Santiniketan is a small skeleton of a town surrounding Visva Bharati University, which was founded by Rabindranath Tagore in 1901. I took the train there on my third day in Calcutta. The day before I met the artist Chandrima Bhattacharyya at Aka Praka gallery in Hindustan Park, a small, mixed-use neighborhood in South Calcutta. She offered me a tour of Santiniketan, so I took the Bolhpur Express two days later to see what an Indian college town is like.
It's no Ithaca. For starters, the heat: For about 4-5 months a year, Santiniketa is tolerably tropical. The other 7 months, however, are brutal. The heat is nearly unbearable. The non-AC reserved seat car on the way up was like a furnace, and I only survived by the convection provided from the open windows and hundreds of Raj-era electric ceiling fans.
Bolhpur itself is a typical bustling Indian town, except there is a larger presence of hawkers selling handmade goods in the local style, a tourist favourite. Santiniketan is much more picturesque, with fewer cars and more students on bicycles.
The most popular courses at the University are art and art history; Chandrima showed me the magnificent glass chapel for ashram activities. The holy day is wednesday and the ashram of the Brahmo Samaj (a semi-religious school of thought that Tagore founded), the core institution of the school before it enlarged to become a university.
Chandrima showed me around a few more buildings, and then I went and saw her beautiful studio situated on the outside of town. But for the heat, the day was great. Chandrima made some home-cooked mustard fish and I was truly happy sitting on her couch, admiring her art as she smoked cigarettes and talked about her education and time as Curator of the Patha Bhavan's art museum.
I stayed at the "Park Villas", a guest house near the science building. There was one other guest, an elderly man in a sarong who I'd like to imagine was writing some long tract about Bengali classical music in the mid-20th century.
The next day I toured the campus and saw Tagore House, the museum-cum-office of the nobel-laureate founder of Visva Bharati, Rabindranath Tagore. The Nobel Prize medal that Tagore won in 1913 was stolen in 2004, so the museum is without its most notable object. Tagore received it under slightly ignominious circumstances, anyway: I've heard that Tagore's treatment in Europe was patronizing at best; he returned the knighthood he received subsequent to his nobel prize in protest of massacres of Indian civilians at the hands of British soldiers.
I took the air conditioned car back from Santiniketan the next day. The rest of my week at Calcutta was spent in a somewhat lackadaisical manner: breakfasts at Flurry's, the famed Swiss baker (now humiliatingly placed inside the trendy cafe of the Park hotel down Park street). The gutted remains of Stephen Court, the usual home of Flurry's, was surrounded by makeshift barriers. I heard the dim sounds of clutter being removed from the building and thrown to the pavement below.
The Park St. Cemetary is about two kilometers down Park Street from Chowringhee, maintained by the British Association for the Preservation of Cemetaries in South Asia (didn't know that such a thing could exist, to be honest). Among other notable early colonizers of India there buried, the grave of William Jones stands imposingly over the rest, as if to acknowledge his towering presence in both Indian and British culture.
Jones was a master of European and Asian languages, reputedly knowing more than ten. Somewhat relatedly, Macaulay, the future governor of India and equally proficient in the apprehension of strange languages, did not learn Sanskrit (and, therefore, hindi) because his dictionary fell off the boat on his journey to India.
The cemetery is a welcome refrain amidst the grime and exhaust of Kolkata's streets.
The best part of my visit was the Marble Palace, somewhat near College Street in North Calcutta.
As far as disorganized museums full of dust and with no regard whatsoever to the visitor, Marble Palace takes the cake. Built by Raja Rajendra Mullick in 1835, it's a smorgasbord of neo-classical kitsch and Babu fawnery.
Imagine a building modeled on the parthenon from the exterior, with sun-shades between pillars, and an inner courtyard a-la the medici palazzio. Then imagine two floors of "Belgian Crystal Lights" 20-foot tall mirrors, unlabeled Titians, Rubens and "After Rubens" paintings next to each other, live parrots imported from Germany and Australia, Statues depicting Sophocles, the four seasons, Homer and the Four Continents (America Africa Europe Asia), electric lamps from 1910 and turquoise marble floors. Each room is symmetrically arranged, for example with two statues of napoleon or victoria one on each end.
There was a room with twenty sculptures, paintings, or other depictions of Queen Victoria in different media. Undoubtedly the best was Victoria as a kind of venus made from wood, standing on a dragon rendered in art-nuveau triumph. The guards want bribes unless you go to the tourist office and get a pass. I had a pass so I received a free tour.
I was staying at the Old Kenilworth on Little Russel street, a classic Victorian lodge with draft rooms, cheap rates and three Alsatian shepherds guarding the front gate when I arrived at 2 a.m. every night. Calcutta: a great city.
