Santiniketan may become 41st world heritage site in India

Kolkata: The dossier on Santiniketan’s nomination, first prepared in 2009, was commissioned by the ASI and prepared by Abha Narain Lambah Associates with conservation architect Manish Chakraborti. But it was only in 2021 that ASI approached Lambah again and asked her to submit the final dossier in 10 days.Lambah said any submission for a world heritage tag required a justification for the site’s outstanding universal value. “At the threshold of the 20th century, when India was grappling with colonialism, the partition of Bengal and the Swadeshi freedom movement, Rabindranath Tagore and the pioneers of the Bengal School of Art steered a new exploration in art, design and cultural interchange. Santiniketan is the tangible realization of an educational and artistic community’s encounter with pan-Asian modernity,” she said.“Santiniketan demonstrates the development of an Asian avant-garde that veered from the prevalent Beaux Arts and European modernism to forge a new design aesthetic rooted in its cultural context and history,” Lambah explained. The architecture of Santiniketan demonstrates cultural interchange, as well as experimentation in construction techniques, materials and design. “ Santiniketan was a bold attempt to revive indigenous construction techniques to create a contextual, regional modernism,” added Chakraborti. If Santiniketan’s nomination is accepted, it will become India’s 41st world heritage site and Bengal’s third after Darjeeling Himalayan Railways and Sundarbans National Park.
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