Fish market at dawn on the Hooghly, kati rolls on Park Street, and the most intellectually layered city in the subcontinent
Kolkata (formerly Calcutta, renamed in 2001 to its Bengali pronunciation) was the capital of British India from 1773 to 1911 — a century in which it was simultaneously the most important city in Asia east of Constantinople and the most densely occupied port city on earth. The food is Bengali: hilsa fish (ilish, silver-scaled, extremely bony, with a fatty flesh that absorbs mustard oil uniquely) is the prestige food; mustard oil and panch phoron (the five-spice blend of cumin, mustard, fenugreek, nigella, and fennel seeds) define the cuisine's flavour architecture. Kati rolls — flatbread (para…
Kolkata was founded in 1690 when Job Charnock of the British East India Company established a trading post at the village of Sutanati on the Hooghly River. The choice of site was the deepest navigable point accessible to ocean-going ships — a functional decision that produced one of history's most consequential port cities. By 1800, Calcutta was the wealthiest city in Asia, with British merchant architecture (Dalhousie Square, the GPO), a Bengali intellectual renaissance, an Armenian community dating to 1688, and the oldest Chinatown in the subcontinent. The 1943 Bengal Famine killed 2–3 mill…