Visva-Bharati University is one of India's major Central Government funded autonomous universities located in Santiniketan, West Bengal.

It was founded
by Rabindranath Tagore who called it Visva Bharati, which means the communion of the world with India. In its initial years Tagore expressed his dissatisfaction with the
word 'university', since university translates to Vishva-Vidyalaya, which is smaller in scope than Visva Bharati. Until independence it was a college. Soon after
independence, in 1951, the institution was given the status of a university and was renamed Visva Bharati University. The English daily, The Nation, notes, "Using the
money he received with his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, the school was expanded and renamed Visva-Bharati University. It grew to become one of India's most
renowned places of higher learning, with a list of alumni that includes Nobel-winning economist Amartya Sen, globally renowned filmmaker Satyajit Ray and the country's
leading art historian, R. Siva Kumar, to name just a few."[1] On 4 April 2016 Visva-Bharati secured 11th rank ( All Indian Rank) in University category by National
Institutional Ranking Framework, Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India