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The Great Hooghly Bazaar is both a celebration of this confluence of cultures and an examination of what the Hooghly’s layered history can tell us about the challenges of the present.
Travelling upstream from Kolkata, we will explore India through the prism of the river that helped shape it. Our journey combines morning excursions with an afternoon programme of talks and conversations with leading writers, historians and environmentalists who have thought deeply about the world through which this river runs.
The fertile banks of the Hooghly first attracted European in the 1600s. Danish missionaries set up camp at Serampore and French lumières preached liberty, equality and fraternity in Chandannagar. By the 1800s, British Calcutta had grown into one of the world’s first mega-cities. In 1825, the first steamboat docked on the Hooghly, symbolizing to the British a mastery over nature and the dominance of the West.
Yet rivers possess longer memories than empires. The partition of India in 1947 and the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 redrew borders, sending waves of migration through Bengal. Today, in the mangrove forests of its delta – where “commerce and wilderness look each other directly in the eye”, as Amitav Ghosh writes – the river bears witness to rising seas, unstable climates and the limits of human control.
From this vantage, The Great Hooghly Bazaar becomes not simply a voyage into the past, but a reckoning with the present and a meditation on the future:.
Our journey begins in Kolkata with explorations of the city and a welcome dinner. On Day Three we board the ABN Rajmahal and sail upstream. Excursions include the former French enclave of Chandannagar, the magnificent Hooghly Imambara and the Nawabi capital of Murshidabad. In the afternoons there will be a schedule of talks and panel discussions, with plenty of time to sit, read, have a drink and watch the life of the river go by. We will disembark at Farakka and take the train back to Kolkata for our final night together and a farewell dinner.
More than a holiday, The Great Hooghly Bazaar is an exploration into the global history and current significance of one of the world’s greatest rivers.
We begin with a story.
According to the Ramayana, the king Bhagiratha, with Shiva’s aid, brought the waters of the Ganga from heaven to earth to nourish the land. The Hooghly is venerated as the Ganga’s most sacred distributary. Its alternative name – the Bhagirathi – evokes its divine origin.
In his book The Golden Road, William Dalrymple argues that in antiquity, India’s ideas transformed the world, creating around itself an Indosphere, a cultural zone that spread over political borders, “radiating out and diffusing its philosophies, political ideas and architectural forms over an entire region.”
Perhaps the greatest of these cultural exports was Buddhism, which spread from India across Southeast Asia and China. It was up the River Hooghly that in the 7th Century CE, the Chinese monk Yijing travelled to make pilgrimage at the Buddhist monastery of Nalanda in modern-day Bihar. In this way, the Hooghly can be seen as a microcosm of India’s outward-looking, world-shaping role before colonial rupture: an inland extension to the maritime Golden Road.
The Ganga is today India’s most visited pilgrimage site. In A Blue Hand, Deborah Baker writes how the Ganga draws “genteel middle-class Hindu pilgrims on holiday, naked, ash-smeared holy men […], and orange-robed sannyasi with shaved sulks and alms bowls.” And recently, no less welcome, “rootless Westerners seeking enlightenment.”
The river has long been regarded as a muse and collaborator to Bengal’s artists. As a 10-year-old, Nobel-laureate Rabindranath Tagore spent a few months residing on the eastern banks of the Hooghly, the river’s ebb and flow sparking his artistic sensibilities. A decade after Tagore’s death, Adwaita Mallabarman likens the river in his 1950 book A River Called Titash, to “a frenzied sculptor at work, destroying and creating restlessly in crazed joy.”
Bengal was one of the richest provinces within the Mughal Empire (1526-1857), governed by the Nawabs in Murshidabad, on the eastern banks of the Hooghly River, 200 kilometres north of where today lies Kolkata.
The Portuguese were the first Europeans to arrive in Bengal, establishing a trading post in 1580 that grew to become the city of Hooghly. Although the Portuguese dominance at Hooghly was short-lived, a precedent had been set. Towards the end of the 1600s, the Danish had settled at Serampore and the French at Chandannagar, both on the western banks of the river. While the efforts of Danish missionaries ultimately withered, the ideas of the lumières birthed with the French Revolution, were later elevated as a counterweight to British imperialism. Robert Ivermee argues that the settlement at of Chandannagar was championed as an island of liberty, equality and fraternity in “an English-dominated sea of despotism and despair.”
In the twentieth century, ideas of representative government and human rights rooted in Enlightenment philosophy would be mobilised by Indian nationalists in the guise of the Bengal Renaissance.
On 24 August 1690, Job Charnock of the British East India Company, founded a settlement on the Hooghly’s swampy eastern bank. In Abir Mukherjee’s novel A Rising Man, a British police officer reflects upon this fateful moment.
“Its climate was as hostile as almost anywhere in the world, […] as though God himself, in a fit of petulance, had chosen everything in nature most abominable to an Englishman and set it down in this one cursed place. So it stood to reason that it was here […] that we should see fit to build Calcutta, our Indian capital. I guess we like a challenge.”
The East India Company’s progression from trade to power-grab is described by William Dalrymple in The Anarchy as “the supreme act of corporate violence in world history.” After the defeat of the last independent Nawab of Bengal at the Battle of Plassey in 1757, the EIC emerged as the dominant force on the river. Charnock’s swampy settlement became Calcutta, which grew to be the second city of the British Empire. That which was a “ruin” when “Clive of India” turned up in 1756, was within forty years described by Governor General Wellesley as “a mass of superb palaces.”
By the end of the nineteenth century, Robert Ivermee writes, Calcutta was an imperial megacity, connected to regional, subcontinental, and global networks of industry and commerce by the technology of steam. One British official was to proclaim:
“There are probably few cities in the world that, from so humble an origin, and apparently under so unfavourable conditions, have within so short a period attained the position now occupied by the capital of India. … [] Few would have ventured to predict […] that physical drawbacks would be made to yield to the indomitable energy of a foreign race; than in spite of morasses, malaria, hurricanes, and the difficult navigation of a treacherous river, Calcutta would in the nineteenth century be an emporium of trade of the first magnitude, and the Capital of an Empire in East.”
Calcutta enticed people from all over the world fostering large communities of Chinese, Armenians and Greeks. It was also a port of emigration. Thousands of Bengalis sailed from Calcutta to work in British Burma’s Rangoon. The Hooghly River was also the primary point of departure for over a million indentured labourers who were transported to various British colonies between 1834 and 1920.
In 1947, with the departure of the British came the partition of India. Bengal was split in two: West Bengal became a state in Hindu-dominated India, while the rest became the eastern wing of Muslim-dominated Pakistan, leading to huge migration across the artificial border.
The River Hooghly remained in India, while some towns, such as the medieval city of Gour, just north of the Ganga, were split in two. In his book Shattered Lands, historian Sam Darlymple writes of Gour:
“It being evenly divided between Hindus and Muslims, Radcliffe’s Bengal Boundary Commission had decided to make the sloping terracotta ramparts of the Kotwali Gate into the border of India and East Pakistan […] The greatest city of medieval Bengal – a central symbol of Bengali identity – had itself been partitioned.”
The Bangladesh 1971 Liberation War led to an influx of refugees into India. Of these 10 million, K.S. Nair writes: “[I]t was then, and remains […] the largest migration of distressed people since the grim records set during WW2.”
Tensions between India and the new nation of Bangladesh peaked in 1975 when India constructed the Farakka Barrage to divert water into the Hooghly, affecting the flow downstream in Bangladesh. A 30-year treaty was signed in 1996 – and is due to expire in 2026 …
Since 1971, economic migrants from Bangladesh have trickled into India via the porous border at the Sundarbans. Inhabitants of the Sundarbans have in turn, beset by cyclones, migrated to Kolkata. Today, Bengalis make up many of the immigrants seeking a better life in Europe.
Before the Farakka Barrage, and the British brigs, and the Nawabi houseboats, the Hooghly was home to river dolphins. In 2025, researchers calculated that today, threatened by mining and pollution, there are just over 100 dolphins left.
The Irrawaddy dolphin features in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, depicting the people of the Sundarbans in the Hooghly’s delta, “where commerce and the wilderness look each other directly in the eye.” Here the natural world is not moderate or commonplace, but fickle, destructive – even demonic. The hunger of the eponymous tide hints to nature’s destructive power and man’s appetite and arrogance.
Ghosh refers to these “not ordinary” times as a “Time of Monsters” – where an old era is dying, and a new one struggles to be born. It is in this interstitial era that it has become possible to contemplate new potentialities: Do plants have intelligence? Are rocks sentient? Is a river alive?
The future of the Hooghly is tied to the fate of Bengal. Here at the close of this journey, as at the beginning, we’ll explore the stories we tell ourselves (and those that we don’t) to understand where we are today and the omens for tomorrow.
On board the ABN Rajmahal, historian Sam Dalrymple will draw on his acclaimed debut novel, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia, to examine how Bengal has been shaped, sundered and reimagined by the forces of Partition.
On the Hooghly, the history of Partition is not abstract. It is etched into the river’s banks: in the refugee colonies that grew around Kolkata, in the severed commercial arteries between Bengal’s twin halves, and in the cultural memory of a region divided first by the British in 1905, then again in 1947, and yet again during the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. Sam will explore how these ruptures unsettled identities, redrew borders and continue to inform the politics, migration and imagination of Bengal today.
Shattered Lands traces five major partitions across Asia, but it is in Bengal that Sam’s work finds some of its most poignant examples. His approach blends archival research, family history, and travels along the very landscapes we will traverse: offering guests a rare opportunity to encounter the terrain of Partition not just through ideas, but through place.
Raised in Delhi, Sam is a Scottish historian, filmmaker, and Oxford-trained Persian and Sanskrit scholar. His work across South and Central Asia includes projects with Turquoise Mountain in Kabul and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Hunza and Lahore. In 2018, he co-founded Project Dastaan, a peace-building initiative reconnecting refugees displaced by the 1947 Partition of India. His writing has appeared in The New York Times and The Spectator, and he is a columnist for Architectural Digest.
More speakers to be announced soon.
A literary journey through Bengal & Assam with best-selling author Abir Mukherjee.
Darjeeling and the story of Sikkim with Jamling Tenzing Norgay.
The Cold War, a fight for freedom and the birth of Bangladesh.
See the textiles of Bengal and how they weave through the history of India & Bangladesh.
