Shantiniketan, Bolpur, West Bengal

I travelled from Kolkata to Shantiniketan and spent three days there. This essay recounts what I saw and experienced.

Image: Viswa-Bharti

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Checking-in

Shantiniketan is a neighbourhood in the city of Bolpur, in Birbhum district. The drive from Kolkata to Bolpur takes about four hours; the road is serviceable, but the journey is far from scenic:

Image: Map of West Bengal Districts

My first impression of Bolpur was not favorable. Like the countryside along the road from Kolkata, the city is strewn with garbage and the population of stray dogs seems out of control. Fortunately, the homestay I was booked in—Amoli—turned out to be an oasis:

Image: Amoli Homestay

The owners of Amoli moved back from Mumbai to Bolpur after the wife’s aging mother refused to leave her hometown. The couple built the homestay from the ground up, adhering to eco-friendly principles. The family lives downstairs, while four rooms upstairs are let out. The accommodations are spacious—combining American amenities, European elegance, and Indian hospitality:

Image: Amoli room

The story of Shantiniketan begins with the visit in 1861 of Maharshi Debendranath Tagore—the spiritually inclined son of Dwarkanath Tagore, one of the richest Indian businessmen of the time. The Tagores, a wealthy landowning family from Jorasanko in Kolkata, were friends with the Sinhas, a Birbhum-based zamindar dynasty. Charmed by the natural beauty of this area, Debendranath leased twenty acres of land from the Sinhas.

The estate he leased was called Bhubandanga. According to one story, the area was named after a dacoit called Bhuban who was reformed by the Maharshi’s spirituality. The story fits a little too neatly into the “moral miracle” trope of literature to be convincing. In this trope, a hardened criminal is disarmed by an unexpected act of radical grace. In Les Misérables, for instance, the Bishop saves the thieving Jean Valjean from arrest by claiming the stolen silver was a gift. In the story of Baba Bharti, the saint disarms the dacoit Khadag Singh by begging the thief to keep the deception secret so that the world does not lose faith in helping those in need.

Over time, the Tagore family constructed numerous buildings on the estate, which came to be known as Shantiniketan—the abode of peace. The place gained global fame when Debendranath’s son, the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, began visiting frequently from 1901 and eventually lived here with his family. Tagore composed the Gitanjali collection of poems in Shantiniketan. Interestingly, only half the poems in the English translation of Gitanjali, which won the Nobel Prize in 1913, were taken from the Bengali volume; the rest were drawn from other Tagore collections.

The balcony of Amoli is a good place to relax and soak in the sights and sounds of small-town Bengal, where itinerant hawkers still yell and conch shells sound. I sat on the porch planning my day:

Image: Amoli room balcony

I decided to spend the day at the Visva-Bharati university campus. Shantiniketan’s association with education began in 1901 when Rabindranath established a school with just five students, one of them his son Rathindranath. The school, called Brahmacharyashram and later renamed Patha Bhavana, was a modern adaptation of the Gurukul system, in which teachers lived with students in secluded forests.

The idea for the university came to Rabindranath in 1916 during a trip to the United States, one stop in the extensive global travels he undertook after receiving the Nobel Prize in 1913. Visva-Bharati University was formally established in 1921. Its name—Bharati being an epithet of Saraswati, the goddess of wisdom and learning—and its Sanskrit motto, “where the whole world meets in a single nest,” reflected Tagore’s aspiration to create an institution that would bring together the best of India and the wider world. The university was conceived as an antidote to the toxic nationalism that had culminated in World War I.

While the university is walkable from Amoli, the large stray dog population I had noticed on the drive made me nervous. From the balcony, I could see some behaving aggressively. On the homestay owner’s recommendation, I booked a Toto—an electric rickshaw—for the day. For any journey longer than a kilometer, I would strongly advise taking a car, as Bolpur’s roads are in poor condition. Even a short ride by Toto can be devastating to the joints.

Visva-Bharati is an integrated urban campus woven into the town’s street network, with all buildings access-controlled. Its structures fall into two categories: active facilities—classrooms, studios, hostels, and faculty housing—and heritage buildings preserved for their historic value, some open to the public.

Yet a recurring pattern is that access to many heritage buildings is either entirely closed or grudgingly granted, with photography prohibited. While shielding classes from disruption is understandable, restricting access to historic structures is inexplicable—an irony, given Tagore’s vision of Visva-Bharati as a liberating alternative to the rigid conventions of India’s formal education system.

A visit to Visva-Bharati can be divided into three distinct experiences.

The first is the spiritual experience, which focuses on the site’s foundational philosophy. Key locations include Shantiniketan Griha, Chattimtala, Upasana Griha, and Taladhwaja—buildings within the Ashram complex.

The second is the Tagore family experience, centered on the Uttarayan Complex across the road from the Ashram area, which contains several homes of the Tagore family.

The third is the university experience, which covers the active campus of Visva-Bharati.

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The spiritual experience: the Ashram Complex

The main drop-off point for the Visva-Bharati tour can be considered Shantiniketan’s epicentre. It hosts the first building Debendranath constructed after leasing the land, which he named Shantiniketan Griha. Built in 1863, it is the oldest building in Shantiniketan:

Image: Shantiniketan Griha

Like most buildings in Visva-Bharati, this one was inaccessible to visitors. It is puzzling that people can enter the Sistine Chapel or the Victoria Memorial, yet the Tagore homes must apparently be kept off-limits from the barbarians at the gate.

Image: Shantiniketan Griha

Source: wikimedia commons

Though Shantiniketan is better known for its association with Rabindranath Tagore, its guiding philosophy is best understood through the spiritual beliefs of his father—the Maharshi. He became the leader of the Brahmo Samaj, a reform movement within Hinduism founded by Raja Rammohan Roy, a close friend of his industrialist father. The Brahmos challenged traditional Hindu practices such as idol worship, superstition, and social injustices including the rigid caste system, child marriage, and the practice of sati. To understand this movement, a brief detour into the history of Hinduism is useful.

In Early Indians, Tony Joseph draws on recent genetic studies to argue that almost all modern Indians trace their ancestry to three broad cohorts.

The first were humans who migrated out of Africa about 70,000 years ago, with their descendants reaching India roughly 65,000 years ago. In fact, every person living outside Africa today—whether in Sweden, China, Australia, or India—descends from a small founding population that emerged from this “Out of Africa” migration (Joseph explains the fascinating genetic science behind this conclusion). He calls these early settlers the First Indians.

Archaeological evidence suggests other human species have lived on the subcontinent earlier, but these arrivals were the first Homo sapiens. The closest “unmixed” descendants of those 65,000-year-old migrants are the Onge and Jarawa tribes of the Andaman Islands, who today form an infinitesimally small share of India’s population.

The second cohort were migrants from Iran who began mixing with the First Indians sometime between 10,000 and 8,000 BCE. Their descendants formed the Harappan civilization in northwestern India, which flourished from 2600 to 1900 BCE. As the Harappan civilization declined—and perhaps even earlier—many Harappans moved south into peninsular India, mixing with the First Indians already there. Their descendants are known in population genetics as Ancestral South Indians (ASI).

Image: a well at an ancient Harappan city in Dholavira, Gujarat

Source: wikimedia commons

The third cohort—now called Indo-Aryans or Indo-Europeans—came from what is now southern Russia and entered the Indian subcontinent in successive waves between roughly 2000 and 1500 BCE. They mixed with Harappan populations in northwestern India. Their descendants are known as Ancestral North Indians (ANI) and speak Indo-European languages such as Bengali and Hindi.

Later arrivals in India—such as Islamic and British invaders—mixed relatively little with the local population. Their impact was therefore more economic and cultural than genetic.

In population-genetic terms, almost all Indians today—apart from a minuscule First Indian population—are either ASI or ANI. The main difference between the two is the Indo-Aryan genetic component. Yet Tony Joseph explains that ASI and ANI mixed freely from about 2000 BCE to 100 CE, after which caste-based endogamy set in. Because of these two millennia of permissive mixing, the ASI–ANI distinction forms a continuum rather than a binary. At one end are groups with higher ANI ancestry—generally found in the North and among traditionally “upper-caste” communities—and at the other, groups with higher ASI ancestry, common in the South and among many tribal populations. Almost no one is at zero percent.

This genetic lineage is also mirrored in language. The script of the Harappans remains undeciphered, but many scholars believe their language underlies the modern Dravidian languages, spoken today by about 20 percent of Indians. The arriving Indo-Aryans spoke an archaic form of Sanskrit; the language family of these migrants is Indo-European, spoken by roughly 75 percent of Indians. Unlike Indo-European, the Dravidian language family is exclusive to India.

Modern Hinduism can be traced to the third cohort of migrants—the Indo-Aryans. Their religion, the Vedic religion, was a polytheistic system centered on deities such as Indra and Agni, who personified the forces of nature. It was largely aniconic and revolved around the yajna, where offerings were made through fire (Agni). Deities like Indra, Varuna, and Agni were invoked through Rigvedic hymns and believed to arrive invisibly to receive the offerings. While the Vedas employed metaphorical anthropomorphism, this did not extend to physical images or idols. The Aryans formalized their hymns and myths in the Vedas—Rigveda, Samaveda, Yajurveda, and Atharvaveda—composed between 2000 BCE and 500 BCE. Some parts of the Rigveda, the earliest of these texts, may even have been composed before the Aryans reached India.

What we recognize as Hinduism today emerged from the fusion of the Vedic religion with the practices of the First Indians and the Harappans—who themselves were a mix of Iranian migrants and First Indians—that had evolved over millennia. Manu Pillai, in Gods, Guns and Missionaries, offers a lucid account of this process in an introductory chapter titled “The Short History of Hinduism,” explaining how Brahmins led this assimilation.

The Indo-Aryans developed the varna system, dividing society into four broad categories: Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaishyas (agriculturalists and traders), and Shudras (the working classes). Like any clergy, the Brahmins were invested in advancing their theology, not least because of their privileged place in the hierarchy. Yet, unlike the later evangelists of Islam and Christianity—whose arrival in India was backed by military and political power—the Brahmins had to rely largely on persuasion.

Manu Pillai explains that this persuasion took the form of accommodation. Brahmins co-opted the practices and myths of local communities. For instance, murti puja, encountered among indigenous traditions, was absorbed as a central element of the faith. The gods of the Rig Veda, such as Indra and Agni, yielded to Shiva and Vishnu. The extensive intermixing between ASI and ANI populations until about 100 CE, noted by Tony Joseph, further facilitated the fusion of Vedic practices with local beliefs. The monochromatic Vedas thus gave way to the Brahmin-approved, kaleidoscopic Puranas.

Pillai notes that Aryan Brahmins often forged connections between local deities and the evolving “Hindu” pantheon. He cites the Chenchu tribe of Andhra, who were incorporated into the Brahmanical narrative through a myth describing the union of a Vishnu avatar with a Chenchu woman. Another example is the myth of Parashuram, devised to explain the matrilineal societies Brahmins encountered in Kerala. In this story, Parashuram urges his followers to pass land to their sisters’ sons rather than their own, as penance for killing his mother on his father’s command over alleged adultery.

Pillai argues that the transformation of the term “Hindu”—from a geographic label for people living on or beyond the Sindhu River to a religion in the Abrahamic sense—was a Brahminical response to the militarized challenge posed by Islam and Christianity. These faiths were so different that the older strategy of accommodation and co-option no longer proved workable.

By the time the Brahmo Samaj was established in Kolkata in 1828, the Hindu faith—having evolved for centuries without a foundational scripture to serve as a “Constitution”—had absorbed many socially sanctioned evils. The Samaj, which played a leading role in the abolition of sati in 1829, argued that the Vedas did not sanction the practice. It went on to adopt progressive positions on female education, widow remarriage, and polygamy.

Yet the Samaj was not merely a movement for social reform. It also sought a deeper metaphysical reorientation—a reconsideration of the nature of God and the individual’s relationship with the divine. Debendranath, who earned the sobriquet Maharshi for his deeply spiritual temperament, often meditated beneath a grove of chhatim trees. The spot, called Chhatimtala (under the chattim trees), lies beside Shantiniketan Griha and remains a revered site:

Image: Chhatimtala

To grasp the Maharshi’s beliefs, one must first examine the theological position of his mentor, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, and the Brahmo Samaj. Roy’s father was a wealthy zamindar who had retired from the administration of the Nawab of Bengal. Around 1781, while still a pre-teen, Roy was sent to Patna to study Persian and Arabic—the tickets to power and prestige in the Mughal era. The elder Roy may have been caught in a time warp, for the Nawab, nominal representatives of the Mughals, had already been neutered by the British East India Company at the Battle of Plassey in 1757. Nonetheless, Ram Mohan Roy also learned English, exposing himself to the ideas of the European Renaissance.

Image: Ganges River Bank Patna

In Patna, much to the chagrin of his father and devout mother, the precocious boy did more than learn these languages. Influenced by Islamic and Sufi writings, he developed an aversion to idolatry. By his early twenties, Ram Mohan Roy was wise enough to see that quoting Islamic scripture would hardly persuade his ritualistic, idol-worshipping brethren. Hence, he turned to the Vedas and began publishing Veda-inspired philosophical tracts from 1815.

As mentioned earlier, the Vedas were composed over a long period between 2000 BCE and 500 BCE. The cultural world of the earliest Veda—the Rig Veda—Tony Joseph notes, is far removed from the motifs revealed in Harappan archaeological remains. The later Vedas, however, began absorbing Harappan beliefs through the process of assimilation described by Manu Pillai. The last of the Vedas—the Atharva Veda—for instance, contains spells and charms for purposes ranging from curing disease and warding off evil spirits.

Ironically, it was a part of this same Atharva Veda—the Upanishads—that most inspired Ram Mohan Roy. The Upanishads pursue answers to philosophical questions such as: "Who is it that sleeps in man, who stays awake, who dreams, and in whom are all these established?" One of its most famous lines—“Satyameva Jayate” (“Truth alone triumphs”)—is now India’s national motto, a phrase that often provokes wry laughter from anyone who has had the privilege of dealing with the Indian state.

Roy was inspired by the Upanishadic conception of God as Nirguna Brahman—the formless, attributeless, infinite Supreme Being. The name Brahmo Samaj derives from the Bengali adjectival form of this Brahman, not to be confused with Brahmā, the four-headed creator deity who appears in later Hindu texts known as the Puranas. These texts, composed between the 4th and 16th centuries CE, are far more folkloric than even the later Vedas.

In 1828, Ram Mohan Roy established the Brahma Sabha, a place of worship in a rented house in Calcutta dedicated to the One True God. As its services drew increasing numbers of congregants, Roy was able to raise funds for a permanent house of worship, consecrated in 1830. One of the financial benefactors who made this possible was Dwarkanath Tagore—the industrialist father of the Maharshi and grandfather of Rabindranath.

Shortly after the consecration of the new building, Roy left for Europe and died in 1833. After his death, his patron Dwarkanath—despite the demands of business—found time to keep the church going. It was his eldest son, Debendranath, however, who became deeply absorbed in the philosophical questions of the Upanishads. An often-repeated, possibly apocryphal, story describes a childhood moment of revelation while gazing at the night sky: the boy reasoned that such a vast cosmos could not be the handiwork of anthropomorphic Hindu gods.

Unlike his father, who supported the Brahmo Sabha financially and administratively, Debendranath became a true believer in its theology. In 1838, at just twenty-one, he founded the Tattwabodhini Sabha to disseminate the wisdom of the Upanishads. In 1841, he effectively merged the Tattwabodhini Sabha with the Brahmo Sabha, which by then had been rebranded the Brahmo Samaj to reflect its broader ambitions. The boy who had once admired Ram Mohan Roy—a frequent visitor to the Tagore home in Jorasanko—was now the leader of the movement his hero had begun.

On December 21, 1843, Debendranath and twenty others signed a covenant he had written, marking their formal initiation into the spiritual fraternity of the Brahmo Samaj—a date commemorated by the annual Poush Mela in Shantiniketan:

Image: Text of 1850 version of the Brahmo Covenant written by Debendranath Tagore

Source: History of Brahmo Samaj by Sivanath Sastri

By the time Debendranath built Shantiniketan Griha in 1863, a major schism was brewing within the Brahmo Samaj. Its roots lay in the 1840s, when two opposing views on the Vedas emerged among the Brahmos. One held that the Vedas alone were the governing canon of Hinduism, while the other—more rationalist in temperament—felt uneasy with the idea of Vedic infallibility.

Debendranath, meanwhile, was occupied with settling the debts of his father, who had died in 1846, yet he had to take a doctrinal stand to resolve the dispute. He sided with the rationalists and compiled selected passages from the Upanishads that aligned with the spirit of monotheism. By the 1860s, however, the rift had widened well beyond the question of the Vedas.

The conservatives—generally older members—saw the Samaj as a Hindu expression of a universal religion centered on the worship of a formless Supreme Being. They viewed the organization primarily as a spiritual fellowship facilitating the individual’s experience of the divine. Beyond rejecting idolatry and egregiously cruel practices such as sati, they were reluctant to challenge Hindu orthodoxy. Most members were Brahmins already facing social ostracism from relatives for their association with the Samaj, even in its less radical form.

The progressives, led by Keshub Chander Sen, a young protégé of Debendranath, envisioned the Brahmo Samaj as a universal religion closer to Christianity than to Hinduism and as an instrument of social reform. They relished provocation: organizing an inter-caste marriage in which one partner was, to add further scandal, a widow, and refusing to allow Brahmins wearing the sacred thread to officiate in the Brahmo chapel.

While Debendranath had sided with the progressives on the question of Vedic infallibility, he considered the Brahmo Samaj to be firmly within Hinduism. The Brahmo Samaj split in 1866. This time, Debendranath Tagore, sided with the conservatives, leading the Adi Brahmo Samaj that mainly concerned itself with organizing religious service in the house of worship in Kolkata while Keshub Chandra Sen led the radical Brahmo Samaj of India, focusing on social change across Bengal and India.

Yet despite managing the Samaj’s internal politics, Debendranath remained at heart a contemplative and deeply spiritual man. In his later years, adjacent to Shantiniketan Griha, he built the beautiful Upasana Griha:

Image: Upasana Griha

Often called the Kanch Mandir because of its Belgian glass, the Upasana Griha was inaugurated on December 21, 1891—the anniversary of Debendranath’s signing of the Brahmo covenant and the beginning of Poush Mela.

Shantiniketan Griha, Chhatimtala, and Upasana Griha all lie within the Ashram complex of Visva-Bharati. Another notable structure in the Ashram area is a mud hut called Taladhwaja:

Image: Taladhwaja

Built beneath a taal tree, this hut served as the residence of Tejesh Chandra Sen, a teacher at Shantiniketan, and embodies a privileged man’s pastoral fantasy of poverty. Unlike the other buildings in the Ashram complex, which date to the Maharshi’s era, this one belongs to the twentieth century and to the period of Rabindranath Tagore, of whom Tejesh Chandra was a protégé.

The hut built around a tree reminded me of the balcony of Amoli:

Image: Balcony of my room at Amoli

Both Taladhwaja and Amoli were built in deference to the surrounding ecology: rather than cutting down trees to suit human plans, the houses were designed around them, with trunks rising through the interiors. Beyond a general respect for the environment, there is also a reason specific to the topology of Birbhum and Bolpur for such ecological rectitude. Riding around Shantiniketan, one repeatedly notices the red soil that defines the landscape:

Image: Laterite Soil

The red soil around Shantiniketan and Bolpur gets its signature rusty color from high levels of iron, which essentially “rusts” when exposed to the region’s alternating rain and heat. This geological trait has earned the surrounding Birbhum district the nickname Lal Matir Desh (Land of Red Soil). The laterite soil gives the region its ruggedly beautiful appearance—one that has inspired generations of artists, including Rabindranath himself.

Yet this soil, for all its beauty, is poor in nutrients and far harsher than softer garden earth. Many plants struggle to grow in it. Preserving existing trees during construction therefore holds particular significance in this part of the world.

It is now time to leave the spiritual roots of Shantiniketan, embodied in the Ashram area, and move toward Uttarayan. A few closing reflections before we proceed.

Reading about the Brahmos reminds me of the sort of people one encounters at Vipassana centers today—well-meaning individuals grappling with first-world problems. The Tagores’ association with the Brahmo Samaj was no accident. Its esoteric spirituality demanded the kind of abstract thinking and exposure to foreign ideas that wealth often enables. Unsurprisingly, the Samaj mostly attracted affluent Bengalis and never became a mass movement.

When Debendranath published a translation of the Rig Veda in 1847, the text was unfamiliar even to many Sanskrit scholars in Bengal. As Manu Pillai notes, Brahmins had long diluted their Vedic precepts; in the popular imagination, the Vedas had already been eclipsed by the more accessible Puranas. Gandhi’s liberal use of bhajan-kirtans to mobilize the masses drew on the same dynamic, though his aims were secular. Little wonder that Rabindranath Tagore was horrified when Gandhi claimed that the 1934 Bihar earthquake was a “divine retribution” for the sin of untouchability. Apart from being foolish, the remark revealed the gulf between the religious worldviews of the two men.

Yet dismissing the Brahmo Samaj as an elitist enterprise would be unfair. The social mores it championed spread far beyond its own ranks. Bengali elite culture—Brahmo or otherwise—has long shaped the lives of ordinary people. In my own family, Doordarshan’s adaptation of Ashapurna Devi’s Pratham Pratishruti inspired my mother to return to school and begin working.

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The Tagore family experience: Uttarayan Complex

Right across from the Ashram area lies the Uttarayan Complex, accessible for a modest fee and home to several residences built by the Tagore family. The transition from Ashram to Uttarayan also marks the shift from the Maharshi era of Shantiniketan to that of Rabindranath.

Bichitra—named after a Tagore house in Jorasanko—now serves as the Rabindra Bhavana museum. It was built in 1961 to commemorate the centenary of Rabindranath Tagore:

Image: Bichitra Bhavana

The museum, which does not allow photography, is well worth a visit. It is fascinating to see Rabindranath Tagore’s personal effects and photographs, though sadly his Nobel Prize was stolen from here in 2004, and the culprits were never found.

Rabindranath—or “Gurudev”—the youngest of the Maharshi’s thirteen children, was born in 1861. His association with Shantiniketan began in 1873, when, at the age of twelve, the Maharshi took him on a long journey that included Amritsar and Dalhousie. One stop was Shantiniketan, where the father son duo stayed at the Shantiniketan Griha. Learning under his father’s tutelage amid pristine nature during this trip planted the seeds of his later educational experiments. His association with Shantiniketan deepened further when, after a decade managing the family’s vast estates in present-day Bangladesh, he opened a school here in 1901 and soon moved to live, initially, in the Ashram area outside Uttarayan.

The Uttarayan Complex contains five homes, none accessible to the public. The first, built in 1919, is Konark:

Image: Konark

The site on which Konark stands once hosted two mud houses. One was gradually modified and eventually became Konark. The other was demolished, and the Mrinmoyee Patio was built in its place, where Rabindranath would sit and write:

Image: Mrinmoyee Patio

The next home built after Konark was Udayan. Construction began in 1921 and took seventeen years to complete. The grandest residence in the Uttarayan Complex, Udayan served as a museum after Rabindranath’s death in 1941, until Bichitra was opened in 1961:

Image: Udayan

When Gurudev came to live in Konark, his son Rathindranath and daughter-in-law lived in a small adjacent outhouse called Rannabari (kitchen house). Over the next two decades, this humble structure evolved into the elaborate Udayan designed by Rathindranath himself, and hosted distinguished guests such as S. Radhakrishnan and Jawaharlal Nehru.

The third home is Shyamali, which Rabindranath built in 1934 as a low-cost experimental model mud house that local villagers could emulate:

Image: Shyamali

The house was humble enough for Gandhi to stay in during one of his visits to Shantiniketan. As Sarojini Naidu famously quipped, it took a fortune to keep the Mahatma in poverty. Jokes apart, it is the most beautiful home in Uttarayan, though it is perplexing that the government would choose the peak tourist season to undertake renovations and ruin the view for visitors.

Gandhi’s friendship with Tagore began after his return from South Africa in 1915. According to one account, two myths surround their relationship. One is that Gandhi was the first to call Tagore “Gurudev.” In fact, the moniker Gurudev had already been conferred on Tagore by Brahmabandhav Upadhyay in 1901.The second myth is that Tagore bestowed on Gandhi the sobriquet Mahatma. Tagore did help popularize the title, but its original coinage has never been definitively traced.

Source: wikimedia commons

While Tagore and Gandhi respected one another, they also had profound disagreements. Tagore supported India’s independence from Britain and returned his knighthood after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, yet he remained skeptical of nationalism and patriotism, seeing them as potential gateways to cultural chauvinism. In fact, the very name Visva-Bharati is a repudiation of narrow nationalism. Articulating his dream for the university in a letter to his son, Tagore wrote, “I want to make that place somewhere beyond the limits of nation and geography.” In the idiom of modern American politics, such stated cosmopolitanism might earn a multinational executive the title John Kerry once coined—a Benedict Arnold CEO.

During the Non-Cooperation Movement, when Gandhi urged Indians to burn their foreign-made clothes to protest British economic rule, Tagore was horrified, considering the act economically wasteful—especially for the poor. Gandhi also wanted every Indian to spin thread on a charkha for thirty minutes a day, arguing that the time would encourage reflection on the condition of the poor. Tagore, however, regarded the charkha as a soulless activity and believed people’s time would be better spent on more creative pursuits.

Gurudev intended Shyamali to be the last house he built, but he later changed his mind and constructed a minimalist, single-story home aptly named Punascha (meaning “Postscript”):

Image: Punascha

Even Punascha was not the last home built for Gurudev. The final house, Udichi, was constructed in 1939 and designed to give the poet a greater sense of openness, as he felt claustrophobic in the other structures:

Image: Udichi

On display within the Uttarayan Complex is the famous sculpture The Santhal Family:

Image: Santhal Family

The sculpture depicts a Santhal family—a man, a woman, two children, and their dog—on the move. They carry their modest belongings, evoking migration, labor, and resilience. Its creator, Ramkinkar Baij, was a student at Visva-Bharati and later headed the university’s sculpture department.

To understand who the Santhals are, it helps to return to Tony Joseph’s account of the major migrant cohorts that shaped the genetic makeup of modern Indians: the First Indians (arriving about 65,000 years ago), Iranian agriculturalists (10,000–8000 BCE), and the Indo-Aryans (2000–1500 BCE). In addition to these large streams, two much smaller migrant cohorts also contributed to India’s genetic mix.

One was the Austroasiatic cohort, which reached India around 2000 BCE—roughly when the Indo-Aryans were arriving, but from the opposite direction. These groups came from Southeast Asia, tracing deeper ancestry to regions of southern China. They formed a distinct genetic layer that mixed with the First Indians and introduced the Austroasiatic language family to the subcontinent. Today this family includes the Munda languages of central and eastern India and the Khasic languages of Meghalaya in the northeast. About one percent of Indians speak languages from this family.

The second was the Tibeto-Burman cohort, representing another small share—about one percent—of India’s population. Their languages include Meitei in Manipur and Tani in Arunachal Pradesh.

The Santhals are descendants of the Austroasiatic-First Indian mix cohort, and Santhali is one of roughly two dozen languages in the Munda family. The community has a significant presence in West Bengal, Jharkhand, Bihar, and Odisha. It gained global prominence when Droupadi Murmu was elected India’s fifteenth President in 2022. The term “tribal” in India is complex, but it often refers to communities with relatively high proportions of non–Indo-Aryan ancestry—such as First Indian, ASI, Austroasiatic, or Tibeto-Burman.

Within the Uttarayan Complex, apart from The Santhal Family, you can also see two Santhal figures sculpted by Ramkinkar Baij on either side of Shyamali’s entrance, consistent with the mud-house aesthetic:

Image: Santhal reliefs on each side of the Shyamali entrance

The Santhal reliefs on Shyamali were inspired by the frescoes of Ajanta. The architecture of Shantiniketan itself is consciously syncretic, drawing on influences as diverse as Mughal, Chinese, and Japanese art, as well as the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Rabindranath’s architectural vision was realized by a team that included his son Rathindranath, Nandalal Bose, Surendranath Kar, and Patrick and Arthur Geddes. They travelled widely, returning with sketches from around the world that inspired many of the buildings.

By incorporating Santhal motifs into the landscape of Shantiniketan, Tagore and Baij were paying tribute to a community that still constitutes about six percent of Bolpur’s population.

The Santhals, who lived in the forests of the Chota Nagpur plateau, largely remained outside the Mughal state’s administrative reach. But from the late eighteenth century, the British—keen to bring more land under cultivation—recognized the Santhals’ remarkable skill at clearing forests. Members of the tribe would clear forested tracts in exchange for cultivation rights. The land itself, however, was owned either by the East India Company or by zamindars, who had been transformed from Mughal revenue collectors into hereditary landowners under the Permanent Settlement of 1793.

A pattern emerged. The Santhals would clear forests for the British and the zamindars, cultivate the land for some time, and then move on to another forested tract. Some British orientalists romanticized this pattern on the lines that you could take the Santhal out of the forest but not the forest out of the Santhal. Perhaps the tribe was avoiding what historian Jared Diamond famously called the worst mistake in the history of the human race—the transition from hunter-gatherer life to settled agriculture. Yet a more prosaic explanation may lie elsewhere. Once forests were cleared, the value of the land rose, and landlords increased the rents.

When Columbus arrived in the Americas, there were no other “civilized” inhabitants in the continent. The Santhals, however, had the misfortune of being exploited by two sets of “civilized” actors: the British and non-tribal Indians who included a gallery of rogues: zamindars, native civil servants, policemen, and moneylenders. By the mid-nineteenth century, they were trapped in a web of exploitation—high taxes, rising rents, and usurious interest rates.

In July 1855, led by two brothers, Sidhu and Kanu Murmu, the Santhals revolted against both sets of tormentors, launching a violent uprising. The rebellion was eventually suppressed, after which the district of Santhal Parganas was created, carved out from Birbhum—where Bolpur is located—and parts of present-day Jharkhand. The district was further partitioned in the 1980s, and today the entire Santhal Parganas region lies within Jharkhand.

While The Santhal Family pays homage to the tribe’s nomadic past, another relief by Ramkinkar Baij—The Thresher—depicts their agrarian life:

Image: Thresher

The rustic touches in Uttarayan—mud houses, Santhal figures—allow visitors to appreciate poverty as an aesthetic category, without the discomfort of encountering it in reality. The Tagores, of course, were loaded, and Rabindranath’s rather elegant car is also on display at Uttarayan for visitors to gawk at:

Image: Rabindranath Tagore's car

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The University Experience: Visva-Bharati

Stepping out of the Uttarayan Complex, I hired a Toto to take me around the sites of the Visva-Bharati campus. The large number of stray dogs and the sheer spread of the campus make walking inadvisable. Many of the roads, as mentioned earlier, are also in poor condition. As a result, even a short Toto ride becomes something of an adventure.

The Toto drivers around the campus double as tour guides, though I remain skeptical about the authenticity of much of the information they provide. It is advisable to come with a trained guide because there are very few information boards on important sites.

Our first stop was the Fine Arts Department of Visva-Bharati—Kala Bhavana. The premises were closed to visitors, perhaps because it was a Sunday. On the grounds, however, I did spot another rendition of the migratory Santhal Family:

Image: Santhal Family sculpture at Kala Bhavana

Reading about the Santhals, I could not help reflecting on the noble savage lens through which the intelligentsia often views tribal populations. The British anthropologist Lewis Sydney Steward O’Malley—better known as L. S. S. O’Malley—wrote the following in his Santhal Parganas installment of the Bengal District Gazetteers in 1910:

Generally speaking the Santals, with their reckless gaiety, their bluntness and simple honesty, and their undoubted zest for all out-door amusements and particularly for hunting, are a very attractive race to an officer accustomed to deal with other races in Bengal.

Mercifully, Mr. O’Malley did not expound on the qualities of Bengal’s “other races,” against whom the Santhals had apparently been judged so favorably.

Many countries have indigenous peoples—descendants of early inhabitants who maintain less industrialized ways of life and preserve social, cultural, or linguistic ties to lands that predate the arrival of currently dominant populations. The romanticization of their resource-constrained lives, though misguided, springs from a familiar modern intuition: beyond a certain threshold, greater freedom and choice yield diminishing returns and even undermines happiness. Dating apps reduce the chances of conjugal bliss, streaming services dilute engagement, and social media deepens loneliness. The argument follows that since desire, as René Girard said, is mimetic, exposing the unspoiled to the trinkets of modernity merely sets them running on the hedonic treadmill.

Yet one need not be a city slicker to recognize the perils of temptation. The Santhal creation myth itself carries a lesson on the dangers of awakening desire.

In the beginning there was only Thakur Jiu, the supreme spirit, and an endless ocean with no land. Thakur Jiu first created aquatic creatures and then two geese, Has and Hasin, but with nowhere to rest they flew endlessly over the waters. Moved by their plight, Thakur Jiu asked the animals to bring soil from the ocean floor to form land. The birds then laid two eggs, from which emerged the first humans, Pilchu Haram and Pilchu Budhi. As they grew, the deity Lita taught them to brew rice beer. After drinking it they became aware of their sexuality and became the ancestors of the Santhals. Their children formed seven clans—such as Murmu, Hansda, and Marandi—establishing the clan system and the rule against marrying within one’s own patrilineal clan that continues among the Santhals today.

The beer in the Santhal myth echoes the Biblical forbidden fruit. The Bible is more explicit about the punitive consequences of the act, but both stories signal a “loss of innocence.” In each, sensory pleasure—the fruit or the beer—ushers in the tragedy of human consciousness. Before that awakening, our minds might have been more animal-like.

These stories thus allegorically anticipate Schopenhauer’s conclusion that knowledge and suffering are positively correlated. The German philosopher argues that the roots of pleasure and pain are the same for animals and humans: health, food, shelter, and sexual gratification. Having them brings pleasure; absence brings pain. Yet the human nervous system intensifies these emotions. An animal flees death instinctively but does not imagine a loved one dying. Animals mate, but they do not commit suicide from unrequited love. Had the primordial couples in the Bible and the Santhal myths refused the agent of awakening, we might have been spared both knowledge and its attendant suffering.

It is worth noting the contrast between Schopenhauer’s view and Tagore’s. For the German philosopher, the expansion of human consciousness is a tragedy. For the Bengali bard, it is a source of creation. Tagore famously wrote, “Art is where there is the superfluous in our heart’s relationship with the world… what overflows our needs becomes articulate.” In this view, animals do only what is useful, while humans generate a surplus of love and creativity beyond survival. When our love, curiosity, or wonder exceeds the demands of daily life, that excess overflows into art, culture, and deep friendship.

Comparing the Biblical and Santhali creation myths with the creation hymn of the Rig Veda, one sees why the Vedas struggled to gain popular appeal. The Rig Veda seems to have been composed by someone willing to admit that they might not know.

Apart from The Santhal Family, another striking sculpture visible from the street on the grounds of Kala Bhavana is what appears to be an igloo made of brick, created by students:

Image: Igloo sculpture at Kala Bhavana

Adjacent to the Uttarayan Complex and Kala Bhavana stands Natya Ghar, built in 1961 in the post-Rabindranath period, and now home to the Drama Department:

Image: Natya Ghar

Rabindranath’s dramatic works are associated with a poignant story. During World War II, one of his plays, Dak Ghar, was performed 105 times in German concentration camps. One of the most notable stagings was by the Polish-Jewish educator Janusz Korczak at his Warsaw Ghetto orphanage, where he organized the play for children just weeks before he and they were deported to Treblinka.

As one moves around the Visva-Bharati campus, several Tagore family homes appear outside the Uttarayan Complex. One such house near Kala Bhavana is Malancha, built in 1926 for Rabindranath Tagore’s youngest daughter, Mira Devi, after her marriage ended:

Image: Malancha

Rabindranath and his wife, Mrinalini Devi, had five children—two sons and three daughters. Of them, one son and two daughters died during their parents’ lifetime. Only Mira Devi and Rathindranath survived Rabindranath.

When reading about people in the past, it is difficult to resist judging them by modern standards. Mira Devi was married at thirteen, and the other Tagore daughters were also balika badhus. Yet Rabindranath was modern enough to welcome back a daughter whose husband was a drifter and an alcoholic.

Even today, Indian newspapers frequently report cases of women killed by their husbands or in-laws. A closer look at such reports often reveals that the husband had a history of domestic violence. The same families who later grieve in the newspapers had repeatedly sent their daughters back to the very households where the abuse occurred.

My next stop was a house called Pratichi, recently in the news because of its association with Nobel laureate Amartya Sen:

Image: Pratichi

In 2023, Visva-Bharati University issued an eviction notice to Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, alleging that he was in “unauthorized occupation” of 13 decimals (about 0.13 acres) of land at Pratichi. Sen contended that his father, Ashutosh Sen, was granted a 99-year lease for the entire 1.38-acre plot in 1943 by Rathindranath Tagore. The dispute became a political flashpoint because Amartya Sen is widely seen as hostile to the ruling dispensation at the center. Ultimately, a court sided with Sen.

Driving through the campus, one also appreciates the range of disciplines the university offers. Below is a picture of Shiksha Bhavana, which houses several scientific departments, including botany, computer science, and physics:

Image: Shiksha Bhavana

Our next Toto stop was outside a beautiful house whose most famous resident was Kali Mohan Ghosh—an associate of Rabindranath who specialized in rural development:

Image: Kali Mohan Ghosh home

We drove past the gates of the Gurupalli, which was historically the residence of the teachers:

Image: Gurupalli Gate

In 1933, a young woman named Amita returned to her father’s home in Gurupalli to give birth to a son. Her father, Kshiti Mohan, was a Sanskrit and Pali scholar who taught at Shantiniketan. Rabindranath persuaded the young mother to choose an unusual name rather than the familiar Bengali ones. The name he suggested was Amartya, and the boy would grow up to become a Nobel laureate—like Rabindranath himself. Later, during World War II, Amartya Sen’s father sent him to study in Shantiniketan, considering Dhaka and Calcutta vulnerable to Japanese bombing.

Despite poor administrative governance, Shantiniketan still retains its natural beauty:

Image: Shantiniketan Landscape

The greenery creates verdant views:

Image: Shantiniketan Landscape

The large iron gates seen across the campus add to Shantiniketan’s old-world charm, yet they diminish the sense of openness Rabindranath envisioned:

The next stop was at Dehuli, an important Tagore family home within the Ashram area where I had begun my expedition:

Image: Dehuli

The name “Dehuli,” derived from the Sanskrit word for “threshold,” reflects its role as the entrance to the Ashram area. Rabindranath Tagore lived here between 1904 and 1906, after the death of his wife, Mrinalini Devi, who died tragically at the age of twenty-nine.

Rabindranath Tagore’s marriage to Mrinalini Devi is often associated with a somewhat controversial backstory. In his youth, Kadambari Devi—married to his older brother Jyotirindranath Tagore—had been his intimate companion since childhood. Kadambari, who was just two years older than Rabindranath was much younger than her husband.

When Rabindranath went to England at nineteen, the emotionally charged letters he wrote to her deeply unsettled the family, who considered their tone improper. It is said that this prompted them to hastily arrange his marriage to Mrinalini in 1883. Only four months after the wedding, Kadambari Devi died by suicide at the age of twenty-five after consuming opium. The Tagore household kept her death shrouded in silence.

Tagore’s novella Nastanirh (The Broken Nest) is widely believed to be semi-autobiographical, drawing on his relationship with Kadambari. It was later adapted by Satyajit Ray into the film Charulata.

As the premises of Dehuli were not accessible, I could not see another historically significant house nearby called Natun Bari:

Image: Natun Bari

Source: Wikimedia

Natun Bari hosted students from Gandhi’s South African ashram after the 1914 Gandhi–Smuts Agreement ended the Satyagraha there by abolishing the “Black Act”—which mandated the compulsory registration of Asians (the term “black” being a nickname for the law’s “dark” nature)—and the tax on former indentured laborers. As Gandhi prepared to return to India, he arranged for residents of his Phoenix Settlement—students and families living communally in his South African ashram—to stay at Shantiniketan under Rabindranath Tagore’s care. The students arrived in December 1914 and were housed in Natun Bari.

A short distance away from Dehuli stands the imposing Teen Pahar, home to an ancient banyan tree:

Image: Teen Pahar

We were now back at Shantiniketan Griha. The Toto I had booked from Amoli was waiting, and we drove back to my hotel. On the way, I stopped at the restaurant of the Mud House hotel:

Image: Restaurant of the Mud House Hotel

I opted for a Bengali lunch of steamed rice, kosha mangsho, and posto boda:

Image: Mud House Lunch

The Bengali word kosha is equivalent to the Hindi bhuna, referring to the laborious process of sautéing meat and spices over low heat for a long time. The aim is to evaporate the moisture until the spices turn into a dark, velvet-like paste that clings to the meat.

In Bengali households like mine, mangsho (goat meat) was reserved for Sunday afternoons. I have vivid memories of accompanying my father to the butcher’s shop on Sunday mornings. The butcher kept live chickens packed into a mid-sized cage. Each time he opened it, the birds erupted in a frantic flutter of terror.

We never made kosha mangsho at home, however, because the dish ideally requires the meat to be slow-cooked for a couple of hours. I am also skeptical that the Mud House prepared it in quite that authentic manner—the version I was served did not taste like the kosha mangsho I have eaten at friends’ homes.

I ordered posto boda mostly out of curiosity, since it is not the form in which I am used to eating posto. While mangsho was a weekly ritual, aloo posto—potatoes gently cooked in a poppy-seed paste—was cooked less often at home and was therefore always a cherished treat. It was only when I cooked aloo posto myself while living in the United States that I first considered myself a passably competent cook.

The historical reason for Bengal’s love of posto lies in the forced conversion of farmland in the Bengal Presidency from paddy to poppy plantations after the East India Company’s victory at Plassey in 1757. The aim was to produce opium for export to China in exchange for tea and silk. The dried white seeds (posto) from poppy pods were considered a useless byproduct by the British. Impoverished farming families, left with little food discovered that grinding them into a paste produced a creamy base that could make frugal, starch-heavy meals far more satisfying.

Ironically, the most iconic posto dish—aloo posto—is now a culinary delicacy. Yet this is not unusual. Every country has its own version of cucina povera, where the economic necessity of using humble ingredients evolves into comfort food. Soul food in the United States, for instance, emerged from the ingenuity of enslaved Africans who were given the leftovers of the plantation. Many such cuisines—often associated with indigenous communities and based on foraged ingredients like red ants or wild greens—are today repackaged as fine dining.

While kosha mangsho is not exactly a poor man’s dish, slow-cooking techniques themselves often arise from poverty. Hardship usually means the available ingredients are tough—stubborn cuts of meat, fibrous roots, or old grains. Slow cooking is what makes them edible.

Another curious aspect of aloo posto is that both of its key ingredients have foreign origins: posto came through British opium cultivation, while potatoes were introduced by the Portuguese. It is striking that a dish now considered quintessentially Bengali rests on ingredients that are European arrivals barely three centuries old.

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Wrapping up

After my visit to Visva-Bharati, I stayed on in Bolpur for a couple of days, doing very little. Amoli has a lovely café with outdoor seating, where I whiled away many idle hours:

Image: Amoli Cafe

The next morning, I had their luchi and aloor dum for breakfast. (The breakfast menu is reserved for in-house guests; the regular menu is continental and pan-Asian.)

Image: Amoli breakfast

A proper Bengali luchi must be made with maida (all-purpose flour rather than whole wheat). The secret lies in the moyen—the practice of rubbing a generous amount of oil into the flour before adding water. If the moyen is not right, the luchi will not puff up.

In a cuisine known for vibrant red curries and yellow dals, the breakfast version of aloor dum is unusual for being white, often prepared without turmeric or red chilli powder.

After breakfast, I took a Toto ride to Sonajhuri, a lively bazaar held beneath groves of sonajhuri trees—named by Rabindranath for the bright yellow flowers they bear in winter—near Shantiniketan. Vendors sell handicrafts, textiles, jewelry, and tribal art, accompanied by Baul music and folk performances:

Image: Sonajhuri Haat

If you enjoy shopping for tchotchkes, you will probably like this place. Even if you do not, it is worth a brief stop for its distinctive atmosphere. The wares on sale are not necessarily local, so this is not the ideal spot for those seeking authentic regional handicrafts.

The Shantiniketan–Bolpur area is well regarded for its artistic ceramics and traditional pottery. The region’s connection to ceramics draws both from the indigenous clay-craft traditions of rural Bengal and from the modern artistic influence of Visva-Bharati University. Since I was looking for something authentically local, the owner of the Amoli hotel directed me to Hasa Ceramic Studio:

Image: Hasa Studio

The owner trained at Kala Bhavana, and in the shed beside the studio you can watch potters at work. They use local clay to produce both purely decorative pieces and functional objects:

Image: Hasa Studio

I bought some lovely dinner plates. I especially liked how sturdy they were, though that also meant paying excess baggage on my return flight to Delhi.

Now it was time to leave. Bolpur, for all its rich history, is a town in shambles. Bad roads, garbage, and stray dogs mar its natural beauty. Shantiniketan is worth visiting mainly for those whose lives are steeped in Tagore’s literature, art, and music. It stands as an ode to a Bengali sensibility that values art for art’s sake. In a world that prizes utilitarian pursuits like engineering, technology, and medicine, Bengalis indulge in what the Italians call dolce far niente—the sweetness of doing nothing. Shantiniketan is the testament to that indulgence.

For me personally, Bengal evokes an unexpected sense of being “at home.” I have never lived there, and my spoken Bengali—though fluent—is sloppy. Yet much of my media consumption has become Bengali. I noticed the same shift in my mother. In the last decade of her life, Ma had almost entirely switched to Bengali shows, even though she had spent more than five decades living outside Bengal. In my case, perhaps this is because the only people with whom I consistently spoke Bengali were my parents, and returning to the language is a way of holding on to a sense of their presence.