THE GROWTH OF CALCUTTA 37 try to understand the changes in their respective positions after the spread of the East India Company's domination. The old revenue records give us a vague picture of the original population of Calcutta which consisted of agricultural and fishing communities and some other hard-working groups.7 They belonged to such castes as Bagdis, Pods and Tiors as well as to the local Muslim groups of lower status. However, stray references to the Hindu and Muslim names ending with Mondals (headmen/owner-cuttivators) might suggest the induction of a relatively high stratum among the agricultural commodities. From the middle of the eighteenth century the new economic activities of the East India Company began to reject these thriving groups of autochthon of Calcutta. Some of them were squeezed out to the fringes (popularly known as Dhapa locality) where the growing city's garbage provided a sort of precarious sustenance for them. The palanquin-bearers of Bagdi caste, a well-known hard-working group in the eighteenth century Calcutta, were gradually found to be unacceptable by the Company's officials.8 The palanquin-bearers did not take it lying down. They organised themselves and subsequently carried out a successful strike in 1827, perhaps the first of its kind in colonial India.9 Evidence on the existence of salt workers, at least on the fringes of old Calcutta, is available from difference sources.10 Their retreating position, however, is borne out by a Court document of 1778: 'there being no business ready but some bills for misdemeanors, that is four indictments for perjury and about twenty for nuisances in burning shells within the town for making lime, called here chunum, and in keeping shells with the stinking fish in them.'11 The profile of social dislocations, emerging after the assumption of diwani by the East India Company and the consequent colonial thrusts in the new 'investment' policy, came out more sharply by the process of decline of the Setts and the Basaks, the traditional merchants who had figured so prominently in pre-colonial Calcutta.12 By caste, they were associated with the cloth and yarn trade, which was the raison d'etre of the growth of old Calcutta. The Setts and the Basaks are believed to have migrated from Saptagram, the traditional port of Portuguese trade which had declined because of the silting up of the river Saraswati in them sixteenth century.13 It is true that these traders of Bengal flourished in the cloth and yarn trade in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century because of their connections with the English merchants. But the character of the trading was, then, different from the post-Plassey period in the sense that the East India Company used to transact in exchange of imported bullion and that the traditional merchants like the Setts and the Basaks enjoyed some amount of autonomy in spite of their involvement with a share of advance (dadni) from the Company. The British records, otherwise so silent about the contemporary Indian traders transacting with the Company, refer to the Setts in