You’ve heard of the Renaissance. It marked a profound turning point in human history, setting the foundations for the modern world. But, have you heard of an era of abundance from India that inspired art, science, and the potential of humanity?
This is the Bengal Renaissance.
The Bengal Renaissance, spanning the 19th and early 20th centuries, was a socio-political awakening across arts, literature, music, philosophy, and science that fundamentally transformed Indian society. It produced social reformers like Raja Rammohan Roy, Nobel Laureates like Rabindranath Tagore, artists like Abanindranath Tagore, and physicists like Satyendra Nath Bose. Its legacy lives in India's institutions, its cities, its cinema, its aesthetic sensibility.
The same century also bore the Great Bengal Famine of 1943 — three million lives lost in eight months, half a million families reduced to beggary, and an earth left depleted for generations.
A century of flourishing and catastrophe, held in the same soil.
Our Bengal Renaissance Project seeks to weave hope back into the soil. Soil is the primary protagonist of our story. It's the giver and taker of all life on this pale blue dot of ours. *Biochar, dark as monsoon clouds and ancient as the Ganges, is our humble offering. This piece of charcoal is one our answer to revitalising the soil creating a new kind of agricultural renaissance.
Biochar
Biochar is like charcoal, and is made from organic waste (think dead plants) that's buried in the soil to permanently lock away carbon while improving soil health.
Breaking down our design
If we're talking renaissance and Bengal, we had to capture a bengali bari. A bari is a large, multi-generational courtyard house where an entire extended family lives together, built around an open central courtyard that served as the heart of daily life, festivals, and gatherings.
This was an ideal setting to visually contextualise the Bengal renaissance.
Our research led us to Jorasanko Thakur Bari. This was the ancestral home of the Tagore family in North Kolkata.
Built in 1784, it was the birthplace of Rabindranath Tagore, and one of Bengal's most enduring symbols of cultural and intellectual life.
Architecturally, the bari embodied India's negotiation with modernity - colonnaded courtyards, layered interiors, European proportion fused with Indian ornament. In our microsite, the bari becomes the organizing logic of the experience, inhabited by thirteen figures, each representing a pillar of the Renaissance — a deliberate echo of Raphael's School of Athens, reimagined in the home they would have actually known. (more on this later)
The blooming flower is the highlight of the opening shot. We built a custom 3D *iris, with a bespoke rig to preserve its distinct character and natural movement.
Iris
The Monsoon Iris is also Alt Carbon's brand colour
The Art Nouveau Motif
As soon as you open the page, you are greeted with a motif; our version of an Art Nouveau. This is a deliberate careful choice. Art Nouveau emerged at precisely the same historical moment as the Bengal Renaissance, born from the same tension: a refusal to let industrial modernity erase the integrity of craft. It finds structure in the many organic forms we have laid bare on the microsite - the sinuous vine, the unfurling fern, the bamboo shoots. They all hark back to a principle we all hold dearly; beauty and function are inseparable.
We wanted to renegotiate Western modernity on Indian terms. You will see this pattern emerge as you decipher the site. The Bengal tiger is also our logo for the *Nobojagoron plant in Darjeeling.
Nobojagoron
Nobojagoron means revival in Bengali. And it's our first biochar factory in Darjeeling.
The School of Bengal
The School of Bengal is an attempt to reimagine Raphael's famous School of Athens. We wanted to reimagine what a Bengal school's renaissance equivalent would look like in Raphael's famous work. To be honest, we wanted to take our time to craft this with a lot more intricacy, but we were forced to cut corners because of time constraints. Instead, we chose to embellish the image with a host of easter eggs that further entrench the personalities we chose to use. More in the image below
The construction of the scene
After encountering the collective presence of thirteen visionaries who shaped the Bengal Renaissance, the journey narrows its focus to where it all began. Emerging from this constellation of reformers, Raja Ram Mohan Roy stands as the pivotal first voice — an intellectual force who questioned tradition, challenged social evils, and laid the foundation for modern Indian thought.
Also notice Rokeya pointing to the sky and Rammohan Roy to the ground? These subtle queues are borrowed from Raphael's painting.
Reconstructing Faces
Most figures associated with the Bengal Renaissance exist in the historical record as faded photographs, oil paintings, or poor hand-drawn illustrations. These images are worn thin by time, often blurred beyond reliable detail. Before a single 3D scene could be built, the project had to solve a more fundamental problem: how do you reconstruct a face from a photograph that is barely a face anymore?
Some of the personalities have just one poor drawing. Take Swarnakumari Devi for example. There's only one image of her, and we were forced to take some creative liberties to recreate her.
We used Gemini to generate photorealistic reconstructions of each figure. Feeding in references, adjusting for historical accuracy, cross-checking against multiple sources where they existed, and refining it all until the portraits felt faithful and alive. The result was a set of 2D portraits that were solid version 1 for us.
From those 2D portraits, the work moved into three dimensions. Using multiple AI agents in conjunction with Blender, we generated and finessed 3D figures for each person. We built geometry, refined proportions, and sculpted the details that would later be carved out to form believable figures. It was a pipeline that did not exist before this project. We built it as we went.
Building the key scenes
With the hall established and the figures built, the project moved into its most granular phase: storyboarding and constructing individual scenes for five of the thirteen figures. Each scene had to work as a world in itself — spatially coherent and visually distinct from the others.
Raja Rammohan Roy — social reformer, abolitionist of sati, founder of the Brahmo Samaj — was the figure who sets the Bengal Renaissance in motion.
The process began with storyboarding - mapping the transition from the shared hall into his personal space, and defining what that space would contain. Sketches came first, loose and exploratory, establishing the proportions and mood of the room. Individual assets were then built and textured separately — the walls, the windows, the objects on his desk, et al. The scene was finally assembled and lit in 3D.
Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain was a writer, educator, and feminist thinker whose 1905 story, Sultana's Dream imagined Ladyland — a utopia governed by women, powered by solar energy, and in deep harmony with the natural world. Her fictional technologies included solar collectors, water-harvesting balloons, flying air-cars, and botanical automation. We captured some of this in the desktop version, and binned some in mobile given the weight of development and load times.
Her scene leaned more heavily on collage than any other, and introduced an element that became the most labour-intensive of the entire project: motion flowers. (desktop only)
Drawn directly from the environmental harmony of Ladyland and its botanical abundance, these animated flowers were built, iterated, and rebuilt over the longest stretch of time in the project. The iteration was painstaking. But it was also the work we are most proud of. In Rokeya's world, flowers were elements of infrastructure and to the discerning reader, it captures our effort.
By the time the Bengal Renaissance had taken root across science, literature, and philosophy, it had also become a force of resistance. As Indian independence gathered momentum and World War II tightened the empire's grip on its colonies, Bengal was quietly undone.
In 1943, Chittoprasad Bhattacharya documented the famine, when it crept through villages over months, and most of the world did not see it. He was sent to Midnapore by the Communist Party of India, he traveled through the dying landscape with a pencil where others had cameras. He sat beside starving families.
He drew what he saw — bones visible through skin, hands lying limp, mothers holding children who had already gone still. His illustrated booklet Hungry Bengal, compiling 22 sketches and eyewitness accounts, was published by the CPI and immediately seized and destroyed by the British government. A single copy survived: the one he had sent to his mother.
His scene in the microsite is built around his studio — a space where the full arc of his art is present at once. On the walls and surfaces, the phases of his work unfold: the raw, skeletal famine sketches of 1943–44; the muscular linocuts of the workers' movement, and finally the prosperous rural scenes of his later years — fields yielding, bodies upright, light falling differently.
That final phase which is the abundant, hopeful rural Bengal he imagined. The paintings on the wall begin to move. The fields he carved into linocut become landscape.
Nobojagoron - The Biochar Revolution
Nobojagoron—“new awakening”— is both the name of our first biochar factory in Bagdogra, and the idea behind the whole project. Chittoprasad’s later linocuts imagined a rural Bengal that could recover and thrive, even after the famine. They were a kind of belief in the land’s future.
The scene ends with a sun rising over the fields, and as the light reaches the land, it finds the Nobojagoron board with a Bengal tiger motif.
This is actual footage of our large factory. Footage we shot waiting for the sun to set — a story we can all recount and talk for hours together.
Nobojagoron Factory - Kamala Tea Estate
And, that was not all. Buttons. Adi has been obsessed with creating buttons. We have a second fantastic one showcasing biomass and how they burn into biochar. Looks simple, hard to execute. Again, that's a story you might want to ask me or Adi or anyone in Climate Studio. We can rant about it all day.
If you liked this piece, please do give us a shoutout, and share some love, we want to do more art, less work 😉
The Bengal Renaissance Project microsite is an ongoing exploration of history, society and technology through a digital experience.
Team
Climate Studio
Visualisation and Animation by Anish Jadhav
Creative Development by Manish Basargekar