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Calcutta, Old and New: A Historical and Descriptive Handbook to the City
This book tells the story of the second city in the British Empire, Kolkata. It explores the history of this city from its humble beginnings as a small village to its rise as a major center of commerce and culture. The book delves into the key historical events that shaped Kolkata, from the arrival of the British in the 17th century to the Indian independence movement of the 20th century. The book also provides an in-depth exploration of the city's culture, architecture, and people. Through vivid descriptions and engaging anecdotes, the author brings to life the rich tapestry of Kolkata's past and present. This book will appeal to anyone interested in Indian history, urban development, or the evolution of one of the world's most vibrant and dynamic cities.
1060 pages, Hardcover
Published August 24, 2018
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October 4, 2025
Harry Evan Auguste Cotton’s Calcutta, Old and New: A Historical and Descriptive Handbook to the City, first published in the early 20th century, belongs to that curious genre of colonial handbooks that sought to combine utility with romance, a blend of guidebook precision, historical layering, and a travelogue’s charm.
It is a book that does not merely describe a city but attempts to encapsulate its pulse in words, tracing how Calcutta had risen from a cluster of villages by the Hooghly into what the British liked to call the “Second City of Empire.” Written by Cotton, a civil servant turned chronicler with a gift for presenting fact with a sense of spectacle, the book reads less like a neutral manual and more like a performance of Calcutta’s place in the imperial imagination, yet one that allows us, over a century later, to peer through the text and see both the brilliance and the contradictions that made the city what it was and still is.
The very opening pages carry the whiff of a city that had already begun to mythologize itself. Cotton anchors his narrative in a Calcutta that is as much about its past as about its ongoing present—the old Fort William, the Black Town, the White Town, the sprawling Maidan, the churches and the ghats, the markets and the institutions.
His book promises to be descriptive but never in the manner of dry enumeration. He writes with an almost theatrical voice, as though he is guiding a new arrival—perhaps an English official, merchant, or curious traveler—through a series of set-pieces that reveal the grandeur and peculiarities of the city. The reader is ushered into a space of palaces and slums, statues and squalor, civic experiments and colonial arrogance, where the tension between the rulers and the ruled simmers under the apparent narrative of progress and civility.
The book’s historical sections are particularly telling, because Cotton does not treat Calcutta’s growth as accidental. He situates Job Charnock and the East India Company firmly at the roots of the settlement, weaving the story of how a swampy riverside cluster of villages—Kalikata, Govindapur, and Sutanuti—was appropriated and reengineered into a fortified trading station. He tracks the building of Fort William, the emergence of Chowringhee, the transformation of the Maidan into the imperial promenade, and the construction of churches, mansions, and courts that turned Calcutta into the capital of British India. Cotton’s voice is admiring, almost celebratory, when it comes to these achievements, yet even when he cannot entirely escape the imperial bias, he gives enough detail for us to perceive the cost: the dispossession of locals, the restructuring of space that segregated Europeans from “natives,” and the way architecture became a weapon of authority.
Cotton delights in describing the physical spaces of the city. He walks us through Dalhousie Square, through Government House, the Supreme Court, the General Post Office, the Eden Gardens, the Botanical Gardens, the Esplanade, and the great thoroughfares that became the skeleton of the modern metropolis. He lingers on the statues and monuments, relics of the British need to inscribe themselves permanently upon the landscape—Clive, Hastings, Cornwallis, the Queen herself. There is an aura of reverence in his tone, for Cotton saw these as symbols of continuity and power, but for the modern reader, they are equally markers of a contested heritage. His handbook thus becomes a record not merely of what Calcutta was, but of how the British wanted Calcutta to be remembered: as a city of order, civilization, and imperial triumph.
But Cotton is not only interested in monumental Calcutta; he also has a keen eye for the everyday. His chapters on the bazaars, the ghats, the tramways, the native quarters, and the social habits of the city’s mixed populations bring a vibrancy that prevents the book from slipping into dry cataloguing. He records the chaos of Burrabazar, the lively commerce of Harrison Road, the religious diversity of Kalighat, the reverent hush of the city’s temples and mosques. He notices the peculiarities of Bengali domestic life, the rhythms of festivals, the bustle of the river with its boats and ferries. And even though he views it all from the colonial lens, there is a depth to his descriptive powers that allows one to feel the sensory weight of Calcutta—the smells, the noise, the density of humanity.
Cotton’s prose is also tinged with nostalgia, though it is a nostalgia for a city that was, in his time, still very much alive but already layered with memory. He is keenly aware of the contrast between the “old” Calcutta of the Company period and the “new” Calcutta of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where civic improvement schemes, drainage projects, new roads, and institutions were transforming the cityscape. He documents the growth of Calcutta University, the emergence of the High Court, the expansion of the docks, the improvement of sanitation. There is in this a sense of municipal pride, the pride of an empire presenting itself as a benefactor. Yet we, reading today, can see the paternalism in such framing: the suggestion that Calcutta owed its very progress to the British, when in truth the city’s vitality came as much from the ingenuity, resilience, and cultural life of its Bengali inhabitants.
One of the strengths of Calcutta, Old and New is that it is more than a handbook for tourists. Cotton devotes space to the intellectual and social movements that had already made Calcutta a crucible of modern India. He notes the presence of the Asiatic Society, the Indian Museum, the Bengal Renaissance, the educational institutions that shaped reformers and writers, the newspapers that stirred public opinion. He acknowledges, sometimes grudgingly, the political unrest that simmered in the city, the rise of nationalist feeling, the ferment of new ideas. Although his sympathies are clearly with the imperial state, he cannot entirely suppress the evidence that Calcutta was not merely a British city planted on Indian soil but a complex cultural node where East and West collided, mixed, and generated something unique.
Reading Cotton’s handbook today also offers a curious double experience. On the one hand, it is a sourcebook, invaluable for its meticulous detailing of streets, buildings, and institutions, many of which have changed beyond recognition or vanished altogether. On the other, it is a window into the imperial mentality, showing how the city was seen, organized, and narrated by those who ruled it. Cotton’s admiration for order, for neat categorization, for the imposition of European civic values, reveals a belief in the permanence of empire. And yet, less than half a century after the book was published, Calcutta would cease to be the capital of British India, the empire itself would crumble, and the city would pass into a very different phase of history. The irony enriches our reading: what Cotton saw as enduring monuments are today contested sites of memory, while what he overlooked—the subaltern life of the city, the resistance, the vernacular imagination—has become the true legacy of Calcutta’s identity.
Stylistically, Cotton is accessible. He writes with clarity and a certain rhythm that makes his descriptions easy to visualize. His intention was practical: to serve both as a guide for new arrivals in the city and as a work of reference for those interested in its past. But because he had the temperament of a chronicler, he often slips into narrative, sketching scenes almost cinematically. His descriptions of the Maidan at sunset, of the thronged ghats, of the river flowing with boats and smoke, have a pictorial quality. The city emerges not merely as a list of addresses but as a living organism, full of contradictions, grandeur, and vitality.
The modern reader, however, must also read against the grain. Cotton’s silences are as telling as his words. He speaks at length about Government House but gives little space to the lived experience of the Bengali middle class who were already shaping the city’s culture. He notes the splendor of Chowringhee but not the grinding poverty of those in the bustees nearby. He admires the imperial institutions but does not reckon with the racial hierarchies that excluded Indians from equal participation. To read Calcutta, Old and New critically, then, is to recognize it as both a descriptive handbook and an ideological artifact, a text that encodes empire even as it documents the city.
There is also a strange timelessness in Cotton’s observations. Many of the landmarks he described remain part of Kolkata’s fabric today, albeit transformed. Dalhousie Square, now BBD Bagh, still holds many of the grand colonial buildings. The Maidan remains a green lung. The trams, which Cotton saw as a novelty of modern urban life, continue to trundle along, a fading echo of another age. The river still defines the city, with its ghats and ferries, though the cargo and traffic have changed. Reading Cotton is, in a way, like looking at an old sepia photograph: familiar yet distant, charming yet laden with the weight of its historical moment.
Perhaps the most poignant aspect of Calcutta, Old and New lies in its attempt to define a city that resists definition. Calcutta has always been too chaotic, too layered, too contradictory to be neatly captured, and yet Cotton tries. He writes as if by listing its buildings, institutions, and histories, one could possess the city. But Calcutta—whether in 1909 or in 2025—remains elusive. It is not simply old and new, but perpetually in flux, never finished, always becoming. Cotton’s handbook thus becomes, despite itself, a testimony to that impossibility: it tries to pin down a city that lives precisely through its refusal to be pinned down.
As a historical resource, the book is indispensable. For scholars of urban history, colonial studies, or Calcutta’s civic past, it offers a guided tour through the early 20th-century metropolis. For readers interested in heritage, it is a reminder of what has been lost and what survives. For the casual lover of the city, it is a doorway into a different era, where one can walk with Cotton’s prose as if strolling down Esplanade Row or gazing at the Hooghly in its imperial heyday. But as a piece of literature, it also demands a critical eye, for it tells us less about the whole city than about the vision of the city constructed by empire.
In the end, Cotton’s Calcutta, Old and New is not simply a handbook; it is a layered palimpsest of memory, authority, and representation. It captures the grandeur of the colonial city, documents its institutions, evokes its daily life, and at the same time betrays the assumptions and blind spots of its author. To read it today is to engage not only with the text but with the history of how Calcutta was imagined, narrated, and displayed. It is to feel the allure of the colonial picturesque while recognizing the silenced voices beneath it. It is to realize that the city Cotton described is both gone and alive, transformed yet continuous, elusive as ever.
And perhaps that is the most fitting tribute. For no book, not even Cotton’s, can truly exhaust Calcutta. The city is too restless, too polyphonic, too haunted by both empire and freedom.
Yet Cotton’s attempt remains invaluable, because it gives us a window into a moment when Calcutta stood at the crossroads of old and new, empire and nation, memory and modernity.
Reading it, one cannot help but be drawn into that paradox: a city simultaneously described and indescribable, catalogued yet uncontainable, old and new in every breath it takes.
It is a book that does not merely describe a city but attempts to encapsulate its pulse in words, tracing how Calcutta had risen from a cluster of villages by the Hooghly into what the British liked to call the “Second City of Empire.” Written by Cotton, a civil servant turned chronicler with a gift for presenting fact with a sense of spectacle, the book reads less like a neutral manual and more like a performance of Calcutta’s place in the imperial imagination, yet one that allows us, over a century later, to peer through the text and see both the brilliance and the contradictions that made the city what it was and still is.
The very opening pages carry the whiff of a city that had already begun to mythologize itself. Cotton anchors his narrative in a Calcutta that is as much about its past as about its ongoing present—the old Fort William, the Black Town, the White Town, the sprawling Maidan, the churches and the ghats, the markets and the institutions.
His book promises to be descriptive but never in the manner of dry enumeration. He writes with an almost theatrical voice, as though he is guiding a new arrival—perhaps an English official, merchant, or curious traveler—through a series of set-pieces that reveal the grandeur and peculiarities of the city. The reader is ushered into a space of palaces and slums, statues and squalor, civic experiments and colonial arrogance, where the tension between the rulers and the ruled simmers under the apparent narrative of progress and civility.
The book’s historical sections are particularly telling, because Cotton does not treat Calcutta’s growth as accidental. He situates Job Charnock and the East India Company firmly at the roots of the settlement, weaving the story of how a swampy riverside cluster of villages—Kalikata, Govindapur, and Sutanuti—was appropriated and reengineered into a fortified trading station. He tracks the building of Fort William, the emergence of Chowringhee, the transformation of the Maidan into the imperial promenade, and the construction of churches, mansions, and courts that turned Calcutta into the capital of British India. Cotton’s voice is admiring, almost celebratory, when it comes to these achievements, yet even when he cannot entirely escape the imperial bias, he gives enough detail for us to perceive the cost: the dispossession of locals, the restructuring of space that segregated Europeans from “natives,” and the way architecture became a weapon of authority.
Cotton delights in describing the physical spaces of the city. He walks us through Dalhousie Square, through Government House, the Supreme Court, the General Post Office, the Eden Gardens, the Botanical Gardens, the Esplanade, and the great thoroughfares that became the skeleton of the modern metropolis. He lingers on the statues and monuments, relics of the British need to inscribe themselves permanently upon the landscape—Clive, Hastings, Cornwallis, the Queen herself. There is an aura of reverence in his tone, for Cotton saw these as symbols of continuity and power, but for the modern reader, they are equally markers of a contested heritage. His handbook thus becomes a record not merely of what Calcutta was, but of how the British wanted Calcutta to be remembered: as a city of order, civilization, and imperial triumph.
But Cotton is not only interested in monumental Calcutta; he also has a keen eye for the everyday. His chapters on the bazaars, the ghats, the tramways, the native quarters, and the social habits of the city’s mixed populations bring a vibrancy that prevents the book from slipping into dry cataloguing. He records the chaos of Burrabazar, the lively commerce of Harrison Road, the religious diversity of Kalighat, the reverent hush of the city’s temples and mosques. He notices the peculiarities of Bengali domestic life, the rhythms of festivals, the bustle of the river with its boats and ferries. And even though he views it all from the colonial lens, there is a depth to his descriptive powers that allows one to feel the sensory weight of Calcutta—the smells, the noise, the density of humanity.
Cotton’s prose is also tinged with nostalgia, though it is a nostalgia for a city that was, in his time, still very much alive but already layered with memory. He is keenly aware of the contrast between the “old” Calcutta of the Company period and the “new” Calcutta of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where civic improvement schemes, drainage projects, new roads, and institutions were transforming the cityscape. He documents the growth of Calcutta University, the emergence of the High Court, the expansion of the docks, the improvement of sanitation. There is in this a sense of municipal pride, the pride of an empire presenting itself as a benefactor. Yet we, reading today, can see the paternalism in such framing: the suggestion that Calcutta owed its very progress to the British, when in truth the city’s vitality came as much from the ingenuity, resilience, and cultural life of its Bengali inhabitants.
One of the strengths of Calcutta, Old and New is that it is more than a handbook for tourists. Cotton devotes space to the intellectual and social movements that had already made Calcutta a crucible of modern India. He notes the presence of the Asiatic Society, the Indian Museum, the Bengal Renaissance, the educational institutions that shaped reformers and writers, the newspapers that stirred public opinion. He acknowledges, sometimes grudgingly, the political unrest that simmered in the city, the rise of nationalist feeling, the ferment of new ideas. Although his sympathies are clearly with the imperial state, he cannot entirely suppress the evidence that Calcutta was not merely a British city planted on Indian soil but a complex cultural node where East and West collided, mixed, and generated something unique.
Reading Cotton’s handbook today also offers a curious double experience. On the one hand, it is a sourcebook, invaluable for its meticulous detailing of streets, buildings, and institutions, many of which have changed beyond recognition or vanished altogether. On the other, it is a window into the imperial mentality, showing how the city was seen, organized, and narrated by those who ruled it. Cotton’s admiration for order, for neat categorization, for the imposition of European civic values, reveals a belief in the permanence of empire. And yet, less than half a century after the book was published, Calcutta would cease to be the capital of British India, the empire itself would crumble, and the city would pass into a very different phase of history. The irony enriches our reading: what Cotton saw as enduring monuments are today contested sites of memory, while what he overlooked—the subaltern life of the city, the resistance, the vernacular imagination—has become the true legacy of Calcutta’s identity.
Stylistically, Cotton is accessible. He writes with clarity and a certain rhythm that makes his descriptions easy to visualize. His intention was practical: to serve both as a guide for new arrivals in the city and as a work of reference for those interested in its past. But because he had the temperament of a chronicler, he often slips into narrative, sketching scenes almost cinematically. His descriptions of the Maidan at sunset, of the thronged ghats, of the river flowing with boats and smoke, have a pictorial quality. The city emerges not merely as a list of addresses but as a living organism, full of contradictions, grandeur, and vitality.
The modern reader, however, must also read against the grain. Cotton’s silences are as telling as his words. He speaks at length about Government House but gives little space to the lived experience of the Bengali middle class who were already shaping the city’s culture. He notes the splendor of Chowringhee but not the grinding poverty of those in the bustees nearby. He admires the imperial institutions but does not reckon with the racial hierarchies that excluded Indians from equal participation. To read Calcutta, Old and New critically, then, is to recognize it as both a descriptive handbook and an ideological artifact, a text that encodes empire even as it documents the city.
There is also a strange timelessness in Cotton’s observations. Many of the landmarks he described remain part of Kolkata’s fabric today, albeit transformed. Dalhousie Square, now BBD Bagh, still holds many of the grand colonial buildings. The Maidan remains a green lung. The trams, which Cotton saw as a novelty of modern urban life, continue to trundle along, a fading echo of another age. The river still defines the city, with its ghats and ferries, though the cargo and traffic have changed. Reading Cotton is, in a way, like looking at an old sepia photograph: familiar yet distant, charming yet laden with the weight of its historical moment.
Perhaps the most poignant aspect of Calcutta, Old and New lies in its attempt to define a city that resists definition. Calcutta has always been too chaotic, too layered, too contradictory to be neatly captured, and yet Cotton tries. He writes as if by listing its buildings, institutions, and histories, one could possess the city. But Calcutta—whether in 1909 or in 2025—remains elusive. It is not simply old and new, but perpetually in flux, never finished, always becoming. Cotton’s handbook thus becomes, despite itself, a testimony to that impossibility: it tries to pin down a city that lives precisely through its refusal to be pinned down.
As a historical resource, the book is indispensable. For scholars of urban history, colonial studies, or Calcutta’s civic past, it offers a guided tour through the early 20th-century metropolis. For readers interested in heritage, it is a reminder of what has been lost and what survives. For the casual lover of the city, it is a doorway into a different era, where one can walk with Cotton’s prose as if strolling down Esplanade Row or gazing at the Hooghly in its imperial heyday. But as a piece of literature, it also demands a critical eye, for it tells us less about the whole city than about the vision of the city constructed by empire.
In the end, Cotton’s Calcutta, Old and New is not simply a handbook; it is a layered palimpsest of memory, authority, and representation. It captures the grandeur of the colonial city, documents its institutions, evokes its daily life, and at the same time betrays the assumptions and blind spots of its author. To read it today is to engage not only with the text but with the history of how Calcutta was imagined, narrated, and displayed. It is to feel the allure of the colonial picturesque while recognizing the silenced voices beneath it. It is to realize that the city Cotton described is both gone and alive, transformed yet continuous, elusive as ever.
And perhaps that is the most fitting tribute. For no book, not even Cotton’s, can truly exhaust Calcutta. The city is too restless, too polyphonic, too haunted by both empire and freedom.
Yet Cotton’s attempt remains invaluable, because it gives us a window into a moment when Calcutta stood at the crossroads of old and new, empire and nation, memory and modernity.
Reading it, one cannot help but be drawn into that paradox: a city simultaneously described and indescribable, catalogued yet uncontainable, old and new in every breath it takes.
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