The Great Eastern Hotel of Calcutta occupies a singular place in the city’s urban and imperial narrative. Founded in 1840–41 by David Wilson as the Auckland Hotel—named for Lord Auckland, then Governor‑General of India—it rapidly became Asia’s longest continuously operating hotel, earning monikers such as the “Jewel of the East” and the “Savoy of the East” by the late nineteenth century.

Imperial Patronage and Distinguished Guests

From its inception, the Great Eastern catered to the British Raj’s power elite. Its original hundred‑room block and integrated ground‑floor department store provided everything from formal dining to general outfitting under one roof—an innovative “one‑stop” arrangement in an age when most travellers still relied on discrete inns and bazaars. By the 1880s the hotel had introduced electric lighting, arguably becoming the first fully electrified hotel in India. Visitors of note included Mark Twain—who lauded it as the “best hotel East of the Suez” during his 1896 lecture tour—Queen Elizabeth II on her Commonwealth visits, and Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin, each dining beneath its high‑ceilinged arches.

Rudyard Kipling, stationed in Calcutta as a journalist, immortalized the Great Eastern in his short story “The City of Dreadful Night.” He depicted its bars and ballrooms as both a cosmopolitan salon and a voyeuristic stage, where the mingling of “all the nations of the earth” underscored colonial Calcutta’s fraught social hierarchies. Kipling’s image of English bobbies patrolling the entrance captures the hotel’s role as a microcosm of Raj order and spectacle.

Architectural Palimpsest

Architecturally, the Great Eastern blends mid‑Victorian solidity with successive Edwardian interventions. Its sash‑windowed corridors and wrought‑iron balconies date to the 1840s, while the ornate facades of the 1860s expansion embody a late‑Victorian flourish. Interior survivals—roll‑top baths fed by gravity plumbing, marble‑topped hall tables, and gas‑lit lanterns—testify to a minimal modernization ethos that prevailed until the late twentieth century .

Perhaps the most evocative emblem of vanished sovereignty is the gilded glass panel above the reception lobby, inscribed “By appointment to HM the King Emperor and HM the Queen Empress.” Geoffrey Moorhouse, writing in the early 1980s, observed that even under West Bengal’s Communist administrations the staff “polished this panel assiduously every day, thirty‑four years after independence had been achieved,” suggesting that preservation had itself become a local badge of pride .

Post‑Colonial Transition and State Stewardship

Following India’s independence in 1947, the Great Eastern continued under private ownership until financial difficulties prompted state takeover in the 1970s. Managed first by the Bengal Hotels Corporation and later by the Tourism Development Corporation of West Bengal, the hotel remained open—if increasingly dilapidated—well into the early 2000s. Its anachronistic elevators and squeaking taps by this period had become part of its “living museum” allure, even as deferred maintenance threatened its structural integrity.

Restoration and Contemporary Rebirth

In 2005 the state sold the property to The LaLiT Hotels, Palaces and Resorts. A multi‑million‑dollar restoration introduced modern plumbing, air‑conditioning, and safety systems while meticulously conserving colonial elements: the stucco moldings of its façade, mosaic‑tiled lobby floors, and, crucially, the embossed glass panel that continues to gleam in gilt above the reception desk.

Today, the LaLiT Great Eastern Kolkata functions not merely as a luxury hotel but as an architectural and cultural archive. Its unbroken guest register chronicles nearly two centuries of diplomatic missions, literary pilgrimages, and colonial ceremonial life. More than a repository of relics, however, the hotel exemplifies Calcutta’s capacity to absorb successive regimes—East India Company, British Crown, independent India, and Communist‑run state enterprises—while keeping its imperial past in daily view. In this respect, the Great Eastern remains the city’s enduring testament to the layered palimpsest of power, memory, and urban identity.

Sources

“A Tradition of Hospitality” (2009). The Tribune, June 28.
“Great Eastern Hotel, Kolkata,” in Twain’s Geography.
Sanchari. (2021). The “Great” Eastern Witness to the Life of a City. The World Around Me, February 25.
Moorhouse, Geoffrey. (1971; republished 1984). Calcutta. London: Penguin.