The drums are beating. And in Kolkata that means its time for the city’s biggest festival. Durga Puja, the 5 day festival when the ten-armed Goddess Durga comes down to earth with her whole family.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata.
Durga Puja has always been the high point of the year’s cultural calendar. But over the years it’s grown bigger and bigger. Ever since it was included in UNESCO’s list of intangible cultural heritage it’s exploded.
Its like a public art show on steroids. Hundreds of temporary temples or pandals spring up all over the city. And hundreds of thousands of people tramping down the streets all day and night. Volunteers with whistles keeping the surging jostling crowds moving.
WHISTLE
These days thanks to an organization called MassArt there’s even an art preview of Durga Puja more than a week earlier. Like its a sort of gallery art opening. Except the gallery is the entire city.
The puja pandals used to be simple boxy affairs of cloth and bamboo. Now they are mega art and sound installations with themes like food clothing and shelter and social justice
FOOD: We are going to shopping malls to purchase things but farmers who work day and night to produce our food are not getting proper food
But it seems as Durga Puja grows bigger and brasher and glitzier it keeps looking back nostalgically to simpler times.
In a crowded neighborhood in North Kolkata, at Kashi Bose Lane, the theme are the books of Lila Majumdar, a beloved author of Bengali children’s books who was born in 1908. A little blue cutout train held up by volunteers chugs by. The pandal is lined with lounge chairs.
A volunteer explains why.
LILA1: It signifies that her writings were actually comforting. When we read her stories a child and adult can feel comforting and relaxing.
In the east of the city in Dum Dum, a Durga puja pays tribute to a legendary Bengali detective. This looks more noir than Lila Majumder, with cutouts of revolvers and stories of murders and cocaine peddlers. But it’s still all about nostalgia as people remember books they read as teenagers. Volunteers turn giant pages of a book while actors re-ennact his stories.
BYOMKESH: Dialogue
Far away from Byomkesh and Lila Majumdar in the western part of the city, the Durga Puja pays tribute to the delights of the circus. Swaraj Pal, a volunteer explains the pictures that line the venue are of the forgotten pioneers of the circus.
TIGER1: In this cage lady with Royal Bengal tiger. She is the first lady in India playing with the tiger.
At one time people with dwarfism found employment in circus as clowns. As circuses declined in popularity the clowns were out of jobs. As a song pipes up at this Durga puja suddenly we are surrounded by little people in clown costumes
CLOWN SONG
For a few days of the Durga Puja they have jobs at the circus.
Near my house another Durga Puja pays tribute to Raja Ravi Verma, a 19th century painter whose lithographs of Hindu gods and goddesses literally gave us the template for the features of today’s Durga and her kith and kin. That pandal is covered with his lithographs including dozens of vintage matchbox covers
RAJA RAVI VERMA: Raja Ravi verma with every stroke of his brush he brought the gods closer to the people. With his own printing press
A volunteer explains at another puja whose theme seems all about memorializing childhood from the first primers to seals and prints.
CHILDHOOD: Basically we are trying to memorize our childhood, our history, our culture.
That might make some wonder if this is all a big budget exercise in nostalgia, in looking back at things that have been lost in the name of progress. Nostalgia makes for great Instagram reels. But does Durga Puja mean much more than selfies and instagram reels these days?
Then I come across a little installation of a Durga that’s made out of scrap leather. She rises from a city made out of cardboard boxes and old CD cases, Palak Sharma, working with the non governmental organization Ek Tara explains it was made by girls whose parents work in the city’s sweatshops and factories
PS1:The entire installation is made from the waste materials where the parents are working, like in leather factories, cardboard factories, and they are making
The girls who grow up there are imagining a New Durga who fights not with weapons but flowers
PS2: And these flowers denote the ten values like resilience, grit, confidence
In a city awash with Durgas that bask in the old joys of the past, it’s a joy to meet a New Durga imagining a brighter future.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW