West Bengal Region Guide

West Bengal runs from the Himalaya to the largest mangrove forest on earth, and holds the city that was the capital of British India.

Kolkata is the reason for most visitors: a city of decaying Palladian mansions, coffee houses where people still argue about politics for hours, the finest bookshops in India, and a festival in autumn that turns the whole place into an open-air exhibition.

Darjeeling sits at 2,000 metres with Kangchenjunga on the horizon and a narrow-gauge railway that has been climbing the ridge since 1881.

The Sundarbans in the delta are a UNESCO site of tidal mangrove creeks holding the only tigers that routinely swim.

And Bengal has India’s most distinctive intellectual and artistic tradition — Tagore, Ray, and a self-image built around it.

Kolkata

Walk the colonial core: the Victoria Memorial, the Writers’ Building, Dalhousie Square and the riverfront ghats. Ride the trams, which are the last running in India, and the metro, which was the first. Spend a morning in the flower market under the Howrah bridge, an afternoon at the Indian Museum, and an evening arguing over coffee on College Street among the secondhand bookstalls.

Kumartuli

The potters’ quarter, where the clay Durga idols are built on straw and bamboo armatures through the late monsoon — open workshops, and the best thing in the city in the weeks before the festival.

Darjeeling

The Himalayan Railway, a UNESCO site, with its loops and reverses; sunrise on Kangchenjunga from Tiger Hill; the tea estates; and the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute.

The Sundarbans

Two or three days on a boat through tidal creeks, with watchtowers, crocodiles, kingfishers and the outside chance of a tiger.

Shantiniketan

Tagore’s university town, UNESCO-listed, with its open-air classes and murals.

Bengal takes its own culture extremely seriously, and the self-image of the educated Bengali — argumentative, literary, politically engaged, contemptuous of commerce — is both a cliche and largely true.

The Bengal Renaissance

From the early nineteenth century Calcutta produced a sustained burst of reform, literature, science and painting: Rammohun Roy, the Tagores, Vidyasagar, Bankim Chandra, and later Jagadish Chandra Bose and Satyendra Nath Bose. Modern Indian prose, the Indian novel and much of Indian social reform start here, and Bengalis are aware of it.

Adda

The long, unhurried, wide-ranging conversation, conducted in coffee houses, on rooftops and at tea stalls, with no purpose beyond itself. It is a genuine institution and something close to a regional pastime.

Politics

West Bengal elected a Communist government for thirty-four consecutive years, the longest democratically elected communist administration anywhere, and political argument remains a normal part of daily life.

Cinema and football

Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen; and the Mohun Bagan and East Bengal rivalry, which maps onto the 1947 partition.

The Sundarbans are a working landscape as well as a reserve: several million people live in the delta, honey collectors and fishers enter tiger habitat, and deaths occur every year. Visit through operators who employ local guides and boat crews, keep to the permitted channels, and understand that a tiger sighting is genuinely unlikely — the forest, the birds and the creeks are the experience.

Plastic and the delta: waste thrown from boats ends up in the mangroves. Carry it out.

Darjeeling tea estates have a long and difficult labour history, with low wages and closed gardens a live issue. Estates that receive visitors vary enormously in how they treat workers; ask, and buy direct where the answer is good.

Durga Puja generates enormous quantities of material that is discarded after five days, though many pandals now build in bamboo and cloth and organisers increasingly recycle.

Kolkata’s heritage buildings are being lost steadily; visiting and paying for the ones that have been restored helps make the case.

October to March is the season everywhere in the state: dry, clear and comfortable.

Durga Puja in late September or October is the single best time to be in Kolkata and the worst time to find a room — book months ahead.

October to December gives the clearest Himalayan views from Darjeeling, with Kangchenjunga out most mornings.

November to February is the Sundarbans season: cooler, fewer mosquitoes and better wildlife activity.

March to May is very hot and humid in the plains, with pre-monsoon kalbaisakhi squalls; the hills stay pleasant, and spring brings rhododendrons.

June to September is a heavy monsoon — Kolkata floods, and landslides regularly cut the Darjeeling roads.

What a day costs, by how you travel

Relative cost across the region

Kolkata is noticeably cheaper than Delhi or Mumbai, and is often cited as the most affordable large city in India.