Why Kolkata, a city of manifold joys, is best enjoyed in the winter

Kolkata is a surprising city, not physically prepossessing but somehow possessed with grace. Its mild winter is the best season in which to experience the city, its festive conviviality and the pleasures of its public spaces. Of course, Christmas is celebrated in Kolkata with a fervour unknown in most other Indian cities. The lights on Park Street, the city’s main commercial thoroughfare, are famous. The city authorities have taken the sensible decision of curbing traffic movement in the area because of the thousands of pedestrians who throng the streets to gawp at the lights and take in the festival at Allen Park on Camac Street.

There are lights on too at Elgin Road, where you might find the lady of liberty shorn of her New York grandeur and decked out instead with the razzle dazzle of a sign for a Vegas casino. This is, frankly, not a sophisticated show; it is, though, indisputably cheery. And, compared to a city like Delhi, there is something profoundly heartening about the inclusivity of the celebrations, the crowds enjoying the city together. Crowds also gather at Victoria Memorial, the city’s colonial heart, at which there is usually a fair of some kind, with stalls and the ubiquitous carriage rides. Bow Barracks too, in central Kolkata, where the city’s small Anglo-Indian population has lived for generations, is a tourist magnet at Christmas. Here you can drink plum wine, or eat a slice of plum cake at Jewish bakery Nahoum and Sons.

But the queues in Bow Barracks offer clinching evidence that word of Kolkata’s star-spangled Christmas has spread far and wide. For those who find the crowds and lights overwhelming, there are quieter delights, such as the nolen gurer sandesh, a winter speciality best enjoyed on a balcony with a cup of tea. The ambrosial liquid is made from indigenous date palms. Singaras and kochuris, the former with cauliflower perhaps as an alternative filling, and the latter with peas, are a winter staple, also best enjoyed on this Platonic ideal of a balcony, with the tea and sandesh and gossip that is vital and inspired. Everyone will have a shop to buy sweets and savouries that they swear by, including perennial favourites such as Sen Mahasay, Mullick & Mullick, Ganguram’s, 6 Ballygunge Place, and many others.

A popular restaurant at Park Circus

Food and conversation are, though, always on offer in Kolkata, with just the menu changing according to the seasons. But the mild temperatures — despite all the Bengali gentlemen swathed in their jackets, mufflers and monkey caps — are, when it’s not raining, best enjoyed outdoors. Couples flock to Dhakuria Lake (now known as Rabindra Sarobar), the artificial water body in the city’s prosperous south. But so do families and joggers and rowers and boys playing football. One of the great joys of Kolkata, for football fans, is to see kids all over the city kicking a ball about, whether in organised matches or amongst themselves. It is a vanishingly rare sight in most other Indian cities. The Maidan, the green expanse at the heart of the city, is home to serious local competition, but games can be found in almost any local park, or even a neighbourhood street.

A game of football at the Maidan is an usual sight

A short walk from the lake, across Southern Avenue, is the Birla Academy of Art & Culture, which usually has something worth seeing in its galleries and sculpture garden. While the city’s reputation for intellectual and cultural activity is sometimes overplayed, it is also true that Kolkata offers small galleries, footpath booksellers, street theatre and independent film options that are superior to India’s other, more salubrious, metropolises. The Nandan complex, the principal host to the city’s annual film festival in November, remains a splendid space for cinema and other cultural activity even if it is sometimes too conservative in its choices. If you’re looking for places to browse, Seagull Books is arguably the country’s most interesting bookshop, even if its shelves, obviously, are stocked only with those books, mostly translations, particularly European, on the eponymous publisher’s list.

A plate of nolen gurer sandesh

Enticing as an afternoon at Seagull is, a crisp Kolkata winter’s day should not be whiled away indoors. Visitors can go on any of several city walks that, for a fee, give you a sense of the city’s street food, its cultural eclecticism, and its still extant (if only just) cosmopolitanism. Kolkata still rewards the flaneur. The writer Amit Chaudhuri has long extolled the beauty of the city’s old, too often ruined houses, the beauty of their stone floors, their slatted, wooden shutters, their Art Deco balconies — relics of the city’s past fast being replaced by “posh” tower blocks.

Perhaps symbolic of this new Kolkata are the replicas of some of the world’s wonders — the Great Wall, pyramids, Easter Island heads, the Taj Mahal — which are part of the 480-acre Eco Park in New Town. They are tacky, as with the city’s glitzy Christmas lights, but equally they are exuberant, lively and likeable. The large crowds here have a particularly Kolkata friendliness about them, an openness of spirit and generosity that is a balm in an otherwise mean period in our contemporary history.