History
The town of Hooghly-Chuchura was founded by the Portuguese in 1579, but the district has thousands of years of heritage in the form of the great kingdom of Bhurshut. The city flourished as a trading port and some religious structures were built. One such structure is a church dedicated to a charismatic statue of the Mother Mary brought by the Portuguese.
In the 17th century, political disorder struck the city and the Mughal governor of Bengal expelled the Portuguese. The statue was lost in the river by the Portuguese when fleeing. The statue was later found by the local people on the bank of the river. The arrested Portuguese were taken to Delhi where a death sentence of trampling by elephants was decreed. When the emperor Shah Jahan heard this he ordered the priests released and granted a piece of land on the bank of the river Hoogly where the statue of the Mother Mary was reestablished. There a church was constructed to house the statue, which still receives pilgims today. The church was renovated in 1980s and has been declared as a basilica by the authority of Rome.
In 1656 the Dutch erected a factory on the site of the town. At that time Kolkata was the principal settlement in Dutch Bengal, used as a base for the Dutch intra-Asian opium trade.
In 1759 a British force under Colonel Forde was attacked at the Battle of Chinsurah by the garrison of Chinsura on its march to Chandernagore. In less than half an hour the Dutch attackers were routed. In 1795, during the Napoleonic wars, the settlement was occupied by a British garrison. At the peace of 1814 it was restored to the Dutch. It was among the cessions in India made by the king of the Netherlands in 1825 in exchange for the British possessions in Sumatra.
Both Chinsurah and Hooghly played a role in the Bengal renaissance and the Indian independence movement. "Vande Mataram", India's national song, was composed by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay at Joraghat in Chinsurah. Nazrul Islam's revolutionary songs were penned while he was imprisoned by the British in Hooghly Jail.
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