Kolkata, West Bengal

Kolkata is the capital of West Bengal and the principal city of eastern India, spread along the east bank of the Hooghly, a distributary of the Ganges, about 150 kilometres inland from the Bay of Bengal.

It was the capital of British India from 1772 until 1911, and that century and a half left the city with the finest colonial architecture in the country — Victoria Memorial, the Writers' Building, Dalhousie Square, St. Paul's Cathedral and hundreds of decaying mansions in between. Kolkata was also the crucible of the Bengal Renaissance, the nineteenth-century intellectual and cultural movement that produced Rabindranath Tagore, Ram Mohan Roy, Swami Vivekananda and Satyajit Ray.

Modern Kolkata is less prosperous than Mumbai or Bengaluru and makes no attempt to hide it. What it has instead is an unusually strong cultural life — theatre, literature, film, classical music, football and political argument all pursued with genuine seriousness — and a reputation for warmth that visitors consistently remark on.

Durga Puja, inscribed on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2021, transforms the city each autumn into what is effectively the world's largest public art festival.

Kolkata is India's most rewarding city for travellers who want atmosphere over polish.

The colonial architecture is unmatched anywhere in the country — not curated heritage precincts, but an entire working city built in the nineteenth century and still lived in. Walking through north Kolkata's lanes or Dalhousie Square is genuinely like moving through a different era, with all the beauty and decay that implies.

The cultural life is the real draw. This is a city where bookshops matter, where people argue about films and politics in coffee houses, where the Bengali intellectual tradition is a living thing rather than a museum piece. College Street is the largest second-hand book market in the world.

The food is exceptional and quite unlike the rest of India — a distinct Bengali cuisine built on fish, mustard, poppy seed and a sophisticated sweet tradition, plus the best Chinese food in India in the Tangra district and a street-food culture centred on the kathi roll, which was invented here.

And Durga Puja, if you can time it, is one of the great spectacles on earth — thousands of temporary art installations across the city, free to walk through, for five days and nights.