Santiniketan, Tagore’s University Town, Joins the World Heritage List
UNESCO inscribed Santiniketan in September 2023. The campus in rural Bengal where Rabindranath Tagore taught under the trees is also an open-air collection of early modern Indian art and architecture.
Santiniketan was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in September 2023, at the 45th session of the World Heritage Committee in Riyadh. It is a small university town in the Birbhum district of West Bengal, about 150 kilometres north of Kolkata, and it is bound up with the life of the poet Rabindranath Tagore.
The abode of peace
The name means abode of peace. In 1863 the poet’s father, Debendranath Tagore, a religious reformer, took a plot of open land here and built a house and a prayer hall for meditation. In 1901 Rabindranath opened a school on the site with five pupils. He disliked the classrooms of colonial Calcutta, and lessons were held out of doors, under the trees, as they still are. In 1921, eight years after he received the Nobel Prize for literature, he founded a university beside it, Visva-Bharati, which he intended as a meeting place for the cultures of Asia and the West. It became a central university of India in 1951.
What is listed
The inscription covers the oldest parts of the campus. The Ashrama holds the first buildings, including the prayer hall, a pavilion of coloured Belgian glass. Uttarayan is a garden with the five houses that Tagore built for himself one after another, each in a different manner. Around them are the schools of art and music, Kala Bhavana and Sangit Bhavana.
The buildings matter because of what they rejected. At a time when official architecture in India was British and classical, the artists of Santiniketan looked to Indian villages, to Buddhist and Mughal forms and to Japan and Java, and built low houses of mud, thatch, brick and tile. The painter Nandalal Bose and his students covered walls with murals. The sculptor Ramkinkar Baij set large figures of Santal villagers in concrete among the trees, where they remain.
For travellers
Santiniketan is reached from Kolkata in about two and a half hours by train to Bolpur. It is a working university, so parts of the campus are open only at certain hours, and the museum in Tagore’s houses closes one day a week. A day is enough for the listed area. A second allows a visit to the craft workshops nearby, known for leather, batik and kantha embroidery, and to the Saturday market held in the woods.
Two festivals draw large crowds. Poush Mela, in late December, is a fair with performances by the Baul singers of Bengal. Basanta Utsav, at the time of Holi, is the spring festival that Tagore devised, with songs and dances in yellow dress.
The same UNESCO session listed two other sites covered here, Koh Ker in Cambodia and the tea forests of Jingmai Mountain.