NILANJAN BANDYOPADHYAY

Artist and poet Nilanjan Bandyopadhyay spent a lifetime absorbing the learnings of Rabindranath Tagore, who in turn shared a special bond with Japan.

- Arshia D

It was Okakura Kakuzō, the Japanese art historian, who sparked the bard's interest in Japan during his first visit to Calcutta in 1902. Eventually, Tagore would go on to forge a lifelong relationship with the country, whose culture would deeply fascinate him. And that, in turn, would fascinate Bandyopadhyay. His home in West Bengal's Santiniketan is set in and around a garden of memories, stillness, and melancholy-inspired by Japan.

Ultimately, all his roads led him to seek out the country's wabi-sabi sensibilities even in his own home, which he built in six months in 2018. The house, however, is simply extension of the garden that lies at the centre of the space he calls home. It's where Bandyopadhyay's dreams have taken root, and have planted him firmly where he truly belongs-a home of paradoxes that's complete in its incompleteness.

Nilanjan Bandyopadhyay is a multihyphenate. He’s a researcher, calligraphy and tea artist, poet, writer, and manager of the Rabindra Bhavana, or Santiniketan Museum, in Visva Bharati, Bolpur. Even though Bandyopadhyay shuffles multiple hats in a day, he wears each of them with an ease that stems from the calm that swathes his home, Kokoro—the Japanese word for heart—which he designed as an homage to his love for Japan.

Love, however, doesn’t quite effectively convey how he feels about Japanese culture, an aspect of which has also been the subject of his PhD research for the past few years. Bandyopadhyay, therefore, attempted to crystallize his reverence for the Japanese way of life into Kokoro, a home that was built around its garden.