By Somdatta Mandal

Title: ‘Santiniketan: Nature’s Gateway to Spirituality‘
Authors: Bitann Chakraborty and Kiriti Sengupta
Publication: Hawakal Publishers Pvt. Ltd, 2026;
Price: Rs. 1500/-

In 1863 Maharshi Debendranath Tagore acquired twenty bighas of land in the village of Bhubandanga in a remote place of wilderness in the district of Birbhum where he decided to build a peaceful meditation centre for himself and for people of the Brahmo faith. This house was called ‘Santiniketan Griha ’, and it is from this that the place gradually acquired the name of Santiniketan, meaning the ‘Abode of Peace’. Rabindranath Tagore started living here with his family since 1895, and how he later opened the Bramhacharya Ashram in 1905, and the place grew and started acquiring its uniqueness is common knowledge. The ashram, the school, and the university called Visva-Bharati gradually developed over the years, and since then the beautiful architectural landmarks of the place have crossed many decades, and it is now even earmarked as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

To the present generation of primarily city-bred individuals, Santiniketan has now become mainly a weekend tourist destination for revelry, fun, merrymaking — what they literally call ‘chilling out’ – where boozing along with fake tribal song and dance sessions in the innumerable homestays and fancy resorts, the Sonajhuri Haat as a chaotic place where shoppers throng each day to pick up exclusive Santiniketani wares, are all adding to the destruction of the quiet, peaceful and idyllic place that Tagore had envisioned. Easy accessibility by rail and road seems to enhance this commercialisation and bring an end to Tagore’s dream world. Nature is receding to the background with each passing day, and soon the uniqueness and charm of this place is sure to disappear.

The reason for such a digressive introduction seemed necessary when a very aesthetically produced coffee-table book titled Santiniketan: Nature’s Gateway to Spirituality has just been published which highlights the lure of the place defined by open expansive spaces and unexplored nooks and ravines of a disappearing Khoai, the rural Bengali ambience, a connectedness of rural-urban life in this little university town with its intermingling of aesthetics and culture with a tinge of otherworldliness, a world of high culture and simple living and at the same time a place steeped in Rabindranath Tagore and his idea of spirituality through nature. The book has a mixture of coloured as well as black-and-white photographs, artistically shot by Bitann Chakraborty and accompanying each entry we have short poetic pieces by Kiriti Sengupta along with some excerpts from Tagore’s own prose translations from his original Bengali poems in Gitanjali.

The book is dedicated to the ace photographer Raghu Rai, and Bitann has really done an excellent job as he managed to focus his camera eye on many simple yet intricate details of nature and human beings in and around Santiniketan. The cover photograph of a lone Baul singer sitting beneath a tree is very eponymous and several other colour photographs all add to the charm of the place. The beautiful Upasana Griha, popularly known as the ‘Kaanch Mandir’, illuminated at night, is a memorable photograph. Among different aspects of nature we find the jarul tree in bloom, the water lilies, the gnarled tree roots, the banyan tree, a simple dragonfly sitting on a plant, ducks, fish in the pond, the red moon, the coloured landscape with the blue sky and white clouds above and the green fields below, farmers ploughing the field, a washerman washing clothes in Lalbandh, the forest during monsoon, and many other objects and scenery are captured through his observant eyes.  Some of the black and white photographs are also remarkable. These include the Chatimtala, one of the entrances to the Visva-Bharati campus with a wet road, the entrance to Amartya Sen’s house ‘Pratichi’, a beggar boy dressed as Krishna, or simply a man sitting on the culvert of a drain, two cowherds idling on the roadside, the front of a deserted house, and a busy street with sunlight filtering through the trees.

Merely mentioning some of the photographs is not enough, and one has to actually see them to appreciate their aesthetic beauty. Kudos to the photographer and poet duo for imagining such a theme and presenting it to readers and viewers in such a way. It will definitely be a collector’s item.

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Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is a former professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan.