For Santiniketan, Unesco World Heritage status has been a decade-long wait

The narrative tends to veer towards Tagore and intangible wealth, while the criteria focuses on tangible elements

The International Council on Monuments and Sites, a Unesco advisory body, has recommended that Santiniketan be included in the list of World Heritage Sites. It’s now for committee members of different countries to accept the recommendation at a meeting to be held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in September.

The idea of Santiniketan as a world heritage site has been in the making for more than a decade. The nomination dossier was first prepared in 2009 by conservation architects Abha Narain Lambah and Manish Chakraborty for the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). But for various reasons it did not move forward. In 2021, the ASI appointed Lambah to prepare and update the dossier.

The big challenge for Santiniketan was that the narrative spontaneously veers towards Rabindranath Tagore, whose vision was what turned it into a hub of creativity. The world heritage site status, however, has a defined set of criteria, which is not about personalities and intangibles.

“Santiniketan was unique and uniquely challenging as a Unesco dossier because apart from the overarching narrative of Tagore as a visionary artist and thinker, under the Unesco format, we had to argue on the cultural criteria of tangible elements,” Lambah says.

“We were thus to demonstrate convincingly that Santiniketan as a cultural property has tangible aspects of architecture, landscape, built form and monumental art, which is the requirement for a world heritage site,” she explains.

The justification for Santiniketan, therefore, rests on the tangible parts – from the indigenous materials to the architecture.

“In the early 20th century, India was under the yoke of colonialism, and Santiniketan heralded a break from colonial revivalist architecture to forge a new modernity, which was not looking to the West but inwards, exploring indigenous materials and techniques, delving into India's rich past and absorbing influences from the East to create a pan-Asian modernity,” Lambah says.
 

In the expression of Santiniketan, there are influences of interchange with Japanese, Chinese, Balinese architecture, she says. “In turn, you see Santiniketan influencing the architecture of Sri Lanka.”
 

The interplay of built and open landscape merges into one here. “Then there is the overlay of the works of Nandalal Bose (one of the pioneers of modern Indian art) and Ramkinkar Baij (master sculptor and painter). It was a new identity for Indian architecture,” Lambah says.

Santiniketan doesn’t fit into one box – it wasn’t meant to. “A unique idea of an alternative education was established there,” Uma Dasgupta, historian and Tagore biographer, says. “Both Rabindranath Tagore and Gandhi believed that the majority of India’s population lived in the villages and unless there was an education system that they could respond to, it would be meaningless.”

“Rabindranath had the good fortune of having a place that his father, Debendranath, founded in rural Bengal as an ashram in the 1860s. Debendranath established the Santiniketan Trust, a deed that provided for a school and a fair (Poush Mela),” Dasgupta says.

With his experimental idea of an open-air education system and centre of creativity, Rabindranath made it famous, and Santiniketan went on to inspire generations. It has gone on to become a university town with the birth of Visva-Bharati University.

Tapati Guha-Thakurta, former director and honorary professor, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta, points out that Kala Bhavan, set up in 1920 and led by Nandalal Bose, served as a centre of a new artistic modernism in India right through the years of independence. “It broke away from the Bengal school of art and established a new visual language, which looked to the East rather than the West,” she says.
 

“Bose went on to become Gandhi’s chosen painter for the pavilions of the Indian National Congress’s sessions in Lucknow, Faizpur and Haripura in 1936, ’37 and ’38, respectively. He and his team were later invited by Nehru to illustrate the pages of the Constitution of India," Guha-Thakurta adds.
 

Bose was also Satyajit Ray’s teacher at Kala Bhavan in 1940.

City-bred and all of 20, Ray wasn’t particularly keen on going to Santiniketan but it opened his eyes, says Sandip Ray, filmmaker and Satyajit Ray’s son. “He often said that Pather Panchali would not have been made without his stint in Santiniketan, which exposed him to rural Bengal.”

About 150 km north of Kolkata, Santiniketan – the seat of art, culture and new-form education – was a way of life.

In recent times, the Visva-Bharati University, which Tagore founded and which became a central university in 1951, has been mired in controversies.

“The present-day Santiniketan no longer resembles the dream Tagore had,” says Guha-Thakurta. “The Unesco recognition will be a tribute to the international and national stature the place once enjoyed and a call to restore it to that eminence.”