That evening, having ‘swept the town of Calcutta with the broom of plunder’, Siraj ud-Daula was brought in his litter to visit his new possession.18 He held a durbar in the centre of the Fort where he announced that Calcutta was to be renamed Alinagar, after Imam Ali – appropriately for a prominent city in a Shia-ruled province. He then appointed one of his Hindu courtiers, Raja Manikchand, to be the Fort Keeper of Alinagar and ordered the demolition of Government House, whose beauty he admired, but considered it worthy to be ‘the dwelling of Princes rather than merchants’, apparently
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