Of the five Universities that the city of Kolkata can boast of till now, Rabindra Bharati is the third to come into existence. It was founded on May 8, 1962, under the Rabindra Bharati Act of the Government of West Bengal, 1961, to mark the birth centenary of the poet Rabindranath Tagore, in whose ancestral residence it found its first seat and where two of the three faculties of the University, those of Fine Arts and Visual Arts, are still located. With the eventual expansion of the University, the Faculty of Arts was added to its academic base in 1976 and a new campus on 56A, B. T. Road, Kolkata-50 was requisitioned to house it. This new campus has also a Tagore connection. Harakumar Tagore, the poet’s uncle, built a mansion called the Emerald Bower, and this building and its parklands, later acquired by the Government of West Bengal, finally became a complex of academic institutions among which this University has the central and larger share. The main administrative office is also situated at the Emerald Bower Campus.

The University was reconstituted in 1981 by the Rabindra Bharati Act, 1981.