Shyampukur Heritage Walk (in Bangla), Kolkata

About this place

Shyampukur is older than the city that grew around it. Before the Seths and Basaks set up their yarn market, this was scrub jungle cut through with ditches and tanks — and as late as 1837, Samachar Darpan reported a tiger sighting here, with English hunters sent out who found only leopard pugmarks and shot two jackals instead. The forest went. What replaced it was one of the densest concentrations of Bengali public life anywhere in Calcutta: the house where Sri Ramakrishna spent his last seventy days before Kashipur, the lane where Birendra Krishna Bhadra lived, the press from which Aurobindo Ghosh published Karmayogin before vanishing to Chandannagar, and three schools that have each been teaching for over a century. Even the name is contested. Shyam Basak's tank, Shobharam Basak's family deity Shyam Rai, or a Brahmin called Shyamcharan Mukhopadhyay — three claims, no resolution. We'll walk you through all three and let you pick.