Alipore

South of Kalighat and west of Ballygunge, Alipore is South Kolkata at its most deliberately gracious, the neighbourhood of colonial Calcutta’s highest tier, its lieutenant governors, judges and wealthy merchants, who required grounds as well as houses. The result is enormous walled compounds, old trees and rare residential privacy. The name comes from Mir Jafar Ali Khan, the Nawab of Murshidabad who succeeded Siraj ud Daulah after the Battle of Plassey and was permitted by the East India Company to settle here after his 1760 abdication. The district that became the seat of colonial authority began as a grant to the man whose alliance made that authority possible.
Where they survive (many have been replaced by apartments in recent decades), Alipore’s British-era bungalows, with their wide verandahs, high ceilings, terracotta roofs and bougainvillea-draped compound walls, represent a genuine vernacular tradition. Fine examples are visible from Belvedere Road and the lanes off Judge’s Court Road.
Belvedere House, once the Lieutenant Governor’s residence, is now the National Library of India, the country’s largest by holdings (over 2.4 million volumes). Its grounds are open freely; the reading rooms, adapted from the former viceregal reception rooms, require registration to enter.
The old Alipore Jail, now the Alipore Jail Museum, held Aurobindo Ghosh during his 1908-09 detention as central accused in the Alipore Bomb Case, alongside his brother Barindra Kumar Ghosh and dozens of other Bengali revolutionary nationalists. It was here that Ghosh underwent the spiritual experience later described in his Uttarpara Speech, which eventually led him to leave politics and found his ashram in Pondicherry.