Things to do in Kolkata

Culture · North Kolkata, near Sovabazar

The idol-makers' quarter — narrow lanes of workshops where the Durga images are built from Hooghly clay and straw, generation after generation.

Local tip: Go between August and early October and you will see hundreds of unfinished goddesses in every stage from bamboo frame to painted eyes. The eye-painting is done last, on an auspicious day. Ask before photographing inside a workshop and buy something small if you spend time there.

Culture · Central, near Presidency University

A kilometre of second-hand bookstalls, generally called the largest such market in the world, with a first-floor coffee house that has been the city's arguing room since 1876.

Local tip: The stalls will find a specific title for you if you ask — the apparent chaos is an index only the sellers can read. The Coffee House upstairs is loud, slow and not really about the coffee. Order the infusion and stay two hours; that is the correct use.

Landmark · Central, south of Park Street

A vast white marble memorial from 1921 in a garden at the edge of the Maidan, the enormous open green that runs through the middle of the city.

Local tip: The gallery inside is a serious collection of colonial-era painting and documents that most visitors skip for the exterior. Walk the Maidan at dawn, when the football clubs, the horses and the tea sellers are all out — it is the best free thing in Kolkata.

Food · Under the bridge, west bank approach

A wholesale flower market that runs through the night under the Howrah Bridge cantilever, at its peak between four and eight in the morning.

Local tip: Go at five. Tonnes of marigold and tuberose move through in a few hours and the bridge above carries perhaps the heaviest pedestrian traffic of any bridge on earth. Photography of the bridge itself is officially restricted — photograph the market, not the structure.

Food · Central, near Poddar Court

India's only Chinatown, settled by Hakka migrants from the eighteenth century, now a handful of streets whose Sunday dawn breakfast market is the last of the old trade.

Local tip: It runs from about six to eight on Sunday mornings and then vanishes — momos, pork buns, fish ball soup, sold from baskets on the pavement. The community has shrunk enormously since the 1962 war; going early and buying from the older stallholders is the point.

Landmark · Howrah Maidan to Esplanade

India's first metro, opened in 1984, and since 2024 the first Indian railway to run in a tunnel beneath a river — thirty-two metres under the Hooghly.

Local tip: The Howrah Maidan to Esplanade run takes under a minute under the river and the tunnel section is marked with blue lighting. Howrah Maidan is among the deepest metro stations in India. It costs a few rupees and is a better introduction to the city than any tour.