Map - Kolkata district (Kolkata)

Kolkata district (formerly known as Calcutta district) is a district in the Indian state of West Bengal, headquartered in Kolkata.

Long before the British came to India, the zamindari (land lordship) of all lands from Barisha to Halisahar, in what is now mostly in the Kolkata (formerly called Kali Kshetra, Land of Goddess Kali) area, were acquired by the Sabarna Roy Choudhury family from the Mughal emperor Jahangir.

With the decline of the once flourishing Saptagram port, traders and businessmen, such as the Basaks, the Sheths and others, started venturing southwards and settled in or developed places such as Gobindapur. They set up a cotton and yarn market at Sutanuti. Chitpur was a weaving centre and Baranagar was another textile centre. Kalighat was a pilgrimage centre. Across the Hooghly, there were places such as Salkia and Betor. Kalikata was a lesser known place. While both Sutanuti and Gobindapur appear on old maps like Thomas Bowrey's of 1687 and George Herron's of 1690, Kalikata, situated between the two, is not depicted. However, one variant of the name, ‘Kalkata’, is mentioned in Abul Fazal’s Ain-i-Akbari (1596). At that time it was recorded as a revenue district of Sirkar Satgaon. In 1698, Charles Eyre, son-in-law of the early colonial administrator, Job Charnock, acquired the zemindari rights of Gobindapur, Kalikata and Sutanuti from the Sabarna Roy Choudhury family. Subsequent to the fall of Siraj-ud-daulah, the last independent Nawab of Bengal, the English purchased 55 villages in 1758 from Mir Jafar. These villages were known en-bloc as Dihi Panchannagram.

After the Treaty of Allahabad, the East India Company was granted Diwani rights (the right to collect taxes), in 1765, in the eastern province of Bengal-Bihar-Odisha. In 1772, Kolkata became the capital of East India Company's territories, and in 1793, the English took full control of the city and the province. Development of Kolkata's infrastructure started and in the early 19th century, the marshes surrounding the city were drained. In the 19th century, Kolkata was the epicentre of the epoch-changing socio-cultural movement, the Bengal Renaissance. The 20th century unfolded historical events in Kolkata – the Swadeshi movement, the first partition of Bengal along communal lines, shifting of the national capital from Kolkata to Delhi in 1911 – and Kolkata emerged as an important hub of the independence movement. With the experience and memories of the Bengal famine of 1943, the Great Calcutta Killings, the final partition of Bengal, and independence of the country, Kolkata moved on to a new era of challenges, with millions of refugees pouring in from neighbouring East Pakistan (later Bangladesh).

Before partition of Bengal, Kolkata had offered education and job opportunities to the people from East Bengal. Kolkata had taken in about a quarter of a million East Bengali migrants long before partition. After partition of Bengal, the number of refugees moving in from East Bengal were so high that large stretches of rural or semi urban habitation were transformed into towns, the density of population, particularly in areas with high refugee population, jumped by leaps. The outer limits of Kolkata were extended. The entire process of urbanisation was hastened. In the fifties 25% of the population of Metropolitan Kolkata were refugees. In 1975, a CMDA report suggested that there were 1,104 squatter colonies in West Bengal, out of which 510 were in Calcutta Metropolitan District. In 1981, a refugee rehabilitation committee set up by the state government put the figures for refugees in the state at 8 million. The break up for Kolkata is not available. The central government had decided that 25 March 1971 was the cut off date for entry of refugees from former East Pakistan into India and so, all those coming in after that date are either immigrants or infiltrators – there were no more refugees, at least officially/legally.

The socio-economic conditions that led to the growth of Kolkata, were urbanising a much larger territory. Right form the 16th century, a number of townships, based on trade and commerce, had sprung up along both banks of the Hooghly. None of these townships withered away as Kolkata gained supremacy, rather they got integrated with the core of the city. In 1951, census operations in West Bengal first recognised a continuous industrial area stretching from Bansberia to Uluberia on the west bank of the Hooghly, and from Kalyani to Budge Budge on the east bank. It was ultimately recognised as the Kolkata urban agglomeration, with the city as its core.

Kolkata has always been a city of migrants. They are the people who have made the city so large. In the first half of the 20th century the largest group of migrants were the working-class people from Bihar. After 1947, they were overtaken in numbers by the refugees from East Pakistan. A comparatively lesser number of people from the surrounding areas have migrated to the city, because a huge population commutes to the city for work and returns to their villages. They are not counted in the census data for Kolkata. The promise of a better quality of life may have been an initial attraction for the migrants, but bulk of the poorer sections soon realized that poverty in Kolkata was as severe and dehumanising as in the villages they left behind. However, many of them found opportunities of income in the urban economy. Some of them managed a place in industry, because of the preferential treatment they got as a result of people in their community vouching for them. A 1976 survey revealed that the proportion of workers from outside West Bengal were 71% in the jute industry, 58% in textile mills and 73% in iron and steel units. The Chamars from the Hindi heartland, many of whom work in the leather industry, have been here for more than a century. As per the 1951 census, only 33.2% of Kolkata's inhabitants were city-born. The rest, including a small group of foreigners, were migrants. 12.3% came from elsewhere in West Bengal, 26.3% from other states in India and 29.6% were refugees from East Pakistan.

This brings us on to another aspect of the city. The slum population has grown at a much faster rate than the total city population, thereby indicating a growing ratio of the impoverished working population of the city. "Geographically, Calcutta is in a unique position vis-à-vis the whole of eastern India. The growth and prosperity of the region must involve Calcutta. How it will grow… is the great question to be answered." P. Thankappan Nair writes, “The six square miles within the Maratha Ditch (the original core of Calcutta) thus came to have the world’s highest density of population in that age. It was a heterogeneous population, sinking differences of caste, creed and colour under the sheer compulsion to interact and survive together. The compulsion has grown stronger ever since, as has the spirit it fostered. Hence Calcutta did not disintegrate when the capital was shifted to New Delhi in 1912. It has kept growing and living by the ever-renewed confidence and vitality of its inherent human forces.”