On 24 August 410 the barbarians reached the gates. It was the beginning of the end for the Roman Empire, the day Alaric the Visigoth sacked the Eternal City.
Rome hadn’t been the capital of the Roman Empire for a century or so but it was still its spiritual centre. The biblical scholar Jerome wrote from Bethlehem, the birthplace of another spiritual world:
My voice sticks in my throat; and, as I dictate, sobs choke my utterance. The City which had taken the whole world was itself taken…
By 1814, the English had taken some of the world and had some taken from it; on 24 August of that year it took stock of sorts, razing public buildings of the capital of its former colonies Washington DC; the President’s House would would rise from the ashes although it only became the White House in 1901.
On the other side of the globe, the view long held was that the city Calcutta was founded by an English merchant on 24 August 1690; in 1990 the Indian government issued stamps to celebrate the tercentenary.
Not so, the High Court of Calcutta declared in 2003. Upon public interest litigation, it adopted an expert report and concluded:
Calcutta does not have a ‘birthday’. Its origin is part of a general process of rural settlement, clusters of which agglomerated in the last decade of the 17th century, into the English Company’s trading factory. This grew into the town in the 18th century. No one year marks its ‘date of birth’.
The name “Calcutta” is an anglicised version of “Kolikata”, one of the clusters referred to. The Bengali pronunciation has always been and since 2001 has been formally adopted as “Kolkata”. Except by the High Court… in 2016, the judges unanimously rejected a request by the Indian government “in view of long history and tradition associated with the existing name”.
The long history and tradition of English involvement in India predates the fictional founding of Calcutta; the first representative of the East India Company landed in Surat on 24 August 1608.
