India · West Bengal
Kolkata
The old capital of British India, turned the subcontinent's most bookish and argumentative city - and the one that stages Durga Puja, its greatest street festival.
Kolkata was the capital of British India for a century and a half, and the city that grew around that has never stopped arguing with it. Palladian civic piles and shuttered Bengali mansions stand over street markets, surviving trams and a working river of ferries, and the local currency is talk: books, films, football, poetry and politics, worked over endless small cups of tea. It is the least polished and the most literate of India's big cities, cheaper and far friendlier than its old reputation, and for anyone willing to eat where locals eat it is the best food city in the country.
Suggested stay
3–4 days
Language
Hindi, English
Currency
INR
Timezone
UTC+5:30
Why you'll love Kolkata
The talk adda, the Bengali art of the long unhurried argument, runs the coffee houses, the pavement bookstalls and the tea stalls, and visitors get pulled into it fast
Faded grandeur a whole city of colonial civic monuments and crumbling courtyard mansions, still lived in rather than restored, with trams and handcarts moving between them
The eating a distinct Bengali kitchen of river fish and mustard, slow-cooked mutton, a biryani with a potato in it, and a sweet-making tradition nobody else in India can match
Durga Puja for a few days at the tail of the rains the entire city turns into an open-air art exhibition, and it is the single best reason to be here
Best time to visit
Nov-Mar
26-34° days
22.573° N, 88.364° E
UTC+5:30 · Asia/Kolkata
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Weather & when to go to Kolkata
Month by month: typical highs and lows, rainfall and rain days.
✓ Best Nov-Mar
Watch for Apr-Jun, Oct-Dec cyclones & hurricanes risk · Apr-May extreme heat risk · Jun-Sep monsoon flooding risk
Cards tinted by calculated verdict · big number = typical daily high, small = low · hover for conditions
When to avoid Kolkata
Jun-Sep is the monsoon and Kolkata takes it heavily: warm rain for days at a stretch, streets that flood within an hour of a downpour, and humidity that never lets go. Apr-May before it is hot and sticky in its own right. The complication is that Durga Puja, the city's defining event and the thing most worth travelling here for, lands at the tail of that wet season in early autumn - so the worst of the weather and the best reason to come overlap, rooms sell out months ahead, and the streets are barely walkable after dark.
Top things to do in Kolkata
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Victoria Memorial - the Raj's marble centrepiece
history culture arts 👍 PopularA vast domed hall of white Makrana marble set in gardens on the edge of the Maidan, raised as an imperial memorial to Queen Victoria and now a museum of the Raj and of Calcutta itself, strong on Company-school painting, Daniell aquatints and the city's own story told room by room. The gardens fill with couples, hawkers and cricket at dusk, and the building is floodlit after dark.
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Howrah Bridge - the cantilever over the Hooghly
scenic 👍 PopularA riveted steel cantilever built without a nut or bolt in its main span, carrying an unbroken river of pedestrians, handcarts and buses between the city and Howrah station. Photography from the bridge itself is prohibited, so the way to see it is from a ferry crossing underneath, or from the Mullick Ghat flower market at its foot, where wholesalers sit knee-deep in marigolds from before first light.
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Kumartuli - the idol-makers' lanes
culture arts ⭐ Highly recommendedA warren of open workshops in the north of the city where the clay images of Durga are built up on straw and bamboo armatures, painted and finally dressed. The work runs most of the year and swells into an all-night frenzy as the festival approaches at the end of the rains, when the finished goddesses start moving out through lanes barely wide enough to take them. The artisans are used to being watched; ask before photographing faces or unfinished work.
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Bengali eating - kathi rolls, river fish and the sweet shops
food ⭐ Highly recommendedThe core is fish: hilsa steamed in mustard, rui in a thin turmeric jhol, always with rice, alongside slow-cooked kosha mangsho and a Kolkata biryani carrying a whole potato, inherited from the exiled Nawab of Awadh's kitchen. The street runs on puchka, egg rolls and the kathi roll, invented on Park Street. Sweets are their own institution rather than an afterthought - rosogolla, sandesh, thick mishti doi - and the cold months bring nolen gur, the season's date-palm jaggery, which turns up in everything and disappears when the weather warms.
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Dakshineswar Kali Temple and Belur Math - the shrines upriver
culture arts 👍 PopularA twelve-spired riverside temple where Ramakrishna served as priest and had the visions that reshaped modern Hinduism, and still one of Bengal's busiest pilgrimage stops. Directly across the water, reached by a small ferry, Belur Math is the headquarters Vivekananda built for the Ramakrishna Mission, its main temple deliberately blending Hindu, Islamic and Christian forms and standing in lawns that feel a world away from the queue opposite.
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Kalighat Kali Temple - the shrine the city is named after
culture artsThe Kali temple that gave Kalikata its name, one of the shakti pithas, small and dark and packed shoulder to shoulder, with goat sacrifice still carried out in the courtyard. Self-appointed guides and garland sellers work the approach hard and a firm refusal is worth having ready. The bold flat Kalighat pat paintings once sold to pilgrims at the gate are now best seen in the city's museums.
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College Street and the Indian Coffee House - the book bazaar
culture artsBoi Para, roughly a kilometre of pavement bookstalls stacked head-high with secondhand textbooks, Bengali novels and out-of-print oddities, wrapped around Presidency College and Calcutta University. Up a staircase behind it, the Indian Coffee House is a high-ceilinged hall of white-uniformed waiters and slow fans where students, poets and old radicals have argued over the same infusion for generations.
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Indian Museum - the oldest in the subcontinent
history culture artsFounded in 1814 and known to everyone as the Jadu Ghar, the house of magic, it sprawls around a colonnaded courtyard on Chowringhee. The Bharhut stupa railings and the Gandharan sculpture are genuinely world-class; the rest is a Victorian cabinet of fossils, minerals and a much-loved Egyptian mummy, and the building is half the reason to go in.
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The trams and the Maidan - the city's slow lane
scenicKolkata ran the first electric trams in Asia and is the last Indian city still running any, though the network has shrunk to a handful of routes and its survival is argued about constantly. Riding one across the Maidan, the enormous common the Company kept clear so the guns of Fort William had a field of fire, is the cheapest hour in the city: football clubs at training, grazing goats, colonial statuary, horse carriages and the Chowringhee skyline down one side.
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Jorasanko Thakur Bari and Marble Palace - the north's great houses
history culture artsJorasanko is the rambling family mansion where Rabindranath Tagore was born, wrote and died, now a museum of the Bengal Renaissance that produced him. A short walk away, Marble Palace is a nineteenth-century merchant's house still occupied by the family who built it and crammed with European statuary, Belgian glass and attributed old masters, with peacocks in the courtyard; admission has long run on a permit from the state tourism office, so sort that out before you turn up.
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South Park Street Cemetery - the Raj's dead
historyA walled garden of pyramids, obelisks and domed tombs from the decades when Calcutta killed arriving Europeans within months - fever, cholera and drink - and the inscriptions read like a catalogue of it. The orientalist William Jones lies here, as does the teenaged Rose Aylmer. Shaded, overgrown and one of the few places in central Kolkata where the traffic noise drops away.
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Mother House - the Missionaries of Charity
historyThe plain building where Mother Teresa lived, worked and is buried, still the working headquarters of the order she founded. Her tomb and the small upstairs room she used are open to visitors, the mood is functional rather than devotional, and the sisters get on with the day around you.
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Botanical Garden - the Great Banyan
nature wildlifeAcross the river at Shibpur, the old Company garden that raised the tea plants sent to Assam and Darjeeling still runs down to the Hooghly. Its headline resident is the Great Banyan, one of the widest tree canopies on earth: the original trunk rotted and was cut out, so what stands is a small forest of aerial roots holding up a tree with no centre.
Best areas to stay in Kolkata
$ Budget $$ Mid-range $$$ Premium
Park Street & Chowringhee
First-time visitors $$Central restaurants, hotels and colonial bones
Explore hotels in Park Street & Chowringhee →
North Kolkata
Old Bengali city $Old Bengali lanes and courtyard mansions
Explore hotels in North Kolkata →
Ballygunge & Southern Avenue
Leafy south $$$Leafy, well-off and quietly residential
Explore hotels in Ballygunge & Southern Avenue →
Salt Lake & New Town
Business & airport side $$Planned suburb of wide roads and malls
Explore hotels in Salt Lake & New Town →
Live nightly prices from Booking.com, Agoda and others, centred on Kolkata
Getting to & around Kolkata
Getting there
Fly into Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International at Dum Dum, roughly an hour from the centre by road, or arrive by train at Howrah or Sealdah in the middle of the city
Flight
Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport (CCU)
About 17 km northeast of the centre at Dum Dum, with the widest domestic network in eastern India plus regional international routes to Bangkok, Singapore, Dubai, Dhaka and Kathmandu. Prepaid taxi counters sit inside arrivals and app cabs pick up from the forecourt; allow 45 min to well over an hour into the centre, because the road in crosses the whole north of the city. Air-conditioned airport coaches run down to Esplanade and Howrah for anyone travelling light, and the metro network has been pushing north towards the terminal for years.
Train
Howrah Junction
The bigger of the two great terminals, on the far bank and reached by the bridge or by ferry, handling most long-distance services including the overnight trains from Delhi and the runs down the east coast to Chennai
Train
Sealdah
In the middle of the city and the terminal for Bengal and the northeast, including the overnight train up to New Jalpaiguri for Darjeeling and Sikkim. A handful of services, among them the cross-border train to Bangladesh, use Kolkata (Chitpur) station instead
Coach
Esplanade
Long-distance buses to Siliguri, Digha, Bhubaneswar and across the border to Dhaka leave from the Esplanade stands, though on almost all of these routes the train is the better ride
Cruise
Kolkata riverfront
River cruise boats work the Hooghly and the Ganges upstream towards Patna and Varanasi over a week or more, a slow and expensive way to arrive or leave
Getting around
Metro
India's first underground runs north-south beneath the city and is fast, cheap and jammed at rush hour; newer east-west and southern lines have opened in stages and do not yet knit into one easy network
TBC
Yellow taxis and app cabs
The fleet of yellow Ambassador taxis is thinning fast but still hails off the street; meters are theoretical, so agree the ride first, which is why most people now use an app
TBC
Ferries
Launches cross the Hooghly between the city ghats and Howrah all day, beating the bridge traffic comfortably and giving you the best view of it
TBC
Trams
Slow, lurching and much loved, on a shrunken set of routes around Esplanade and the Maidan; a fine way to see the city and a poor way to get anywhere
TBC
Buses
Dense, cheap and hard to read without local help; conductors call the destinations from the door and take cash on board
TBC
Auto-rickshaws
Run as shared taxis on fixed routes rather than point to point - you squeeze in with three others and get off somewhere along the line
TBC
Hand-pulled rickshaws
Kolkata is the last city anywhere where men still pull passenger rickshaws on foot, mostly in the central and northern lanes. Plenty of visitors find the whole idea unbearable; the trade has been banned on paper more than once and keeps going because the pullers have nothing else
TBC
Walking
The colonial core around Dalhousie Square and the Chowringhee strip repay walking; elsewhere the pavements belong to hawkers and parked cars, so expect to be in the road
Free
Day trips from Kolkata
Sundarbans
2 daysMangrove delta reserve
The largest mangrove forest on earth, where the Ganges delta breaks up into tidal creeks and islands, run as a tiger reserve and reachable only by boat once the road ends. Trips are slow cruises between watchtowers and village stops; the tigers are famously numerous and famously unseen, so come for the waterscape, the birds and the fishing communities rather than a sighting. It cannot honestly be done in a day.
Getting there
car | ferry | tour
3-4 hr by road to the jetty at Godkhali, then by boat
Chandannagar, Serampore and Bandel
Full dayColonial river towns
A string of rival European toeholds upstream of Kolkata, each under a different flag: French Chandannagar with its riverside strand and Sacred Heart church, Danish Serampore around its restored tavern and college, and Portuguese Bandel, whose basilica is among the oldest churches in Bengal. Chandannagar's other trade is light - its artisans build the illuminated arches that make Durga Puja look the way it does, and the town stages its own lamp-lit Jagaddhatri Puja in late autumn.
Getting there
train | car
1-1.5 hr by local train from Howrah or Sealdah, about 40-50 km upriver
Shantiniketan
1-2 daysTagore's university town
The rural school Rabindranath Tagore grew into a university, where classes were taught outdoors under the trees and the campus is scattered with Ramkinkar Baij's sculpture and Nandalal Bose's murals. The Khoai scrubland nearby holds a weekly craft market with Baul singers working the crowd, and the winter fair here is one of the fixed points of the Bengali cultural year.
Getting there
train | car
2.5-3 hr by train from Howrah to Bolpur, about 160 km northwest
Bishnupur
1-2 daysTerracotta temple town
Capital of the Malla kings, whose laterite and brick temples are sheathed in terracotta panels telling the Ramayana and Mahabharata in comic-strip registers - some of the finest architectural sculpture in eastern India. The town also weaves Baluchari silk saris with narrative scenes across the pallu and keeps its own classical music gharana going.
Getting there
train | car
4 hr by train or road, about 130 km northwest
Mayapur and Nabadwip
Full dayVaishnav pilgrimage towns
Nabadwip is where Chaitanya launched the ecstatic devotional movement that still shapes Bengali Vaishnavism, a town of kirtan and small riverside temples. Across the water at Mayapur the Hare Krishna movement has built its world headquarters and an enormous domed temple, and the contrast between the two banks is the whole point of going.
Getting there
train | car
2.5-3 hr by road or train north, about 120 km
A little history of Kolkata
The English East India Company set up a trading post on the Hooghly in 1690, on three villages whose names the city still carries in its own. Job Charnock was credited with founding it for three centuries until the Calcutta High Court ruled otherwise, deciding the place had no founder and no birthday. What the Company built anyway was Fort William and a customs town, sacked by the Nawab of Bengal in 1756 and retaken by Clive the following year at Plassey, the battle that turned a trading company into a territorial power. From 1772 Calcutta was the capital of British India, and for a century it was the second city of the empire: banks, jute mills, a High Court, a racecourse and a European quarter of columns and porticoes laid out over a Bengali city that kept its own lanes and gods.
The nineteenth century produced the Bengal Renaissance, when reformers, novelists, scientists and painters remade Indian intellectual life in this city - the line runs from Rammohan Roy through Vivekananda to Tagore, the first non-European to win the Nobel in Literature, and on to Satyajit Ray. It also produced the nationalism the British came to fear: the 1905 partition of Bengal set off a mass boycott movement, and in 1911 the capital was moved to Delhi. The twentieth century was brutal - the 1943 famine, the communal killings of 1946, and a partition that put the border a short drive away and sent millions of refugees into the city, followed by another wave in 1971. Industry left, the Left Front governed for thirty-four unbroken years, and the city acquired its reputation for decay. The name went back to Kolkata in 2001, and what survives is less an economic capital than a cultural one, which is exactly how the place likes to see itself.
The East India Company establishes a trading post on the Hooghly at Sutanuti, Kalikata and Gobindapur
Siraj-ud-Daulah, Nawab of Bengal, storms Fort William and takes the town
Clive wins at Plassey, handing the Company effective control of Bengal
Calcutta becomes the capital of British India
The Indian Museum is founded on the Asiatic Society's collections, the first of its kind in Asia
The partition of Bengal triggers the swadeshi boycott movement; it is annulled six years later
The imperial capital is moved to Delhi
Rabindranath Tagore wins the Nobel Prize in Literature
The Bengal famine kills millions and drives the starving into the city
Partition puts the border on the doorstep and sends waves of refugees from East Bengal into Calcutta
The Left Front takes power in West Bengal and governs for thirty-four years
The city's official name reverts to Kolkata
Know before you go
Payment
Cards & cash mixed
English
Widely spoken
Wifi
Reliable
Power
Type D / M
230 V, 50 Hz
Dialing
+91
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The months our climate read flags to avoid: the wettest, lowest-rated weather of the year.
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FAQs about Kolkata
▸ When is the best time to visit Kolkata?
Nov-Mar is the season: cool, dry and the only stretch when you can comfortably walk the city all day, with the Christmas weeks bringing lights along Park Street and the sweet shops working with nolen gur. Jun-Sep is the monsoon, heavy and humid, with streets that flood fast. The catch is that Durga Puja, the reason many people come at all, falls at the tail of the rains in early autumn; it moves with the lunar calendar, rooms sell out months ahead, and you take the weather as it comes in order to be here for it.
▸ What is Durga Puja actually like, and is it worth planning a trip around?
For a handful of days the city fills with pandals, temporary pavilions built at full architectural scale - bamboo cathedrals, replicas of foreign monuments, contemporary art installations - each housing a clay Durga image made in the north Kolkata workshops. People walk them all night in new clothes, kitchens run around the clock, and traffic effectively stops; at the end the images are carried down and immersed in the river. It is worth planning a trip around, provided you book early, expect to walk a very long way, and accept that ordinary sightseeing pauses for the duration.
▸ How many days do you need in Kolkata?
Three days covers the colonial core, north Kolkata and the temples upriver, with enough time left for the eating that is half the point of coming. A fourth buys the museums and a slower pass at the markets. The good day trips - the colonial river towns, Tagore's Shantiniketan - each want a full day of their own, and the Sundarbans cannot be squeezed into one at all.
▸ Is Kolkata safe?
It has a long-standing reputation as one of the safer big Indian cities, with comparatively little street crime, and women travellers generally report an easier time here than in the north. The real hazards are traffic, broken pavements and the practised touts around the main temples and the markets. Take the usual care late at night, particularly around the stations, and refuse firmly the rest of the time.
▸ What should I eat, and where do you start?
Start on the street with puchka, an egg or kathi roll and a clay cup of tea. Then sit down to Bengali fish with rice - a thin turmeric jhol, or hilsa in mustard, which is at its best during the monsoon and is about the only good thing anyone says about the rains - and a Kolkata biryani with its potato and egg. Finish in a sweet shop, which in this city is a serious institution rather than a dessert stop, and come back in the cold months for anything made with nolen gur. Eating well here costs little, and the best food is rarely in the smart places.
▸ Do the trams and hand-pulled rickshaws still run?
Both, just about. The tram network has shrunk from a citywide system to a few surviving routes and its closure is announced every few years; while it runs it is a lovely and useless way to cross the Maidan. Hand-pulled rickshaws still work the central and northern lanes, the last of their kind anywhere in the world, and they divide visitors sharply - the trade has been outlawed on paper more than once and continues because the men pulling them have no other work.
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