On August 24, 1690, Job Charnock, an agent of the British East India Company, returned to Sutanuti, a settlement on the banks of the Hooghly River. For generations, the event was treated as the founding date of Calcutta, now Kolkata, with Charnock widely described as the city’s founder.

The land, however, was far from empty when he arrived. Sutanuti was already an established textile and yarn trading centre, while the neighbouring settlements of Kalikata and Gobindapur formed part of an existing social and economic landscape.

The East India Company subsequently developed the area as an important base for its Bengal operations. In 1698, it secured landholding rights over Sutanuti, Kalikata and Gobindapur. Commercial premises, warehouses, residences and eventually Fort William followed as the riverfront became increasingly important for trade, transport and urban development.

Over the following decades, these settlements expanded and gradually merged into a major commercial and administrative centre. Calcutta would eventually emerge as one of the most important cities of British India and a major centre of property, commerce and urban expansion in South Asia.

The traditional account of its birth, however, was formally challenged centuries later.

In 2003, the Calcutta High Court accepted the findings of an expert committee which concluded that Job Charnock could not be regarded as the founder of Kolkata and that August 24, 1690 could not be identified as the city’s definitive date of birth. The city, it found, had evolved gradually from settlements that existed before Charnock’s arrival.

For real estate and urban history, the episode offers a particularly relevant lesson. Major cities rarely emerge from a single event. They develop through the interaction of land ownership, trade, transport links, existing communities, infrastructure and successive waves of development.

August 24 therefore marks not the birth of Kolkata, but an important moment in the long transformation of three riverside settlements into one of South Asia’s great metropolitan centres.