Four days in Kolkata: crumbling, bookish, and the best company in India

Three nights, mostly on foot and by tram. Imperial marble in the south, decaying palaces in the north, and the river in between.

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Length
4 days, 3 nights
Where you stay
Kolkata
Places
11 across 4 days
OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles Data from OpenStreetMap

Calcutta was the second city of the British Empire and the capital of India until 1911, when the government moved to Delhi and took the money with it. What was left behind is a city of enormous buildings that nobody has the budget to repaint, which is why the standard word for Kolkata is decaying and why that is only half the story.

The other half is that it is the most sociable big city in India. Bengalis have a word, adda, for the long unstructured argument about politics, football and literature that is the main indoor sport here, and four days will pull you into several of them. People will talk to you on the tram. They will have opinions about your itinerary.

It is also cheaper, greener and considerably less frantic than Delhi or Mumbai, and it eats better than either.

Highlights

  • White marble built by an empire that had already lost the argument
  • The house where Tagore was born and died, in the middle of the old north
  • A private palace of 1835, still lived in, with a Rubens on the wall and no photography
  • The workshops where Durga is made out of river clay every autumn
  • The flower market under Howrah Bridge at six in the morning

Where to stay

Kolkata, three nights

The city divides cleanly. South Kolkata, around Park Street and the Maidan, is the imperial half: a park the size of a district, white monuments, cathedrals, the museums and most of the hotels. North Kolkata is the older Bengali city, a grid of narrow lanes with nineteenth-century merchant mansions falling apart in them, and it is where the four days get interesting.

Between the two sits the old administrative centre and the river, with the ghats, the bridge and the flower market along it.

Stay around Park Street or Esplanade. Both are central, on the metro, and within walking distance of the Maidan, which you will cross more than once.

Day by day

Day 1 in Kolkata

White marble, a cathedral and the river at sunset

The airport is about forty-five minutes north of the centre. Whatever time you land, the first afternoon is the easy one, and all of it is on the southern edge of the Maidan.

The Victoria Memorial was proposed the year the Queen died and finished in 1921, by which point the capital had already moved to Delhi and the whole thing was a monument to something that had gone. It is Makrana marble, the same quarry as the Taj Mahal, set in gardens that the city uses as a park. The museum inside is a good deal better than it needs to be.

The cathedral a few minutes north went up in 1847 and looks like an English parish church that has been left out in the sun. Then walk west to the river.

The ghat with the Palladian portico on it was built in 1841 and named after an East India Company official who worked out how to read the earliest Indian scripts. It is where Kolkata goes at sunset: couples, buskers, boats, and the second bridge lit up downstream.

  1. 15:00

    Victoria Memorial

    Historic

    The city's landmark, in white marble with a bronze angel on top that turns in the wind. Buy the ticket for the galleries as well as the gardens; the paintings of old Calcutta are the best record of it that exists.

  2. 17:30

    St. Paul's Cathedral

    Religious

    Built in 1847 and the largest Anglican church in the city, with a Burne-Jones window at the west end. Ten minutes' walk from the memorial and usually almost empty.

  3. 19:00

    Prinsep Ghat

    Other

    A Greek revival portico of 1841 on the riverbank, named for the man who deciphered the Brahmi script. Come for the last hour of light, when the whole neighbourhood is out and boats are working the channel.

With more time: The old British cemetery off Park Street is a ten minute walk east and holds about two thousand graves from the eighteenth century, most of them of people who died in their twenties and thirties. It is overgrown, enormous and completely quiet.

Day 2 in Kolkata

North Kolkata: Tagore's house, a private palace and the idol makers

The Bengali city today, which is where Kolkata stops being a colonial capital and starts being itself.

Start at the Tagore family mansion, a sprawl of red brick around courtyards that was the centre of the Bengal Renaissance for a century. Rabindranath Tagore was born here in 1861 and died here eighty years later, and in between became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The house is now a museum and a university, and the rooms are kept much as they were.

Ten minutes away is a mansion built in 1835 by a Bengali landowner with more money than editorial judgement, stuffed floor to ceiling with European paintings, statues, chandeliers and mirrors, with peacocks in the courtyard and the family still living upstairs. You need a permit, you go round with a guide, and you cannot take a camera in. It is the strangest hour in the city.

Finish north at the potters' quarter on the riverbank, where the clay figures for Durga Puja are built on straw and bamboo frames. In September the lanes are impassable. The rest of the year you can watch a goddess being made from the feet up.

  1. 10:30

    Jōrāsānkō Thākurbāṛi

    Historic

    The Tagore family's ancestral house, now a museum with the poet's rooms preserved and galleries on the Bengal Renaissance. Closed Mondays. Allow ninety minutes, more if the Bengali literature interests you.

  2. 13:00

    Marble Palace

    Historic

    Built in 1835 and never edited since: marble floors, Belgian glass, European statuary in ranks, and a zoo in the garden. Free with a permit, no photography, and tip the guide.

  3. 14:30

    Lunch on College Street

    Eat

    The biggest second-hand book market in India, a kilometre of stalls, with the Indian Coffee House upstairs at the middle of it. Order the mutton cutlet, sit under the fans, and listen to the arguments.

  4. 17:00

    Kumartuli Ghat

    Other

    The riverbank steps below the potters' lanes, where the finished idols are carried down to the water. The workshops behind are the reason to come and they are open to the street all year.

With more time: The lanes of north Kolkata are full of merchant houses in the same state as the palace and without the permits: peeling shutters, courtyards, and families who have been in them for six generations. Walk between the three sites rather than taking a taxi and you will see thirty of them.

Day 3 in Kolkata

The old company town, an Armenian church and the bridge

Everything today is within a kilometre of the spot where an East India Company agent set up a trading post in 1690, which is as close as Kolkata gets to a founding.

The Anglican church of 1787 was built on the model of St Martin-in-the-Fields and has the graveyard of the early settlement around it, including the mausoleum of the man who founded the place. The building holds a painting of the Last Supper with Calcutta merchants as the apostles.

The Armenians were here before the British, and their church, rebuilt in 1724, is the oldest in the city. It sits in a courtyard behind a market and a caretaker will let you in.

Then the bridge. It carries an extraordinary number of people across the Hooghly on a single cantilever span with no bolts in it, and it is a defence installation, so photography from the bridge itself is not allowed. The place to see it from is the flower market underneath, which starts before dawn and is the best thing in Kolkata.

  1. 09:30

    St John's Church and Compound

    Religious

    Built in 1787, the third oldest church in the city, in a compound of monuments to the earliest British dead. The Last Supper painting inside used local merchants as models and nobody was flattered.

  2. 11:30

    Armenian Church of the Holy Nazareth

    Religious

    Rebuilt in 1724 on an older burial ground and the oldest church in Kolkata. Ring the bell at the gate. The gravestones in the courtyard run back to the 1630s, which predates the city entirely.

  3. 16:30

    Howrah Bridge

    Architecture

    A riveted cantilever bridge opened in 1943, with no nuts or bolts in the span. Walk across it for the crowd rather than the view, and put the camera away before you step on.

With more time: Come back to the flower market under the bridge at six the next morning if you can face it. It runs on the riverbank from before first light, sells marigolds by the sack, and is the most photographed hour in the city for good reason.

Day 4 in Kolkata

The oldest museum in Asia, and a small room on Bose Road

Two things on the last morning, and they are about as far apart in spirit as a city can manage.

The Indian Museum was founded in 1814 and is the oldest in Asia and the largest in India. It is also, in places, still the museum it was a century ago: dark wooden cases, handwritten labels, a whole gallery of fossils nobody has touched in decades. Go anyway, and go straight to the Gandhara sculpture and the Bharhut railings, which are among the most important early Buddhist objects anywhere.

Then walk twenty minutes east to the plain building where the Missionaries of Charity have their mother house. Mother Teresa's tomb is a stone slab in a downstairs room, with her bedroom preserved upstairs, and it is free and unfussy in a way that is more affecting than anything grander would be. It is closed on Thursdays.

After that, the airport, and a very long list of things you did not get to.

  1. 10:00

    Indian Museum

    Culture

    Founded in 1814 and still holding the urn said to contain a portion of the Buddha's ashes. Closed Mondays. Two hours, and ignore the natural history wing unless you like Victorian taxidermy.

  2. 12:30

    Mother Teresa’s tomb

    Visit

    The mother house of the order founded here in 1950, with the tomb downstairs and the room she worked in kept as it was. Free, quiet, and closed on Thursdays.

  3. 14:00

    To Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International

    Travel

    Forty-five minutes north by road, and longer in the afternoon. There is no metro to the terminal, so allow for the traffic on the northern approach.

With more time: With a spare afternoon instead, the Kali temple upriver at Dakshineswar and the monastery across the water at Belur Math make a good half day by ferry, and the boat between them is much better than the road.

Before you go

When to go

October to February. November to January is properly pleasant, mid-twenties and dry. The rest of the year is either very hot or very wet: April and May reach the high thirties with humidity to match, and the monsoon from June to September floods streets regularly.

October is worth aiming at for a different reason. Durga Puja takes over the entire city for about a week, with hundreds of temporary pavilions built and then dismantled, all-night crowds, and no accommodation available at any price if you have not booked.

Getting around

The metro was the first in India and runs north to south under the middle of the city, which is exactly the direction you need. It is cheap, fast and worth using for the longer hops.

Above ground, yellow Ambassador taxis still work, ride-hailing apps work better, and the tram network, once the oldest in Asia, has been cut back to almost nothing. If a tram is running on your route, take it for the sake of it. Otherwise walk: central Kolkata is flat and the pavements exist.

Two things that need arranging

The Marble Palace is a private house and needs a free permit, obtained from the West Bengal tourism office a day in advance, or arranged by your hotel. Turning up without one usually works and sometimes does not, and there is a small unofficial charge either way. No cameras inside.

Kumartuli is a working district rather than an attraction. The studios have no doors and the artisans are used to visitors, but ask before photographing anyone and buy something small if you spend an hour there.

Eating, which is the point

Bengali food is river fish, mustard oil, and a sweet course taken seriously enough to have its own shops on every street. Try shorshe ilish if the season allows, kosha mangsho, and mishti doi to finish. Rosogolla is a matter of civic pride and there is an ongoing argument with Odisha about who invented it.

Beyond that: kathi rolls, invented here and sold from pavement griddles, and the Chinese food of the old Tangra quarter, which is its own cuisine and nothing like anything in China.

Kolkata is the only Indian city where strangers will ask what you think of the place and then argue with the answer. It is also the one where the buildings are falling down at the same rate the conversation is improving.

Four days is enough to stop noticing the peeling paint. After that you notice what is underneath it.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

Copy to my trips

Common questions

Is four days enough for Kolkata?
Yes for the central city. Five or six would let you add the temples and monastery upriver, the Chinatown at Tangra, the botanical garden across the river and a proper afternoon in the north Kolkata lanes without hurrying.
Is Kolkata safe?
It has a reputation as the safest of the big Indian cities and it is largely deserved, including for women travelling alone. Ordinary care at night in unlit areas is enough. The commonest hazard is the pavement.
Should I visit during Durga Puja?
If you can get accommodation, absolutely. It is the biggest street festival in India, the city stays up all night for a week, and the pavilions are genuinely extraordinary pieces of temporary architecture. Book months ahead and expect to walk a great deal.
Do I need a permit for the Marble Palace?
Officially yes, free, from the state tourism office at least a day ahead. In practice most visitors turn up and are let in for a small payment, but the permit removes the doubt and hotels will get it for you.
What is worth eating?
Bengali fish curry, mutton kosha and mishti doi at a proper Bengali restaurant; a kathi roll from a pavement stall, which was invented here; and Chinese from the Tangra quarter, which is a cuisine of its own. Sweets are a serious matter and every neighbourhood has its shop.
Are the trams still running?
Barely. The network was the oldest in Asia and has been cut back to almost nothing over the last few years. If a route is operating near you, ride it, because it may not be there next time.
Can I change this plan?
Yes. Copy it and move the days about. The one thing worth keeping is the split: the imperial south and the Bengali north are half an hour apart and mixing them in one day wastes the time in traffic.