Kolkata invented modern Indian art, theatre and cinema, and it never stopped arguing about them. Three days here run from Georgian tombs and a marble-floored Mullick mansion to Kumartuli's idol studios and Bengali drama in a 19th-century Hatibagan playhouse.
Opened in 1767, this walled Georgian necropolis holds some 1,600 tombs — obelisks, pyramids and Palladian cupolas raised over East India Company dead. Orientalist William Jones lies here. Open 08:00–17:00 daily.
Kolkata's oldest gallery society, founded 1933 on Cathedral Road, runs six halls of rotating shows by Bengali painters plus permanent rooms of Rabindranath Tagore's own canvases and Jamini Roy folk-line works. Open 12:00–20:00, closed Monday.
Rajendra Mullick's 1835 neoclassical mansion is floored in 126 varieties of Italian marble and crammed with Rubens and Reynolds canvases, Victorian statuary and a courtyard aviary. Open 10:00–16:00, closed Monday and Thursday.
The colonial administrative core: the 150-metre red facade of Writers' Building, the domed GPO standing on the Black Hole site, Doric St Andrew's Kirk and the 1780 Currency Building, all ringed around the Lal Dighi tank.
India's oldest museum, founded 1814, wraps 35 galleries around a colonnaded courtyard: the 2nd-century BC Bharhut stupa railing, Gandhara Buddhas, an Egyptian mummy and a coin cabinet of thousands. Open 10:00–17:00, closed Monday.
Founded by Orientalist William Jones in 1784, the subcontinent's oldest learned body keeps some 47,000 manuscripts and a museum room of Company School portraits at 1 Park Street. Weekdays 10:00–17:00; sign in with photo ID at the desk.
West Bengal's state film complex, its logo lettered by Satyajit Ray himself, runs three auditoriums of restored Bengali classics, world cinema and, each November, the Kolkata International Film Festival. Buy at the counter an hour ahead.
The 1883 playhouse where Girish Ghosh built Bengali drama and Ramakrishna watched from the stalls. Rebuilt after a 1991 fire, it stages Bengali plays and jatra most evenings from 18:30 in north Kolkata's old theatre district.
On the Hooghly's north bank, around 500 workshops raise Durga idols from straw armatures, river clay and gouache. The lanes run barely three feet wide and the work peaks August to October, before Durga Puja.
Boi Para is a mile of secondhand book stalls around Presidency University, feeding the Indian Coffee House upstairs at 15 Bankim Chatterjee Street — a ceiling-fanned 1942 hall of adda where Ray and Mrinal Sen argued for hours.
Rabindranath Tagore's ancestral 1784 mansion, now the Rabindra Bharati Museum: the room where he died, his handwritten manuscripts and paintings, and galleries tracing the Bengal Renaissance. Open 10:30–17:00, closed Monday.
Six blocks of red-brick tenements built for First World War troops, now the heart of Kolkata's Anglo-Indian community — laundry strung across the lane, kitchens smelling of ball curry and vindaloo, and the city's loudest street Christmas.