The least-visited quarter, and the one we most often press on returning clients
The East
The East rewards the second-time visitor. Bengal in winter — Calcutta in December, the Sundarbans in February — gives you a literary India that the guidebooks still underserve. Odisha's coast and its weaver villages are at their best between November and March. Bihar is for the Buddhist circuit and Nalanda; Jharkhand we visit for the tribal markets and the Parasnath hills. None of it is luxury in the gilded sense. All of it is unusually rich.
Photo: Joydeep Chakraborty · CC BY-SA 4.0
Destinations · 7
West Bengal
Bishnupur
The terracotta temple town of the Malla kings. Brick the colour of dried blood, panels that read like a Mahabharata graphic novel.
Bihar
Bodh Gaya
The tree the Buddha sat under, a temple standing since the 6th century, and monasteries built by a dozen Buddhist nations around one square kilometre.
West Bengal
Darjeeling
Kangchenjunga at dawn from Tiger Hill, a steam railway that has run since 1881, and tea estates you can walk into rather than photograph.
West Bengal
Kolkata
The old imperial capital, still the most literary city in India — coffee house arguments, a working Chinatown breakfast, and Kumartuli's clay idol lanes.
Odisha
Konark
A 13th-century temple built as the sun god's chariot — twenty-four carved stone wheels, seven horses — and the least-crowded stretch of the Odisha coast behind it.
Odisha
Puri
One of the four Char Dham, a chariot festival that moves 400,000 people, and a temple kitchen that may be the largest in the world.
West Bengal
Sundarbans
The only mangrove tiger forest in the world. You won't see a tiger. That's almost the point.
If you have done India once already, write to us — the East is where we would send you next.
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