Where once Kolkata’s trams rumbled through busy streets, now only two routes remain of the network that shaped how this city grew, protested, loved and, more than once, buried its poets.
That’s probably about to change. The new BJP government in West Bengal said last week that it wants to do so Revive the tram networkWhich stopped most of the services in September 2024.
“We want to revive the environment-friendly public transport system. RITES (Rail India Technical and Economic Service) has been asked to conduct a survey,” state transport minister Arjun Singh said on Sunday.
Officials say the plan is to refurbish existing tracks and preserve the network as heritage infrastructure, as well as attract tourists and offer eco-friendly transportation options. The new trams will be modeled after those operating in Australia and parts of Europe.
A touching piece of history
Trams first needed roads, but Calcutta did not have them. Until the 18th century, the city’s streets and alleys were narrow and “kutcha” or unpaved. According to Bisvendu Ghosh in his 2023 doctoral thesis, From Palki to Automobile: A ‘Transport Revolution’ in Calcutta, 1827–1947, on the transport history of Calcutta, no horse carts could use them, and bullock carts, palanquins and foot-carts filled that gap.
The Circular Road, built in 1742 and paved in 1799, was the first paved road in the city.
But even then trams did not come easily. According to Ghosh’s paper submitted to the History Department of Jadavpur University, as early as 1803, the British-era Governor-General Lord Wellesley had constituted a thirty-member committee to promote road construction in the city.
In 1865, Bombay received its first license for a horse-drawn tram, but the project collapsed. Therefore Calcutta, as Kolkata was called at that time, reached there first. Its inaugural horse-drawn tram ran in 1873, a 3.9 kilometer line along the Hooghly between Sealdah and Armenian Ghat Street.
But the Sealdah line was not for the public. In the words of Ghosh, it was conceived as “a lifeline for the trade and commerce center of Calcutta”, built to carry goods from the riverside wharves and wharves to the city’s warehouses and the Sealdah terminus.
According to an HT report of October 29, 1980, which marked the centenary of the tramways, each car was pulled by a pair of sturdy Australian pullers and served suburban merchants’ stores in Showa Bazaar and Strand Road.
The plan did not come to fruition. When officials realized that Calcutta’s port canals were too badly silted up to reliably serve goods traffic, the line was opened to passengers.
However, this arrangement could not last long. lose roughly ₹500 per month and designed for ₹Rs 1.5 lakh against the approved budget ₹1 lakh, the service was discontinued in November 1873. Horses also could not withstand the Indian summer and many of them died due to extreme exhaustion at that time.
Calcutta tried a second time in 1880. Independent promoters had submitted revival proposals since 1876, and on October 2, 1879, the Calcutta Corporation signed an agreement with the newly formed Calcutta Tramways Company Limited (CTC) – founded by Dillwyn Parish, Alfred Parish and Robinson Sutter – for rights on eight fixed routes, as Ghosh’s paper notes.
The construction work on this progressed rapidly. According to Calcutta Tramways, the Bowbazar line was certified for operation on 27 October 1880 and the Hare Street line on 19 November, before the formal opening of a long, metre-gauge route running from Sealdah to Armenian Ghat via Bowbazar Street, Dalhousie Square and Strand Road. The company was formed and registered in London on December 20, 1880, although its founding date was November 1 of the same year.
There were many people who were not convinced about the service.
A 1980 HT report quoted The Statesman (then called The Statesman and Friend of India) at the time as saying, “Tramways are to commence operations on the 1st, but how successful it will prove remains to be seen. The trial trips now being conducted have proved satisfactory.”
The fear did not last.
Then in 1882 steam engines arrived and brought chaos with them. Six accidents occurred in the month-long trial on the Chowringhee section, although no deaths were recorded. According to Ghosh’s paper records, steam trams were stopped from running after sunset due to lack of street lighting. The noise of the engines was also so loud that horses pulling other nearby carriages were frightened, and some European residents formally objected to the smoke and noise. “Terrible”, the HT report said, was in the words of the city’s “white town”, although many Indians welcomed the speed of commuting.
The protests won for a short time, before electricity arrived in 1902 and reached every route on the network by 1905, and the horses returned to duty “with honour”, the same HT report noted.
Also read: Government will bring back AC trams in Kolkata; New route may connect Dakshineswar, Kalighat temples
electric tram took over
Introduced in 1902, electric trams made Kolkata home to the oldest continuously running electric tram network in Asia. Madras was the first state in India to get electric trams in 1895, but that system did not last for a century.
The first service to Kolkata ran from Esplanade to Kidderpore and later extended to Kalighat.
Like any technology, electrical energy brought with it a new set of problems. According to Ghosh’s paper, the high power drawn for the tram disrupted laboratory work at nearby Presidency College. Both were believed to be connected to a transformer near the premises.
The trams also established a visible class divide. There were two ticketed compartments – a first class with padded seats, overhead fans and blue lights, and a second class with plain wooden seats and red lights.
Ghosh’s thesis cites author Kshitindranath Tagore’s documentation of public protest against this partition.
The tram as a colonial legacy and its goal
The tram was a modern convenience, but it was also a visible symbol of the colonial regime that had built it.
And so, attacks on trams began as early as the Swadeshi movement of 1905.
Ghosh says that trams were set on fire when nationalist leaders were arrested during the Civil Disobedience Movement, and also during the Quit India Movement, when overhead wires were cut and tramcars were burnt. Some local policemen were also believed to be involved in the arson attacks.
The thesis reads, “So when it came to protesting against oppressive colonial rule, local people did not hesitate to destroy their primary means of surface transportation, which they otherwise used in normal times.”
Then, service was also disrupted due to a strike by employees. For example, due to a strike in 1921, tram services in Calcutta were suspended for 64 consecutive days.
According to a BBC report, even after independence, the Calcutta Tramways Company remained under London management, even being listed on the London Stock Exchange until 1968. But day-to-day control had passed to the state just a year earlier. The first United Front government took over the running of the company in 1967 after the British owners stopped paying salaries to employees, HT reported in 1980.
CTC eventually transformed into West Bengal Transport Corporation Limited and has been running tram services since 2016.
Two anniversaries, and an uncertain future
Kolkata’s trams have celebrated at least two big birthdays. On 1 November 1980, the city celebrated a centenary of the Calcutta Tramways Company, with the then Chief Minister Jyoti Basu inaugurating an exhibition on its history.
The organizers wanted to put the city’s only surviving horse-drawn tram car on display, but it was by then in a museum in Bombay and the CTC was not sure it could be brought back in time for the event. The fleet then consisted of 438 cars, with an average of 320 cars per day, and carried approximately nine million passengers, subsidized by the state. ₹40 lakh per month.
A ₹A ₹102 crore modernization plan was underway, promising 75 new cars and 165 refurbished cars – which the CTC, with typical good humour, called “a bounty from the oil crisis”.
According to the BBC, forty-three years later, in 2023, Kolkata celebrated 150 years of the first Sealdah-Armenian Ghat line, with vintage trams – including a century-old wooden carriage – paraded through cake-cutting ceremonies and musical performances.
But this celebration proved to be short-lived. Within a year, in September 2024, the state government had closed down most of the network, leaving two routes that survive today: Gariahat-Esplanade and Shyambazar-Esplanade.
In culture and literature
Long before it became a heritage cause, the tram was “the lifeline of the city of Kolkata”, featuring prominently in Indian cinema. Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen included it in Mahanagar, Bari Theke Pali, Interview, Calcutta 71 and Padatik. And recently, Piku, Kahaani, Barfi got trams! And young.
Bengali literature returned to him equally many times. Jibanananda Das’s poetry uses the tram to highlight the solitude and tranquil rhythms of urban life, nowhere more so than in Tram Line-er Dhaare, translated as Along the Tram Line.
A popular translated version reads:
“I walk along the tram line: the night is now deep
I hear the whispers of some past life:
‘You’re like a broken tram-
There is no depot, you don’t need a salary
Alas, when did this happen!’
that old life sinks behind
Star in the sky, in the dark.
It is often taken as a cruel irony that Das, who often talked about trams, died after being hit by a tram in 1954.
As Ghosh’s paper notes, trams were omnipresent in Bengali prose as well. Leela, the lead heroine of Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay’s Aparajito, describes the electric tram running from her home to Apu as a vehicle that needs neither horses nor steam engines, but is propelled by an overhead wire. Bharat, the protagonist of Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Prothom Alo, describes the tram as more reliable and faster than the steamships running in Hooghly.
A September 2005 HT feature on Tramjatra – a carnival celebrated by Calcutta and Melbourne, two cities where modes of transport have survived the passage of time – chronicled Kolkata’s obsession with trams in an eponymous book by Soumitra Das. While the other Indian metropolises of Bombay and Madras had long ago discontinued the service, in Kolkata the trams, which were “woven into the cultural ethos” of the city, “continued to run on the streets”.
(With inputs from Karishma Ayaldasani and Danita Yadav)
