Santiniketan makes it to UNESCO World Heritage list

Subject: History

Section: Arts and culture

Context:

Santi Niketan, the town in West Bengal, was included in the UNESCO World Heritage list during the 45th Session of the World Heritage Committee in Saudi Arabia.

About Shanti Niketan:

Established in 1901 by the Nobel Laureate Gurudev Rabindra Nath Tagore.
Location: Birbhum district, West Bengal.
Current Vice-chancellor of Santiniketan: Bidyut Chakrabarti
It is the 41st UNESCO World Heritage Site in India and the third in West Bengal, after the Sundarbans National Park and the Darjeeling Mountain Railways.
- Last year (2022), the state’s Durga Puja got space in “Intangible Cultural Heritage of humanity” under UNESCO.
Santiniketan was a residential school and center for art based on ancient Indian traditions and a vision of the unity of humanity transcending religious and cultural boundaries.
A ‘world university’ – Visva Bharati – was established at Santiniketan in 1921.
Santiniketan was the pioneer of the Bengal School of Art. It exhibits the crystallisation of their ideas of internationalism, humanism, inclusiveness, environmentalism and a pan Asian modernism.
Global art movements parallel to Santiniketan:

Bauhaus:

Founded by architect Walter Gropius in Weimar, the Staatliches Bauhaus, or Bauhaus (German for ‘building house’), was a German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined crafts and the fine arts.
The school became famous for its approach to design, which attempted to unify individual artistic vision with the principles of mass production and emphasis on function.

Mingei in Japan:

The concept of mingei, variously translated into English as “folk craft”, “folk art” or “popular art”, was developed from the mid-1920s in Japan by a philosopher and aesthete, Yanagi Sōetsu (1889–1961), together with a group of craftsmen, including the potters Hamada Shōji (1894–1978) and Kawai Kanjirō (1890–1966).
Mingei may be seen as a reaction to Japan’s rapid modernization processes.

Vienna session in Austria:

The Vienna Secession is an art movement, closely related to Art Nouveau, that was formed in 1897 by a group of Austrian painters, graphic artists, sculptors and architects, including Josef Hoffman, Koloman Moser, Otto Wagner and Gustav Klimt.

Other sites to find place on the prestigious listinclude:

Ancient Jericho in Palestine; the Zarafshan-Karakum Corridor of Silk Roads in Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan; the Gedeo Cultural Landscape in Ethiopia; and the Cultural Landscape of Old Tea Forestsof the Jingmai Mountain in China’s Pu’er.