555, 88.340

Worth knowing

The new fort was designed so that its guns could sweep the whole open ground in front of it, which is why central Calcutta has a park the size of a small district and no buildings in it. The Bengal Renaissance, the Brahmo Samaj, the Asiatic Society and the Indian National Congress all have addresses within a mile of it.

Connections (25)

• Successor capital ofHooghly–Chinsurah

  The Hooghly carried Portuguese Bandel, Dutch Chinsurah, Danish Serampore, French Chandernagore and English Calcutta within about thirty kilometres of each other, each a sovereign patch on one riverbank. Calcutta swallowed the trade of all of them after Plassey, and the smaller settlements were bought or taken one by one — Chinsurah in 1825, Serampore in 1845, Chandernagore not until 1949. The river's Europeans are a useful reminder that British India was not inevitable.

• Successor capital ofNew Delhi, Lutyens' plan

  The capital moved from Calcutta to Delhi in 1911, announced by George V at the Durbar, partly to get away from Bengali political agitation after the 1905 partition of the province and partly for the prestige of ruling from the Mughal capital. Lutyens and Baker then took twenty years over the new city, which was inaugurated in 1931 and served its empire for sixteen years.

• Power passed toBuxar

  Buxar in 1764 produced the Diwani grant the following year, giving the Company the right to collect the revenues of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa — and Calcutta, a trading settlement of seventy years' standing, became the capital of that administration and then of British India for a century and a half. The city's whole nineteenth-century character, including the reform movements that argued there, follows from being the seat of that government.

• Teaching lineageWilliam Carey

  Carey taught Bengali and Sanskrit at Fort William College while running the Serampore press twenty kilometres upriver, so the Company's training institution and the mission the Company excluded were staffed by the same man. The prose textbooks commissioned at Fort William from Indian munshis are among the first modern prose in Bengali, Urdu and Hindi, which means a colonial college helped standardise the languages it existed to teach.

• Life routeTeresa of Calcutta

  Teresa's Calcutta was the city left by the 1943 famine, Direct Action Day in 1946 and the refugee influx of 1947 — a colonial capital that had lost its capital status in 1911 and then absorbed millions of people the state could not house. The Missionaries of Charity grew directly out of that specific emergency, which is why the order's founding address is a street in Calcutta rather than anywhere in Europe.

• Shrine within cityKālīghāṭ painting and the Patuas

  Kalighat painting existed because of the temple's pilgrim traffic in the southern suburbs of the colonial capital: sheets sold for a few paise at stalls on the approach, as souvenirs of a visit. That market supported a volume no village patron could, and it carried no liturgical requirement, which is why the pictures drift within thirty years from Kali to the babu, the courtesan and the Tarakeswar murder trial. Cheap lithography took the same buyers in the 1890s and the craft ended.

• Imperial administration ofBarrackpore

  Barrackpore was the Bengal Army's principal cantonment, sixteen miles up the Hooghly from Calcutta and directly under the eye of the government that ran India from Fort William. It had mutinied before — in 1824, when the 47th refused to embark for Burma and was fired on by artillery. The 1857 rumour about the cartridges started in exactly this cantonment, among men whose grievances the government beside them had had thirty years to hear.

• Power passed toRangoon / Yangon

  Burma was governed as a province of British India from 1886 until 1937, administered from Calcutta and then Delhi, and Rangoon's commerce, labour, money-lending and civil service were substantially Indian. That is why Zafar could be exiled there as an internal transfer, why the Chettiar banking houses ended up owning much of lower Burma's rice land by the 1930s, and why the anti-Indian riots of 1930 and 1938 happened when the depression hit.

• Site adjacencyDirect Action Day, Calcutta

  The Great Calcutta Killing of August 1946 happened in the capital of Bengal and the former capital of British India — a city with a Muslim League provincial ministry, a huge mixed population, and an administration that declared the day a public holiday. Four thousand died in four days. The city that had produced the nineteenth-century reform movements and the first Indian nationalism produced, in 1946, the worst communal violence India had yet seen.

• Site adjacencyMother House, Kolkata

  Teresa's Calcutta was the city left by the 1943 famine, Direct Action Day in 1946 and the refugee influx of 1947 — a former imperial capital that had lost its capital status in 1911 and then absorbed millions of people the state could not house. The Missionaries of Charity grew directly out of that specific emergency, which is why the order's world headquarters is a house on a loud street here rather than anywhere in Europe.

• Succession in timeHazarduari, Murshidabad

  Hazarduari was designed in 1837 by an officer of the Bengal Engineers, in Greek revival, for a Nawab Nazim who by then had no revenue, no army and a British Resident in the compound — while the actual government of Bengal sat in Calcutta a hundred and eighty kilometres downstream. The thousand doors, several hundred of them false, are as complete a statement of a pensioned dynasty's position as any building in India.

• Imperial administration ofPlassey (Palāśī)

  Siraj ud-Daulah took Calcutta in June 1756 and the prisoners died in the fort's lock-up; Clive retook it in January 1757 and fought Plassey in June. Fort William was rebuilt on a far larger plan afterwards, with the Maidan cleared as its field of fire. The battle and the fortress are one sequence: the Company stops being a tenant in Bengal and becomes its garrison.

• Imperial administration ofRobert Clive

  Clive returned to Calcutta as governor in 1765, took the diwani grant from Shah Alam II, and issued the regulations against private trade that his own fortune had made necessary. The dual system he left — a Company collecting revenue behind a Nawab who still nominally governed — produced the 1770 Bengal famine and, in London, the Regulating Act of 1773.

• Imperial administration ofCellular Jail, Andaman Islands

  Convicts sentenced to transportation were shipped from Calcutta to the Andamans, first after 1857 and then, once the Cellular Jail opened in 1906, as political prisoners under sentences designed to remove them from any audience. The penal settlement is the outer edge of the Bengal presidency's judicial machinery, a thousand miles offshore and administered from Fort William.

• Alternative toSerampore & the Mission Press

  Serampore's whole importance is its fifteen miles of distance from Fort William. The Company refused missionaries a licence, fearing they would unsettle Indian religion and with it the revenue; the Baptists therefore landed on Danish ground and printed from there. Carey then crossed the river daily to teach Bengali and Sanskrit at the Company's own Fort William College.

• CampaignBanquibazar

  Banquibazar sat between Calcutta and Chinsurah by design, buying from the same Bengal weavers with Flemish capital and undercutting both. The English and Dutch could not attack a neutral European settlement directly, so in 1733 they persuaded the Mughal governor at Hooghly to do it for them. It is a clean example of European companies fighting each other through Indian authority.

• CampaignWilliam Bolts

  Bolts made his money in Bengal as a Company servant trading on his own account, was expelled by Council in 1768 and deported, and published Considerations on India Affairs in 1772 — one of the first sustained indictments of Company government, written from inside it. His Austrian venture was an attempt to beat Calcutta at the trade Calcutta had thrown him out of.

• Route adjacencyNathu La & the Chumbi corridor

  The Bengal terminus of the northern highway sat at Calcutta once the Company moved its headquarters there in 1772, and the Chumbi corridor climbed out of the plain at Nathu La. Together they carried the Bengal-Tibet trade that ran through Kalimpong: jute, cotton and brick tea going up, wool, borax, musk and salt coming down. The Younghusband expedition of 1904 went up the same track, and the trade survived until 1962.

• Power passed toBalasore (Baleshwar)

  Balasore was the door to Bengal until the Hooghly channel was surveyed and Calcutta founded in 1690. The shift is purely navigational: a roadstead where ships anchored miles offshore was replaced by a river berth a hundred kilometres inland, and the province's entire export trade moved with it within two decades.

• Power passed toMurshidabad

  Murshidabad was the capital and Calcutta the port until 1757; after Plassey the Company took the revenue administration downriver and the Nawabi court was left with its palaces and its ceremonial. The Jagat Seth bankers who financed the transfer lost their position within a generation, because the new government raised money in London instead.

• Institutional successionSurat

  The Company minted at Surat and Bombay in the Mughal emperor's name, then in its own at Calcutta, then under the Crown after 1858. The design changed three times and the weight essentially once. A currency whose standard was fixed in 1540 by an Afghan ruler of Bihar survived every change of sovereignty until decimalisation in 1957.

• Patronage networkMagen David Synagogue, Kolkata

  The Baghdadi Jews came to Calcutta with the opium and jute trades that Fort William's government ran, and the synagogue stands a few streets from the offices those trades were transacted in. Armenians, Chinese, Greeks and Parsis all built in the same square mile for the same reason: the city was a port administration before it was anything else.

• Succession in timeFort St George, Chennai

  Fort St George of 1640 and Fort William of 1700 are the first and the decisive English fortifications in India, and the difference between them is Bengal's revenue. Madras invented the machinery — the mint, the court, the municipal corporation of 1688, the first in Asia — and Calcutta inherited it and then governed a subcontinent with it.

• Site withinKolkata

  Kolkata: Fort William & the Maidan lies within Kolkata — the two sites sit about 3 km apart, well inside the city's historical boundary and part of the same urban or peri-urban landscape. Kolkata: Fort William & the Maidan 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.

• Historical linkSher Shāh's silver rupiya

  The East India Company's Bengal rupee at Fort William continued Sher Shāh's 11.53-g silver standard; the Coinage Act of 1835 kept the weight across all Presidency mints.

On these journeys

• The Grand Trunk Road — Kabul to Chittagong
• Early modern ports & companies
• Colonial & republican urbanism
• How the Company took India
• Cities through time — many civilisations, one place
• The printing revolution in India
• British India — 1600 to 1947
• Decolonisation, partition and integration
• Bengal before partition — the delta as one landscape
• Coinage & mint networks — karshāpaṇa to the rupee

Sources

Wikipedia, “Fort William, India”. P.J. Marshall, Bengal: The British Bridgehead (1987); the Fort William–India House Correspondence, National Archives of India.

• Wikipedia — Fort William, India