About this stamp
On the Stamp
An old engraving, set in an oval on a red ground, of tall sailing ships on the Ganga before the old Fort William, with the words “Ganga: The River of Life” in Hindi and English and a “300 Calcutta” mark, on a ₹6 stamp.
The River and the Fort
India Post issued two stamps on 28 December 1990, ₹1 and ₹6, for three hundred years of Calcutta. The city’s beginning is traditionally dated to 24 August 1690, when Job Charnock of the East India Company returned to set up his headquarters there. The stamp looks back to eighteenth-century shipping on the Hooghly, the branch of the Ganga on which the city grew. The East India Company built the first Fort William between 1696 and 1702. The present fort, on a different site, came into use in 1781. India Post’s brochure for this issue is not online, so this text draws on Wikipedia and on the stamp itself.
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