Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s abode ‘Santiniketan’ in West Bengal has been inscribed on the UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites during the 45th session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in September 2023. It is India’s 41st UNESCO World Heritage Site. After the Sundarbans National Park and the Darjeeling Mountain Railways, Santiniketan is the third UNESCO World Heritage Site in West Bengal. In 2022, UNESCO had declared the Durga Puja of West Bengal as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
Santiniketan was recommended for inscription to the World Heritage List by International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), a France-based international body, which is the advisory body to UNESCO World Heritage Centre, and is also dedicated to the conservation and enhancement of global architecture and heritage. A combination of historic buildings, landscapes and gardens, pavilions, and artworks, Santiniketan has been continuing educational and cultural traditions that together express its outstanding universal value. As explained by UNESCO, “Santiniketan is an outstanding example of an enclave of intellectuals, educators, artists, craftspeople and workers who collaborated and experimented with an Asian modernity based on an internationalism that drew upon ancient, medieval and folk traditions of India as well as Japanese, Chinese, Persian, Balinese, Burmese and Art Deco forms”.
UNESCO also termed Santiniketan as an institution of national importance and recommended further strengthening of its legal framework and management system. Moreover, no new developments would be approved within the property boundary, and all conservation projects would be overseen by the Visva Bharati Heritage Committee. This needs to be strengthened even more by developing guidelines for the responsibilities of the Heritage Committee and making sure that Heritage Impact Assessments are prepared for the Heritage Committee in writing in accordance with the operational guidelines.
The World Heritage Convention, which was adopted by UNESCO in 1972, has been striving hard to safeguard historically significant and noteworthy places for future generations by recognising their universal value and the need for international cooperation in their protection. UNESCO has been motivating the identification, protection, and preservation of cultural and natural heritage around the world which are considered to be of outstanding value to humanity.
About Santiniketan
The beautiful and culturally rich Santiniketan (abode of peace) was established by the renowned poet and philosopher, Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore in 1901. Santiniketan was started as a residential school and centre for art based on ancient traditions of India. It was then called the Brahmacharya Ashram.
The Visva Bharati University was established at Santiniketan in 1921 and declared as a central university by ‘The Visva-Bharati Act, 1951’. Visva-Bharti is recognised as an institution of national importance, known for its unitary teaching.
Santiniketan represents approaches towards a pan-Asian modernity, drawing on ancient, medieval, and folk traditions from across the region, which is in contrast to the dominant architectural styles of British colonialism in the early 20th century and European modernism. Santiniketan has been a vision of the unity of humanity transcending religious and cultural boundaries.
India’s Dossier for the UN Heritage Tag
According to the nomination dossier, submitted by India for justifying the specific nomination fit for inscription, it was stated that Santiniketan has always been directly and tangibly associated with the ideas, works, and vision of Rabindranath Tagore and his associates, who are pioneers of the Bengal School of Art and the early Indian Modernism.
India’s dossier for the UNESCO World Heritage Convention was prepared by Professor Manish Chakraborti, Head of the School of Architecture and Planning, Sister Nivedita University, Kolkata, along with the renowned conservation architect, Abha Narain Lambah. The dossier took two years to be completed, and is based on the one submitted in 2010. Professor Chakraborti also had to submit a site management plan for the protection and preservation of the site along with the dossier. As per the dossier, Santiniketan is “an outstanding example of an avant-garde enclave of intellectuals, educators, artists, craftspeople, and workers who collaborated and experimented—free from the established European colonial paradigms—to espouse a unique architectural language and herald a new modernism in art, architecture, landscape, product design, and town planning”.
The dossier also brought out similarities of Santiniketan with Bauhaus, the German art school, and the Mingei, the tradition of Japan. Bauhaus and Santiniketan were founded at the same time. However, Santiniketan embodies alternative modernity and internationalism, which are totally different from the austere puritanism of the Bauhaus. The art school of Santiniketan embraced a romantic humanism that was comprehensive and playful. It has been representing a strand of design which is equivalent to movements like the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain, the Mingei in Japan, and the Vienna Secession in Austria.
According to the site management plan, India has recorded that Santiniketan has a total area of 36 hectares, which has been conserved and protected by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). It also has a buffer zone of 537 hectares which would be regulated by the ASI for any kind of construction activities.
Other World Heritage Sites Included in 2023
Apart from Santiniketan, other places that found a place in the prestigious UNESCO World Heritage sites list included Ancient Jericho in Palestine; the Zarafshan-Karakum Corridor of Silk Roads in Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan; the Gedeo Cultural Landscape in Ethiopia; and the Cultural Landscape of Old Tea Forests of the Jingmai Mountain in China’s Pu’er.
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