Smita's Kolkata Chronicles

  Christ Church situated on Bidhan Sarani is currently in its 180th year.  Bethune School and Christ Church Girls High School were an integral part of the church.  The Christ Church is an old and historical place built by Bishop Wilson and dedicated in 1839.The first Presbyter-in-Charge of this church was Rev. Krishna Mohan Banerjee and he served this Church from 1839 to 1852. Banerjee an eminent 19th-century Indian reformist attempted to rethink Hindu philosophy, religion and ethics in from a Christian viewpoint. He was the first president of the Bengal Christian Association, and a member of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio’s (1808–1831) Young Bengal group, educationist, linguist and Christian missionary.   He used to preach and deliver sermons in Bengali.  In  1862   Toru Dutt (   a  Bengali  translator and  poet  from  British India , who wrote in English and French) and her  entire family converted to Christianity, all the three children were baptized into the religion at   Christ Churc

Tollygunge Club was established by the British colonisers in the southern part of Calcutta, a mangrove filled forest area then known as ‘ Rasa Pagla ’. The marshy track was populated by mangrove vegetation including Sundari, Baine and Garjan trees. The area now houses the Tolly Club and the Royal Calcutta Golf Club. Mad tree ( Pterygota alata var diversifolia ) or ' Pagla Gaach ' is present at the club premises. The tree is named so as all the leaves of this tree are different. It is also believed that Saint Pir Pagla baba Hazraat Masood Ghazi, a Sufi Saint with spiritual powers, would meditate under this tree and was cremated here after his death.  Col William Tolly desilted and   revived the Adi Ganga channel in 1774, thereby connecting Kolkata mainland to the eastern districts of undivided Bengal.This navigatable water stretch came to be known as 'Tolly Nullah' and the surrounding area as Tollygunge, from where the club derives its name. He dredged the Gobindapur cr

  In his 2015 speech at the Oxford Union, Shashi Tharoor said of Clive - "...the British had the gall to call him Clive of India as if he belonged to the country, when all he really did was to ensure that much of the country belonged to him." Robert Clive during his first governorship (1755-60) had won the Battle of Plassey and thus laid the foundation of British dominion over the subcontinent. Clive spotted a building on his way to Nawab Siraj-ud-Daullah's camp and sent his men to order the occupants to vacate by the time of his return. Clive used this building as his country house from 1757 to 1760, during his first term in Bengal. The house was originally a single-storey structure equipped with underground chambers or cellars. It even had an underground tunnel leading up to another house in today’s Mall Road area. Clive added a floor and extended the house. On the ground floor was his office, and on the first floor, the residential quarters and a nautch ghar. He also

  22 Ishwar Mill Lane, one of the bye lanes of Bidhan Sarani, was the home of the renowned scientist Satyendra Nath Bose, who in his early years resided in the Goabagan area. S. N. Bose (1894-1974) was a colossal in theoretical physics and has made some of the most fundamental conceptual contributions in the development of Quantum mechanics and quantum statistics. The Boson particle (following Bose-Einstein statistics) was named after him by Paul Dirac. He was a Fellow of Royal Society and a recipient of Padma Vibhushan in 1954. The S.N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, Salt Lake, an autonomous research institute established in 1986, is associated with his legacy. In the words of Prof. Partha Ghose “Bose’s work stood at the transition between the ‘old quantum theory’ of Planck, Bohr and Einstein and the new quantum mechanics of Schrodinger, Heisenberg, born, Dirac and others”. Date of visit: 26.11.2020

Newspaper report Building of the second herbarium Roxburg House Palm Avenue Original Botanical painting One of the oldest herbarium sheet Curator Building Overlooking the Hugli River A portion of the great Banyan tree Central National Herbarium Cactus House Branched Palm Ornamental flower garden Founded in 1786 by Colonel Robert Kyd , Acharya Jadadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic garden was originally named as “The Hon’ble Company’s Botanic Garden, Calcutta”. Later it was colloquially called ‘company bagan’.  It is the oldest botanic garden in India covering an area of 109 hectares. The garden was built as a repository of exotic plants with commercial value for the East India Company.  The emphasis was on spices smuggled in from the Dutch East Indies as the East India Company competed with the Dutch for market share in selling South and East Asian spices. The garden now has about 12,000 varieties of indigenous and exotic plants, including several rare & endangered ones, orchid hous