Plaques marking Santiniketan as a UNESCO heritage site will not contain any mention of poet Rabindranath Tagore, whose family founded the settlement and who made it a university town over a century ago by setting up the Visva-Bharati University.
In fact, the Archaeological Survey of India’s text for the plaques does not mention any names at all. It is general in nature and merely says that the site deserves protection for the benefit of humanity. According to Visva-Bharati authorities, this is the style of plaques at UNESCO World Heritage List sites around the globe; names of historical figures associated with such sites are hardly ever mentioned, they said.
