Kolkata served as the second city of the British Empire for 139 years, and became the ground where Indian nationalism organised itself. This route runs from Bharhut stone carvings to Bose's escape car and the potters' lanes of Kumartuli.
Founded 1814, the oldest museum in Asia. The Bharhut gallery holds a 2nd-century BC stupa railing carved with Jataka scenes, alongside Gandharan Buddhas and a 4,000-year-old Egyptian mummy. Open 10:00–17:00, closed Monday.
Sir William Jones founded this in 1784 to study Asia's languages and antiquities — effectively the birthplace of Indology. The museum room shows Ashokan edict rubbings and rare manuscripts; the stacks hold 47,000 handwritten volumes.
India's first university museum (1937), inside Calcutta University's Centenary Building. Terracotta plaques from Chandraketugarh — a Bengali river port trading by 200 BC — sit beside Pala-dynasty bronzes and Bengali folk scrolls.
The city's largest mosque, built 1926 by Kutchi Memon traders on the model of Akbar's tomb at Sikandra — red Rajasthani sandstone, 46-metre minarets, capacity 10,000. The lanes outside form Kolkata's oldest Muslim quarter.
The 1906 colonial prison where Aurobindo Ghose awaited trial in the Alipore Bomb Case and where Nehru, C.R. Das and Subhas Bose were held. Opened as a museum in 2022 with cells, watchtower and gallows preserved intact.
The Bose family home from which Subhas Chandra Bose slipped past British surveillance in a German Wanderer W24 on 17 January 1941, en route to Kabul and Berlin. That car still stands in the porch. Entry ₹25, closed Monday.
Kolkata's third-oldest church (1787), modelled on London's St Martin-in-the-Fields. Its yard holds Job Charnock's octagonal 1695 tomb — the city's oldest masonry — plus the relocated Black Hole monument and Warren Hastings' desk.
The administrative core of British India: the red Writers' Building of 1777, the GPO raised on the ruins of the original Fort William, and Lal Dighi, the tank that predates the British. Renamed for Binoy, Badal and Dinesh.
Potters from Krishnanagar settled these riverside lanes in the 18th century to sculpt clay idols for the zamindars' Durga Pujas. Roughly 550 workshops still build straw-and-Ganga-clay figures by hand, unfired and unglazed.
Raja Rajendra Mullick's 1835 mansion, floored in 126 varieties of marble, with Rubens and Reynolds canvases hung to the ceiling and a private menagerie in the garden. His descendants still live in one wing. Closed Monday and Thursday.
The 1784 Tagore family mansion where Rabindranath was born in 1861 and died in 1941. Fifteen galleries trace the Bengal Renaissance the Thakurs bankrolled; the room in which he died is preserved as it stood. Closed Monday.
Boi Para, a mile of second-hand book stalls wrapped around Presidency College, founded 1817. Upstairs in the Albert Hall, the Coffee House has poured since 1942 for Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and the Naxalite student generation.