Friday, 19 September 2025
Friday, 19 September 2025
Days after Amartya Sen arrived in Santiniketan in December 1998 after receiving the Nobel Prize for Economics, a group of students from the local Patha-Bhavana school arrived at the gate of Pratichi, his ancestral home in the university town that Rabindranath Tagore had set up.
“We walked in and said Amartya Kaku amader mishti khaoao [Amartya Uncle treat us to sweets]. He got kalakand [a kind of moist milk cake] for all of us,” singer and alumna of both Visva-Bharati and Patha-Bhavana Sahana Bajpaie recalls from her London residence.
Rabindranath Tagore had started Patha-Bhavana with five students on a December morning of 1901. Sen studied in the school in the 1940s.
Twenty-seven years after that December morning when he treated students to kalakand, the doors of Pratichi do not open as easily. In 1998, the gate only had a latch. Now it has a lock tied to a chain. Entry is restricted.
“Do you have an appointment?”
Any visitor will have to answer this question. If the answer is no, the wait could stretch for hours. On the August afternoon we are there, we spend four hours outside Amartya Sen’s house before an audience for just about a couple of minutes is granted.
“Dekha hoye gelo. Kono proshno korben na [We have met. Don’t ask any questions],” Sen says feebly.
There have been other changes too.
Amita Sen, mother of the second Nobel laureate from Santiniketan and herself an ashram kanya, is no more.
Inside the premises, covering a large part of the ground in front and blocking a view of the two-storey house, is a makeshift tent for policemen that has become a permanent fixture at Pratichi. Outside, on the road, another Birbhum police team stands guard. The personnel keep changing twice a day.
“There are no fixed hours. Some days we have to stay till late in the evening, on some days we get to leave in the afternoon,” says a cop stationed outside.
Including the team of 14 security personnel, there are around 22-23 members in the household of the Nobel laureate to take care of him during his stay.
“When the lights in the garden are lit we know Amartya Sen is in town,” says a resident of Simanta Pally, a locality close to the Visva-Bharati campus. “One evening I was cycling when I saw him walking in the garden.”
That was in July, few days after Amartya Sen reached home.
Sen and Santiniketan: Unbreakable bond
For most of the time that Amartya Sen was in Santiniketan this year, he was confined to the first floor. An ailing Sen, 91, moved to the first floor on August 2 and mostly remained confined there till August 21 when he left for Kolkata and flew out of India.
A day before his departure from Santiniketan, a team of doctors packed in two SUVs had come to check on him. Sen had plans to visit the State Bank of India’s branch on the Santiniketan campus that afternoon. Instead, two bank officials came to Pratichi in the afternoon.
The drivers of the doctors’ SUVs were curious about who lived in the house. One of them had heard about the Nobel Prize, not Amartya Sen.
A familiar sight in Santiniketan during Sen’s previous visits was of him cycling on the roads of the varsity town and two lathi-wielding policemen following him on foot.
“That is history now,” says a policeman.
But Sen’s bond with the varsity town around 164 km north of Kolkata remains impervious to change.
“… and I very much feel at home in India, particularly at our little house in Santiniketan where I grew up and to which I love going back regularly,” he had told the BBC in London and retold in his memoirs, Home in the World.
On 3 November, 1933, when Calcutta too was much colder than Kolkata is now, Amartya Sen was born in a “little thatched cottage, austere but elegant” in Santiniketan’s Guru Palli where his maternal grandfather Kshiti Mohan Sen, a scholar and close confidant of Rabindranath Tagore, lived.
Santiniketan and Tagore featured prominently in Amartya Sen’s speech at the Nobel banquet hall on 10 December, 1998.
“Tagore had set up an unusual school in Santiniketan, where my grandfather was teaching; I was born on the school grounds. The school aimed at offering education that was at once local and global. As Tagore put it: ‘Whatever we understand and enjoy in human products instantly becomes ours, wherever they might have their origin.’ His universalist, tolerant and rationalist ideals were a strong influence on my thinking, and I often recollect them in these divisive times.”
Times are even more divisive now.
During his stay in Santiniketan in the months of July and August, in spite of his ill-health, Amartya Sen was occupied giving the finishing touches to an upcoming book of his in Bengali.
“After lunch, every day, he would sit in the ground floor room chatting with visitors. While he is here [in Santiniketan] his friends from abroad visit him,” says an aide. “This time he was confined to his room for most days of his stay.”
That did not stop the stream of visitors.
Sen ‘loves talking to people’
Visva-Bharati’s Agro-economic Research Centre is located opposite Amartya Sen’s ancestral house. A copy of a research paper that he did with Sunil Sengupta on morbidity is kept there.
“He loves talking to people. Earlier I would meet him quite often when he was in town. He would visit the Poush Mela ground too. Those activities have almost stopped now,” says Achiransu Acharya, deputy director at the Agro-economic Research Centre and Economics faculty member at Visva-Bharati. “I met him a few times though he was unwell. We discussed a lot of things. His doors are always open for us.”
Pratichi today is one of the tourist stops in Santiniketan after Tal-Dhwaja (a circular-thatched hut around a Palm tree, Upasana Griha or Kaanch Mandir (prayer hall made of Glass, where once Tagore would himself lead the prayers), Kala Bhavana (the art school), Sangeet Bhavana (the music school and, of course, Rabindra Bhavana which houses a museum and the Uttarayan complex that includes the houses that Tagore had built for himself and stayed at in different points of time.
Like Udayan, Shyamali, Konark, Udichi and Punashcha, the homes associated with Tagore, Pratichi, the house built by Amita Sen and Ashutosh Sen and now owned by Amartya Sen, is a major draw for tourists.
Mechanised rickshaw-pullers stop their tourist-laden vehicles outside the locked gate of Pratichi. Tourists peek from inside the hooded vehicle, eagerly take out their handy phones and click pictures of the two-storey house, many of them unaware that the Nobel laureate is inside.
“Rabindranath donated this house to Amartya Sen,” one of the rickshaw-pullers declares to a group of young men.
Sen did recall meeting Tagore as a kid, a “benign elderly person who seemed to enjoy talking to the kid Amartya.”
As a five-year old at a prayer session being held at the Upasana Griha led by Tagore, the kid Amartya, on being told by his grandmother to stay silent, had asked, “Why is that man there speaking, then?”
The winters of Santiniketan
Sen is likely to return to his hometown again in December, during the annual Poush Mela. A time when – much like the migratory birds – students from Patha-Bhavana and Visva-Bharati return to their homes.
Santiniketan qualifies to be called an urban village, where everyone knows everyone and everything that is there to know about anyone. To its bhakts, Santiniketan is a country within a country.
And in Santiniketan, there are many myths about Tagore. Such myths about Amartya Sen are unlikely to take shape soon. There still are people – though most from his generation have departed – who have discussed, argued or listened with rapt attention to each of Sen’s words.
Amartya Sen still delivers lectures, writes, teaches and gives interviews at times. His voice is in our midst. And Santiniketan, the town Bengal’s most famous poet built, is grateful to still be home to another one of the land’s greatest sons.
