Prior to the establishment of British Calcutta, there were three pre-existing Bengali villages in the area: Suttanutte (or Sutani) and Gobindpore (or Govindapur, which formed the nucleus of Calcutta) plus one village by the name of Kalikata, the least important of the three. It seems likely that both ‘Calcutta’ (English) and ‘Kolkata’ (Bengali) were derived from ‘Kalikata’. Kolkata’s history is intimately related to the British East India Company, which first arrived in 1690, and to British India, of which Calcutta became the capital in 1772 and remained so until 1912. The Englishman, Job Charnock, is traditionally credited with founding the city, although this notion has been challenged in recent years, mostly by Bengalis, who prefer to believe that the original three villages represented a preexisting settlement - chiefly Gobindpore. The city was occupied by a large Bengali force in 1756, immediately after which occured the infamous Black Hole of Calcutta incident. Calcutta, briefly renamed Alinagur, was quickly retaken the following year by a small British force under Sir Robert Clive. In the nineteenth century Calcutta was the centre of activity in the early stages of the national movement of independence. In 1943 the city suffered an acute famine and its port was bombed by the Japanese. In 1946 there was an outbreak of violence between Hindus and Muslims, which claimed over 2,000 lives.
Despite such challenges, Kolkata remained in the forefront of Indian prosperity up to independence and for some more years afterwards before the population pressure on infrastructure and political disturbances led to a gradual decline. A violent and bloody Marxist-Maoist movement known as the Naxal movement (after Naxalbari, the place where it first started) in the 1970s left the city badly bruised. The city’s recovery process gathered steam after India’s liberalization in the early nineties. From January 1, 2001, the local government decided to change ‘Calcutta’ to ‘Kolkata’ and passed the law legalising the name on July 30, 2001