“What is Calcutta? A hand-me-down city, a colonial city, a dying city, a city of the future — all at once.” — Amit Chaudhuri
Kolkata History Timeline
335 years of history — from a trading post on the Hooghly to a 15-million-person metropolis. 30 milestones across 6 eras.
Kolkata is conventionally dated to 1690, when Job Charnock established an East India Company trading post on the Hooghly. It became the capital of British India in 1772 and lost that status to Delhi in 1911 — 139 years as the seat of an empire, followed by a century of working out what to be instead.
This timeline sets out 30 milestones across six eras, from the trading post through colonial capital, the freedom struggle, Partition, the 34-year Left Front period, and the city since 2011.
About this data
What this page shows
A navigable timeline from 1690 to 2026, organised into six eras: Trading Post & Early Settlement (1690–1757), Colonial Capital (1757–1911), Freedom & Upheaval (1911–1947), Independence & Partition (1947–1977), the Left Front Era (1977–2011), and Modern Kolkata (2011 onward). Events range from the Battle of Plassey and the 1943 famine to Cyclone Amphan and the Metro's recent expansion.
Where the data comes from
Compiled from historical records, Census of India volumes, Kolkata Municipal Corporation archives and published histories of the city.
Limitations worth knowing
A thirty-event timeline is a set of editorial choices, not a neutral record. Selecting milestones necessarily privileges some stories — administrative, political, infrastructural — over others, and the colonial period is far better documented in surviving records than the lives of most people who lived through it. The 1690 founding date is itself contested: settlements existed on this stretch of the Hooghly well before Charnock arrived, and the Calcutta High Court ruled in 2003 that the city has no single verifiable founder or founding date. Dates before the nineteenth century vary between sources.
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