For being the home of the Government of Free India and the focus point of hefty forces of nationalism and patriotism, Kolkata was born not as one of the nations' innumerable settlements with histories stretching back into the dimness of the far past, but as an explicit incarnation of imperialist desire - specifically, the East India Company's desire to carve an empire using the forces of capital. As the Company's ambitions grew, so did Kolkata - till, inevitably, they went too far, and the oversized holdings of a corporation became the vast sprawl of a new colonial enterprise.

Nevertheless, as India entered the modern age, so did the city, sparking cultural renaissance, industrial revolution, and becoming the centrepoint of the nation's freedom struggle as it changed and transformed. Now, as the seat of the HSS and the movement that challenges Delhi for overlordship of an entire subcontinent, Kolkata finds itself once more the base for lofty ambitions encompassing the vastness of India.

Vastness to conquer, or vastness to be swallowed whole by...