Long before the Maidan stretched lawn‑green across the city, Job Charnock—by some called the “Father of Calcutta”—found his perfect spot not by surveying trade routes, but by smoking his meditative hookah beneath a sprawling peepul tree. This tree stood at the junction of today’s Bow Bazar Street and Lower Circular Road, on a little rise that Charnock deemed ideal despite the surrounding marshes. Locals called the site Boytaconnah (from boitak‑khana, “resting‑place”), and it served for years as a rendezvous where foreign merchants grouped together for safety before braving the jungles or dispersing with their wares .
When Lord Hastings cleared the area for urban improvements in 1820, the beloved tree was felled amid public lament and superstitious “prophecies of evil,” severing a living link to the city’s humble beginnings. Yet Charnock’s hookah‑lit reverie under the peepul remains a poetic emblem of Calcutta’s birth from riverside villages into a great metropolis.
Source: Cotton, H.E.A. (1907). Calcutta: Old and New. Calcutta: W. Newman.
Arup K. Chatterjee 