Rediscover Europe on the Ganga: The holy river has a unique tourism potential for Bengal

The late hotelier and "Indian by choice", Francis Wacziarg, would have had a wide smile on his face this week. The city of Chandannagar - Chandernagore, in its French colonial avatar - in West Bengal was all aglow for a festival celebrating its Franco-Bengali heritage. As the city is known for magnificent artwork using lights, it was befitting. But Wacziarg's vision was larger. "Do you realise," he told me excitedly over 25 years ago, "Bengal has a Europe on the Ganga?"

Indeed, none of the other rivers in India have such a legacy: five cities, representing the imprimatur of five major European encounters with India. In the final phase of her journey from the Himalayas at Gomukh to the Bay of Bengal at Gangasagar, the holy river (inexplicably called Hooghly in this stretch) has the Portuguese-founded Bandel, the French enclave of Chandernagore, the Dutch factory township of Chinsurah and the Danish settlement of Serampore.

The last European at the party hit the jackpot, the British, set up Calcutta (now Kolkata) which grew into the second city of the subsequent Empire. It retains its preeminence in Bengal while the other four cities saw a distinct decline from the turn of the last century. But the potential of all of them together, so blindingly obvious to Wazciarg, was never contemplated in the same way by any others. Even those five nations' embassies today tend to see each city in isolation.


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Although the phrase 'Europe on the Ganga' has been talked about in heritage tourism and conservation circles, its potential is yet to be tapped. Some years ago, the Danish government generously renovated the beautiful Danish church and tavern at Serampore, but footfall has remained largely local. The Portuguese seem to have forgotten Bandel though the salty cheese they apparently taught the locals to make is seeing a revival now thanks to the initiative of a few people.

Over a decade ago, a Dutch-funded project mapped the colonial-era buildings in Chinsurah in collaboration with a conservation architect and an Indian university. The resultant website provides lovely glimpses of Chinsurah in its heyday. Now it is just the headquarters of Hooghly district with the court and district magistrate situated there. Two years later, a British university and IIT Kharagpur built a resource database of similar buildings in the other four "European" cities.

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The annual French Festival just launched in Chandannagar is a welcome step forward from that largely academic exercise. West Bengal and Embassy of France have signed an MoU to restore the 150-year-old Registry Building (Chander Bari) and reimagine it into a cultural centre. Another 99 Indo-French structures will be restored thereafter. There are plans to extend this restoration and preservation initiative to the heritage buildings of Serampore, Chinsura and Bandel, too.

Companies already do tours of the four cities upstream of Kolkata by road, but Wacziarg had a grander concept: of all five cities as part of a single riverine tourism circuit. Of visitors from India and abroad sailing grandly down the Ganga in traditional handmade wooden barges, stopping to see each section of "Europe". He even identified craftsmen who could make those river barges, now hardly seen anymore. Sadly, cancer took him in 2014 before he could fulfill that dream.

UNESCO recognising Kolkata's Durga Puja in 2021 as an intangible cultural heritage has led to a spurt in local and inbound tourism. So, developing "Europe on the Ganga" (not Hooghly, a name Europeans gave it based on the Portuguese fort opposite Bandel called Ugolim) as a unique tourism offering and aiming for a UNESCO World Heritage tag is a no-brainer. If Germany's Upper Middle Rhine Valley can get it for its "cultural landscape", why not the Ganga in Bengal?