Calcutta in Urban History

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A major purpose of this work is to place Calcutta in the framework of India's urban history without ignoring the unique elements in the city's history. It may appear that Calcutta is not the best choice for generalisations on India's urban history. After all, it grew basically as a colonial city, following a global tendency of growth of urban centres for the convenience of an economic and political power based thousands of miles away. Any study which ignores this basic reality is likely to defeat its purpose. But almost equally stultifying may be an inordinate emphasis on this global reality at the cost of some basic realities of India's economic and social life and background.

The question of continuities and discontinuities arises for Calcutta, as it does for such cities as Bombay and Madras. Each of these cities had a black town from the earliest stages of its growth. Was it not, to an extent, a continuation of traditional urbanism, meaning thereby the complex attributes of pre-colonial port cities, riverine emporia and the regional urban centres? Could we not detect a segment of Surat, of Delhi's Chandni Chowk, and of a traditional town in Bengal like so many period pieces in the spatial arrangement of, say, late 18th or early 19th century Calcutta? Could we not still wonder, looking at the traditionally most organised Muslim sector in Calcutta, whether it was a silhouette of a Mughal town? Such a thought indeed occurred to people who were better placed than we are on the time scale. In the 1860s a Bengali traveller, who wrote some good things among a number of bad ones, observed in the course of his peregrinations in Delhi that the real Chandni Chowk was not in mid-19th century Delhi but on Chitpur Road in Calcutta. In 1872 Calcutta's pioneer sociologist, the Rev. James Long observed while addressing the Family Literary Club in Burrabazar: "The position of your Society in Burra Bazar has often reminded me, in threading into its labyrinth, of the adage: 'One half of the world does not know how the other lives.' The Burra Bazar and the Mughal part of Calcutta are quite a terra incognita to the other part, and I hope your society will pursue its inquiries into the curious social life of the Marwaris, Jews and Mughals that inhabit the far-famed Burra Bazar.""

What were Burrabazar and the Mughal part of Calcutta as historical realities? Significantly, it was a Persian-speaking Khatri (north-Indian merchant group) who in 1869 addressed the Family Literary Club, composed predominantly of people of Bengali gold merchants' caste, traditionally residing close to the Muslim-dominated sector, on the history of Burrabazar. Little fragments of evidence from the late 18th and early 19th century source materials relating to Calcutta help to put the jigsaw puzzle together. But it seems a little historical reasoning is necessary before the factual evidence, not particularly rich and chronologically somewhat whimsical, is brought into the picture.

Islam, or rather peoples professing Islam, and allied peoples from west or central Asia tended to act as a major urbanising force in India for centuries after the serious weakening of the Hindu-Buddhist-Jain urban tradition. The penetration of India started with early Arab traders, followed by a major breakthrough by central Asian peoples who were not necessarily traders.