Education and Culture of Kolkata

Kolkata is the home of the University of Calcutta (founded in 1857) and Jadavpur University (1955).

Rabindra Bharati University (1962), devoted to fine arts, is housed at the former residence of Bengali poet and Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore. Part of the Tagore residence is now a museum.

Another Nobel laureate, Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, who received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1930 for his discovery of the Raman effect on light, worked and researched in Kolkata for a long period.

Sarat Chandra Chatterjee, a highly regarded Bengali fiction writer of the early 20th century, lived in nearby Hāora.

Ram Mohan Roy, sometimes called the father of modern India, began his social reform for abolition of suttee (burning to death of a wife with her deceased husband) in Kolkata. He also founded Brahmo Samaj, a modern Hindu religious sect, in the city in 1828.

More than 70 percent of Kolkata’s population are literate. The literacy rate is higher for men, who generally receive more education than women; for every three men only two women are literate.

Several languages are spoken in Kolkata, including English. Bengali speakers constitute 60 percent of the city’s population, and there are Hindi (23 percent), Urdu (11 percent), and Oriya (1.3 percent) speakers as well.

After British India was partitioned into India and Muslim Pakistan in 1947, a large number of Muslim residents migrated from Kolkata to East Pakistan, while many Hindu refugees arrived in the city from East Pakistan.

Today Hindus constitute 83 percent of the city’s population while Muslims make up 14 percent; the rest of the population is comprised of small groups such as Christians, Jains, and Sikhs.