Discover West Bengal

West Bengal runs from the Himalaya to the Bay of Bengal in a narrow band, which gives it an improbable range for a single state: tea gardens under Kanchenjunga at one end, and the world’s largest mangrove forest at the other.

Kolkata was the capital of British India until 1911 and looks it — a city of colonnaded buildings, trams, coffee houses and a genuinely intellectual public culture that came out of the nineteenth-century Bengal Renaissance. Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European Nobel laureate in literature, worked here and at Shantiniketan, the school he founded, which is now UNESCO-listed. Durga Puja, the city’s five-day autumn festival, fills the streets with thousands of commissioned temporary pavilions and is itself on the UNESCO intangible heritage list.

In the north, Darjeeling grows the most valuable tea in the world on steep slopes at two thousand metres, reached by a narrow-gauge railway built in 1881 that is also a World Heritage site. In the south, the Sundarbans are a tidal labyrinth of mangrove channels shared with Bangladesh, holding the largest population of Bengal tigers anywhere. Bengali cooking — freshwater fish, mustard oil, a whole separate course of sweets — is treated by Bengalis as a serious subject and by most Indians as a legitimate one.