The colourful city that feels like stepping into a Wes Anderson film

“Accidentally Wes Anderson”, an Instagram account with 1.2 million followers, is all about finding the aesthetic of idiosyncratic US filmmaker Wes Anderson in uncontrived real-life situations.

Characterised by symmetry, colour and eccentricity, Anderson’s whimsical visual style is offset by decay, dereliction and desolation. It is a realm of dreamlike melancholy and off-kilter nostalgia, like a favourite painting set crookedly on a wall, leaving you to question the backstory of how it became askew.

On my first visit to Kolkata, I check in at a hotel near the Alipore Zoological Garden where dubious practices have recently come under scrutiny. I don’t visit, but its entrance, a dinky stone arch with cement animals roaming across it and identical toy-like clocktowers either side, delights that part of me that loves Anderson’s work.

In fact, it seems to me everything is “accidentally Wes Anderson”. It’s as if I’ve stepped into the auteur’s viewfinder, so vibrant, quirky and decidedly decaying are my surroundings.

Anderson – whose films include The Grand Budapest Hotel, Fantastic Mr Fox and, set in India, The Darjeeling Limited – is openly influenced by the celebrated Kolkata-born filmmaker, Satyajit Ray.

Ray is so important to this arts-loving city, upon his death in 1992 it came to a standstill. There’s no “accidentally” about it. Wes Anderson, I soon realise, is intentionally Kolkata.

I’m in this city, the capital of the state of West Bengal, 154 kilometres inland from the Bay of Bengal in the east of India, on APT’s 10-day Kolkata and Lower Ganges Cruise escorted journey. The city sits on the Hooghly River, a tributary of the Ganges, upon which we will later cruise. For now, I’m staying at the wonderful Taj Bengal, its late-’80s architecture filmworthy in its own way, and chatty chief concierge straight out of central casting.

Our first excursion is a ride on what’s left of Kolkata’s 1873 tram network, one of the oldest in the world, pipping Melbourne by 12 years. Our ancient car, coloured an Anderson-esque baby blue, trundles through old Kolkata’s dirty, industrious streets which are choked with bright-yellow Tata taxis, gaudily decorated trucks, green and gold auto-rickshaws (tuk-tuks) and even the occasional man-pulled rickshaw.

Another morning, we explore the Mullick Ghat flower market, India’s largest, a dazzling and frenetic assault on the senses. We roam through the spectacular Kumartuli Potter’s Lane, a whole neighbourhood of small operators who make clay Hindu deities. We pass crowded food stalls, with copper pots clanking and steaming tea pouring, roadside shoeshine set-ups and busy open-air barbers. I take some free time to wander along College Street, or Boi Para, a 900-metre stretch of bookstores and stalls, shabby as a well-loved paperback and pulsating with the city’s intellectual current.

We also visit the Victoria Memorial Hall, the so-called Taj of the Raj, encircled by 26 hectares of garden, of which the city is generally proud despite its colonial roots. Overwhelmingly, Kolkata’s streets are lined with once magnificent 19th century buildings, still beautiful and imposing even in their decline. At some times of the day, I see shepherds moving herds of goats past them and through the city centre.

The impression is of a city as cinematic as it is hectic, and while our stay is only a few nights, it fuels in me a burning desire to return. It seems an excellent place in which to linger, to try to get under its skin. But, one does need to be careful about reducing a city and its culture to its quirk. Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited, for instance, has been criticised for Orientalism, stereotyping India as an exotic backdrop to a white European story. And Kolkata, like all of India, is multi-layered. Though it may look idiosyncratically whimsical, it has a deep and important history.

Considered India’s cultural capital, it has proudly produced several Nobel Laureates, including Mother Teresa, the Albanian-born Nobel Peace Prize winner who worked with the city’s destitute and was canonised in 2016. Under British colonial rule as Calcutta, it was the de facto capital of India and the second-largest capital in the British Empire after London.

It ceased to be India’s premier city in 1911 after vehement anti-British sentiment in the region and a range of geopolitical changes. New Delhi, 1500 kilometres north-west, assumed the mantle.

Now, the combination of being a megacity with a metro population of 4.5 million and a wider population of 15 million, years of political instability and corruption, failing infrastructure, pollution and poverty plus a brain drain as younger people leave for better opportunities, Kolkata is perhaps at a crossroads.

Can it maintain its eclectic character and become a thriving modern economy? Savills Research, one of the world’s leading market trend forecasters, says it can at least do the latter. In 2024, it named Kolkata the 11th most promising city for future growth in a survey of 230 metropolises worldwide.

And as for its character, the good news is that quarters of the city are undergoing a revival with young entrepreneurs turning old buildings into cafes, restaurants, galleries, boutiques, inns and bars. The city’s famed 100-year-old Oberoi Grand hotel, an emblem of its allure, is currently closed for renovation, set to reopen shiny and new in 2026.

An optimistic outlook? Absolutely. After all, it is not “accidentally” that Kolkata is nicknamed City of Joy.

THE DETAILS

CRUISE + TOUR
APT’s 10-Day Kolkata and Lower Ganges Cruise costs from $7295 a person. See aptouring.com

FLY
Singapore Airlines flies daily to Kolkata via Singapore. See singaporeair.com

The writer travelled as a guest of APT and Singapore Airlines.