The reported plan of the new BJP government in West Bengal to shift the state secretariat back to the Writers’ Building in BBD Bagh from Nabanna, may be presented as a pragmatic step and a return to heritage. But it is actually a failure of imagination. The Writers’ Building was built in 1777 by Thomas Lyon, on behalf of the British East India Company. It was Calcutta’s first three-storeyed building – a 150-metre Greco-Roman structure designed to project authority.

It stood as a grand symbol of who held power, who dispensed it, and who was expected to receive it in silence. The building sits at the heart of what was then called the White Town, deliberately separated from the Black Town where the native population lived. It was not built for Indians. It was built to administer them. On 8 December 1930, three young revolutionaries – Benoy Basu, Badal Gupta, and Dinesh Gupta – walked into this building and shot dead Colonel N.S. Simpson, the Inspector General of Prisons, notorious for his brutality toward political prisoners.

Badal took cyanide on the spot. Benoy died in hospital five days later. Dinesh was hanged in 1931. The statues of Benoy, Badal and Dinesh proudly stand in front of the building to this day. The square is named after them. This place has real,........

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