Documenting Kolkata Heritage

Kolkata is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal and the old capital city of India during the British era. There are several important heritages. The civic administrative body, which responsible for the civic infrastructure and administration of the city of Kolkata is Kolkata Municipal Corporation or KMC (formerly Calcutta Municipal Corporation or CMC). KMC has it's own declared list of heritages, categorised in different grades. KMC has Graded heritages in four different categories as follows: Grade I, Grade IIA, Grade IIB, and Grade III, this list can be found at Kolkata Municipal Corporation's official website. In Grade I, 399 heritage out of 565 heritages, Grade IIA 162 heritages out of 176, and Grade IIB 97 heritages out of 100 heritages has no photographs in Wikimedia Commons. That comes around 658 heritages out of a total of 841 has no photographs.

Documenting Kolkata Heritage is a photo documentation project which has been planned to photograph, geo-tagged 658 number of KMC defined graded heritages which photographs are still not available in Wikimedia Commons. Kolkata Municipal Corporation's heritage list can be found HERE, on their official Website.

The heritage walk would be conducted every Saturday or Sunday in the morning each week as convenient. The assembly point for each day walk would be different, as heritages are widespread in the city. Anyone can participate in this event, regardless of photographic ability, and whether or not they are a Wikimedian and training would be given to new Wikipedians on Wikimedia Commons after each walk.

Wikidata Queries has been used to generate the list of the heritages of which photographs are not present in Wikimedia Commons based on these lists: Grade I, Grade IIA, and Grade IIB. Wikidata Queries can be found here: Grade I, Grade IIA, and Grade IIB

Architectonic memorials along with historic environment – cemeteries or graveyards have always been an irreplaceable objective for heritage study. Calcutta, during the days of British settlement and even before, had been a migrant hub for heterogeneous communities such as the Jews, Chinese, Burmese, Parsis, Armenians and even Greeks. This resulted in not only the establishment of British and Anglo-Indian burial places but also a fair number of memorial grounds for such a diverse population. Some cemeteries or graveyards cease to exist today, some no longer embrace the dead but fascinate the living and the remaining are still functional.

Our idea here is to document all the cemeteries and graveyards of Kolkata, make an index along with complete description in the wiki data item and virtual mapping of the individual graves with historical importance. Our future plan also includes photographing and geo tagging of the graves with a systematic approach.

The project was initially started with the focus to photograph the heritage of Kolkata but thereafter we planned to add other information about Kolkata to Wikidata. Recently, as a part of that initiative, we have added some information to Wikidata about Kolkata. All the streets of Kolkata (ward wise), Kolkata corporation borough offices (ward wise), list of all ponds, list of parks & squares of Kolkata have been added to Wikidata database. In future, other information about Kolkata will be added to Wikidata as part of this project. To get the complete list of Streets, Boroughs, Ponds, and Parks & Squares Click here.

Join us

Event Co-ordinator

Indrajit Das
Phone - +917003780348
WhatsApp - +919831422555

Event Dates
- Past Events – Heritage Walks

- Next Event – Heritage Walk
  - TBA