Spence's Hotel was a hotel established in Kolkata in 1830. It was near the Government House.[1] It no longer exists.[2]
Various sources describe Spence's Hotel as either the first hotel in Asia, or in India, or in Kolkata.[3][4][5]
The hotel is mentioned in Jules Verne's The Steam House as a place where the characters stay during a visit to Kolkata.[6] It was the inspiration for the hotel described in the Sankar's 1962 novel Chowringhee.[7]
On 16 January 1861 Duleep Singh met his mother Jind Kaur at the hotel.[8] They had been separated in 1849 after the Treaty of Lahore when he was 10 years old and they reunited when he was age 22.[8] From here, Singh brought his mother back with him to live in England.[8] Because of political tension the British government choose Spence's Hotel as a neutral place where there was unlikely to be conflict.[8]
References
- Colin Wright. Spence's Hotel, Calcutta British Library, 26 March 2009^
- Spence’s Hotel, Dalhousie Square, 1830 puronokolkata, 23 November 2013^
- Bishwanath Ghosh. Inside India’s oldest hotel The Hindu, 11 July 2016^
- Ps Mukherjee. Heritage structures of Bengal: The Treasury Building & Spence's Hotel: the connection Heritage structures of Bengal, 10 March 2013^
- Dibyendu Banerjee. LEGEND OF THE LOST – Spence’s Hotel Noise Break, 2 August 2016^
- Sandip Ghose. Check In, Check Out Open The Magazine, 7 February 2020^
- Sudipta Datta. Looking back at ‘Chowringhee’ by Sankar on Kolkata The Hindu, 23 June 2022^
- William Dalrymple, Anita Anand. Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World's Most Infamous Diamond Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017^