Rural Bengal: Off the Beaten Track India

One of our favourite places to get accustomed to the city’s distinctive ambience is the College Street Coffee House on Bankim Chatterjee Street– a favourite hangout for Bengali intellectuals and artists. Grab a table under one of the paddle fans, order a dosa and masala chai from one of the turbaned waiters and you’ll soon be drawn into the local ‘adda’, or chit-chat.

Today’s tour covers most of the city’s must-see sights, including the iconic Victoria Building on Kolkata’s Maidan, the Indian Museum’s famous collection of antiquities, the Writers’ Building and Park Street Cemetery, where an evocative collection of 18th and 19th century Gothic tombs recalls the early days of British rule. In the early evening, drive across town to the Kali Ghat temple, dedicated to a black-faced incarnation of the Goddess Durga. The temple is the most important Hindu shrine in the city. Raucous crowds attend rituals here from dawn til dusk, forming snaking queues in the temple precincts as they wait to fling hibiscus flowers at the three-eyed, gold-tongued deity in the main sanctum.

Some of the most beautiful and richly embellished temples in eastern India are to be found 93 miles north of Kolkata at Bishnupur, former capital of the Malla Rajas. Made of laterite stone and brick faced with finely carved terracotta, the temples take their cue from the form of simple Bengali village huts, whence their gracefully arched chala roofs. Tiles around the bases of the shrine depict scenes from the Hindu epic, as well as intricate floral motifs.

First stop on today’s tour is the market town of Bankura. Nearby Panchmura is renowned as a pottery centre where Hindu deities in the shape of horses and elephants are made from terracotta. Showrooms in the market displaying ranks of the figures make great photo opportunities.

Founded by Rabindranath Tagore in the early 1900s, Vishwa Bharati in Shantiniketan was created as a kind of crucible of Bengali culture. Classes in singing, painting and music take place under the trees in the grounds – one of the region’s defining spectacles.

The university holds numerous buildings decorated with fine sculptures, paintings, murals and terracotta work by renowned Bengali artists. The spiritual focal point is the Upasana Griha, a glass-walled chamber that looks especially wonderful on Wednesday evenings when bhajan-singing sessions take place inside it. Music is very much a part of everyday life here, and if you’re lucky enough to be here on Saturday afternoon, after the local market ends, you’ll see groups of Bauls – mystic minstrels distinguished by their saffron clothes – gather beside the canal to play and sing.

Aghoris are a Tantric order of sadhus whose ritual practises include smearing their bodies with ash, drinking blood from skulls and eating human flesh. They believe that breaking taboos in this way helps them transcend illusion and attain knowledge of the Absolute. At the cremation ground in Tarapith, next to the temple, a small community of Aghori live in huts scattered around a Banyan grove. Contrary to their popular image, they’re rather docile, spending most of their lives high on cannabis – the drug is closely associated with the worship of Shiva throughout India.

The flat, riverine countryside of central Bengal to the north of Kolkata holds the remains of numerous lost cities dating from before the time of the British. Grandest of them all is Murshidabad, capital of Murshid Quli Khan, the First Nawab of Bengal, who took control of the region after the death of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb in the early 18th century. Numerous mosques, tombs and gardens survive on the site, but its crowning glory is the vast, Georgian-style Hazarduari Palace, whose great Neoclassical façade rises in spectacular fashion from the banks of the Bhagirathi River.

Gaur holds the remains of several cities that prospered on this stretch of the Ganges for over a thousand years before the arrival of the East India Company. The ready source of basalt stone in the nearby Rajmahal Hills provided material for the impressive mosques whose remnants today tower rise above the surrounding mango trees.

Nearby Pandua is the site of what was, in the late 14th century, India’s largest mosque – a vast building modelled on the Great Mosque in Damascus, retaining dozens of domes and a vast façade.

It’s not hard to understand why the British chose Darjeeling as the site of an army sanatorium back in the early 19th century. Dense oak and sal forest cloaks the high, undulating ridge on which the hill station was founded, at a refreshing altitude of 2,200m. For much of the year, the skies remain blue and air blissfully cool. Whole hillsides of lush tea gardens carpet the surrounding slopes. Visitors travel here to watch the pluckers at work amid the terraces, to marvel at the rhododendron flowers in the botanical gardens, and enjoy the old-world atmosphere of the town itself, with its mock-Tudor bungalows and Gothic churches.

The top of Tiger Hill offers a truly extraordinary panoramic vista, extending from the plains bordering Bangladesh in the south to the summits of Lhotse, Makulu and Everest in the west, and Kangchenjunga to the north. Few viewpoints in the world encompass a comparable span, though you’ll need to be there shortly after sunrise to see it in all its glory.

Ghoom Monastery is the day’s other highpoint. Its centrepiece is a particularly beautiful bronze-faced Maitreya, the ‘Buddha to Come’.

An exhibition detailing the history of Himalayan mountaineering forms the core of the illustrious training institute in Darjeeling, where Sir Edmund Hilary’s climbing partner Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, was the once the director. Anyone interested in the sport will enjoy seeing the amazing extent to which equipment has evolved over the past sixty years!

No visit to Darjeeling is complete with a trip on the glorious little Himalayan Railway, a narrow-gauge line built by the British at the end of the 19th century, and the only one in India that still uses steam locomotives. Kurseong provides the perfect target for a short taster ride. You’ll be met at the station and driven back to your hotel in town.