West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee is contesting her fourth election from the constituency of Bhowanipore or as it is commonly known, Bhabanipur. It is one of the oldest areas of Kolkata (earlier Calcutta), no history of this city would be complete without this neighbourhood. (Facebook | Mamata Banerjee)
Bhowanipore or Bhabanipur has grown from a small village, which was a part of the fifty five villages (Dihi panchanagram) purchased by the East India Company from Mir Jafar in 1758, to being the heart of political power in West Bengal. This journey was gradual, in the 19th century it grew into a suburb dominated by artisan and trader communities, and in the following decades it came to be known as Cinema Para due to the presence of several cinema halls.
Home to personalities like Subhas Chandra Bose, Satyajit Ray, Gurudutt, Hemant Kumar and politicians such as Siddharth Shankar Ray, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, and the current CM, Mamata Banerjee, the story of Bhowanipore is as old as it is fascinating.
It is one of the oldest areas of Kolkata (earlier Calcutta), no history of this city would be complete without this neighbourhood. As the first city in India that was built by the English, Kolkata has come a long way. But then, even in 1901, it had already been more than a century old base for the conquerors from Europe. The battle of Plassey (1756) took place more than sixty years after the British had built Fort William in 1690 at Calcutta. In less than a century this malarial and marshy land which contained a few fishing villages and weaver communities became the official headquarters of the rapidly growing East India Company.
In the 1750s (mid-18th century) Bhowanipore lay outside the city and was considered a safe haven whenever reports of deaths due to malaria or cholera outbreaks spread panic among the English occupiers. HEA Cotton wrote in 1901 in ‘Calcutta, Old and New: A Historical & Descriptive Handbook to the City’, “... every Englishman who was able avoided the plague-stricken air of Calcutta by residing in garden-hoises outside its boundaries. Clive (Rober Clive) lived at Dum-Dum, Sir William Jones, at Garden Reach (later the last Nawab of Awadh was imprisoned in this area), Sir Roberts Chambers had a house at Cossipore (Kashipur) and another at Bhowanipore, far out of the town in those days (1760s) but well within sight of the present Cathedral”.
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Bhowanipore lies between Kalighat- and the St. Paul’s Cathedral which was built in 1847. Fort William and the more than 4km long moat built to protect against Maratha invasion remained the core of English Calcutta till well into the 19th century. Today the Maratha Ditches remain identifiable by a small lane while the rest of it was paved off and filled up and forms today’s AJC Bose circular road.
Mamata’s famous appearance as a lawyer in the Supreme Court earlier this year reminded us about her extremely short career as a lawyer.
Banerjee went to law school a few kilometres from her home in Bhowanipore, which has its own legal heritage going back to the 1840s when there were no universities, the Port Trust or even the Hoogly bridge. Disputes existed and were adjudicated in different fora. As the Indian Penal and Procedure codes and the Evidence Act were yet to be developed legal battles were fought in the domains where they pertained to: Company’s affairs or within the territory controlled by the English, the Queen’s courts. For the Englishmen living in Calcutta there was a separate court. Hindus and Muslims argued according to their own codes, in Persian. Cotton recounted the typical day, “Before the civilian judges of the Sudder Dewanny Adawlut (Sadar Diwani Adalat) and their native law officers at Bhowanipore, pleaders and munshis are arguing abstruse question of Hindu and Mohammedan law in Persian. In the Court House on the Esplanade Sir Henry Seton and his colleagues of the Supreme Court administer the laws of England in English and exercise a separate jurisdiction over all who reside within the limits of the Maratha Ditch”.
In fact, for well into the second half the 19th century those who lived on and around the Ditch were called Ditchers! The White town and Black town where Indians lived were divided by the Ditch which they had once excavated together as protection against the Marathas.
“Between 1742 and 1753 the development of the town consisted chiefly in the rapid increase of native Indian houses, both kutcha and pukka- mostly kutcha-in the outlying parts of the European town within the Maratha Ditch”, writes, Raja Binaya Krishna Deb in The Early History and Growth of Calcutta.
The Sadar Diwani Adalat was the highest court of appeal for civil and revenue cases and has changed location a few times since it was first created in 1772 by Warren Hastings the first Governor General of Bengal. Originally built as a military hospital the building was taken over by William Bentick for the Company’s court and the building could be restored to its original purpose in 1862 when the High Court was built. The building survives within the precincts of the prestigious Eastern Command Hospital of the Indian Army.
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Bhowanipore and Kalighat suburbs grew at a rapid pace and in effect blocked the spread of the White town to the south of Calcutta which was key to the racial segregation that the English tried hard to impose. Ranjit Sen writes in the ‘Birth of a Colonial City’, “The racial segregation of the natives was not possible because of the lurking of Kalighat and Bhowanipore in the immediate neighbourhood. The maintenance of the cultural identity of the tough island race of the English by keeping them insulated in the south was equally impossible because a cosmopolitan town with a mixed population existed as a buffer between the natives of the north and the whites of the south”.
Author Valay Singh’s HistoriCity is a column about a city in the news based on its documented history, mythology, and archaeological digs. The views expressed are personal.