Introduction

This chapter considers the arrival of Job Charnock in Sutanuti in 1690 as the beginning of the modern metropolis of Calcutta, the city nevertheless celebrated its tercentenary in 1990, and this created an unprecedented interest in and a market for the city's history. If the refugees captured the imagination and sympathies of the postcolonial citizenry of Calcutta, they completely forgot its Muslim population. The story of Calcutta from the beginning of the 1940s till the beginning of the 1950s is a saga of momentous changes that shaped the subsequent trajectory of the historic metropolis. Rarely has any city in world history undergone such profound change compressed into one decade. Its unplanned and rapid growth, its refugee colonies, its evolving cultural and structural dichotomy, and the marginalisation of its religious minority that we witness in this period, also mark the life of what is modern-day Kolkata.