The main beach at Karwar is officially the Rabindranath Tagore Beach, and visitors who notice the name usually assume it is the ordinary Indian habit of attaching a great man to a public place. It is not. Tagore actually came here, actually stayed, and actually wrote about this stretch of sand at some length — and the sentence on the plinth under his bust is his own.
The brother who was posted here
Satyendranath Tagore was the elder brother — the first Indian to enter the Indian Civil Service, in 1863 — and in the early 1880s he was serving as a district judge at Karwar, which had been the headquarters of North Canara under the Bombay Presidency since the town was built in 1857. Rabindranath was twenty-two and had not yet become Rabindranath Tagore. He came down to stay with his brother, and stayed some months.
What he wrote
He gave a chapter of his memoirs to the town. The passage everyone quotes is the one on the plinth: "The sea beach of Karwar is certainly a fit place in which to realize that the beauty of Nature is not a mirage of the imagination, but reflects the joy of the Infinite and thus draws us to lose ourselves in it."
It is worth reading the rest of the sentence, because the argument in it is the interesting part: "Where the universe is expressing itself in the magic of its laws it may not be strange if we miss its infinitude; but where the heart gets into immediate touch with immensity in the beauty of the meanest of things, is any room left for argument?" That is a young writer working out, on a beach, the thing he would spend the next fifty years saying.
What is there now
The bust and its plinth stand in the beach park at the southern end of the strand, a few minutes from the town centre. Beside them, on a concrete platform on the sand, sits the decommissioned missile boat INS Chapal, opened up as a walk-through warship museum with a retired maritime patrol aircraft parked next to it — which makes the Tagore end of Karwar beach one of the more unexpected pieces of public space in India: a Bengali poet, a Cold War gunboat, and a long shallow bay under a headland.
The beach itself has not changed as much as you would expect. It is still a wide bay with the Western Ghats standing behind it and the islands strung out to the west, and it still empties out at midday and fills again at five. Come in the hour before sunset between November and February and you will see roughly what he saw.