How Santiniketan finally got the well-deserved UNESCO recognition

The UNESCO recognition for Santiniketan

Nandalal Bose, a pioneer of modern Indian art, was zealously supervising the relief artwork on the walls of Shyamali — the mud house. Rabindranath Tagore would often live here. So would Mahatma Gandhi during his visit to Santiniketan.

Shyamali and many such priceless architectural structures, sculptures and frescos are sprinkled across this otherwise fickle landscape, 160 km from Kolkata, where Rabindranath Tagore created this open-air institution in 1901 and named it Santiniketan.

The first attempt at UNESCO tag happened in 2010, which did not succeed. From 2021 onward, a renewed effort was made, and this time, it clicked.

Conservation architect Manish Chakraborti, who spearheaded Santiniketan’s UNESCO-project team and created the dossier which clinched the deal, explained how, strategically, they departed from the 2010 approach and settled for a smaller core heritage area. They then painstakingly recorded the integrity and authenticity of all the tangible buildings and assets, and mapped them to the philosophy of Tagore.

“The dossier, thus, has multiple layers,” says Manish. “Take for instance, the stain-glass Upasana Griha, also called, Mandir, Rabindranath Tagore transcended the archetypal mental-model of ‘mandir’ and made it a space for larger humanism. Under the tempestuous drumbeat of the Second World War, his seminal last speech in Santiniketan, ‘Crisis in Civilisation’, was delivered here.

Conceived in the ancient Indian concept of ‘Tapovan’, Santiniketan was Tagore’s alternative path to education from Macauley-imposed colonial highway. Ancient, yet modern and universal.

The low brick-layered half-rings — under a banyan tree here, a mango tree there — would go unnoticed. But during school sessions you would never fail to wonder at the students squatting on those half-rings, facing the teacher. That’s a regular class in progress, in the open. A dry leaf would mischievously fall dancing down from the branch above and land softly on an open exercise-book while one is diligently taking notes. The sun can play shadow-games through the foliage above. Santiniketan teaches what not to look for — solid boundaries.