Take a virtual stroll through India's ‘city of joy’

Kolkata, IndiaThe Out of Eden Walk project's "Walking Kolkata" interactive map is the continuation of a series of urban maps. Photos, video, and interviews recorded on a storytelling walk through a major city located on (or near) the project's global walking route are loaded into a digital map. And by following our GPS track, readers anywhere in the world can experience the daily textures and dramas that unfold on the streets of great urban centers that today straddle the corridors of our species’ first discovery of the world in the Stone Age.

Past city walks have included foot journeys through Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; Jerusalem, Israel; Tbilisi, Georgia; and Baku, Azerbaijan. I am joined on this journey through Kolkata by Out of Eden Walk cartographer Jeff Blossom and by journalist Sutirtha Chatterjee.

Our city walks are guided by locals, most of them newly met friends: archeologists, human rights activists, radio talk show hosts, skyscraper window washers, mountaineers. The walks are recorded at a leisurely pace—we pause often to chat with passersby, hydrate with a chai, and explore dead-ends. The distances can be spanned comfortably in a day. (Walking Jerusalem, a particularly complex city, took three days.) This time we ramble through Kolkata, the historic capital of West Bengal, India.

Nicknamed the “city of joy,” Kolkata—or Calcutta as it was formerly known—is the cultural capital of eastern India: a dizzying, steaming hot alloy of human longing, high and low. Much of its gloried architecture dates to the British Raj. It’s where Mother Teresa treated lepers and AIDs sufferers at her missionary hospitals. Men in boats sink lines into its river, the muddy Hooghly—not to pull up fish, which are almost gone, but to yank up old, recyclable metal using magnets. Occasionally, it is said they find gold.

View interactive walking tour map.