Another Tagore house at Mungpoo to get facelift

A guesthouse under construction for tourists at Mungpoo

Vivek Chhetri, TT, Aug 09, 2018, Mungpoo: The Bengal government along with the GTA will renovate a bungalow, which had hosted Rabindranath Tagore during his visit here and was gutted in a fire later, as part of a larger plan to promote heritage tourism revolving around the bard.

Another bungalow (which is now called Rabindra Bhavan) where Tagore had stayed in Mungpoo was converted into a museum. Both the bungalows belonged to the directorate of cinchona and other medicinal plants.

"I had a discussion with (GTA head) Binay Tamang today (Wednesday) and we plan to preserve the heritage of Mungpoo, and protect and promote it in a befitting manner," said Gautam Deb, state tourism minister, at a programme held at Rabindra Bhavan to mark the bard's 78th death anniversary.

Mungpoo is about 30km from Darjeeling.

Tamang said on Wednesday that the GTA and the state government would renovate the Suriel bungalow of the cinchona plantations where also Tagore had stayed.

The Suriel bungalow had been gutted in a fire in 1986.

Samuel Rai, the director of the cinchona plantations, said: "During his first visit to Mungpoo in 1938, Tagore had stayed at Suriel bungalow, which was the guesthouse of the cinchona plantations then. He had come as a guest of Manmohan Sen and his wife Maitrayee Devi."

The Sen family then invited Tagore to stay at their official bungalow, which is now called Rabindra Bhavan.

Several poems written by Tagore from Mungpoo feature in his collections like Janmadine, Nabajatak and Sanai.