West Bengal Culture & Language

Bengali culture is verbal, argumentative and unusually self-aware, and it has produced a disproportionate share of India’s art and thought.

Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore wrote poetry, novels, plays, essays and around two thousand songs, founded a university, painted seriously in his sixties, and in 1913 became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. His songs, Rabindrasangeet, are a living repertoire that ordinary people sing, and he wrote the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh.

Satyajit Ray

The Apu trilogy and the films that followed put Indian cinema on the world stage; Ray also wrote detective fiction and children’s books, designed typefaces and composed his own scores.

Baul

Wandering mystic singers of Bengal, in ochre robes with a one-stringed ektara, whose syncretic songs draw on Sufi and Vaishnav devotion and are UNESCO-recognised.

Terracotta temples

At Bishnupur, where a lack of stone led builders to face brick temples with moulded terracotta panels of epic scenes — an entirely distinct regional architecture.

Bengali literature

The modern Indian novel effectively begins here with Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay in the 1860s, and the tradition since — Sarat Chandra, Bibhutibhushan, Mahasweta Devi, and the detective and adventure serials that every Bengali child reads — sustains a publishing industry and the College Street book market, the largest secondhand book market in India and possibly the world.

Kalighat painting and patachitra

Kalighat painting grew up around the temple in the nineteenth century: fast, bold watercolours sold to pilgrims, satirising fashionable Calcutta as often as depicting gods, and a direct influence on later Indian modernists. Patachitra scrolls are unrolled frame by frame while the painter sings the story, a tradition still practised in the villages of Medinipur and now often carrying public-health and social messages alongside the old epics.

Bengali is the state language and the seventh most spoken in the world, written in its own script. It has an exceptional literary tradition, and Bengalis take pride in it to a degree that is itself culturally significant — the language movement across the border in East Pakistan led to Bangladesh’s independence, and International Mother Language Day commemorates it.

Nepali is the main language of the Darjeeling hills, along with Tibetan, Lepcha and Bhutia.

Hindi and English are both widely understood in Kolkata, and English is common among the educated middle class and in the hills.

Useful Bengali: nomoshkar for hello, dhonnobad for thank you, koto for how much, and bhalo for good.