I Visited India's Cultural Capital - Kolkata 🇮🇳

Back when the British Empire was dominating the whole world, this place was called the Empire's second city after London and today it's called the cultural capital of India. I'm in Kolkata right now and in this video we're going to take a better look at this historic and dynamic city. Right now it's 1 30 p.m and I haven't had breakfast yet today because for the last 24 hours I was non-stop scripting this story that I'm about to tell you. It's time to go to one of the more iconic buildings in Kolkata. Hopefully I can find one of the classic Kolkata yellow taxis for that. I'm in one of the iconic taxis of Kolkata and this one definitely looks very different from any taxi in Bangladesh for sure. The back seats and the front seats are both like one huge seat and it's pretty run down. My favorite part about this whole thing is that there isn't really an AC but there's like a little mini fan pointing to the back. Jesus Christ, I almost forgot my bag in the back seat. This is why I don't like rush things. In front of the Victoria Memorial behind me and this was built like 100 years ago and it's a very iconic building all over Kolkata. The special thing about this is that it's entirely made out of marble and it was sort of structured behind the Taj Mahal. I'm actually not gonna try to go in because the line to get a ticket in here is absolutely crazy and I don't want to spend the next two hours in that. So this building was basically built to commemorate Empress Victoria after she died and this is a really pretty building but it's not the most historic building so right now I'm going to go to another building that's a lot more important. Right now I am in Prinsip Ghat trying this kind of food. They have the name I've never heard of before. It's got like a lot of like dry nuts and other stuff. I don't know how to describe it. They got something very similar to this called chalmuri in Bangladesh but this has carrots in it. That's the biggest difference. This place, Prinsip Ghat, is basically this like mini harbor-like thing with like small ferries that's right on the Hooghly river and the Hooghly river is probably the most important thing in shaping the history of Kolkata because right here was one of the first ever trade posts by the East Indian Company way back in the day. In case if you're wondering why there are huge buildings dedicated to British empresses and why I'm talking about the East Indian Company which is essentially a British company, here's a really quick but important history lesson for you. So up until the end of let's say the 16th 17th century this whole area, the Indian subcontinent, was controlled by the Mughal empire but as the early 18th century was starting that Mughal empire was declining in strength. This was becoming basically a fractured empire with not a lot of control and a lot of diffusion of power. That's when this company called the East Indian Trading Company or the British East Indian Trading Company later came in and started to set up trading posts and they're not the only ones by the way. There were trading companies by the French and by a lot of other countries in Europe and these were private companies that were sponsored by the government but they were private at the beginning of it. So these companies were laying down trading posts everywhere but they laid a very important one here and then they went on to buy on three villages that were here and combined them to make the first ever city of Kolkata let's say and they started developing it as a proper city and don't get me wrong people were living here for 2,000 years before that but the modern day city of Kolkata has really its root to that colonial time when this East India Company set base over here and you know how much the British were just involved in building the city can be seen from the names of places. If you go to any other big city in India or even Bangladesh that used to be under the Brits at least the places and the streets sound like the local language you know over here streets are called things like Park Street or Central Avenue that doesn't sound at all and this company went on to do some pretty ridiculous things they grew so much they expanded to such an extent that by the end of the 1700s this company was doing half the trade in the whole world half the trade they're responsible for it that's freaking crazy for one little company they colonized not just the Indian subcontinent but parts of Southeast Asia and even parts in the Persian Gulf and you know eventually this company wasn't even a company anymore it just became a managing agency for the British government but in order to make its first trading post last year and to protect it from attacks by the French or just by people in the Mughal Empire that didn't like them they had to build a fort which was very hard to do until they finally did it a little further behind me there 200 meters away. So I wanted to show you guys the fort that's Fort Williams that the Brits built in the 1690s which is 500 meters that way but I was trying to enter and I just found out that that is definitely not a tourist area because that's still a fort inside a military complex and I can't get in that explains all the barbed wire behind me there but let me tell you the story of this so in the 1690s the Brits came and built this fort which gave them some teeth on the ground in this part of the world to protect themselves and their trade and that essentially led to the rapid urbanization of this whole area and this whole area became the center of all British trade in this subcontinent and then in 1773 the British East India Company established Calcutta which was the name of Kolkata back then as the capital of British East India and it stayed that way for almost 150 years and when you think about India now in the biggest cities you probably think about Delhi and Mumbai but back in the day it used to be Kolkata and honestly India's biggest city was Kolkata all the way up until 1980s but a lot happened in those 140 or 50 years when Kolkata was the capital one of the big things that happened was that in 1857 there was the Indian rebellion as the Brits call it or the Indian mutiny or the first Indian war of independence as the people from here call it which is a lot of Indians rose up against the British East India Company because of their unfair practices what the Brits did in response to that was that they said like okay East India Company you messed up you gotta get out of here and we gotta go no that's not what they said they said that the East India Company needs to transfer all ownership of this area this huge colony directly to the British government and the British government continued to colonize and rule this area for almost another hundred years after that but right after the British government took over a lot of big changes happened and a lot of it was spurred by the industrial revolution that was full-on underway all over the world and also in British India with the industrial revolution Kolkata there came cars and buses and trams and Kolkata actually has the oldest tram network in all of Asia so back when it started I think it was around 1873 it was controlled or run by horses for like I think 20 years and then for 10 more years it was run by steam then at the very start of the 20th century it switched to the electric network unfortunately it seems like there's less and less trams every single time I come here I remember when I used to come here like 20-25 years ago there were a lot more trams on the streets than there are now on the flip side there's a lot more metro stops and metro lines so it's definitely easier to get around the city even though there are a lot less trams than there used to be but if you do want to see one of the old trams come to this tram museum right here and you can take a look at one of the ancient trams and what it used to be like to be inside them you know not everything was good about the industrial revolution in British India unlike the western countries of Britain itself or America where private investors were absorbing the risks of whatever investments that didn't work out although all the decisions were being made by the colonial administration the ultimate people who endured the risks of these risky infrastructure projects were the were the local people of the Indian subcontinent and this led to so many farmers or farm owners losing everything they have losing all their property losing jobs losing food and it also led to massive famines that killed millions and millions of people in the subcontinent so obviously people were not happy previously about the British occupation but they were more and more and more dissatisfied with what was going on and Kolkata was actually at the very center of the early stages of the Indian independence movement but it wasn't just the center of political activities it was also a huge center of culture and the arts so right now I'm at this place called Janashanko Thakurbari I know that's a mouthful for those of you who don't speak Bangla this is the place where this guy named Rabindranath Thakur was born where he grew up and where he died for those of you don't know Rabindranath Thakur is one of the top two people in the history of Bangla literature he was mostly famous for his poems and he won a noble prize for his poems and he was the first ever non-European to win a noble prize for literature anywhere in the world and he made such an impact on Bengali culture so my dad has been listening to his songs for the last 40 years and I see him listen to it every time he's at work he's a dentist and he listens to like classic Bangla music and this is someone that died 1941 or something like that even before India was independent even beyond his work as an artist he was also a very well-versed and outspoken anti-nationalist and internationalist he was very much against the British occupation of British India which included Bangladesh, India and Pakistan he was actually offered knighthood and he refused it because he was against British colonialism the national anthems for both Bangladesh and India are actually original compositions of Rabindranath Thakur but classical literature is not exactly my thing but you don't have to be into Bangla literature classical literature to appreciate the ridiculous talent that this man had and now we're going to go to one of those places which is definitely what you think about when you think of artists in Kolkata. So before you go inside this coffee house that I'm which literally means book market and this is the largest second-hand book market in all of India but now on to the coffee house this place is called Indian coffee house on the outside but I think it's called like central coffee house that's the nickname for this place and a lot of very historic coffee houses and a lot of famous artists used to come here back in the day including Oscar-winning film director Shobha Zakhoi and a very famous actress from the region. Okay so right now I'm in front of the biggest mosque in Kolkata called Nakoda Mosque. 20% of the entire population is Muslim and this is without a doubt the biggest mosque in the city. There's two huge minarets at the top with the entrance that are 150 feet high each. This place can hold 10,000 people. I'm going to try to see if I can go in and get some shots. I was able to go inside and get some shots and when I went inside and I was sitting down met some people that were super friendly that came up to me and talked to me and are asking me where I'm from and all. One thing I just really want to say is that when I walk around the streets of Kolkata it really doesn't feel like a different country. When I try the food it's almost the same food that I grew up eating. When I meet the people it's a slightly different accent but we all seem the same and we all seem the same because really we are the same. West Bengal wasn't a separate part from Bangladesh before the partition happened. It was one big region with the same culture, the same language and if you don't know the history in 1947 when India became independent immediately it was separated into Pakistan and India depending on religion. And my parents, my grandparents were mostly staying in the Indian side today and had to move to what is Bangladesh. Both my parents on my dad's side actually lived in this place called Nodia, not too far from here. My dad's older brothers and sisters actually were born there. My mom's side is actually from Bangladesh but her dad also lived in India back before the partition. We're the same people essentially but we're separated by this border and it's not like an open border like let's say Czech Republic or Slovakia. It's a very very hard border with a fence and a wall and all that stuff and no one can still cross that because you need a passport and a whole visa process to go around. Most working class people are uneducated, they don't have a passport, they'll never see all these other people who are just like them. It's kind of sad. Hope that changes sometimes but until that does we'll have to deal with the world that we live in today. Anyways that's it for this one. If you like this video don't forget to hit the like button. If you want to see more feel free to subscribe to my channel. If you want to catch my adventures in real time feel free to follow me on Instagram, it's back. I'll catch you guys in the next one from probably India.