During the rule of the East India Company, the white town of Calcutta developed without any overarching urban planning. Despite its reputation as the administrative and commercial centre of British India, the town’s physical layout remained irregular and uncoordinated. Mrs. Kindersley, writing in the 1770s, noted that Calcutta’s houses appeared to have been “thrown up in the air” and settled haphazardly. French observers, such as the Comte de Modave, echoed this view, criticizing the settlement as a disordered mass of buildings.
Private enterprise, not public planning, drove the expansion of white Calcutta. After the 1757 Battle of Plassey, British officials and merchants invested heavily in residential and commercial construction. The East India Company itself contributed minimally, primarily funding Fort William and Government House. Other official buildings were usually built by private individuals and rented to the Company. By the early 19th century, only eighteen buildings in Calcutta had been purpose-built for public use.
Architecture in the white town was dominated by European classical styles, with brick buildings covered in white lime stucco (chunam). Houses had high ceilings, thick walls, and deep verandahs to accommodate the tropical climate. Large garden houses were constructed in areas like Garden Reach, Alipore, and Ballygunge. These houses were often rented rather than owned by their occupants. Many were financed by wealthy Indian investors, such as Gokhal Goshal and his heir Jayanarayan Ghoshal, who together invested in dozens of properties in the 18th century.
The Company refrained from planning drainage, paving, or street alignment. Instead, limited improvement works—such as the creation of Circular Road—were undertaken by voluntary lottery committees between 1809 and 1833. Municipal services, including policing and sanitation, remained inadequate throughout the period. By 1866, even white town’s services were deemed “considerably behind [those of] a second-rate English provincial town.” Mortality rates, though lower among Europeans than Indians by mid-century, remained high in the absence of reliable water supply and drainage.
Despite its attempt at social exclusivity, the white town could not maintain spatial segregation. Indian huts or bustees proliferated in the interstices of European neighborhoods. Servants’ huts often abutted elite houses, and the streets were filled with Indian vendors, labourers, and craftspeople. European-owned shops and premises in areas like Bow Bazaar and Dharamtollah merged with Indian commercial zones, creating what Pradip Sinha has termed an “intermediate town”—inhabited by poor whites, Indian Christians, and people of mixed descent.
The legal and administrative framework also reflected the disorder. The East India Company governed Calcutta through its zamindari rights and later through a Collector, but showed little interest in structured civic development. Proposals for municipal reform, such as those made under Warren Hastings, were sporadic and often contested. Only in 1793 did Company charter clauses authorize the appointment of Justices of the Peace with the ability to levy rates for civic improvements.
Thus, Calcutta’s urban morphology was defined by a paradox. It housed one of the wealthiest colonial communities in Asia, yet it lacked basic urban coordination. Private wealth built imposing structures that embodied imperial confidence, but the city beneath remained structurally fragile, socially divided, and environmentally unsound. The disorder was not accidental; it stemmed from a refusal to invest in shared civic life. Even as the white elite invested in comfort, they remained physically and ideologically aloof from the majority Indian population.
Source
Marshall, P. J. (2000). The white town of Calcutta under the rule of the East India Company. Modern Asian Studies, 34(2), 307-331.
Arup K. Chatterjee 