Showing 1-5 of 5 results
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Academy of Fine Arts
The bright, ground floor galley of the Academy of Fine Arts featuring local contemporary artists. The dusty upstairs museum has a room each of Mughal miniatures, old textiles, antique carpets and 20th-century paintings. There's also a special, air-conditioned shrine-like room displaying several watercolours by Bengali-Renaissance superstar Rabindranath Tagore.
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Asutosh Museum of Indian Art
The Asutosh Museum of Indian Art has priceless if slightly dry displays of fabulous antique Indian sculpture, brasswork and Bengali terracotta with some more light-hearted toys and 20th-century folk art upstairs. The museum is within Kolkata University, facing some grand, older collegiate buildings.
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Birla Planetarium
Loosely styled on the Buddhist stupa at Sarnath, the Birla Planetarium is one of the world's largest and looks impressive when floodlit. Its outer circle forms a small but well-presented, tomb-like gallery featuring astronomer busts and planetary pictures. But the star shows are slow-moving and rather stilted.
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Indian Museum
Around central lawns, Kolkata's Indian Museum fills a glorious colonnaded palace with aging glass-and-hardwood display cabinets that are almost attractions in themselves. Exhibits range from fabulous Hindu bronzes to elephant skeletons. Notice the 2000-year-old eyeliner pencils, gag at the human embryos in formaldehyde and don't miss the impressive life-size reproduction of the 2nd century BC Barhut Gateway.
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Tagore's House
Within Rabindra Bharati University, Rabindranath Tagore's comfortable 1784 family mansion (Tagore's House) has become a shrine-like museum to India's greatest modern poet. Even if his personal effects don't inspire you, some of the well-chosen quotations might spark an interest in Tagore's deeply universalist philosophy.
Showing 1-5 of 5 results
