When the poet Rabindranath Tagore set up his global cultural and educational centre “Viswa Bharati” in a relatively arid area of West Bengal Bengal, India, in 1901, he had already defined the settlement as “Shantiniketan” or ‘Abode of Peace’. The humanist values he espoused, along with his stature as the most important figure of the Bengali Renaissance (he was also the first non-Western recipient, in 1913, of the Nobel Prize for Literature), attracted many others from Kolkata and elsewhere to join him and live there.. A recent application for World Cultural Heritage status for Shantiniketan is under consideration by UNESCO. The Dey family built their Mitali home in Shantiniketan in 1968, inspired by the creativity of Tagore and his universalist, tolerant and freethinking ideals.
