Kolkata district

Kolkata district (formerly known as Calcutta district) is a district in the Indian state of West Bengal. It only contains the entire city proper of Kolkata, the capital city of the state and therefore it is a city district. It is the smallest district in the state and also the most densely populated district. Being a city district, the district itself is its headquarter, it does not have further subdivisions like mahakumas or blocks that exist in all other districts of the state and it also doesn't have a district magistrate. The sole local government of the whole district is Kolkata Municipal Corporation. Long before the British came to India, the zamindari (land lordship) of all lands from Barisha to Halisahar, in what is now mostly in the Kolkata (formerly called Kali Kshetra, Land of Goddess Kali) area, were acquired by the Sabarna Roy Choudhury family from the Mughal emperor Jahangir. With the decline of the once flourishing Saptagram port, traders and businessmen, such as the Basaks, the Sheths and others, started venturing southwards and settled in or developed places such as Gobindapur. They set up a cotton and yarn market at Sutanuti. Chitpur was a weaving centre and Baranagar was another textile centre. Kalighat was a pilgrimage centre. Across the Hooghly, there were places such as Salkia and Betor. Kalikata was a lesser known place. While both Sutanuti and Gobindapur appear on old maps like Thomas Bowrey's of 1687 and George Herron's of 1690, Kalikata, situated between the two, is not depicted. However, one variant of the name, ‘Kalkata’, is mentioned in Abul Fazal’s Ain-i-Akbari (1596). At that time it was recorded as a revenue district of Sirkar Satgaon. In 1698, Charles Eyre, son-in-law of the early colonial administrator, Job Charnock, acquired the zemindari rights of Gobindapur, Kalikata and Sutanuti from the Sabarna Roy Choudhury family. Subsequent to the fall of Siraj-ud-daulah, the last independent Nawab of Bengal, the English purchased 55 villages in 1758 from Mir Jafar.