Kalikata

Kalikata (Bengali: কলিকাতা) was one of the three villages which were merged to form the city of Kolkata (formerly, Calcutta) in India. The other two villages were Gobindapur and Sutanuti. Job Charnock, an administrator with the British East India Company is traditionally credited with the honour of founding the city. He settled in the village of Sutanuti.

Kalikata was much less important than Sutanuti and Gobindapur, and this, along with the consequent abundance of space, afforded the British room to settle there. While both Sutanati 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 shown in Abul Fazal’s Ain-i-Akbari (around 1590).

A British trader Job Charnock landed at Sutanuti on 24 August 1690 with the objective of establishing the East India Company’s Bengal headquarters. As Kalikata did not have any settled native population, it was easy for the British to occupy the site. In 1696, construction of old Fort William began (near the site of the present day General Post Office) without legal title to the land. Legal title was eventually secured on 10 November 1698 when Charles Eyre, Job Charnock’s son-in-law and ultimate successor, acquired the zemindari (land-holding) rights from the Sabarna Roy Choudhury family, the zemindars (landlords) of the area. It is from this date that Kolkata came legally under British control. (At this time, the Mughal empire was still strong, under Aurangzeb).

It is not clear when the Sabarna Roy Choudhury family acquired the village of Kalikata, but they acquired a vast acreage by grant allegedly in 1608 from Raja Man Singh, a maternal cousin of the reigning Mughal emperor Jahangir. However, other sources state that a founder only impressed Man Singh in 1612. The Sabarna Roy Choudhury's own tenure of the three villages - Kalikata, Sutanuti, and Gobindapur- is thus of uncertain duration, although in 1698, they were certainly the zemindars, or landlords, with their lands acquired by some sort of grant or lease from the Mughal emperors. They were apparently reluctant to transfer their rights as landlords but were forced to do so under pressure from the Mughal court.

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