Sudder Street is a street in Central

Kolkata Kolkata, also known as Calcutta ( its official name until 2001), is the capital and largest city of the Indian state of West Bengal. It lies on the eastern bank of the Hooghly River, west of the border with Bangladesh. It is the primary ...

and famous for cheap hotels. Foreign tourists often prefer the living places in this street during their stay in Kolkata.

Localities

There are a number of cheap eateries, foreign currency exchange kiosks and travel agencies in Sudder street. The area around Sudder Street is notorious for drug peddlers, who supply contraband drugs at cheap rates.

Landmarks

The street starts exactly opposite the Fire Brigade Headquarters on Free School Street and ends towards the entrance of

Indian Museum Indian Museum (formerly called Imperial Museum of Calcutta) is a grand museum in Central Kolkata, West Bengal, India. It is the ninth oldest museum in the world and the oldest, as well as the largest museum in Asia, by size of collection. It ...

Chowringhee Road Chowringhee Road (also spelt ''Chourangi Road''), located in the Chowringhee neighbourhood of Kolkata, is the arterial road running from the eastern fringes of Esplanade southwards up to the crossing with Lower Circular Road (AJC Bose Ro ...

. The famous Elgin Fairlawn hotel is situated on Sudder Street. There is also a building on the turning of Hartford Lane off Sudder Street where Nobel Laureate

Rabindranath Tagore Rabindranath Thakur (; anglicised as Rabindranath Tagore ; 7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941) was a Bengalis, Bengali polymath who worked as a poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer, and painter of the Bengal Renai ...

lived for a while and penned a few poems.

History and nostalgia

Famous poet Rabindranath Tagore's elder brother Jyotirindranath Tagore and his wife Kadambari Devi lived at 10 Sudder Street. It is well known how Rabindranath came to write his profoundly moving long poem "Nirjharer Swapnabhanga" in a fit of sudden illumination that had all the qualities of an epiphany. in the morning at Sudder Street, Rabindranath had a joyful feeling. His sorrows had been totally removed by the morning sun rays coming from all the directions. In his excitement he created Nirjharer Swapnabhagna. "Aji e probhate robir kar ...". which was incorporated in '' Prabhat Sangeet''. Sometime in 1881-82 Rabindranath lodged with his brother Jyotirindranath and Kadambari at 10 Sudder Street, Kolkata, just behind

. Here, as he later recalled in Jibansmriti (My Reminiscences): "One morning I happened to be standing on the verandah looking that way. The sun was just rising through the leafy tops of the trees. As I gazed, all of a sudden a lid seemed to fall from my eyes and I found the world bathed in a wonderful radiance, with waves of beauty and joy swelling on every side. .... That very day the poem 'Nirjharer Swapnabhanga' (The Awakening of the Waterfall)".

Localities

Landmarks

History and nostalgia

References

See also