Kolkata: The Evolution of a Colonial City

Kolkata – formerly known as Calcutta – is one of the most historically layered cities in South Asia. Its story as a British settlement begins in 1690, when Job Charnock, an agent of the English East India Company, established a trading post on the eastern banks of the Hooghly River. What started as a cluster of three villages – Sutanuti, Kalikata, and Gobindapur – grew into the nerve centre of one of the largest empires the world had ever seen. Kolkata’s transformation into a colonial metropolis is not just a tale of urban growth; it is a study in how power shapes space, society, and identity.

From trading post to imperial capital
The spatial logic of a colonial city
White Town: the city of palaces
Black Town: the other Calcutta
The intermediate zone: between two worlds
Economic inequality embedded in urban form
A city of hybrid tensions
The transfer of capital and its significance

From trading post to imperial capital

In 1690, the East India Company purchased the three villages from the local landlord family of Sabarna Roy Choudhury. Within decades, the Company had developed Fort William at the site, and by 1727, a civil court was established under the orders of King George I. The city grew rapidly, and Calcutta did not formally become the capital of British India until 1772, when the first Governor-General, Warren Hastings, transferred all important administrative offices there from Murshidabad, the provincial Mughal capital.

By the end of the 18th century, Kolkata had grown into the second most important city of the British Empire after London, serving as the administrative capital of continental India until 1911 when the seat of power was moved to Delhi. Its development in commerce, industry, transport, and culture during this period was remarkable – comparable in scale and ambition to metropolitan London itself.

The city’s strategic location along the Hooghly river was central to its selection. It is a purely colonial city, developed by the British for their own strategic and administrative needs, a fact that shaped every dimension of how Kolkata was planned, built, and governed. The British used it as a base to extend their colonial reach toward the Far East, and the abolition of inland customs duties in 1835 further stimulated commerce, followed by railway construction from 1854 onwards, which deepened Calcutta’s role as a commercial hub for all of northern India.

The spatial logic of a colonial city

One of the most defining features of colonial Kolkata was its deliberate spatial organisation. The city was not built as a shared urban space – it was structured around racial and economic hierarchies. The city was racially segregated into the White Town, exclusively built for British officers; the Native Town for Indians; and in between, the Grey Town, which was mainly the residing place of other foreign communities. This tripartite division was not incidental – it was the physical expression of colonial power.

White Town: the city of palaces

The White Town was built on ground that had been raised and drained, centred around Chowringhee and Dalhousie Square by the mid-19th century. It was a world apart from the rest of the city. The White Town was a stark contrast to the native settlements, complete with colonial mansions, wide roads, and plenty of open spaces including the Maidan, which was created in the style of London’s Hyde Park by clearing dense forest. There were so many palaces in the British sector that Kolkata earned the nickname the “City of Palaces.”

The White Town consisted of rich mansions and colonial-planned settlements with wide roads and open spaces, meant for the residence of British elites. The buildings featured Gothic Revival, Art Deco, and Italianate architectural styles, designed to be spacious and airy, incorporating verandas, large windows, and high ceilings suited to Bengal’s tropical climate. Architecture here was not merely functional – it was a deliberate symbol of imperial authority and European superiority.

The Writers’ Building, one of the most iconic structures in this zone, served as the administrative headquarters of the East India Company. It remains a defining landmark of colonial Calcutta’s urban identity, and its grand façade with symmetrical wings is often described as the epitome of European classical architecture in India.

Black Town: the other Calcutta

In contrast, the northern part of the city – originally the site of the village Sutanuti – became what colonial records referred to as Black Town. Black Town comprised the northern part of the city, inhabited mainly by Indians, particularly Bengalis, while White Town was concentrated in the central area where British administrators and merchants lived alongside European entrepreneurs.

Black Town was entirely devoid of any urban planning, particularly in the poorer quarters, with houses piling on to each other, shops and marketplaces encroaching upon residential areas, and narrow lanes and bylanes making their way between houses. Wide roads and open thoroughfares were conspicuous by their absence. Yet this area was not simply poor – it was also home to some of the wealthiest Indians in Calcutta, including merchants and traders who had made fortunes through their dealings with the Company. No matter their financial standing, however, they were residents of Black Town and, within the colonial hierarchy, were treated accordingly.

The Bengali residents of this zone actively shaped the urban landscape in ways that resisted colonial control. Locals built narrow lanes and by-lanes called golis in Bengali, naming them after local celebrated small-business owners such as washerwomen and tailors, thereby reclaiming ownership of their local spaces and subverting the colonial authorities’ urban planning designs.

The intermediate zone: between two worlds

Between the White Town and the predominantly Bengali areas lay what can be described as an intermediate or “Grey” zone – a buffer space occupied by wealthy Indians, Anglo-Indians, Armenians, and other non-British communities. This was not a neatly planned zone but an area of social and cultural negotiation. The buildings here were often a mix of colonial-style mansions and traditional Bengali structures, reflecting the hybrid character of this population.

It was in this zone that a new social class emerged: the bhadralok – literally “gentlemen” – an educated, upper-caste Hindu elite drawn primarily from Brahmin, Baidya, and Kayastha communities. The Bengali bhadralok emerged as a distinct group in the 19th century, dominating British administrative jobs, land resources, and literary and cultural production. They distinguished themselves from the rest of Bengali society through their deportment, speech, dress, style of housing, eating habits, and cultural values.

The coalescence of British and Indian culture also resulted in the emergence of the babu class of urbane Indians – often bureaucrats, professionals, and Anglophiles who usually belonged to upper-caste Hindu communities. The babu figure became synonymous with a new kind of Bengali identity: educated in Western institutions, employed in colonial offices, and occupying a peculiar social position – neither fully British nor entirely aligned with the working masses of Black Town. The ‘Babu’ came to be associated with this new class of Bengalis eager to adopt Western manners and learning, who formed the greater part of the white-collar workers required in the cosmopolitan enclave of Calcutta.

Economic inequality embedded in urban form

The spatial divisions of colonial Kolkata were not just about where people lived – they determined who had access to resources, infrastructure, and opportunity. Colonial capitals grew as concentrated seats of political and economic power, which led to hugely unequal urban development in erstwhile colonies. In Kolkata, the British controlled the major industries, ports, and commercial activities, while the majority of the population remained in poverty, working as labourers, servants, or small traders.

Calcutta grew as a jute and tea trading hub, with jute mills lining the waterways and coal-powered industries driving urban expansion. The city underwent rapid industrial growth starting in the early 1850s, especially in the textile and jute industries, which encouraged British companies to massively invest in infrastructure projects including telegraph connections and the Howrah railway link. This investment, however, overwhelmingly served British commercial interests and reinforced existing social hierarchies rather than improving conditions for the wider population.

Urban planning itself became a tool of social control. Urban planning was used extensively to translate the political symbols of imperialism into visible form. Unplanned growth in Indian-inhabited areas led to serious problems of overcrowding and poor sanitation, issues that the colonial administration was slow to address in Black Town, even as it invested heavily in the upkeep and beautification of European areas.

A city of hybrid tensions

It would be too simple to read colonial Kolkata purely as a city of two halves. The rhetorical categories of “white” and “black” towns were used to sustain the British desire to maintain difference in a city where everyday life constantly compromised such distinctions. In practice, the boundaries were fluid. Domestic workers, traders, and servants moved daily between zones. Indian merchants and colonial officials existed in the same commercial networks. The city that colonial planners imagined as neatly ordered along racial lines was, in daily life, far messier and more interconnected.

British efforts to intervene in Kolkata’s urban fabric through architecture and urban planning encountered resistance, resulting in compromises and negotiations that yielded a colonial Kolkata that was neither fully ‘British’ nor fully ‘Bengali.’ Both the White Town and the Black Town were, in their own way, hybrid spaces shaped by the friction between imperial ambition and local life.

The Bengal Renaissance, which flourished through the 19th century, was itself a product of this tension. Figures like Ram Mohan Roy, Rabindranath Tagore, and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar emerged from the bhadralok milieu – shaped by both Western education and a deep attachment to Bengali cultural identity. Calcutta became the epicentre of the Bengal Renaissance, with figures blending Indian traditions with Enlightenment ideals, while the city’s coffee houses and newspapers incubated anti-colonial thought.

The transfer of capital and its significance

By the early 20th century, Kolkata’s role as the colonial capital had become increasingly fraught. The city’s politically active population – from the bhadralok intelligentsia to the working class – had made it a hotbed of nationalist agitation. It is a commonplace in Indian history that the decision to move the colonial capital from Calcutta to New Delhi was spurred by the political landscape of Calcutta: anti-colonial nationalism had made Calcutta ungovernable. In 1911, the British shifted the capital to the newly planned city of New Delhi – a move that also signalled the beginning of Kolkata’s relative decline as the imperial centre.

Yet the legacies of colonial urban planning did not disappear with the transfer of power. Even today, Kolkata’s growth and land uses are highly influenced by its colonial past. The spatial inequalities embedded in the city’s layout – differential access to infrastructure, public services, and economic opportunity across neighbourhoods – continued to shape urban life long after independence in 1947. The crowded lanes of North Kolkata and the wider roads of the former European quarters remain visibly distinct, a living archive of how colonial power organised space.

Kolkata’s history as a colonial city is, at its core, a story about how urban space is never neutral. Every road, every neighbourhood, every architectural style carries the imprint of the political and social forces that created it. Understanding this history is essential not just for understanding Kolkata, but for thinking critically about how cities everywhere encode – and sometimes perpetuate – inequality.

What do you think? How does the spatial legacy of colonial urban planning continue to shape social and economic inequality in cities like Kolkata today? And when a city’s built environment is itself a product of oppression, should it be preserved as heritage or reimagined entirely?

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Table of Contents

From trading post to imperial capital 🔗

The spatial logic of a colonial city 🔗

White Town: the city of palaces 🔗

Black Town: the other Calcutta 🔗

The intermediate zone: between two worlds 🔗

Economic inequality embedded in urban form 🔗

A city of hybrid tensions 🔗

The transfer of capital and its significance 🔗