East India House in London in 1800 Slavery. An ugly word to describe an ugly, despicable practise. Owing to what history has documented, most of us probably tend to equate the term ‘slave’ with the image of Africans working on huge American cotton plantations, and the
He is an electrical engineer, but he runs a decades-old paan shop in Kolkata, that is an icon by itself. But why did someone give up a career in Engineering and take up the reins of a paan shop? Well, Shyamal Dutta, the electrical engineer,
If Khela Hobe raised a storm in the poll circuit of Bengal, Kolkata Police and Trisys Foundation’s recently launched Cholo Kheli has broken all barriers to address the childhood needs of street children, something that is grossly neglected. This unique initiative has been launched to
ICalcutta traffic today might not be as notorious like cities of Bangalore or Delhi, but once upon a time, even visiting soldiers of World War II were caught in traffic snarls. A short film made in 1945 by the war department and army pictorial service
When did Durga Puja turn into what is probably the world’s largest street art exhibition? If you consider the question ridiculous, consider the facts too. Today, almost all big-ticket pujas in Kolkata habitually employ the services of renowned artists and sculptors, many of whom call
Fort William in 1828 The British knew two things about Calcutta, the city they helped create from a cluster of villages for which they had obtained leases from the Mughal empire. One, it was a city built on trade, where merchants were VIPs. Two, Calcutta and
‘Nobody conquers a poor country. There is not enough return on investment.’ Can’t remember who said this, but it applies perfectly to the British and their conquest of India. When they arrived, India was among the world’s wealthiest countries. When they left, it was among
A few days ago, we spoke about the ways of crime and punishment in old Calcutta. This may lead quite naturally to questions about famous trials and the justice system as it then was, and while today is not the day to talk about all
Calcutta Supreme Court from a print by Thomas Daniell, 1786 In the past, we have written about how Calcutta Police was the world’s first police force to set up its own fingerprint bureau in 1897, or how the brutal murder of a young Anglo-Indian woman in
Town Hall Europeans in Calcutta. This one topic has generated so many books, essays, articles, photographs, and other documents that one could probably fill half a library with them. Ironically, a lot of this documentation has been produced by Indians, who have failed to do the