Mid-18th-century Calcutta saw the growth of defensive works born of fear and rumor. In 1742 Nawab Alivardi Khan’s Bengal was harried by annual Maratha raids demanding tribute. When news arrived that Maratha armies were approaching, the Company and native residents decided to dig a protective trench around the town. As historian Joshua Ehrlich notes, “in the year 1742, the Indian inhabitants of the Colony requested and obtained permission to dig a ditch at their own expense round the Company’s bounds.” This “Maratha Ditch” was to run some seven miles, linking Sutanuti in the north to Gobindapur in the south, encircling Calcutta’s limits.
Over six months about three miles of the entrenchment were completed, but then work stalled. In fact, by year’s end the settlers realized the Marathas posed no immediate threat. Robert Orme records: the construction was halted “when the inhabitants seeing that no Marattoes had ever been on the western side of the river within sixty miles of Calcutta…discontinued the work.” The ditch itself never proved militarily useful (indeed no invasion ever materialized). Nevertheless its legacy endured: an independent report noted it was a 5 km long ditch unearthed in 1742 “to form a perimeter around the city” funded by taxes on local Indians. Today only a back-alley called “Maratha Ditch Lane” recalls this episode. The trench stands as a vivid anecdote of early Calcutta’s intersection of European fears and indigenous initiative: Bengali diggers acting at the Company’s behest to fortify a town that scarcely needed it.
Sources
- Orme, Robert. (1861). A History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan, from the Year 1745. Madras: Atheneum Press.
- Banka, Neha. (2022). Streetwise Kolkata: A lane commemorating the Maratha Ditch still exists. Indian Express, December 16.
Arup K. Chatterjee 