culture
Howrah Bridge: The Story Behind Kolkata's Rabindra Setu
Commissioned in 1943 over the Hooghly, the cantilever crossing was renamed after Rabindranath Tagore in 1965.
How we reported this
No image is more tied to Kolkata than the steel span of the Howrah Bridge crossing the Hooghly river. The balanced steel cantilever structure was commissioned in 1943 and replaced an earlier pontoon bridge that had linked the two banks since the nineteenth century.
A bridge and a new name
The crossing was originally known as the New Howrah Bridge. On 14 June 1965 it was renamed Rabindra Setu after the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, who was the first Indian and Asian Nobel laureate, although it is still widely called the Howrah Bridge in everyday speech. The bridge is maintained by the Kolkata Port Trust.
An engineering landmark
Constructed between 1936 and 1942, the bridge has a total length of about 705 metres and a main span of roughly 457 metres. At the time it was built it ranked among the longest cantilever bridges in the world. Reporting on its history notes that it was designed by the firm Rendel, Palmer and Tritton, and that the project had been debated for more than two decades before construction, against the backdrop of major changes in colonial India.
The bridge remains one of the busiest of its kind anywhere, carrying very large volumes of vehicles and pedestrians between Howrah and the Burrabazar side each day. It connects the Howrah railway terminus, one of the country's principal stations, with the commercial districts on the Kolkata bank.
Visitors often photograph the bridge from the riverside ghats or from a ferry on the Hooghly, which gives the clearest view of the truss. Because it is a working traffic artery rather than a monument, the best experience is usually from the water or the riverbank rather than from the roadway itself.