Few recall that Calcutta sprang from a cluster of small hamlets—Betor, Chitpore, Sutanuti, and Govindpore—rather than a grand plan. In the mid‑16th century, Portuguese traders anchored at Garden Reach and built thatched huts on Betor’s banks, erecting them each season to ship their Goa‑bound cargoes of spices and textiles. As Satgaon silted up, mercantile families like the Bysacks and Setts moved upriver, clearing jungle at Govindpore and founding a linen‑trading post at Sutanuti. That market became the famed Sutanuti Hat, or Cotton‑Bale Bazaar—Calcutta’s very first stock exchange in cloth, where Indian weavers and European merchants bartered beneath temporary shelters long before brick and mortar appeared. This makeshift cotton mart laid the economic foundation of the city: a vivid reminder that Calcutta’s rise was less the triumph of imperial design than the sum of enterprising settlements that leaned into the Hooghly’s currents.
Source: Cotton, H.E.A. (1907). Calcutta: Old and New. Calcutta: W. Newman.
Arup K. Chatterjee 