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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 July 2025
Gadi ghoda phuler toda / ei tin nie Uttarpara
(Vehicles, horses, bouquets / the three make up Uttarpara).
If any town or village is ambitious of attracting the applause of the Majesty of Great Britain in India, Who is greater than even the Emperor of Delhi was in his palmiest day of glory, it must first deserve, by the means by which Ooterparah has been reclaimed from mud village into a smiling garden, the splendid honour.
—Mary Carpenter, Six Months in India (1868)The loss is not personal, it affects the whole [of ] India which has lost a statesman, politician, patriot, and philanthropist.
—Prince Muhammad Bakhtiyar Shah, on the death of Joykrishna Mukherjee (S. Mukherjee 2009)The middle of the nineteenth century witnessed the rapid growth of municipal towns in British India. Act 26 of 1850 provided for the establishment of municipalities if two-thirds of the inhabitants of a locality applied for it. According to the Act, municipal responsibilities included conservation, road repairs, lighting, the framing of by-laws and their enforcement by means of fines, and the levying of indirect taxes. Thereafter, rudimentary municipal organisations emerged in 352 towns and villages in the Bombay Province. In Bengal, there were only four – Serampore, Uttarpara, Nasirabad and Sherpore – but numbers increased rapidly after the passage of the District Municipal Improvement Act (1864), the District Town Act (1868) and the Bengal Municipal Act (1876). By 1881, Bengal had 138 municipal boards (Tinker 1968). In south Bengal, the fifty-mile radius around the metropolis of Calcutta (now Kolkata) contained a large concentration of new municipalities. Across the river from Calcutta, along the riparian tract on the west bank of the Hooghly River, spatially contiguous municipalities emerged north of Howrah.
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