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Everything that made money in this para came off a ship - jute, tea, coal, engineering goods. The Ghosals built their palace here for a reason, and the old money along these lanes still traces back to the water.
Say Dum Dum today and people think of the airport. For most of its history it meant the opposite - barracks, arsenals and parade grounds, one of British India's biggest cantonments, training soldiers for an empire.
It was Armenian money that financed the warehouses and trade routes that turned Calcutta into a port. Walk the lanes off the church and you are walking through what is left of that commercial network.
The same family paid for schools, hospitals, markets and public buildings all over the city. Half the nineteenth-century architecture people photograph in this part of town was funded by them.
Ezra Street carries the name of the Baghdadi Jewish merchants who were among the wealthiest people in nineteenth-century Calcutta. Most of the traders working here today have no idea whose street they are on.
Chitpur Road was here before British Calcutta was. It linked villages and pilgrimage routes long before anyone drew a city on this bend of the river, which makes it one of eastern India's oldest roads still in use.
Cossipore was already a village on the Hooghly before colonial Calcutta grew out towards it. The garden houses along the river are what is left of that older, slower settlement.
Edward Tiretta was an Italian architect who owned land here in the late 1700s. The name stuck, but the neighbourhood became India's first Chinatown instead - an Italian street known the world over for Chinese food.
Every year thousands of idols made in these lanes are crated up and shipped to London, New Jersey, Sydney, Singapore. The Durga you see in a pandal abroad almost certainly started here.
In the nineteenth century this para held wealthy merchant houses and a well-known courtesan quarter side by side - and Ramakrishna Paramahansa was a regular visitor to the ghat and to devotees living in the same lanes.
Chronicles of Kolkata
Real people. Real memories. Authentic life snippets that breathe soul into the historic streets.
Behind the counter of a tiny neighborhood paan shop sits Pintu Pohan, quietly crafting 11 novels, hundreds of stories, and countless poems between serving customers.
Articles & Features
Discover the history, culture and people behind some of Kolkata's most interesting para finds.
Creator Discoveries
See creators uncover lesser-known places, people and local favourites from across Kolkata.
