page_title: New Market, Kolkata
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: New Market, Kolkata / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Original description: "Probably the largest market in the East is the New Market. Convering several blocks in the downtown area, the 2,000 stalls offer most anything you could ask for, wartime shortages excepted. In addition to all the items appealing to the local and tourist trade, the market contains giant food departments." The South Asia Section of the Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania recently acquired from a bookdealer a photograph album consisting of 60 photographs of Calcutta taken most likely between 1945-1946. The photographer, Mr. Clyde Waddell, also provided the interesting glosses accompanying each photograph. Several attested copies of this work has emerged including one with a 'title page' held by the Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana. Mr. Waddell was a military photographer. Many of his captions sound like annotations that would be found in a typical military magazine. The album begins with several general long shots of Calcutta and ends with a picture of dhobi-s (washermen) washing clothes. The text accompanying the last photograph also sounds as if the author intended to finish with that picture of one of the "great mysteries of India." The annotations have been included because of their intrinsic interest not only to the photographs but to a 'typical' American impression of India at this time.
context_page_description: New Market is a market in Kolkata situated on Lindsay Street, beside Free School Street. Although primarily "New Market" referred to the original enclosed market, today in local parlance, the entire shopping area is often known as "New Market".
context_section_description: Some of the earliest English quarters of Calcutta were in an area known then as Dalhousie Square. Terretti and Lalbazar nearby were the customary shopping haunts of the British. Later settlements arose in Kashaitola, Dharmatala and Chowringhee.
  By the 1850s, British colonists held sway in Calcutta and displayed increasing contempt for the "natives" and an aversion to brushing shoulders with them at the bazaars. In 1871, moved by a well orchestrated outcry from English residents, a committee of the Calcutta Corporation began to contemplate a market which would be the preserve of Calcutta's British residents. Spurred by the committee's deliberations, the Corporation purchased Lindsay Street, made plans to raze the old  Fenwick's Bazar located there, and commissioned Richard Roskell Bayne, an architect of the East Indian Railway Company, to design the Victorian Gothic market complex which would take its place. It began to take shape in 1873, and Bayne was honoured for his achievement with a Rs. 1,000 rupee award, a large sum in the 1870s. Mackintosh Burn was the builder.
  The giant shopping arcade was thrown open to the English populace with some fanfare on 1 January 1874. News of Calcutta's first municipal market spread rapidly. Affluent colonials from all over India shopped at exclusive retailers like Ranken and Company (dressmakers), Cuthbertson and Harper (shoe-merchants)  and R.W. Newman or Thacker Spink, the famous stationers and book-dealers.
  Sir Stuart Hogg, then the Chairman of Calcutta Corporation, had shown tenacious support for the plans to build the New Market. So, 28 years later, on 2 December 1903, the market was officially named Sir Stuart Hogg Market and later shortened to Hogg Market. Bengali society, in the British era, called it Hogg Shaheber Bajaar, a name that is still in use, just as a painting of Sir Stuart Hogg still hangs in Calcutta Corporation's portrait gallery. But the earliest provisional nickname, New Market, which remained in use throughout, proved to have the most sticking power.
  New Market's growth kept pace with the city until World War II. The northern portion of the market came up in 1909 at an expense of 6 lakh rupees. Despite the gathering storm of World War II, an extension was engineered on the south flank, and the historic clock tower on the southern end of the market was  shipped over from Huddersfield and installed in the 1930s. Florists were located near the front entrance, and stalls selling fresh and preserved foods were placed towards the rear of the market. Beyond the vegetable stalls, fishmongers and slaughterhouse butchers plied their trade, and, until the mid-1970s, at the very back of the market, exotic animals from all over the British Empire could be bought as pets.
caption: New Market circa 1945
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