First page

 
Chinsurah trivia

Bandel Church in Hooghly (founded in 1599) is the oldest church in Bengal. This Roman Catholic Church is one of eastern India's oldest churches, and still a major centre of Catholic pilgrimage.

Armenian Church in Chinsurah (founded in 1695) is the second oldest church in Bengal.

Chinsurah Court (initially built to be the British police barrack in 1829) is the longest building in Bengal.
Cover page of the grammer book The first printed book in Bengal, 'A Grammar of the Bengali Language' by Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, was published from a small press in Hooghly in 1778.

First time any Indian side emerged victorious against an European army in history was when the Mogul army won a battle against the Portuguese troop in June of 1632 in Hooghly.

Ramram Basu (1757-1813), a resident of Chinsurah, published his book 'Raja Pratapaditya Charit' in 1801 to become the first Bengalee author of Bengali prose. He later published another book, 'Lipimala', in 1802.

For a long time (till the end of eighteenth century) Chinsurah had the only ice-field in India.

First regular train service for public in Bengal was started on the 15th of August, 1854, between Howrah and Hooghly. This is the second oldest railway line in India.

Punkahs (hand-operated fan, a fixture of the Raj in tropical India and widely popular among eighteenth and nineteenth century upper class people) were invented by a Dutch Governor of Chinsurah.

Bankim Chandra Chatterjee wrote his famous novel 'Ananda Math' (in 1880) that contains one of India's two national anthems, 'Vande Mataram' - the great patriotic hymn that aroused the entire nation to fight for its freedom - in Chinsurah.
Chinsurah Rice Research Station from satellite The 'Rice Research Station' in Chinsurah is the largest rice research center in Asia. Chinsurah Boro-II - an engineered rice from here - has now become a worldwide sensation.

Chinsurah is home to the second oldest high school in Bengal - Hooghly Collegiate School, founded in 1812.

Hooghly College, later renamed as the Hooghly Mohsin College, is the third oldest and predates even its former parent Calcutta University.

Few old soccer tournaments (Gladstone Cup, Barnard Cup) were part of the Chinsurah Maidan heritage. At the beginning of the past century, Gladstone Cup was one of the most popular tournaments of Bengal. Calcutta giant Mohun Bagan beat the British team Dalhousi 6-1 at the historic Gladstone Cup final in 1905, which paved the way for Mohun Bagan’s 2-1 victory over East Yorkshire Regiment in the 1911 IFA Shield final that eventually became a symbol of Indian nationalism.