Jorasanko Thakur Bari

Ancestral home of Rabindranath Tagore, now a museum and university

Address 6/4 Dwarkanath Tagore Lane, Jorasanko, Kolkata 700007
Admission ₹10 Indians, ₹150 foreigners
Opening Hours 10:30-16:30, closed Wednesday

The Tagore family mansion in the Jorasanko quarter of north Kolkata is the birthplace and ancestral home of Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The house has been converted into the Rabindra Bharati Museum, with galleries documenting the lives of Tagore and other members of this remarkable family — artists, reformers, musicians, and philosophers who shaped modern Bengali culture.

The building itself is extraordinary: a rambling 18th-century mansion built around two large courtyards, with painted ceilings and iron-pillared verandas. The rooms where Tagore slept, wrote, and entertained visitors are preserved. There is a collection of his paintings (he took up painting in his sixties), manuscripts, letters, and personal effects. The visit takes about 90 minutes and is peaceful even by Kolkata standards.

things to do museum historic house
A story
Rabindranath Tagore was born in this house in 1861 and died here eighty years later in 1941. He wrote many of his most celebrated poems, plays, and songs within these walls, and composed "Jana Gana Mana" — the Indian national anthem — here. The house remained in the Tagore family for generations; today it belongs to Rabindra Bharati University, which continues the family's tradition of nurturing Bengali arts and culture.