How Kolkata wrote her own history, one year at a time

Equally important would be the vernacular almanacks, the Panjikas, printed by Bishudho Siddhanta, Gupta Press, and P. M. Bagchi,  clustered around old north-central Kolkata within the College Street-Machuabazar-Girish Park triangle alongside the Hindi Panchangs of Chitpore’s Battala.

The English directories and vernacular almanacks were published at the start of every Gregorian and Hindu calendar year, respectively. English directories were published on the first day of January, and the almanacks came out on the first of Baisakh (around 14th/15th April). These volumes were within easy reach of officials, householders, merchants, traders, travellers, as well as clergy and priests. They guided users through addresses and auspicious hours alike.

Today, they lie dormant and uncared for in library basements, inside old and unused household chests, or in astrologers’ offices, their spines dulled, pages yellowed, and edges brittle. Yet, within them hums our city’s forgotten heartbeat, the quotidian pulse of 19th‑century Kolkata.

The world of Thacker’s and Bengal Hurkaru

Thacker’s Directory was first issued in 1864 in Kolkata. It began humbly as a regional guide to the Bengal Presidency. By 1885, it had blossomed into Thacker’s Indian Directory, stretching its reach across the subcontinent. Published annually until 1960, it became an annual compendium of the Empire in India. It listed European residents and “prominent” Indians, government departments, schools, foreign consulates, religious missions, mills, clubs, hotels, and hospitals. There were details of railway lines and shipping services, telegraph offices, postal routes and rates, trade associations, learned societies, and newspapers. Nothing escaped enumeration. And, each of them had detailed information about city streets. Each volume grew dramatically in size, from an initial 400 pages to nearly 2,000 by the time they ceased publishing.

Kolkata’s Samuel Smith & Co. played an equally vital role, producing The Bengal Directory and Annual Register (and its variants) even before Thacker’s compendium, from 1825, exactly 200 years ago, until the end of the Great Revolt in 1858/59. These were often printed at the Bengal Hurkaru Press near the Tank Square (today’s BBD Bagh area), which also housed the Bengal Hurkaru and Chronicle, the influential English daily that pulsed with the social and commercial milieu of British expatriate life. The paper was partly funded by Dwarkanath Tagore, Kolkata’s benevolent Medici, who also lent money to Joachim Hayward Stocqueler to launch The Englishman and Military Chronicle, Hurkaru’s chief rival, in 1833.

The-Bengal-Directory-And-General-Register1826, 1, Hare Street, Bengal Hurkaru Press, Calcutta

What grants both these directories and some of their lesser-known cousins is their enduring power of density of observation. House by house, lane by lane, Kolkata emerges not as an abstraction but as a tangible sequential journal.

A name disappears from Cossaitollah Gully one year and reappears on Chowringhee the next, tracing the city’s quiet repositioning and mobility. They also tell us the story of a growing city, and the resultant regrouping of Kolkata’s neighbourhoods, where Cossaitollah transformed into Bentinck Street around 1876, and Harrison Road (now Mahatma Gandhi Road) was constructed connecting the Howrah and Sealdah railway stations between 1889 and 1892.

They describe the chaos and cacophony throughout the city when Central Avenue (now Chittaranjan Avenue) was constructed in the early 20th century. For example, city directories of 1915 and 1916 referred to ‘Halliday Street’, named after Frederick James Halliday, the lieutenant governor of British Bengal (1854-1859), for the last time. The street was swept aside when the Calcutta Improvement Trust, established in 1911, began construction of Central Avenue. What only remains now of this street is Motilal Seal’s Free College.

5 Chowringhee (now JL Nehru Road), the site of a modern multiplex with a shopping mall and a rooftop restaurant, is history unravelling in strata. Between 1870 and 1873, the premises at number 5 Chowringhee were occupied by Percy Wyndham, a soldier of fortune, veteran of the American Civil War, and publisher of the celebrated and controversial 19th-century satirical magazine Indian Charivari. Within the next quarter century, Thacker’s Indian Directory (1897) records that Whiteaway, Laidlaw and Company occupied numbers 4, 5, 6, and 7 Chowringhee Road, while the adjacent building at number 3 housed The Statesman and Friend of India.

By 1918, the two-storey structure at number 5 accommodated William Leslie and Company on the ground floor, with the city’s Archdeacon’s office above, while Whiteaway, Laidlaw continued at number 7. In 1931, the newspaper expanded its offices and moved into number 5, with number 6 also under its occupation. Whiteaway, Laidlaw retained number 7. A year later, in 1932, the newspaper relocated to its own purpose-built premises at Chowringhee Square, where it remains to date.

The transformation culminated in 1935, when the building at number 5 was demolished to make way for the Art Deco Metro Cinema, built by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, marking the site’s conversion from administrative and commercial use into one of Kolkata’s most recognisable entertainment landmarks. Only the city directories could have given us this locational interplay.

A different saga unfolded at the Darbhanga House and its associated buildings, such as the Raja Mansions, within the compound at 41, 41/1, and 42 Chowringhee Road, the grand residence of the Singh family, the Rajas of Darbhanga (Thacker’s 1936). Their garage overflowed with numerous Bentleys, Packards, Cadillacs, and a particularly renowned 1936 Daimler Double-Six once owned by King Edward VIII. Their automotive collection disappeared with the destruction of their palace, sacrificed to the city’s longstanding neglect of heritage conservation. In its place now stands a cold, glass-and-steel block known simply as “The 42,” a symbol of vertical ambition, the tallest structure of the city.

These directories enable us to observe such transformations unfolding within the city’s rapid cycle of annual renewal. For example, we can, even today, with the help of these directories, precisely recreate the history of each of the 80-odd buildings of Jawahar Lal Nehru Road, erstwhile Chowringhee Road, even today.

The social hierarchy is also clearly documented in these pages: Europeans are foregrounded, and Indians are subtly qualified as “prominent.” Yet within the typographical order, there is an undercurrent of change. Lawyers, doctors, contractors, printers, and hotel‑keepers of Indian origin begin to appear, their addresses shifting southward and eastward within the municipal limits as new neighbourhoods form. Economically, the directories read like inventories of ambition. Carvers and gilders, boarding houses, chop shops, confectioners, shipping firms, auctioneers, printers and booksellers, with later-day managing agency houses with their jute mills, coal mines, tea gardens, and banks and solicitors’ firms, stand shoulder to shoulder at Tiretta Bazar, Radha Bazar, Bowbazar, College Street and Dalhousie’s Clive Street. They document our transition from an agrarian economy to a commercial one with a precision no official report could match. They pinpoint the movement of Chinese immigrants, both Hakka and Cantonese, in Cossaitollah, now Bentinck Street. They chart civic association: the schools, missions, philanthropic societies, reading rooms, and theatres that defined civic awakening.

The directories were not merely utilitarian. They were a mirror of aspiration, a catalogue of the city’s becoming. For the contemporaries, these directories were indispensable. They were an address book, a city guide, a professional directory, a modern-day yellow pages and tariff handbook, as well as a Google map, rolled into one. For historians and social anthropologists willing to look closely, they remain a treasure trove of urban aspiration, mobility and identity.

 Directory-Panjikas: Almanacks as urban archives

If Samuel Smith’s and Thacker’s mapped colonial modernity in English, the Panjika mapped domestic continuity in the idiom of faith and language of the land. Traditionally, astrological and ritualistic, the Panjika evolved during the late nineteenth century under the subtle influence of English street directories.

The P. M. Bagchi’s Directory & Panjika (Established in Bangabda 1290, CE 1883/84) stands as a glowing example. Alongside the usual tables of eclipses, auspicious hours, and festival days, the Bengali text tucked in lists of residents and tradesmen, creating a map of daily life entirely its own,  a priest would use it to determine the wedding hour, a householder to check an address, and a local trader to locate a market rate or a municipal assessment record. Sacred and civic shared the same surface. In these hybrid volumes, one witnesses an indigenous society in transition, negotiating modernity without giving up its traditions. Advertisements for schools and patent medicines jostled with the religious calendars, municipal notices hovered near ritualistic Ekadashi fasting prescriptions. Commerce and cosmology become strange but harmonious neighbours.

First Page of the Directory section of Panjika year 1882

What, rather forcefully, drew me towards these Directory-Panjikas, as a narrative history researcher, were the advertisements placed by the seed-sellers through extraordinary woodcut prints of red radishes, cauliflowers and cabbages to attract the farmers to buy them; the huge agrarian user base of the Panjika was the target. At the same time, the almanack printed elaborate postal rates and dwelling-tax calculation charts for the city of Kolkata, as well as the tariff and timing of the trains of the East India Railways for the Bengal presidency, and ferries over the River Hooghly.

Why we miss them

Despite such richness, these sources still occupy the margins of public memory. They were once dismissed as ephemeral, useful for a single year, to be replaced by the next. Libraries revered proclamations and literature but ignored the humble books that grew obsolete with time. Language was another barrier. Thacker’s spoke to the anglicised; Panjikas spoke to the vernacular. Historiography rarely bothered to create a bridge and explore the relationship between them. And, the real neglect stems from our habit. History long worshipped the monumental: files, treaties, dispatches, laws, and palatial structures. The prosaic world of shopfronts, rituals, and daily-life advertisements seemed beneath its notice.

In truth, these trivialities are what cities are made of.

Leafing through a late‑19th‑century Panjika as well as a city street directory reveals an astonishing moment. There sits Butto Kristo Paul, operating a chemist and apothecary shop in the indigenous commercial hub in ‘Chitpore-Hatkhola-Shovabazar’, supplying European-style medicines, tonics, and prescriptions to both British and native clients by bridging colonial pharmaceuticals, like laudanum, quinine, with local herbal remedies, typically touting in his advertisements “genuine English drugs”  and “bottled tinctures’. A few pages away stands an advertisement for an Ayurvedic Kaviraj, healer by lineage and leaf. Their proximity reveals not conflict but transition: The coexistence of century-long traditional healing alongside modern medical science. For the uninitiated, north Kolkata’s one of the main thoroughfares, BK Paul Avenue, is named after Butto Kristo Paul.

Commerce, too, mirrors the psychological shifts. De, Das & Company, the tailors and cloth-merchants from north and central Kolkata, do not sell only dhotis, but make pantaloons too. Indigenous tailors, dressmakers, and outfitters describe their wares in English, infusing garments with aspiration. The Panjika, meant to guide rituals, becomes an unnoticed anthropologist of modern identities.

Kolkata reported her transformation quietly, year by year, through these annual publications, hidden in plain sight, for us to rediscover them.

Devasis Chattopadhyay is a narrative history writer and a columnist