West Bengal produced the Bengal Renaissance, Rabindranath Tagore, and the finest tradition of classical Indian music this side of Varanasi — and still operates a city, Kolkata, that is more intellectually alive than anywhere else in India.
Kolkata has been being written off since the British moved the capital to Delhi in 1911, and has been refusing to cooperate with the obituary ever since. The coffeehouses of College Street — where poets, filmmakers, and revolutionaries have argued since the 19th century — still function as intellectual commons of a kind that most cities have lost to the internet. The Victoria Memorial, which took fifteen years to build (1906–1921), is the most impressive piece of colonial architecture in India and presides over the Maidan with a confidence the British Empire already lacked by the time it was finished.
Durga Puja, the annual five-day festival that transforms every neighbourhood in Kolkata into a temporary temple, is the most ambitious public art event in India. The pandals — temporary structures sometimes twenty metres high, built from bamboo and cloth and plaster — are designed each year in competition by some of India's most adventurous visual artists. On the final day, the statues are carried to the Hooghly river for immersion in a procession of several million people that is the largest annual gathering in the city.
Darjeeling, in the state's northern hills at 2,100 metres, looks across to Kangchenjunga on clear mornings, and the first flush tea harvested from the estates the British planted in the 1840s is among the finest in the world. The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway — a UNESCO World Heritage Site — has been climbing the same loops and spirals through the same tea gardens on 2-foot gauge track since 1881, at an average speed of 12 kilometres per hour, in one of the most leisurely and scenic journeys available in India.