Calcutta: Built Heritage Today

The City of Calcutta as we know it today had its genesis in the three villages of Gobindopur, Kalikata and Sutanuti. By the middle of the 17 century the lower reaches of the River Bhagirathi and the River Saraswati were already the site of a series of settlements with the Portuguese at Satgaon and Hooghly and the flourishing textile market at Sutanuti. To the east of the Bhagirathi was also the old Kali Temple. The existence of the temple is tentatively traced back to the Gupta and Sena Periods, although the actual location of the temple is said to have moved a number of times. Heritage is not just built area, it is the juxtaposition of buildings with drainage, water supply, sanity with aesthetic maintenance of open space. The determination of this is the best way to envisage the logic of demarcating precinct areas of heritage clustering. Superimposition of maps and graphic charts, some of which have been used in this book, will demonstrate such clusters in the older parts of the city, particularly in the North and in the Wide Arc Round Fort William from the Clive Street (now Netaji Subhas Road), Dalhousie Square (now Benoy Badal Dinesh Bagh) area, round by "South of Park Street (now Mother Teresa Sarani (!))" to the Maidan as an inner arc from Esplanade  (now Siddhu Kanu Dahar) to the stately hospitals on lower circular road (now Acharya Jagadis Chandra Bose Road), further south, the environs of Belvedere and the Alipur Magistracy and Judicial Courts, as well as the Dockland to the south-west deserve protection from ambitions building projects destroying their space and vistas, in the way our generation has permitted Chowringhee to be destroyed by unimaginative lack of regulation of building, flyovers or even by monster hoardings of the sort that are now proliferating on the Eastern Highways to Dum Dum Airport. A survey of such heritage clusters that are worth preserving has now become an urgent public priority if Kolkatans are to breathe, untrammeled by the pie in the sky that is now being permitted to go up, south of our once lovely lakes.