The Santiniketan prelude to The City as a Museum, held on November 28 and 29, unfolded less like an opening ceremony and more like an immersion. Across walks, conversations and trails, the two-day programme used Santiniketan’s lived rhythms to show how architecture, learning and community practice remain deeply interconnected here.

Santiniketan as a living museum

The Prelude reintroduced Santiniketan not as a heritage zone, but as a living museum where spaces, people and practice are inseparable. Through walks, sketching sessions, music and conversations, participants moved through Uttarayan, the Ashrama and Kala Bhavana, reading the campus as a place where Tagore’s ideas of art, nature and learning continue to guide how structures are designed and used. Architectural historian Saptarshi Sanyal and art historian Soumik Nandy Majumdar led a walk through the Udayan complex and Kala Bhavana, describing them as “experiments with modernity” - fluid forms, light-responsive surfaces, murals woven into daily routines, and a design language that treats the campus as a “nest”: rooted, permeable and always open.

Visitors rediscover the familiar

For many, the day felt like returning to a place they thought they already knew.
Management professional Kaveri Narang, back to Santiniketan after 35 years, called the experience “transformative.” “The walk finally revealed the impulses behind spaces I used to see as just buildings,” she said.She spoke of noticing how sun, mud, foliage and movement shaped structures like Konarak and Shamoli - and how art, from Nandalal Bose’s frescoes to Ramkinkar Baij’s sculpture of Gandhi, sits in the open as part of the landscape, not as museum pieces.
Educator Ishi Bhatia, a regular at previous editions, said the shift from Kolkata to Birbhum widened the frame: “It moved the festival from the idea of ‘city as epicentre’ to a broader map of modernity.”

Terracotta trails and everyday rhythms

Away from campus, the “Pora Matir Khata” trail led by scholar-artist Bihan Das took participants to Surul, Ilambazar and Moukhira - temples seen not as postcard “heritage sites” but as community-kept spaces shaped by rituals, repairs and local memory. Das pointed out how Bengal’s heritage imagination often centres Kolkata, Murshidabad or Bishnupur, while small shrines continue through local stewardship. The group read these terracotta temples as “notebooks in baked earth,” carrying additions and repairs by generations who used them.

Back in the ashram precinct, the “Ashrom Prangoner Jibon Japoner Golpo” session, led by pedagogues Avik Ghosh, Partha Chakraborty and musician Amit Kumar Dey, opened up the sounds and textures of Santiniketan life — classes under trees, bells, seasonal rituals and everyday routines that give the place its quiet tempo.

Rethinking ‘City’ before Kolkata takes over

For both Bihan Das and Ishi Bhatia, the Santiniketan chapter mattered because it stretched what “City as a Museum” can hold - not just metros, but ashram towns, terracotta clusters, and campuses shaped by Pan-Asian ideas. Das emphasised that design and conservation conversations must treat local communities as co-authors - “A city-as-museum cannot just be a visual-art frame. It has to include people who keep these places alive.” Bhatia added that many of Bengal’s most important cultural experiments unfolded outside big cities, even though they rarely appear in mainstream cultural festivals.