Inside Rabindranath Tagore’s House in Kolkata
When my fascination with India began piquing my curiosity during my college years, I'd come across the name of Rabindranath Tagore, who, like his contemporary, our very own Jose Rizal, was born in the same year in 1861, and together, they also shared the distinction of being a writer, poet, and social reformer.
While my personal library, which contains more than a hundred books, half of which are still unread, only has one Rabindranath Tagore title: The Postmaster, a collection of short stories published in 1891, I remained interested in his life. Therefore, upon discovering the transformation of his family's ancestral home in Kolkata into a museum, I suggested to my friend Aileen that we ought to visit it.
After a cab ride, during which the driver informed us that the museum was "somewhere here, just ask around," upon dropping us off, we found ourselves walking for nearly an hour in search of the museum. It turns out that Rabindranath Tagore's birthplace isn't your normal residence. It covers 35,000 square meters and has housed Rabindra Bharati University since 1962.
Also known as the Jorasanko Thakur Bari (taken from two attached “sanko” or bridges and the Bengali translation for "House of the Thakurs," with Thakur being the anglicized version of "Tagore"), the residence was first built in 1784 on property provided by a wealthy member of the Sett family to Prince Dwarkanath Tagore, Rabindranath's great-grandfather.
Jorasanko Thakur Bari or the House of the Thakurs
Built in between two bridges, the Jorasanko Thakur Bari, also known as the House of the Tagore, became an integral part of Bengali culture and society. Rabindranath Tagore's family developed close associations not only with the city's business circle but also with the intellectuals of the era.
The palatial red brick mansion was where renowned thinker, writer, and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore was born, took up early education, and also where he breathed his last. In between his extensive travels across the globe—again, much like our own Jose Rizal—Tagore would always come back here.
He brought home with him countless mementos, letters, and artworks that now make up the collection of the Rabindra Bharati museum, established in his honor following the founding of the Rabindra Bharati University in 1961—the birth centenary of Tagore.
The Rabindra Bharati Museum's collections include 2,071 books, 770 journals, 16 artworks, 27 sculptures, and 208 personal mementos. The West Bengal government acquired forty of Tagore's original paintings and notebooks from his family and has since displayed it all at the museum.
The museum not only showcases anything about Rabindranath Tagore, but it also has galleries dedicated to leading figures in Bengali Renaissance art as well as works encompassing Western art. My favorite, of course, is the gallery that shows Rabindranath's extensive travels abroad, showing rare photographs and travel journals to countries such as China, Italy, Mexico, Japan, the United States, the UK, Sri Lanka, Iraq, and more.
The museum's ban on photography turned out to be a blessing because it allowed me to concentrate entirely on the exhibits, reading the captions on the photographs and descriptions of the items. Walking out of Jorasanko Thakurbari had me contemplating the many similarities between Tagore and Rizal. Both of their writings have impacted their respective countries in terms of history, literature, and identity.
