Long before the British came to India, the zaminda...

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.[3]

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).[3][4] At that time it was recorded as a revenue district of Sirkar Satgaon.[5]

Jorasanko Thakur Bari, now Rabindra Bharati University
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.[4] 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.[3]

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).[3]

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.[6] 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.[7]

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 commerc