The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Maidan, Calcutta
the emperor. The difference between the rate of taxes set by the zamindar
and the fixed sum returned to the emperor’s coffers could be a substantial
amount of money. By the time Siraj-ud-Daula came to power, the British
had bought zamindar rights to thirty-eight villages in and around Calcutta.
The White Town (of the British) was a mile long and a quarter of a mile
wide, and a Black Town, a circle roughly a mile and a quarter across, lay beyond
it. Although they were not protecting territorial rights, the British
were careful to guard their valuable trading post within the cantonment at
Fort William, which bounded several warehouses and a large tank of rainwater.
The threat of the Seven Years’ War, far away in Europe, led them to
increase the strength of the fort against the French, who were also trading
in Bengal; these actions aroused the suspicions of the nawab.
On the day before the monsoon broke, the nawab marched on Calcutta.
As his men scaled the walls of the fort, Governor Grant and the majority
of the European inhabitants escaped down the river, leaving behind a
small number of British. Taking only their watches, buckles, and jewelry,
the nawab’s men put their captives into the fort’s punishment cell, called
“the Black Hole.” Accounts of what happened next vary. Geoffrey Moorhouse
tentatively puts the number of those entering the Black Hole at 146,
with 23 leaving it alive, the next morning; the rest were suffocated by the
intense heat and humidity. He observes, “It was a brutal age all round[;] . . .
the same week had seen these captives decapitating their own servants.” 21
Overnight a transformation of names and identity occurred. Allinagore
was the name given to the newly Moghul town by Siraj-ud-Daula.
The event held immense symbolic power for the British, for whom it confirmed
their worst prejudices. Allinagore, or Alinagar, was “the space of the
Other . . . always occupied by an idée fixe, despot, heathen, barbarian, chaos,
violence.” 22 The town reverted to “Calcutta” six months later, retaken by
Robert Clive for the British. He went on to eliminate the French as viable
competition, and brutally exacted huge sums of money in compensation
from the new puppet nawab in Murshidabad. His retribution was not complete,
however, until he had also vastly increased the territory directly under
British control by annexing the zamindar rights to nine hundred square
miles of land south of Calcutta, known as the twenty-four Parganas.
The village of Govindapur was drained and cleared of the tiger
jungle and its scattering of native huts, as the site for the new Fort William
moved south to cover the Govindapur Kali Temple. The fort, an example of
French military architecture of the eighteenth century, was designed by
Georges Coleman. Octagonal in plan, it has five regular faces inland and
three river-bound faces that vary with the requirements of topography and
defense. Its presence above ground is diminished by the use of large ditches,