Kolkata, once the capital of India until 1912 when the capital was shifted to Delhi, is currently the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal. It is still considered by many to be the intellectual capital of India. With a population of almost 5 million, and an extended metropolitan population of over 14 million, it is the third-largest metropolitan area of India, preceded by Greater Mumbai and Delhi. The place (where Kolkata now stands) has an ancient history in the form of a legend associated with Kalighat, a shrine dedicated to Hindu goddess Kali. In the near term, the history of the city began in 1690, when an English man, Job Charnock, docked at Hooghly River, which flows to the Bay of Bengal, and set up some camps on the marshy land. In 1970, the English purchased three villages named Sutanati, Gobindpur and Kalikata from the local rulers. They constructed a fort, the Fort William. From then onwards, the place around the fort continued to grow and emerged as the nerve center of the British Empire in India.

The city has lived a glorious past, and has experienced the emergence and shaping of Indian literary and intellectual renaissance in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It has been a center of many social and political movements, and continues to be a city where you may expect to find a rally or a procession, for the most trivial issue or the most serious ones, almost everyday of the week. The city has a cosmopolitan culture interspersed with the innocence of the people from the rural hinterland who live in the city for work and livelihood. However, the refined culture of Bengal is all pervasive. The population is composed of many ethnicities of India, and they speak many languages, but most of them speak and understand Bengali and Hindi. Anyone having even a very little working knowledge of English would be able to manage fine in the city.

The metropolis of Kolkata has been described as a City of Joy in a novel of the same name by the French writer Dominique Lapierre, and a movie of the same name was also produced under the direction of Roland Joffé. Kolkata is a city of absolute diversities. On the one hand, it is a well known center of art, literary, intellectual and cultural activities. And, on the other hand, the city is notorious for its crowded roads, dirty slums, traffic snarls, waterlogged roads and streets, and frequent power failures. However, this should not daunt the determination of a tourist to visit the city as once you are done with Kolkata, you shall certainly feel awesome. After seeing the city, knowing about its history, and being in the vicinity of its many historical monuments and structures, you shall feel the centuries roll by your mind’s eyes; and being witness of its cultural saga, you shall be transported to a world of oriental charm, exotic and unique.