Visva-Bharati University (VBU) has announced that it will hold Basant Utsav on 11 March this year, instead of 14 March, the day of Dol Yatra.
Visva-Bharati University
Visva-Bharati University (VBU) has announced that it will hold Basant Utsav on 11 March this year, instead of 14 March, the day of Dol Yatra. The university has also stated that outsiders will not be permitted to attend the festival, which will be restricted only to its students and faculty members. This will be the fourth consecutive year that visitors have been excluded from the festivities. The last time the public was able to participate in the renowned Basant Utsav at Shantiniketan was in 2019. The 2020 and 2021 celebrations were cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The former Vice Chancellor, Bidyut Chakraborty, subsequently declined to organise the event.
Basant Utsav and Poush Mela are two of the largest cultural events held in Shantiniketan, attracting visitors from around the globe. This decision is a significant disappointment for the hundreds of businesses in and around Bolpur that rely on tourism, including homestays, hotels, restaurants, and transport providers. Hundreds of thousands of visitors used to arrive in Shantiniketan for Basant Utsav until 2019. The Basant Utsav was previously broadcast live on Doordarshan.
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VBU’s decision, reached after a lengthy meeting on Friday evening, aims to protect the university’s century-old heritage buildings, particularly following Shantiniketan’s recent designation as a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site. Professor Binoy Kumar Soren, the officiating Vice Chancellor of VBU, presided over the meeting where the decision was unanimously reached. Basant Utsav was first organised by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore at Shantiniketan in 1920 to celebrate the spring festival. It has since become a rich cultural and heritage event in Bengal.
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