Fort William, Kolkata: Two Forts, Plassey Money and the Vijay Durg Name

Fort William Kolkata is the East India Company’s citadel on the east bank of the Hooghly, begun after the Battle of Plassey in 1757 and today the headquarters of the Indian Army’s Eastern Command. It is the second fort of that name in the city. The first stood a little to the north, and its fall to Siraj-ud-Daula in 1756 is what made the second one necessary. Since mid-December 2024 the Army has called the fort Vijay Durg.

Most readers carry one picture in their head: a single building where the Black Hole happened and where the Army sits today. That building doesn’t exist. The Black Hole belongs to the old fort, which is long gone, while the fort on the Maidan has never faced a siege. The name also outgrew the walls and became the formal name of the Bengal government. And Vijay Durg in Kolkata isn’t Vijaydurg in Maharashtra, the Maratha sea fort it’s named after. Keep these apart and the story reads in a straight line, from trading post to seat of empire.

Fort William Kolkata at a glance

Fort William is a land fort on a river bank. It’s a bastioned citadel laid out as an irregular octagon, with five sides facing the land and three facing the Hooghly. These are the facts worth fixing first, with the dates as the sources give them.

Why there were two Fort Williams

There were two forts called Fort William, and they did different jobs. The first was a fortified warehouse that failed its only real test in 1756. The second was a planned citadel, sited and designed around the lessons of that failure.

The first fort, 1696 to 1706

The East India Company returned to Sutanuti on the Hooghly under Job Charnock in 1690. In 1696, when the revolt of Subha Singh, a zamindar of Burdwan, grew serious, the English asked the Nawab for leave to fortify their settlement and got it. The fort rose on the river bank, on ground now occupied by the General Post Office and the Custom House.

The name came with a promotion. In 1699 the Company made Bengal a separate Presidency, a regional government with its own President and Council, and the next year the rising fort was named after the reigning king, William III. The Imperial Gazetteer dates the fort’s completion to 1702, while Banglapedia carries the work on to 1706, when the factory house at the center of the fort was finished. Both are right about different parts of the job.

It looked stronger than it was. The Company records that C.R. Wilson collected in 1906 note that no ditch was ever dug round it, and that a church and several houses outside the walls overlooked it. The Directors in London put it bluntly in 1713: the fort made “a very pompous show to the waterside by high turrets of lofty buildings” but had no real strength.

A fix was discussed before 1756 and went nowhere. A Company engineer, reviewing a plan by one Monsieur Forrestie for fortifying Calcutta, pointed out that a proper fort needed an esplanade: open, level ground running at least 100 yards beyond its outer works, so that nobody could approach under cover. In Calcutta that meant pulling down houses through the heart of the town. The Directors agreed that the rules used on the Coromandel coast might not suit Calcutta, and the town stayed pressed up against the walls.

The fall of Calcutta in 1756

In June 1756 the young Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daula, marched on Calcutta. Britannica gives his reason plainly: the Company had not stopped fortifying the town, which it was doing against its European rivals as the Seven Years’ War approached. The irony is sharp. The fortification work provoked the attack, and the fort itself couldn’t withstand it.

The Imperial Gazetteer describes the collapse. The Indian troops deserted and the Europeans were driven into the fort, which proved practically indefensible because the surrounding buildings masked its guns, meaning the houses stood so close that they blocked the guns’ line of fire. Governor Roger Drake and many officials left for the ships on 19 June, and the remaining garrison under John Zephaniah Holwell surrendered.

Siraj-ud-Daula ordered that Calcutta be known as Alinagar. The Company’s hold looked finished. Robert Clive and Admiral Watson retook the town early in 1757.

The Black Hole, and what historians dispute

The episode everyone remembers happened on the night of 20 June 1756. After the surrender, Holwell and the other European prisoners were locked in the fort’s lockup for petty offenders, a room about 18 feet by 14 with two small windows, known as the Black Hole. Many of them died of heat and suffocation before morning.

The numbers are where care is needed. Holwell’s own account says 146 were shut in and 23 came out alive, and the Imperial Gazetteer repeats his figures. In 1915 a British schoolmaster, J.H. Little, questioned Holwell’s reliability as a witness. A 1959 study by Brijen Gupta concluded that the incident did happen, but that about 64 people were confined and 21 survived. Britannica’s reading of this work is that the nawab’s part was negligence alone.

The story mattered long after the night itself. It became a set piece of imperial memory, and Lord Curzon had a marble replica of Holwell’s memorial put up in Calcutta. For an answer, the safe line is the one the evidence supports: a real episode, whose figures rest on one survivor’s account and remain disputed.

How Plassey paid for the new fort

The present fort was built with the proceeds of Plassey. After the Battle of Plassey on 23 June 1757, the new Nawab, Mir Jafar, paid heavy compensation for the losses of 1756 and gave the Company the zamindari of the Twenty-four Parganas. Part of that money cleared a village and laid the foundations of the fort that stands today, on lines traced by Robert Clive.

Clearing Gobindpur

The site lay on the river bank well south of the old fort, in the middle of Gobindpur, one of the three villages the Company had bought in 1698. H.E.A. Cotton’s history of the city records that its people were compensated and given land elsewhere in the town, Kumartuli and Sobhabazar among them. The jungle around the site was cleared as well, and that cleared ground became the Maidan, Kolkata’s great open park.

This is where the lesson of 1756 becomes visible. The old fort had lost partly because houses crowded its guns, and the new one sat in open ground. The Imperial Gazetteer credits the clearing of the jungle round the fort with the formation of the Maidan. By the early 1900s Fort William and the Maidan together, 1,283 acres, were under the military authorities, who also controlled building on the Maidan.

The records don’t say in so many words that the Maidan was planned as a field of fire. But the connection is hard to miss: the Maidan gave the new fort the esplanade the old one never got, on a far larger scale.

An engineer, an estimate and a long build

The work began under John Brohier, an engineer who had taken over the fortification work at Fort St David on the Coromandel coast in 1751. In March 1757, after Clive and Watson took the French settlement at Chandernagore, Brohier carried out its demolition. Cotton says he began at Calcutta at the end of October 1757; Banglapedia says the Bengal authorities called for his estimate in September 1758, and he put the cost of finishing the citadel at 21 to 22 lakh rupees.

Brohier didn’t see it through. He was arrested on a charge of fraud, released on parole and then disappeared. The work went on. By early 1761 the fort was reported almost complete except for the gateways, but labor stayed short, and the Company’s engineer was still complaining in 1762 of a constant want of workmen.

When was it finished? This trips up almost everyone, because the sources disagree. The Imperial Gazetteer and Cotton, both writing in 1907, give about 1773. Banglapedia says the bulk of the work was done by 1780 and that the fort was ready for occupation in Warren Hastings’s time. Most modern accounts, including the 2025 news reports on the renaming, give 1781.

The safe formula is that the main building ran from 1757-58 into the late 1770s, with a second major phase from the 1860s to the end of that century. The Gazetteer puts the total cost at a reputed two million pounds sterling, half a million of it spent protecting the river face from erosion.

The defenses, in the order an attacker meets them

Fort William follows the bastioned system of European military engineering, the design that gives such forts their star-like outline. A bastion is an angled platform projecting from the wall. From it, gunners can fire along the face of the neighboring wall, so an attacker who reaches the foot of the wall still has nowhere to hide. Approach from the city side and the defenses come in this order.

1. Open ground. The Maidan gave an approaching force no cover for a long way out, which was exactly what the old fort had lacked.
2. The ditch. Banglapedia describes a ditch round the fort that was usually kept full of water let in through a sluice from the river. It holds an attacker at the point where the bastions’ guns bear on him.
3. The walls. The brick-and-mortar outline is an irregular octagon, five sides to the land and three to the river. With bastions at the angles, every stretch of wall could be covered by fire from its neighbors.
4. The gates. These were the only way through the ring, and their names still carry the fort’s history.
5. The river face. Three sides look onto the Hooghly, which was both a supply line and a threat. The half-million pounds spent against erosion went into this face.

Accounts differ on the count of gates. Banglapedia gives seven entry points, while the 2025 reports list six:

• Chowringhee Gate
• Plassey Gate
• Calcutta Gate
• Water Gate
• Treasury Gate
• St George’s Gate, the south gate, now Shivaji Gate

Inside, the early barracks were single-storied, and there was a garrison church dedicated to St Peter. Water supply and drainage stayed poor, and disease was a constant problem until new barracks and medical facilities came in the second half of the 19th century.

Then comes the test result. Banglapedia’s verdict is that the new Fort William never stood a siege and never fired a gun at an enemy from its ramparts. By the time it was finished, the Company was already the strongest power in eastern India, so the fort’s real work was to deter and to show who ruled Bengal. Banglapedia calls it a showpiece fortress, and the description is fair.

How the name outgrew the fort

For most of the Company’s rule, “Fort William” meant a government as much as a building. The name moved from the walls into the titles of government, education and law, and these titles carry many of the dates worth remembering.

The Presidency of Fort William

The Bengal Presidency’s formal name was the Presidency of Fort William in Bengal. When the Regulating Act of 1773 created a Governor-General, Warren Hastings became Governor-General not of India but of the Presidency of Fort William in Bengal, with authority over the Company’s other possessions. So the first Governor-General held a title with a fort in it. The Charter Act of 1833 turned the office into the Governor-General of India, first held by Lord William Bentinck.

Fort William College, 1800

Lord Wellesley founded Fort William College in 1800. Despite the name, it wasn’t a military school. It trained the Company’s newly arrived civil servants, most of them between 15 and 17 years old, in Indian languages, history and administration before they were posted. Each major language had its own department, with a European professor and Indian pandits and munshis as tutors. Three of the department heads are worth knowing:

• Hindustani: John Borthwick Gilchrist.
• Sanskrit: H.T. Colebrooke.
• Bengali and the other vernaculars: William Carey, a missionary.

The college mattered most for what it did to Indian prose. Its pandits, Ramram Basu and Mrityunjay Vidyalankar among them, worked with the professors to standardize Bengali prose, and a run of printing presses followed, beginning with the Serampore Mission Press, set up in 1800.

The Directors disliked the college because Wellesley had set it up without their sanction, and in 1806 they opened the East India College in England instead; it moved to Haileybury in 1809. Fort William College survived as a language school. Bentinck abolished its professorships in 1830 and its council in 1831, and the Dalhousie administration formally dissolved it in 1854.

The High Court of Judicature at Fort William

The name reached the courts too. The Calcutta High Court was created by Letters Patent dated 14 May 1862 as the High Court of Judicature at Fort William, and it opened on 1 July 1862 with Sir Barnes Peacock as its first Chief Justice. The court’s own history still describes it as formerly known by that name.

Fort William today: Eastern Command and the Vijay Durg name

Fort William is the headquarters of the Indian Army’s Eastern Command, and since mid-December 2024 the Army has called it Vijay Durg. Durg means fort and vijay means victory, so the new name reads as “victory fort”. The Command is responsible for the Army’s formations in the eastern and north-eastern states, and its corps are set out in the Army corps and headquarters note.

What was renamed, and when

The renaming was an Army decision taken in mid-December 2024 and made public on 5 February 2025. The Defence Public Relations Officer in Kolkata, Wing Commander Himanshu Tiwari, told The Hindu that the decision was made in mid-December, that communications had since stopped using the old name, and that a formal announcement was still pending. Three names changed:

• Fort William, the headquarters itself, became Vijay Durg.
• Kitchener House, inside the fort, became Manekshaw House.
• St George’s Gate, the south gate, became Shivaji Gate.

The reason given, as ThePrint reported it, was to shed the colonial legacy and move towards Indianization of the forces. The new name is borrowed from Vijaydurg, the Maratha sea fort on Maharashtra’s Sindhudurg coast, which is one of the 12 forts in the Maratha Military Landscapes of India inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 2025.

By September 2025 the new name was in official use. All India Radio’s news service reported that the Prime Minister would open the 16th Combined Commanders’ Conference at the Eastern Command headquarters at Vijay Durg, the erstwhile Fort William, and PIB confirmed the inauguration for 15 September 2025. The renaming also sits inside a wider effort to retire colonial-era customs in the forces, a line the Army continued with its new dress manual.

Status and the debate

The fort is a working military headquarters held by the Army, so access is the Army’s decision. It isn’t a UNESCO World Heritage property, and it doesn’t appear on India’s Tentative List either.

The renaming has two readings, and both deserve a hearing. One sees it as ending a borrowed name on a working Indian headquarters, in step with the drive to retire colonial customs elsewhere in the forces. The other worries that erasing names makes it harder to read a place’s history on the ground. It is wise to hold both. The name on the gate has changed, but the record of 1696, 1756 and 1757 hasn’t, and that record is what an answer needs.

How to study Fort William Kolkata for exams

Fort William sits where three parts of the syllabus meet:

• GS Paper I, modern history: the Company’s rise in Bengal, from the 1756 crisis to Plassey and the Regulating Act.
• GS Paper I, art and culture: colonial military architecture and the bastioned fort.
• Current affairs: the Vijay Durg renaming and the wider push to retire colonial names in the forces.

It is tested through the processes around it rather than as a monument. The 2013 Essay paper offered “Is the Colonial mentality hindering India’s success?“, and the renaming debate is exactly the kind of example such an essay needs. History Optional Paper I in 2014 asked candidates to explain “The Battle of Plassey that decided the fate of Bengal was won by Clive through intrigues.” In Prelims, History accounts for 184 of the 1,403 questions in the Prelims question bank from 2013 to 2026.

For revision, fix these:

• 1696: leave to fortify, after Subha Singh’s revolt; 1700: the name Fort William, after William III.
• 20 June 1756: the Black Hole night, with Holwell’s 146 and 23 set against Gupta’s estimate of about 64 and 21.
• 1757-58: the new fort begun on cleared Gobindpur, on lines traced by Clive, with Plassey compensation money.
• Completion: about 1773 in the Imperial Gazetteer, the bulk by 1780 in Banglapedia, 1781 in most modern accounts.
• Plan: an irregular octagon, five sides to the land and three to the river, with a water ditch fed by a sluice.
• 1773: Hastings becomes Governor-General of the Presidency of Fort William in Bengal; 1800: Fort William College.
• December 2024: renamed Vijay Durg, with Manekshaw House and Shivaji Gate inside.

The common confusions are few, and each has a clean way to keep it apart:

• Old fort or new fort: the Black Hole belongs to the old fort near today’s General Post Office, not the fort on the Maidan.
• Fort William or Fort St George: Calcutta and Bengal against Madras and the Coromandel coast.
• Vijay Durg or Vijaydurg: the Kolkata headquarters against the Maratha sea fort it’s named after.
• Fort William College or a military academy: the college trained civil servants, not soldiers.

A comparison with sibling forts helps the picture settle:

Fort William rewards the aspirant who reads it as a process rather than a monument. The old fort’s fall, the new fort’s cleared ground and the name’s spread into government tell one story, a trading company turning into a state. Learn that arc once, and the fort gives you material for Plassey, the Regulating Act and the decolonization debate alike.

Frequently Asked Questions

Practice Questions

Prelims

1. Consider the following statements about Fort William, Kolkata: 1. The fort captured by Siraj-ud-Daula in 1756 is the same structure that stands on the Maidan today. 2. The present fort was built on the site of the village of Gobindpur, cleared after the Battle of Plassey. Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

• (a) 1 only
• (b) 2 only
• (c) Both 1 and 2
• (d) Neither 1 nor 2

Answer: (b) The 1756 fort stood further north and is long gone; the present fort was begun in 1757-58 on cleared Gobindpur.

2. Consider the following statements: 1. Under the Regulating Act of 1773, Warren Hastings became Governor-General of the Presidency of Fort William in Bengal. 2. Fort William College was set up by Lord Cornwallis to train army officers. Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

• (a) 1 only
• (b) 2 only
• (c) Both 1 and 2
• (d) Neither 1 nor 2

Answer: (a) The college was founded by Lord Wellesley in 1800 to train civil servants, not soldiers.

3. The Indian Army renamed Fort William in Kolkata as Vijay Durg after a fort that is:

• (a) Shivaji’s hill capital in the Sahyadri
• (b) a Maratha coastal fort on Maharashtra’s Sindhudurg coast
• (c) a Siddi island fort off Murud
• (d) the Qutb Shahi citadel near Hyderabad

Answer: (b) Vijaydurg is a Maratha sea fort on the Sindhudurg coast and one of the 12 forts of the Maratha Military Landscapes.

4. Consider the following statements about the Black Hole episode: 1. Holwell’s account gave 146 prisoners and 23 survivors. 2. Brijen Gupta’s 1959 study concluded that the incident never took place. 3. The episode took place in June 1756. Which of the statements given above are correct?

• (a) 1 and 2 only
• (b) 1 and 3 only
• (c) 2 and 3 only
• (d) 1, 2 and 3

Answer: (b) Gupta accepted that the incident happened but estimated about 64 confined and 21 survivors.

5. Which of the following carried the name Fort William in its formal title? 1. The Calcutta High Court at its creation in 1862 2. The college founded by Lord Wellesley in 1800 3. The first fortified English settlement at Madras. Select the correct answer using the code given below:

• (a) 1 and 2 only
• (b) 2 and 3 only
• (c) 1 and 3 only
• (d) 1, 2 and 3

Answer: (a) The Madras fort was Fort St George; the court and the college both carried the Fort William name.

Mains

1. Why did the armies of the British East India Company – mostly comprising of Indian soldiers – win consistently against the more numerous and better equipped armies of the then Indian rulers? Give reasons. (10 marks, 150 words) Previous year: Mains 2022, GS Paper I.
2. The old Fort William fell in 1756, while the new one never faced a siege. Explain what this contrast reveals about the East India Company’s transition from trader to ruler in Bengal. (15 marks, 250 words)
3. Trace how the name Fort William came to stand for the Company’s government in Bengal between 1699 and 1833. (10 marks, 150 words)
4. Examine the contribution of Fort William College to the development of Indian vernacular prose. Why did the college decline after 1806? (15 marks, 250 words)
5. Renaming colonial-era military landmarks such as Fort William is part of a wider effort to shed colonial legacies in the armed forces. Critically examine the case for and against such renaming. (15 marks, 250 words)