Mysterious Towers: Relics of the Visual Telegraph

Stretching north-west across West Bengal and Jharkhand, and all the way to Chunar near Varanasi are sentinels of a forgotten era. Planted squarely in fields, crowning gentle hillocks, tucked deep inside forests, and scattered alongside busy highways and railway lines are mysterious towers that have refused to budge for 200 years.

These giant towers, made of brick, exhibit another peculiar feature – incredibly, they were built in a straight line from Fort William in Calcutta, then the capital of the Bengal Presidency, to Chunar – a distance of 694 km!