Victoria Memorial

Address: 1 Queens Way 
Timing: Tuesday-Sunday 10am-5pm 
Entry: Museum fee applicable
There is no neutral response to the Victoria Memorial: simultaneously one of India’s most beautiful buildings and one of its most politically complicated, a monument to a queen who never visited the country, conceived by Lord Curzon after her 1901 death, funded largely by Indian taxation and completed in 1921 after sixteen years of construction.
Designed by Sir William Emerson in a style blending Italian Renaissance and Saracenic elements, it is built of the same Rajasthani marble as the Taj Mahal and shares enough of the Taj’s vocabulary, a great central dome, subsidiary chhatris, domed corner towers, to have earned the nickname “the Taj of the Raj.” Atop the dome, a five-metre bronze Angel of Victory doubles as a weather vane. The building sits within 64 acres of formal gardens; scattered through them are statues of the men who built and administered the empire, Clive, Hastings, Dalhousie and Curzon among them.
Inside, the Queen’s Hall holds a marble statue of a young Victoria by Sir Thomas Brock, and a recently reopened gallery carries twelve frescoes depicting episodes from her life. Further galleries hold British paintings of Bengal from 1770-1835 (several the only surviving visual record of demolished buildings), the world’s largest collection of Daniell aquatints, Robert Clive’s arms and objects connected to the Mysore Wars and the museum’s biggest draw, the Calcutta Gallery, tracing the city’s history through maps and photographs up to Partition. Since 1988 the building has been illuminated nightly, and most evenings host a 45-minute sound-and-light show: spectacle rather than history, but a genuine experience of a Kolkata evening. The Memorial’s interpretive framework and the politics behind its construction remain actively contested, which does nothing to diminish the case for visiting.