The Maidan, New Market and Park Street

At the corner of Chowringhee and Sudder streets, the stately Indian Museum is the oldest and largest museum in India, founded in 1814. Visitors come in their thousands, many of them villagers who call it the jadu ghar or “house of magic”. The main showpiece is a collection of sculptures obtained from sites all over India, which centres on a superb Mauryan polished-sandstone lion capital dating from the third century BC. One gallery houses the impressive remains of the second-century BC Buddhist stupa from Bharhut in Madhya Pradesh, partly reassembled to display the red-sandstone posts, capping stones, railings and gateways. Carvings depict human and animal figures, as well as scenes from the Jataka tales of the Buddha’s many incarnations. There is also a huge collection of Buddhist schist sculptures, dating from the first to the third centuries, from the Gandhara region. You’ll also see stone sculpture from Khajuraho and Pala bronzes, plus copper artefacts, Stone-Age tools and terracotta figures from other sites. Along with an excellent exhibit of Tibetan thangkas, the museum holds Kalighat pat and paintings by the Company School, a group of mid-nineteenth-century Indian artists who emulated Western themes and techniques for European patrons. Finally, there’s a spectacular array of fossils and stuffed animals, most of which look in dire need of a decent burial.

Around the corner from the museum, the Asiatic Society, established in 1784 by Orientalists including Sir William Jones, houses a huge collection of around 150,000 books and 60,000 manuscripts, some dating back to the seventh century. The society has a reading room open to the public as well as a gallery of art and antiquities that holds paintings by Rubens and Reynolds, a large coin collection and one of Ashoka’s stone edicts. Around 2km east along Park Street from the Maidan, the disused Park Street Cemeteryis one of the city’s most haunting memorials to its imperial past. Inaugurated in 1767, it is the oldest in Kolkata, holding a wonderful concentration of pyramids, obelisks, pavilions, urns and headstones, under which many well-known figures from the Raj lie buried. The epitaphs make fascinating reading.

The dramatic white marble Victoria Memorial, at the southern end of the Maidan, with its formal gardens and water courses, continues to be Kolkata’s pride and joy. Other colonial monuments and statues throughout the city have been renamed or demolished, but the popularity of Queen Victoria seems to endure; attempts to change the name of the “VM” have come to nothing. This extraordinary hybrid building designed by Sir William Emerson, with Italianate statues over its entrances, Mughal domes in its corners, and elegant open colonnades along its sides, was conceived by Lord Curzon to commemorate the empire at its peak, though by the time it was completed in 1921, twenty years after Victoria’s death, the capital of the Raj had shifted to Delhi. A sombre statue of Queen Victoria, flanked by two ornamental tanks, gazes out towards the Maidan from a pedestal lined with bronze panels and friezes. Faced with Makrana marble from Rajasthan, the building itself is capped by a dome bearing a revolving five-metre-tall bronze figure of Victory.

The main entrance, at the Maidan end, leads into a tall chamber beneath the dome. The 25 galleries inside still contain mementoes of British imperialism – statues and busts of Queen Mary, King George V and Queen Victoria; a huge canvas of the future Edward VII entering Jaipur in 1876; French guns captured at the Battle of Plassey in 1758; and the black marble throne of a nawab defeated by Robert Clive. Well worth seeing, the Calcutta Gallery provides a fascinating insight into the history and life of the Indians of the city and the Independence struggle through paintings, documents and old photographs. The evening sound-and-light show held in the grounds, concentrates on the same theme. After the gardens close, the Maidan in front of the gates, adorned with musical fountains, is transformed by crowds of people who come to enjoy the evening breeze, roadside snacks and pony and ikka(open carriage) rides.

A little way from the Victoria Memorial, past the Birla Planetarium, stands the Gothic edifice of St Paul’s Cathedral, erected by Major W.N. Forbes in 1847. Measuring 75m by 24m, its iron-trussed roof was then the longest span in existence. For improved ventilation, the lancet windows inside extend to plinth level, and tall fans hang from the ceiling. The most outstanding of the many well-preserved memorials and plaques to long-perished imperialists is the stained glass of the west window, designed by Sir Edward Burne-Jones in 1880 to honour Lord Mayo, assassinated in the Andaman Islands. The original steeple was destroyed in the 1897 earthquake; after a second earthquake in 1934 it was remodelled on the Bell Harry Tower at Canterbury Cathedral. South of the cathedral, the Academy of Fine Arts on Cathedral Road is a showcase for Bengali contemporary arts. As well as temporary exhibitions, it holds permanent displays of the work of artists such as Jamini Roy and Rabindranath Tagore. A café and pleasant grounds enhance the ambience. Rabindra Sadan, the large auditorium nearby, features programmes of Indian classical music and next door, Nandan, designed by Satyajit Ray, is a lively film centre.