Place · secretariat building · India
Writers' Building, Kolkata
Also known as Writers' Building, Mahakaran, Writers Buildings
The red-brick secretariat building at Dalhousie Square (now Benoy-Badal-Dinesh Bagh) in central Kolkata, built in stages from 1777 as offices for the East India Company's junior clerks — the 'writers' — and expanded through the nineteenth century. The building was the West Bengal state secretariat from 1947 until 2013. On 8 December 1930 the Bengal Revolutionary Volunteers' Benoy Basu, Badal Gupta and Dinesh Gupta walked into the building and killed the Inspector General of Prisons Colonel Simpson; all three died in the engagement. The 1930 Writers' Building attack is one of the Bengal armed movement's defining episodes.
- Date
- 1777–None
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Patron dynasty
- East India Company · British Raj · West Bengal
- Tradition
- Standard reference; INTACH, ASI and municipal records; institutional histories.
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 22.572, 88.349
Connections (1)
- Site withinKolkata
Writers' Building sits at Dalhousie Square in central Kolkata, built in 1777 for East India Company clerks and expanded through the nineteenth century into the West Bengal state secretariat it functioned as until 2013. The 1930 Benoy-Badal-Dinesh assassination of the Inspector General of Prisons inside the building is one of the Bengal armed movement's defining episodes.