Day 20 – Kolkata

Today I visited the Indian Museum, the largest and oldest multipurpose museum in India and SE Asia. Founded in 1814, it is housed in an enormous building which has seen better days.

Despite the building’s aging facilities and lack of signage, the museum is full of interesting and surprising content, particularly the remains of an early stupa from the second century BCE found in Bharhut in 1823.

This eastern gateway is 23 feet tall, all made of red sandstone. The other gateways have disappeared over time.

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Day 19 – Paro to Kolkata

Sunny but chilly this morning on the way to the Paro airport.

An immigration officer at the airport sports a button with the faces of the current king and his father.

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Day 3 – Kolkata

Today we visited a place called the Weavers Studio in the Kasbah  Industrial Sector of Kolkata. All the textiles made here are done by hand.  These women are stitching cloth which will eventually be dyed, the stitches pulled to create a resist.

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Day2 – Kolkata

Today I took a walking tour of old Calcutta, the Kumartuli and Chitpore Road Walk, which covers part of the “black city” where the natives lived, as opposed to the “white city” where the Brits lived in past history. Kolcutta  was the capital of India prior to independence.

Several women from the group joined me. The guide, Tathagata Neogi, an archaeologist from Heritage Walks, took us down to a ghat on the Hooghly River, which is a tributary of the Ganges.  In a few days when the Durga Festival starts, statues of Durga, a goddess of peace and home life, will be brought to ghats all along the river and tossed in so they return to the spirit world.

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