Kolkata
Three villages merged by the East India Company in 1690 became the British Empire's second-largest city by 1901, now India's cultural capital struggling to transcend jute-era industrial decline.
Kolkata emerged from three villages—Kalikata (fishing), Sutanuti (weaving), Gobindapur (trading)—absorbed by the East India Company after Job Charnock established a trading post in 1690. A 2003 court ruling rejected Charnock as founder, noting the area was a trading centre since Maurya and Gupta times. But the Company transformed it: Fort William rose in 1696, and a 1717 Mughal grant gave monopoly trading rights for 3,000 rupees annually. By 1834, Calcutta became the official capital of British India; by 1901, it was the second-largest city in the British Empire after London, with one million people.
Jute created the industrial base. From the 1870s, Bengal's jute mills clothed the world's goods in burlap sacks, complementing textile factories that had arrived in the 1850s. The city attracted massive British infrastructure investment—Howrah Bridge, Sealdah Station, Victoria Memorial. But independence in 1947 brought partition trauma: millions of refugees flooded in from East Pakistan, even as jute mills lost their supply base. The capital moved to Delhi in 1911; economic centrality followed.
Today Kolkata is headquarters for legacy public sector giants: Coal India, National Insurance Company, Tea Board of India, Geological Survey, Jute Corporation. Howrah remains India's busiest railway complex (as of 2024), Sealdah the second-busiest. The city is Bengal's cultural capital—Tagore's Nobel, Satyajit Ray's cinema, Mother Teresa's missions all emerged here. The Bengal Renaissance of the 19th century made it India's intellectual center before Mumbai took commercial primacy.
The jute industry's global glut symbolizes Kolkata's challenge: path-dependence on colonial-era industries. Manufacturing share declined as Mumbai, Chennai, and Bengaluru attracted new investment. But the city retains its cultural density—literature, film, political discourse—and a metropolitan population of 15 million still makes it India's third-largest urban agglomeration.