Laldighi

Laldighi– the 5.7-acre rectangular water body in Kolkata’s B.B.D. Bagh was not only the historic blue centre of the erstwhile Calcutta, but it also continues to be the nucleus of the city’s administrative district for more than three centuries now. 
Laldighi is surrounded by several listed heritage buildings. Writers’ Building (secretariat of the state government) on its north, General Post Office (GPO) (that stands on the footprint of the Old Fort) on its west, Standard Life Assurance building and Dead Letter Office on its south and the Currency building on the eastern side are some of the most prominent ones. The Royal Exchange (former residence of Robert Clive, now housing the Bengal Chamber of Commerce), Town Hall, High Court, Governor’s House, and St John’s Church are also in its close vicinity.

Right adjacent to the place where Job Charnock had established his trading post in 1690 and where the old Fort William was later erected (begun in 1698 & completed in 1706), Laldighi served as the blue centre of the British business settlement, then known as the ‘White Town’. Laldighi was popularly stated to be ‘in the middle of the city’ during the 18th century.

In Bengali language, Laldighi means ‘Red Tank’. There are three schools of belief regarding how such a name was derived: 

1. The water got red hued during ‘Holi’ or ‘Dol’ festival played near the Shyam Rai temple of the local zamindar Sabarna Roy Choudhury’s family He also owned a kutchery (court-house) nearby that was first rented and later purchased by the British East India Company. 
2. The red coloured old fort got reflected in the water and hence the name. 
3. A businessman named Lalchand Basak of Dihi Kalikata had excavated the pond and thus the tank came to be known as Laldighi after him. 

Initially referred to as the ‘Green before the Fort’ by the British, it was named ‘the Park’ and the ‘Great Tank’,  followed by ‘Tank Square’, and eventually, ‘the Dalhousie Square’ in 1865 in memory of  Governor General (1847-1856) Lord Dalhousie (1812-1860). In the 1960.s, the square was renamed as Benoy-Badal-Dinesh Bagh or B.B.D. Bagh, in short. The park and the tank together supplied plant and fish produces to the Company, while serving as the main source of drinking water until the introduction of municipal water supply. The Laldighi ground was the recreational hotspot of the time, where the British took an evening stroll, enjoyed the breeze and also shot wild fowls once a while. 

The peaceful ambience of the ‘Park’ changed into a violent scene of battle in 1756, when the forces of the Nawab of Murshidabad rampaged through the town and captured Calcutta on 20th June 1756. St. Anne’s church (built 1709), where the Rotunda of the Writers’ building now stands, and the old Fort William suffered great damage. This battle is associated with the much-contested Black Hole tragedy.

Fortunes turned in 1757 and Calcutta was recaptured by Lord Clive in the Battle of Plassey, Murshidabad by defeating Siraj-ud-daulah, the last Nawab of Bengal. The old fort was reestablished in 1758.

The next nearly two centuries saw Calcutta emerge as the ‘City of Palaces’, marked by commissioning of several landmark institutions – Asiatic Society of Bengal (1784), Governor’s House (1803), Imperial Museum renamed Indian Museum (1814), Agri-horticultural Society of India (1820), General Post Office (GPO – 1868), Central Telegraph Office (1876), and Victoria Memorial (1921) to name a few. The physical limits of the city expanded manifold. Laldighi & the square, however, remained mostly unchanged in terms of its physical fabric. 
A comparison of the three maps of the years 1784-85, 1825-32 and 1855 reflect an evolution of the N-E corner of the Tank Square. While the Old Court House (or Kutchery) is seen in the first, it is replaced by the St. Andrew’s Church (1818) in the second map, and the last photograph shows the church spire dominating the northern skyline of Laldighi. 

The 1910 Smarts survey map of Kolkata Municipal Corporation shows two structures near Laldighi that no longer exist: 

• Holwell monument (encircled in the map by black dots) built in 1760 by G. Holwell and removed in 1940 to the St. John’s church grounds, mainly through Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s efforts
• Dalhousie Institute (encircled in the map by red dots), built in 1865 but replaced by the Telephone Bhavan building in 1950.