In the Name of the Goddess: The Durga Pujas of Contemporary Kolkata 9789384082468

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In the Name of the Goddess

IN The NAMe oF

The Goddess The dURGA PUJAs oF CoNTeMPoRARY KoLKATA

Tapati Guha-Thakurta

PRIMUS BOOKS An imprint of Ratna Sagar P. Ltd. Virat Bhavan Mukherjee Nagar Commercial Complex delhi 110 009 offices at CheNNAI LUCKNoW AGRA AhMedABAd BeNGALURU CoIMBAToRe dehRAdUN GUWAhATI hYdeRABAd JAIPUR KANPUR KoChI KoLKATA MAdURAI MUMBAI PATNA RANChI VARANAsI © Tapati Guha-Thakurta, 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 2015 IsBN 978-93-84082-46-8 Published by Primus Books design and Lasertypeset by Bit Blits digital Workstation, Kolkata Printed at ...

This book is meant for educational and learning purposes. The author(s) of the book has/have taken all reasonable care to ensure that the contents of the book do not violate any existing copyright or other intellectual property rights of any person in any manner whatsoever. In the event the author(s) has/have been unable to track any source and if any copyright has been inadvertently infringed, please notify the publisher in writing for corrective action.

For Ma, hari and Mrinalini

Contents Preface

ix

Introduction

1

Chapter 1:

The City of the Festival

29

Chapter 2:

The Making of a New Civic event

77

Chapter 3:

Pre-histories of the Present on Artists and Awards

117

Chapter 4:

Pre-histories of the Present on Pratima and Pandal Makers

149

Chapter 5:

The Age of the ‘Theme’ Puja

199

Chapter 6:

demands and dilemmas of durga Puja ‘Art’

247

Chapter 7:

durga Puja Tours and Travels

293

Chapter 8:

destruction, dispersals, Afterlives

339

Glossary

365

Bibliography

370

Index

381

Preface This was meant to have been a short, non-academic book that I thought I could write after two or three seasons of research. In 2002–03, I could never have anticipated that it would end up in its present form and take the many years it did to be completed. The fault here lies not just with the author, who has always needed a decade or more to finish each of her books. It lies equally with the subject the book sets out to study, where in the spirit of the city’s festival the work rolled and gathered new layers every durga Puja and took on its own annual cycle of research and writing. It is hard to justify why a single festival phenomenon in a single city, studied only over the span of a decade, should call for a book of so many pages, notes and images. The ‘call’ has been entirely mine. The book, one could say, is guilty of the same excesses as the Pujas. And I ask of my readers the same indulgence and tolerance that the festival asks of its public. My engagement with the transforming artistic dispensations of this festival became an incursion into the contemporary history of the city of Kolkata—a city that I have never left and that has never left me; a city that has remained my emotional and intellectual home even as I have never ceased to despair about it. It is in that ineluctable space of living, loving and agonizing that I would like to place this work on my city and take the blame for both its narrow focus and its disproportionate bulk. Unlike any other book I have written, this one has pushed me into taking many disciplinary liberties and leaps. It has led me from my training in history into my untrained foray into urban ethnography, from the field of art history into that messy space of production and practices that fall under the rubric of popular visual culture, from the secure enclave of libraries, archives and museums into the chaos and crowds of a street festival. Without realizing it, I also found myself flung from the role of writer to that of amateur photographer and book designer. With each move, I found myself learning more than I ever thought I was capable of at my age, and (as my publisher alleged) biting off more than I could chew. I found myself grappling with the challenge of writing a new kind of academic-cum-pictorial book, where I could dispense with concepts and theories in my narrative and use my visuals not merely as illustrations but as the ground on which the work stands. having never before worked on a theme of contemporary history, I also found it very hard to bring to a close a project for which I had defined points of entry but no easy routes of exit. The end product bears the marks of all these difficulties and the ‘indiscipline’ of my meanderings into these different fields and skills. Nonetheless, in the manner of the durga Pujas, this book too, I hope, will hold its own despite its blemishes and rough edges.

x

preface

The analogy with the Pujas keeps surfacing. Like every aspect of the festival, this work has been, from its inception to its end, a collective endeavour. It began in 2002 as a collaborative project with my colleague and friend, Anjan Ghosh. Together, we mobilized an enthusiastic team of student researchers, went about our field tours and began compiling an archive of taped interviews and transcripts, photographs and media reports, to be housed at the Centre for studies in social sciences, Calcutta (CsssC). Anjan’s particular interest in studying public spaces and neighbourhoods of the city through the lens of the durga Pujas is evident in the articles he wrote on this theme, on which I have based many of my formulations. That he never lived to develop these into a larger work nor see my book completed remains a lasting regret. his untimely loss is what propelled me to finish this book against all personal and professional odds. This work would never have been possible (nor been half as pleasurable) without the participation of over different seasons of a large team of committed researchers. My heartfelt thanks go out to Kamalika Mukherjee, Abhijit Bhattacharyya (both of the CsssC archives), Jayani Bonnerjee, Moumie Banerjee, Moumita sil and sudipta Ghosh, who formed our first group of researchers; to Paramita Brahmachari and Ranu Roy Chowdhury who worked on this project during its most expansive phase in the mid 2000s and provided me with the most comprehensive interviews, transcripts and coverage of the festival; and finally to Moumita sen, who brought a fresh lease of life and companionship to this project from 2010–12, when I found myself alone in my struggle to wind up the work. I hope they will all be able to relive the incredible fun of our Puja tours through the pages and images of this book. My thanks also to Kaliprosad Bose and sanchita Bhattacharyya for their help with compiling media reports. While the bulk of the photographs used here are my own, over different periods of research, sambuddha Banerjee, Abhijit Bhattacharyya, Ranu Roy Chowdhury, Arnab Ghoshal, shankulal Bose and Moumita sen have contributed a large body of photographs on the festival for our archives. As the completion of the book has dragged on for years, the trail of debts has mounted in equal measure. I have many to thank for keeping faith in the book and patiently waiting for it to happen. Firstly, my colleagues at the CsssC who heard me promise every year that the book will be done soon and gave me their valuable responses to the first versions of some of these chapters that I presented in staff seminars. secondly, the many organizers and audiences at seminars in delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Baroda, Ahmedabad, London, New York, Cambridge (Massachusetts), Berkeley and stanford, where I have over the years shared different sections of this work. This book has had its prior life not in published articles but in seminars and public lectures, all of which cannot be listed here. The ones that I would like to specially acknowledge for the critical feedbacks they gave me are the presentations I made at the Centre for the study of developing societies (Csds), delhi (in 2003 and 2012), at the school of Arts and Aesthetics and Centre for historical studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New delhi (in 2006 and 2009), at Ambedkar University and department of Political science, delhi University (in 2012), at the Centre for south Asian studies at Columbia, Berkeley and stanford (in 2004, 2005 and 2011) and at the National Institute of design, Ahmedabad (2013). Thirdly, I must thank the many Puja committee members and Puja designers who gave us interviews year after year and, through their conversations and work, offered the material from which the work evolved. In a field of immediate returns and gratifications, many ceased to take seriously the promise of an ever-deferred book. But there were a few who welcomed me back to the Pujas each season and believed that my work would take their art and the festival to places they had not gone before. I hope not to have let them down entirely. I remain particularly indebted to those who had the time and patience to plough through this voluminous work to convince me that it was worth publishing. Janaki Nair gave me her incisive comments on the first book proposal I had floated. As the book took on its present shape, Partha Chatterjee’s and Manas Ray’s

preface

xi

critical annotations on some of the chapters provided important insights for the work as a whole. susan Bean’s enthused reading of the full manuscript was a great morale-booster, and pushed me to think of ways of making this work accessible to a global readership—a task in which I have admittedly failed. Ajanta dutt, a childhood friend, meticulously read and edited the entire work through an immensely difficult time in her own life. hari Vasudevan also took it upon himself to read the work amidst his many other commitments and taught me new ways of thinking about its implications. While I feared that the work failed to rise above its material, they both persuaded me that its value lay in its details. They became the main lifeline of this work in its last stage. Without Ranjana dasgupta taking charge of the director’s office and Lakshmi subramanian sharing responsibilities as dean, Academic Affairs, I would never have survived my years of directorship nor ever been able to finish this work. The book owes a lot to their unflagging support and friendship at office, and to the ever-smiling assistance of Kamalika Mukherjee, who has been the constant factor in this project from its beginning to the end. over 2013–14, the book has traveled between different publishers, to all of whom I remain grateful for the interest they showed in the work. I take this occasion to record my thanks, in this context, to shoma Chowdhury, Monica Juneja, Indira Chandrasekhar and Manish Purohit. My special thanks go to the team of Primus Books for taking on this book at a very short notice, for keeping to all deadlines and for committing themselves to the full expenses of such a volume. sumona Chakrabarty provided much-needed assistance in compiling the bibliography, and swarnali Mukhopadhyay with making the maps for the book. It was always my wish to have a ‘made in Kolkata’ brand for this work. A book on the city’s durga Pujas, I believed, had to be a product of the design aesthetics of the city’s rich tradition of book publishing and graphic art. I remain deeply grateful to Pradip Bhowal and his dedicated work team at Bit Blits digital Workstation for fulfilling this wish, for allowing me to design the book with them, and making this project as much theirs as mine. Working in their small office, I participated in the work of typesetting, image layout and page design, and found myself inadvertently learning the essence of teamwork in Puja production, where as a group one does it all, from writing the concept note to installing the pandal structure to giving it its finishing embellishments. This book has been written under an ever-lengthening shadow of death and illnesses. I have often wondered why a work that began in a spirit of unalloyed joy should have to be finished in a pall of grief. With each debilitating loss has come a new test in forbearance, a new strength to soldier on, and a growing belief that there are attachments that survive the blurred boundaries between life and death. Today, as I draw this book to a close, I feel surrounded by the presence of those who would have been happiest to have held this work in their hands—Baba (my father, Pranab Guha Thakurta), who loved touring the Pujas with me and left me the most abiding memories of the last festival we spent together in october 2003; Kaka (my uncle, Prabir Guha Thakurta), who kept telling me to take leave from office and finish this book, even as he fought to finish his own multi-volume work on Rabindrasangeet through his losing battle with cancer; Anjan, but for whom this book would never have germinated; and Kumkum (Kumkum Chatterjee), with whom I shared a life-time of personal and academic interests. I lost Baba suddenly one evening in November 2003, Kaka after his intense suffering in september 2010. Anjan’s and Kumkum’s lives were cruelly cut short by the same dreaded disease, in June 2010 and december 2012. Their posthumously published articles on the durga Pujas came as a chilling reminder of the urgency of finishing this work before the unforeseen happens. I would also like to remember shanumashi (the artist, shanu Lahiri, who passed away in February 2013): the cover of this book is a tribute to her memory. As my mother’s health rapidly declined over 2014, I raced as hard as I could to bring this book out in time for her to savour it as best as she could. even that hope today stands greatly dimmed.

xii

preface

As times have got harder and harder, I count as my blessings my support structure at home, my husband and daughter who have given me more of their lives than I could ever ask for, my large dog family who have given me an unparalleled space of affection and care, and a community of relatives, friends and students spread across the world who have constantly reached out to me and helped me come through. Writing a book on contemporary history made me understand, more than anything else, the speed with which our present becomes the past. The time of this book became for me a time of the passing of our parental generation and the nearing end of our own professional lives. It is ultimately for Mrinalini and her generation that I leave this book, with the hope it will give them a taste of the best the city can still offer and a reason for still making it their home. 27 december 2014

Tapati Guha-Thakurta

Image Credits It has been a great relief to do a book with so many images that has not involved the long-drawn process of procuring permissions from institutions and artists. The art of the durga Pujas inhabits an open public domain where all have free rights of photography and reproduction - where, as the book will show, the ownership of works is itself freely transferred from producers to Puja committees and sponsors who commission these and retain the rights for their post-festival resale or recycling. Most of the print advertisements and hoardings reproduced here are also in the same open access public domain. The bulk of the photographs published in this book belong to the visual archives of the Centre for studies in social sciences, Calcutta (CsssC). Where no names of photographers and sources are cited, it is to be assumed that the photographs are taken by the author and are part of the institutional archives. I am especially grateful to Jeet (sanjeet) Chowdhury for generously offering his photographs for my book; and to saktidas Roy of the Ananda Bazaar Patrika (ABP) library for searching out valuable photographs from the ABP archives and for securing permission to use other commercial and advertising photographs of the media group. My thanks also to Ei Samay and India Today for the use of the few select images from their publications. The maps in the book have been redrawn from the following main sources – (i) NATMo Urban Land Use Map, 1991 (ii) Kolkata; Details of 141 Ward Maps with Street Directory, Kolkata: d.P. Publication, 2001 (iii) Kolkata Police-Indian oil Puja Guide, 2005 (iv) eicher Kolkata Map, 2010. The spelling of place names in the maps at times differ from the spellings I have used in the text.

Map of Kolkata

Kashipur

Sinthi

Chitpur Paikpara Lake Town

Baghbazar

Dum Dum Park

Belgachchia

Shyambazar Telengabagan

Hatibagan

Howrah Howrah Bridge

Ultadanga

Shobhabazar

Salt Lake (Bidhannagar)

Maniktala Eas

Kankurgachi

Barabazar

tern

Narkeldanga Beleghata

ss

ypa

nB

olita

Sealdah

trop

Me

College Square

Taltala

New Howrah Bridge

pass

Entally

rn Me

tropo litan By

Park Circus Maidan

Alipur

Ballygunge Tiljala

Easte

Bhowanipur

Dhapa

Kasba

Kalighat

Chetla Dhakuria

Taratala Jodhpur Park

ss

Santoshpur

Jadavpur

la

Paschim Barisha

h

Purba Barisha

Pashim Putiary

Haridebpur

rn ste

Bagha Jatin

Nu

Sarsuna

Ea

s ly’

l To

Me tro p

olito

Tollygunge

Selimpur

ypa

Behala

Kalikapur

nB

New Alipur

Adi Ganga

Khidirpur

Naktala

Baishnabghata Patuli

Ganguly Bagan

Garia Thakurpukur Purba Putiary

Legend Kolkata Municipal Corporation Boundary

Adi Ganga (Tolly’s Nullah)

Chitteshwari Temple

Wetlands

Kali Temple Roads

Hooghly River

Introduction Each year, Kolkata’s Durga Puja scales new heights as the most spectacular, extravagant and publicized event in the city’s calendar. There is a long history of the transforming life of this biggest religious festival of Bengal into a civic communitarian event, a time of mass public festivity, a mega consumerist carnival and a city-wide street exhibition. This history, in its many frames, takes us back to different points of time in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There is also a shorter history of the present—one that brings us to the first decade of the twenty-first century—where we see the festival assuming a special artistic profile that is unique to the contemporary city, confronting us with new categories of Durga Puja ‘art’ and ‘artists’. This book extricates itself from the demands of the longer history to hone in on this shorter temporal time frame, to see how certain new dispensations of ‘art’ and ‘design’ have come to signify a specific contemporary tenor in the life of this urban festival.1 One of its main concerns lies in dissecting the anatomy of this newly-configured public art event, by tracking the different trends of creative and spectatorial practices as well as commercial promotion and sponsorship that made for the visual metamorphosis of the current festival. This new visual aesthetic, it is argued, has become the most important marker of the rapidly mutating identity of today’s Durga Puja in Kolkata, bringing into the fray new categories of artists and designers, new genres of public art, and new spaces for popular

art production and reception. All of these come together to orchestrate an artistic high-point in the image of the city’s Durga Pujas in the first decade of the new millennium, during which the main research was conducted for this book.2

the past in the present At the heart of this new story are the cumulative, embedded residues of multiple older stories. There is, to begin with, the inheritance of a curious composite iconography of goddess Durga in her role as Mahishasuramardini, astride her lion, slaying the buffalo demon Mahishasura, while she stands surrounded by her four divine children, her two sons Ganesh and Kartick and her two daughters, Lakshmi and Saraswati. (See 0.1) Each of them are separate deities in their own right and have their own smaller dedicated Pujas, that come either before or after the Durga Puja in the annual ritual cycle, but appear in this setting as offspring of mother Durga and an integral part of her pantheon. This seamless blending of the martial with the maternal image of the goddess is one that is particular to the history of Durga Pujas in Bengal and goes back over four centuries. The invincible warrior Durga of the Devi Mahatmya of the Markandeya Purana becomes one with the domestic Durga of Bengal’s Agamani and Bijoya songs, where she is Uma, Parvati or Gauri, the daughter of

2

in the name of the goddess

0.1 Composite iconography of Durga and her family, designed by Nirmal Malik, Santoshpur Trikone Park Puja, 2009

Himavant and Menaka, the presiding deities of the Himalayas, and the consort of Shiva, lord of Mount Kailash.3 And what is played out every autumn is an intensely emotional ritual of ‘homecoming’ around the five days of the Pujas, when Bengalis welcome the goddess both as mother and as a married daughter who descends to her earthly home each year from her husband’s abode in the hills and returns there following a tearful farewell that is accorded to her on the last day of her worship. With no major Durga temples in existence in Kolkata or in all of Bengal, the worship of the goddess has always been seasonal and always premised on the fabrication of temporary clay images (pratimas) to be immersed in the river at the end of the five days of the Pujas—and the creation of temporary abodes, whether inside existing household altars of affluent and middle-class homes or inside elaborately constructed, dismountable public pavilions on streets and open grounds, which are called pandals. (See text box, p. 3)

This seasonal cycle of worship and the impermanence of the clay images of the goddess and the abodes that are constructed for her stands integral to the life of this event in the past and in the present. These factors will emerge as critical in understanding the intensity of production and participation that is invested in this ephemeral annual event, as well in comprehending the compelling transfigurations of time and space in the city in the build-up to the final days of the festival. The autumnal calendar of the festival and the main continuing format of Durga’s household and public worship—beginning with Mahalaya which inaugurates the ten days of the Debi-paksha, leading to Shashti, Saptami, Ashtami and Nabami (sixth, seventh, eight and ninth days) as the main days of the Pujas, and ending on the tenth day, Dashami, the day of the immersion of the goddess—especially underscore the carry-over of the past into the civic urban festival of the present. Ritual and secular time stand powerfully interpolated in this seasonal

introduction

3

outburst of festivity. What is particularly striking for any outsider is the extent to which the full spread of the year in Bengal gets structured around the ritual calendar of this autumnal event, and the way all work and professional time in the modern metropolis freezes during the week of the Pujas.

in the timing of the Durga Pujas in Bengal has been interpreted by scholars as a part of the ‘Sanskritization’ of the ritual event and its induction within the new structures of Brahmanical orthodoxy and the rising political authority of Hindu land-owning magnates during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.5

Today’s Durga Puja encapsulates a series of critical transitions in the timing, forms and locations of the festival in Bengal in a history that has been shown to stretch from the sixteenth to the early years of the twentieth century. We could look back, for instance, to the early passage of the Puja from a spring-time ritual to an increasingly grand autumn celebration (held in the month of Ashvin in the Sharat season), where the changed time was intended to commemorate Rama’s unseasonal invocation of the goddess on the eve of his battle with Ravana and the last day of the Durga Puja was made to coincide with the Dussehra festivities marking Rama’s final victory over Ravana.4 The goddess’ killing of the buffalo demon came to be thus incorporated within a larger all-India mythological canon of the Ramayana and its climactic narrative of the triumph of good over evil. Alongside the evolution of Bengal’s specific mixed iconography of Durga, this important change

All along, the evolving religious history of the festival powerfully coalesces with its changing social and political roles in Bengal under late Mughal and early colonial rule. If the first public performances of the worship of Durga were staged in the courts and households of the Hindu zamindars from the turn of the seventeenth century, more well-known are the later shifts and travels of the Pujas through the colonial era—first, from this rural feudatory setup to the wealthy mansions of the new merchant aristocracy of the colonial city, producing the new ostentatious entity of the Banedi Bari (aristocratic household) Pujas, and thereafter from the exclusive precincts of elite homes to the spaces of communities, neighbourhoods and open grounds of the city. With these transitions come about the new nomenclatures of the public community Pujas—of, first, the Barowari Puja (literally meaning a Puja begun by twelve friends or associates) and next, the

There are two famous Durga temples that do exist though in the city. One is Kolkata’s oldest temple, the Chitteshwari shrine at Kashipur, founded in 1610, located at the northern-most end of Chitpur Road that takes its name from this shrine. The wooden goddess that was worshipped here by the legendary dacoit of the region, Chitey Dakat, is a folk version of goddess Durga on a horse-lion mount and an accompanying tiger, with the figures of the attendant deities later painted on to the background frame. (See 0.2) The other is the 23 Pally Durga Mandir on Harish Mukherjee Road, near the intersection of Bhowanipur and Kalighat, which grew out of a famous community Puja of the locality in the late 1970. Following a vision of a devotee of the goddess wanting a permanent abode in this location, a metal statue of Mahishuramardini was installed within a newly constructed temple where the Puja of the 23 Pally club would be held each season. These few instances apart, Bengal’s Devi temples are primarily dedicated to the worship of different incarnations of goddess Kali.

0.2 The goddess Chitteshwari at one of the city’s oldest temples at Kashipur, north Kolkata

4

in the name of the goddess

Sarbojanin Puja (connoting a Puja belonging to all) —which over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gradually defined the contours of the modern urban festival.6 The contemporary city festival, I will show, continues to thrive on a thick cultural nostalgia for these different forms of the rural and urban Pujas of older times, and generates its own bounty of historical memories of the shifts from the pomp, extravagance and hedonistic celebrations of the rich and powerful to the communitarian ethos of a people’s festival. The present then remains in a continuous dialogue with these ritual, historical and social pasts of the Durga Pujas, even as it offers its own sharpened image of contemporaneity alongside the narratives of an artistic upgradation and corporate makeover of today’s festival. In this book, though, I have chosen to turn my back on these many legends and histories of the Durga Pujas to think about how we may conceive of a specifically contemporary history of this city festival. I use to my advantage here a significant body of recent scholarship that covers these various angles to the study of the festival that I have briefly skimmed through above. So, for instance, my work consciously steps outside the wide range of writing on the mythological, textual, iconographic and liturgical dimensions of goddess worship in Bengal,7 to approach today’s public event from a distinctly ‘non-religious’ perspective. To do so means separating out my interests in current urban history and popular visual culture from the disciplinary locations of scholars who have studied the Durga Pujas (often locating this prime event within Bengal’s year-long calendar of religious festivals) from the fields of religious studies or structural anthropology of rituals and belief systems.8 The book also avoids the project of providing a broad historical overview of the origins and traditions of Durga worship in medieval Bengal or of the changing socio-cultural forms of the household and public festival in the modern Kolkata of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A good sampling of these histories are there to be read in some recent articles and monographs, some of which also effectively combine a study of the Durga Pujas of Bengal, traced over a long period from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, with the complementary though different trajectories

of the Kali and Jagaddhatri Pujas that come in its immediate wake.9 The broad range of this scholarly coverage has given me the liberty to train the lens of my book closely on the present, on only the Durga Pujas, and on the urban topography of a single city, whose image has grown to be synonymous with this grand autumnal festival of the goddess. It has allowed me to think of the present itself as a distinct historical time, and to clock back to earlier histories of the festival to see how far they serve as pre-histories of the present and presage the contemporary turning points in tastes, forms and practices.

the thrust of the ‘non-religious’ Let us first consider how we may conceive of the ‘non-religious’ life of the Pujas, not as a detriment or denigration but as a social extension of the ritual occasion. The ‘religious’ itself is a concept that needs to be undone and opened up to include a series of practices and affects that grow around it, dissolving the line that holds apart the liturgical domain from the broader ambience of festivities that have evolved within the same sphere, often making it impossible to determine what separates the ‘religious’ from the ‘non-religious’. Across the world and across India, festivals, celebrations, pageants and spectacles have historically been an inseparable feature of the public performance of religion. The Durga Puja, in particular, has always lent itself to the notion of a festival (utsab), where the internally-bound community of worship could extend into a more fluid, cross-class, cross-religious group that would partake of the feasting, revelries, entertainments and philanthropy that grew to be an integral part of both the Banedi Bari and Barowari Pujas of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There is a long-standing terminology in place of the Pujas as Durgotsab or Sharadotsab,10 where the autumn season has been a time of congregation and conviviality, of the coming together of families, friends, communities and neighbourhoods, and of the close enmeshing of worship with mass public celebration. In recent times, these cultures of sociability have come to cohere more and more around a frenzy of competitions, publicities and awards among Pujas, and a new intensity of pandal-hopping, touring and

introduction

5

photography.11 (See 0.3, 0.4, 0.5) The contemporary Durga Pujas provide, in this sense, an exemplary instance of a festival that is constantly ‘on the move’, one that is always in the making.12 As the biggest show in town, it has become primarily a spectacle of advertising and consumption, of fashions and new releases—of products ranging from the older varieties of literary annuals, music albums, clothes or jewellery ranges to new electronic gadgets, cell phone ring-tones and caller tunes, computer screen savers or health and holiday packages. And, as an exhibitionary event spread across the entire metropolis, it also lays out for mass viewing a vast display of architectural and archaeological sites, craft tableaux, tribal art villages, and new orders of public art installations. To explore all these ‘non-religious’ dimensions of the festival is not to imply the evacuation of the rituals of worship, which continue to form the constitutive core of the event, nor to assume any easy conversion of the Pujas into a ‘secular’ festival. If the disappearing religiosity of the public festival has been a matter of perennial concern, the ‘secular’ has proved to be an equally difficult denomination to attach to a celebration where the goddess remains the central affective protagonist. If the Pujas have become inadequately ‘religious’, they have also remained incommensurately ‘secular’. What sharply spells out this incommensurability, for instance, is the way the experience of touring the exhibitionary field of the Pujas still has no other name in local parlance except thakur dekha (‘seeing the gods’), even as this practice of spectatorship has little that is religious about it and stands quite separate from other contemporary practices of pilgrimage tourism. Such contradictions are never resolved but only accentuated by the new language of publicities—by the thick inflections of devotion and sentiment with which today’s print, television and advertising media packages the Puja and produces around it a discourse of a communitarian festival that is meant to transcend the barriers of religion, creed and class. An evocative example is provided by the Puja advertising campaign of 2013 of the Bengali newspaper, Ei Samay, of the Times of India group, carrying the phrase from a Rabindrasangeet, Apon hotey bahir hoye (‘To emerge outside from within one’s self ) and a logo of a Durga reaching out to children with her benediction of

0.3 Puja sponsorship and award banners at the Ahiritola Sarbojanin Puja, 2008

food, learning, shelter and first aid. This campaign carried a variety of images with social messages—a turbaned Sikh in an immersion procession; a Puja gift for the canteen boy; an apartment block resident serving a security-guard at a Puja community meal; a middle class man beating the dhak with street children; a lady and her domestic help exchanging sindur on Bijoya Dashami. (See 0.6, 0.26) It will be my contention that the festival has, over a long period of time, opened up a domain of social affect and transaction where the normative, institutional categories of the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ can neither fall comfortably in place nor be set off in opposition to each other. Following Giorgio Agamben, it may be pertinent to replace these categories of the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ with those of the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’ and to think of their co-mingling and co-constitution in a process that he calls ‘profanations’, in which the consecrated object of the divine is continually returned to the ‘free use and commerce of men’. The Pujas may be positioned within that everyday liminal zone of use and exchange, where, to quote him, the ‘sacred and profane represent the two poles of a system in which a floating signifier travels from one domain to the other without ceasing to refer to the same object’,

0.4 Crowds at a pavilion designed with painted acrylic sheets and small inverted umbrellas by Gouranga Kuinla, 66 Pally Puja, Kalighat, 2010

0.5 Cameras clicking away at a Puja pavilion designed by Tamal Bhattacharyya with ceramic glazed tiles, Barisha Club, Behala, 2007

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where, in the constant passage of meanings between the two, one must reckon with ‘something like a residue of profanity in every consecrated thing and a remnant of sacredness in every profaned object’.13 While the work of sacralization, he argues, centres around keeping the spheres of humans and gods separate and distinct, that of profanation is about a refusal to hold on to these separations, and to return that which was rendered sacred to the human sphere, through contact, touch, use or play. As against the process of secularization, which represses the religious while leaving intact its forces, replicating its orders by simply moving objects and practices from one realm to another, the work of profanation ‘neutralizes’ and ‘deactivates’ that which it profanes.14 The pertinence of bringing Agamben’s notion of ‘profanations’ into the context of the Durga Pujas of the past and present comes with the necessary caveat that ideas of the ‘sacred’ and ‘religious’ on which he builds the arguments about separations and returns remain grounded in a normative Western matrix. In what ways, we must ask, is the notion extendable to the very different social and institutional field of ‘religion’ that has been given the name Hinduism? It is important to recall here Talal Asad’s observations on how ‘religion’ came to be formed as a concept and practice in the modern West’ and the dangers of employing it as a ‘normalising concept’ to nonWestern religions. While Asad is concerned primarily with the problems of asymmetry in applying the modern Christian concept of religion to Islamic traditions, he hints at the even greater untranslatability of the concept to ‘non-disciplinarian, voluntaristic, localized cults of non-centralized religions such as Hinduism.’ Can there ever be any hard and fast separations of the worlds of the human and the divine in a framework of worship, where the embodied icon always exudes a deep sense of personhood, where the sacrality of deities, in both Brahmanical and popular cults, are inextricably tied to mortal lives and identities? This is all the more so, in the case of essentially non-Brahmanical deities like Durga and her family in Bengal, who stand ensconced within a long tradition of intimate humanization and domestication within the medieval tradition of the Mangalkavyas and within the paintings, songs and performances of popular folklore.16 (See 0.7) If in 15

0.6 ‘Let everyday household tensions be forgotten and ties be strengthened’, Ei Samay Puja advertisement, October 2013. Courtesy: Ei Samay

these earlier narratives the goddess’ transformation into housewife and mother involved her induction into the travails of ordinary rural life (her misery specially compounded by the waywardness of her drunken and dissolute husband, Shiva),17 the same genealogy has allowed for her equally compelling incorporation into the changing middle class desires and lifestyles of modern times, with the same playful mix of humour and irreverence. So, on the heady occasion of the annual descent to earth of this divine family, each act of what Agamben calls ‘profane contagion’ become forms of creative appropriation and reanimation—whereby Durga’s affective powers as an icon are neither neutralized nor deactivated but continually recharged in her promiscuous entanglements with the everyday worlds of human consumption and celebrations. It is a sign of our times that the ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ in today’s Durga Pujas come together primarily through the circuits of consumption and the image repertoire of contemporary advertising. It is here that

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in the name of the goddess is performed before the goddess. And, as SMS voting contests for the best Puja keep proliferating within the expanding categories of awards on offer, a cartoon graphic pictures a smiling lady wielding a cell-phone, receiving the worship of the priest alongside the adoration of the viewing and photographing crowds, much to the bewilderment of the figures of Durga and her family. (See 0.10)

0.7 Shiber Paribar (‘Shiva’s Family’), anonymous oil painting, Calcutta, nineteenth century. Courtesy: Chitrakoot Art Gallery, Kolkata and visual archives, CSSSC

the goddess is repeatedly morphed on to the figure of the modern Bengali woman or the girl child. Each takes on the liberty of performing the goddess. Let us take the case of the 2010 announcement of the Asian Paints Durga Puja awards, where three little girls dressed as Durga, Lakshmi and Saraswati hold up the signage for the awards and its website, while a group of boys hold up photographs of the prizewining pandals of the previous years. (See 0.8) The same year, a different metamorphosis is staged in the hoarding of the ‘Pujo Perfect’ awards campaign of the paint company Snowcem, where a woman applying eye make-up gazes back at us out of the mirror as the divine face of the Durga pratima, the flesh and blood figure becoming one with the clay image in a competition for beauty and perfection. (See 0.9) As the spirit of the festival enters homes, the advertisement for an Ananda Bazaar Patrika festival supplement shows a housewife breaking into a jig in her drawing room, her cup of tea turning into the Hclay incense burner with which the evening dance

With Durga becoming the most sought-after advertising icon of the season, the goddess and her festival become serviceable for multiple uses and ends.18 The iconography of the goddess or the theme of her Puja can be made to endorse anything, from paints, adhesives or cosmetics to alcohol brands, matrimonial services and hospital offers. (See 0.11) The ten arms of the goddess has become one of the most common templates for Puja advertising. They can signify the entire spectrum from the multi-tasking energies of the modern home-maker cum professional woman, to the latest Hitech cell-phones and tablets that a young girl has for her taking, (0.12) to the ecstatic delight of a collective of children giving their verdict on the best Puja in town, to the many offers of a Peter England shirts sale. The decorated background frame (chalchitra) that traditionally holds together Durga and her family becomes another repeating motif and metaphor. It could be used by a plywood company to present another group of children, masquerading as different members of the Durga pantheon with their animal bearers, to extol the unbreakable bonds of a joint family. (See 0.13) In a more sensational advertising stunt, it could be deployed by a cell-phone network company, Airtel, to deify five prime football stars of the year— Wayne Rooney, Lionel Messi, Christiano Ronaldo, Kaka and Thierry Henry— during the World Cup football season of 2010. In a city where international football stars are feted with no less ardour than Durga, and neighbourhood altars are often set up by athletic clubs of the two warring camps of Brazil and Argentina supporters to pray for their respective victories, this latest form of the deification of these heroes carried the metaphor of the Puja to a new level of audacity. In a three-dimensional tableau made on almost the exact scale of the iconographic unit of the goddess, including various items of traditional Puja décor like the chandmala or the mangal-ghot, these sporting idols dribbling their footballs (made

0.8 Asian Paints ‘Sharad Samman’ awards announcement on a street hoarding near Science City, October 2010

0.9 Snowcem ‘Pujo Perfect’ awards hoarding, Khidirpur, October 2010

0.10 Ananda Bazaar Patrika ‘Pujor Sera’ contest advertisement, October 2012. Courtesy: ABP

0.12 Hitech Puja advertisement hoarding titled ‘Dasharupa’, Kalighat, October 2013

0.11 The Telegraph, Calcutta, Matrimonial advertisement, September 2010. Courtesy: ABP

0.13 ‘Let the joint family remain unbroken’, Advertisement for Sylvan Ply, The Telegraph, Calcutta, October 2012

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0.14 Pantheon of World Cup Soccer stars, fibreglass models set up as the ‘Airtel Bishwacup Pujo’, Gariahat, July 2010

at the same idol-making hub at Kumartuli where the clay images of deities are made) directly mimicked the goddess group in what was called the ‘Airtel Biswacup Pujo’.19 (See 0.14) Each of these transplantations of iconicity from the realm of the divine to the human can be read as ‘acts of profanation’, in an extension of Agamben’s sense of the term. But, contrary to what he proposes, none results in the deactivation of the affective powers of the icon—nor produces a sense of defilement or insult to the deity. What needs emphasizing here are the elastic grips of the ‘religious’ from which the citations of the goddess and her worship can be thrown open into this wide public field of use, play and circulation. The Durga Pujas can serve as metaphor and trope for all that is celebrated in the city all through the year, whether it is a literary festival in winter or an international football championship in summer. This is where Durga’s malleability and availability as a publicity and social icon need to be carefully situated outside the politics of offence-making and offencetaking that has invaded contemporary India and

severely compromised the scope of any humorous or artistic license with religious iconographies. The goddess and her festival can be seen to occupy their own secure public grounds of artistic and cultural transactability, seldom having to battle the forces of religious chauvinisms and vandalism that keep leveling charges of defamation of sacred icons in other regions and institutional spheres. This is also where I would like to place my ‘non-religious’ take on the Durga Pujas outside the grain of the familiar Bengali lament about the desacralization of the religious occasion and distaste for the bacchanalian festival of shopping, awards and pandal-hopping that has taken its place. The main thrust of my work will be to think less of de-sacralization and more of re-sacralization, and to consider the continuous reinscription of devotional affect, surrounding the annual homecoming of the goddess, within the body of the urban spectacle. 20

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If I take for granted the now well-established identity of the city Pujas as a commercialized masscelebration, I also turn to the huge outpouring of

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in the name of the goddess

cultural nostalgia for the Pujas of the past and the unceasing investment of the festival in reinventing a sense of ritual and tradition for the present. The best example of the creation of a modern, technologically-mediated ‘ritual’ is the All-India Radio Calcutta station’s pre-dawn Mahalaya broadcast of Birendra Krishna Bhadra’s Chandi-path (recitation of stanzas on the legend of Durga based on the Saptasati Chandi section of the Markendeya Purana): a programme that has persisted in its unchanged form from the 1950s into the present. Later titled Mahishasuramardini, the making of this iconic radio programme in the early 1930s involved the finest talents of the Bengali film and music industry of the day. Scripted and produced by Banikumar, who wrote the text in consultation with a Sanskrit scholar, the team of Pankajkumar Mallick, Raichand Boral and Harishchandra Bali composed the accompanying songs and music of what came to be compressed by the 1950s into an hour and a half programme.22 The greatest aura surrounds the figure of the narrator, Birendra Krishna Bhadra (who himself came from a career in writing and performing radio plays). There are stories that still circulate of his legendary live performance of the event—about how he would arrive at the Calcutta Radio Station before 4 am, freshly bathed and clothed in a dhoti and namabali chadar, and about how his voice would invariably break with emotion as he reached the culminating points of the narration of the goddess’ killing of Mahishasura and the incantations of her veneration. His becomes a wonderful instance of the performance of devotion and affect through the art of voice modulation and elocution for a radio recording, where the performative becomes constitutive of the religious.23 The ritual onset of Mahalaya and Debi-paksha has become integrally tied to this long unbroken tradition of the radio airing of his recorded performance and its repertoire of songs. This is the one time of the year when the radio wins out over television and all other media. Even as the recitation and songs of Mahishasuramardini came to widely circulate from the 1980s as the music company HMV’s largest selling album and began playing on loudspeakers throughout the Pujas—even as a host of television and stage performances began to be put out on the same theme—listening to the

radio programme in the quiet of one’s home at the break of dawn still makes for the most ‘authentic’ Mahalaya experience. From the Mahalaya example, we can proceed to think about a host of other performative rituals that have come to define the contemporary festival. As the Pujas have turned progressively into an exhibitionary event, I look at the way the rituals of worship have been layered over by new rituals of spectatorship, touring, and the obsessive clicking and sharing of photographs. The sense of ‘ritual’ and ‘tradition’ can also be seen to continually extend from the religious into the changing artistic and commercial profile of the Pujas. Over different chapters, I will show how the corporate economy of the current festival stands inalienable from its cultural and artistic self-image, and the new discourses it generates about community, social collectivity and civic responsibility in the city. In keeping with the title of the book, I also explore the diversity of images and practices—from the excesses of publicities and the bonanza of awards to the efflorescence of public art and craft—that unfolds in this season ‘in the name of the goddess’. A prime intention of my work is to consider how the goddess can assume her concurrent identities as a devotional icon, an advertising brand image and a viewable or collectible ‘work of art’ in the current life of the festival. (See 0.15) And a key shift that I wish to foreground is the way a festival that was once predominantly glitter and opulence began clamouring for attention at the turn of the twenty-first century as the city’s biggest public art event. This artistic designation, I will argue, is far from easily secured and has to struggle to assert itself within the structure of the religious event and the mass public festival.

the scope of this micro-history It is the new wave of designer productions that came of age in Kolkata during the 2000s and took on the local name of ‘theme’ Pujas that has determined the time frame and focus of this micro-study. The nomenclature, as we will see, came to be associated with a new premium on authorship, artistry and synchrony between the image of the goddess and the

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0.15 Bhabatosh Sutar, Durga, Naktala Udayan Sangha Puja, 2012, now in the Rabindra Sarovar art gallery

0.16 A new-style fair complexioned Kali by Pradip Rudra Pal at the Kalighat Natun Sangha Puja, Kali Temple Road, 2010

intricately conceived architectural replicas, themeparks, folk art villages or themed pavilions in which she is housed. How far has the trend spread to the suburban Pujas of Bengal or to the Pujas conducted by expatriate Bengali communities in other Indian cities or in cities all over the globe? Have the new styles of iconographies and pandal installations intervened within the longer line-up of Bengal’s Pujas, whether of Ganesh or Vishwakarma, or of Kali, Jagaddhatri, or Saraswati, many of which have assumed a new visibility on the face of the city? (See 0.16) And, does the prolific art and craft output of Kolkata’s Durga Pujas find its equivalence in other regional religious festivals in other states and cities of India? I leave these questions open for other researchers, with the conviction that Kolkata’s Durga Puja remains singular not only in the sheer artistic scale and resplendence but also in the new corporate brand identity that the festival has assumed. This city is where the Durga Pujas first and most persistently

took on their new look and aesthetic identity at the dawn of the new millennium—with the city’s festival always enjoying the status of the masterevent, setting new standards in artistic achievements, in media promotions and publicities, and in the intensity of spectatorship. And the city is also where this present festival phenomenon shows signs of repetition, excess and saturation, not least of all its changed political affiliations. On all these counts, my study has delimited itself to the story only of the contemporary Durga Pujas of Kolkata, and has used the changing forms and spaces of the festival as the lens through which to observe the larger public life and visual culture of the city. For an event that invites multiple angles of study, this book has had to grope through a dense thicket of themes to arrive at a specific tenor for the micro-history and ethnography it undertakes of this city festival. The choice of such a tenor needs

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in the name of the goddess mass community festival with the populist politics of post-Independence and post-Partition Bengal, under the Congress government, under the three and a half decades of Communist rule, and most visibly under the current Trinamool Congress regime.

0.17 Crowd-control personnel and policemen on duty at the Lake Temple Road Shibmandir Puja, 2013

elaboration. The ‘micro’ dimensions of my study show up not only in its time frame and subject matter, but also in the specific set of issues about the festival that it chooses to profile. One can conceive of several themes for study converging around this single subject—the passage of the urban Puja from aristocratic mansions into the open streets and its transformation over the early twentieth century into a public community event; the spreading processes of commercialization, competition and corporate sponsorship of the past decades; the changing sociology of residential neighbourhoods of old and new Kolkata as it is mapped by the Pujas;24 the vast economy of production and consumption that thrives around this festive season; or the history of political affiliations and patronage of this festival in the city over the course of Kolkata’s long twentieth century. There are detailed studies waiting to be conducted, for example, on the different artisanal economies and older and newer subaltern livelihoods that are sustained by the Durga Pujas—livelihoods that range from the creation of the clay images of the goddess, the erection of bamboo structures for pandals to the tailoring and hawking of garments, the printing and mounting of flex hoardings, the setting up of roadside food stalls, or the manning of crowds outside and inside pandals on the days of the festival. (See 0.17) Or on the deep linkages of this

Avoiding an overview that cursorily touches on all these themes, the book has honed in on the 2000s as the time of a marked shift in the artistic orientations of Kolkata’s Durga Pujas, with the argument that the frame of the ‘aesthetic’ opens out into the changing civic, social and cultural face of the festival. It has taken on as its onus the writing of an artistic and visual history of the contemporary event: to cover the range of productions in this sphere that come within the notations of ‘art’, and to pan out to the wider imagecomplex of the urban festival. Even as it has sought to tap the myriad fields of the visual, the study has needed to narrow down its objects for investigation. Leaving aside the ‘heritage’ Pujas of old zamindari households or today’s growing crop of apartmentblock Pujas, it has taken on only the main category of the community or the Sarbojanin Puja as the kernel of the urban public festival. Over the twentieth century, it is the Sarbojanin Puja which grew steadily in scale, drawing on a growing corpus of funds from subscriptions and sponsorships, entering the league of rising competitions and rivalries, each Puja committee jostling with each other to provide the season’s most spectacular pratimas, pandals, decoration and lighting. Within this category again, I have tracked mainly the career of the ‘theme’ Puja as the key barometer of the changing artistic identity of the festival. Defining the contours of this entity, marking its novelties as well as its continuities with older practices of idol and pandal making, tracing the highs and lows of its track record, and mapping its diversity and proliferation across the city has been one of the prime investments of this research. This city’s contemporary phenomenon of the ‘theme’ Puja— in all its indeterminacy, high promise and current signs of over-production—stands as the core subject of this book, dominating the visual history it presents of the festival. There are a number of balances that this book attempts in the way it crafts its story. One of the challenges has been to both take stock and move beyond the huge spurt of media coverage of the Durga

introduction Pujas (in newspapers, magazines, advertisements, street hoardings, television channels, and electronic websites), to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the event. The growing media hyperbole that surrounds today’s Pujas makes it ever more difficult to sift out such an approach, to remove the outer gloss and lay bare the inner scaffolding in the staging of the event. At the same time, it has been important not to allow the claims of the academic to deaden the extraordinary vitality of the festival. The option was to evolve a mode of writing that can walk the tightrope between the celebratory and the critical, and move from the anecdotal and episodic to the analytical. To present a multi-sensory, richly performative event like the Durga Puja through a written account and a selection of still imagery is itself a challenge. To make a film on the Pujas has always seemed a far more compelling way of capturing the visual and aural sensorium of the phenomenon. Both the limitations and advantages of my medium have come home to me whenever I have positioned my book project, indulgently drawn out over several years of research and writing, vis-à-vis the documentary films made by filmmaker colleagues in the course of a few months. While they have been able to invoke a far stronger sensorial feel of the festival, they have had to compress the event within a screen time of forty minutes or an hour.25 Another pressing challenge lay in deciding what kind of readership this book would cater to. The work is in many ways torn between two potential audiences, one which is familiar with the spaces of the city and with the Durga Pujas and best served by a thickly descriptive urban social history, and another larger audience who would have been better served by an excision of local details and a drawing out of the broader conceptual issues that speaks to the current scholarship on urban studies and popular visual cultures. The book is clearly weighted towards the first group of readers, with the aim of presenting the event is all its local fervour and flavour. The tools of a micro-history have allowed me to probe the entrenched vernacular locations of the festival and weave its story with the many particularities of persons, places and neighbourhoods that the field research has provided.

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I invoke the notion of the ‘vernacular’ here at different levels. At one level, I consider the way my work has been in dialogue with Bengali writing on the Durga Pujas while situating itself in a different field of academic scholarship in the English language.26 At another level, I look at how the vernacular linguistic field that the festival inhabits maps on to a parallel vernacularity of the image-field and produces a specific aesthetics of ‘vernacular modernism’ on which the art-event thrives. (See 0.18, 0.19) The art of the Pujas, I argue, needs to be given its place within the discursive sphere of modern art and craft practices of the region. In this context, I also reflect on the way this local festival has set up its own parochial dialogues with the cosmopolitan and the global without ever gaining entry into the exclusive circuits of national and international contemporary art. How does this vernacular event produce its own parameters of cultural portability for audiences across the nation and the world? On the same grounds, one could also ask: how can my insider’s ethnography of this city festival engage a larger set of questions about the overlapping rituals of worship, art-production, viewing and touring that constitute the festival’s praxis? Just as Kolkata’s Durga Puja is today consciously wooing national and international publics, this book too will hopefully appeal to not just an in-house but also a larger trans-cultural readership.

defining the term ‘puja’ and situating its ‘art’ The term ‘Puja’ (Pujo in colloquial Bengali) carries many meanings. Moving from its narrow definition as the liturgy of worship to its larger connotation as a public festival, the Pujas will feature in this account as primarily individual units of organization and production, over 4,000 of which come up in the extended space of the metropolis to make for the enormous density of the city festival. The main unit of organization that will come up here is the para (neighbourhood) club and the Puja committee that stands equated with it, with each Puja identified by the name of the organizing locality and the club. The year-round activities of the para club centre on this core endeavour of organizing the Durga

0.18 Lotus-themed pavilion designed by Purnendu Dey, Santoshpur Trikone Park Puja, 2008

0.19 Entrance to a Durga Puja pavilion titled Tandava, designed by Anirban Das, Lalabagan Nabankur Sangha Puja, Maniktala, 2010

introduction Pujas, the scale of which has exponentially grown in the case of most hosting the new style of ‘theme’ Pujas. The Pujas, in turn, serve as the prime conduit through which the clubs both feed inwards into the neighbourhood, defining the main participatory community of the festival and the group of local residents who will work most actively in conducting the event from its inception to the end, and radiate outwards into the city to liaise with corporate sponsors, advertisers and award-givers, all of whom have become integral to the commercial economy of the festival. (See 0.20) Closely coordinating these internal and external public spheres of the para Puja are a series of other figures and institutions, like the ward councilor, the local politician, minister or MLA, and the police station of the area. These bring to the Puja a strong dose of political patronage and funds (increasingly so, under the current Trinamool Congress regime), while also rendering it into an object of municipal regulation and governance. Each season, it is the physical unit of the Puja which redefines the internal territorial identity of the para and delimits its boundaries vis-à-vis other Pujas in the immediate and surrounding neighbourhoods. At the same time, it is the thickening network of outside contacts which determines the competitive budgets, publicities, and awards profile of a Puja, inscribing various big and small neighbourhoods on the festival map of the city through the cultural prestige of their Pujas. (See 0.21) Closely tied to the unit of organization is the unit of production, where a Puja consists of the central ensemble of the goddess group, an elaborately fabricated pavilion on the open grounds and streets of a locality, often with gateways and a walkway leading into it, and the attendant surrounding topography of illuminations and commercial signage. (See 0.22) It is in this sphere of production that contemporary times have left their strongest imprints—in the experimentation with different materials, mediums and thematic concepts; in the changing appearances and iconographies of the goddess; and in the radical reconceptualization of the form of the pandal into ‘art’ and ‘theme’ installations. This is where the modern vocations of art and design have most visibly intervened within the hereditary artisanal trades of idol-making in unfired alluvial clay, of

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0.20 Para residents with their Puja awards on display at the BE Block (East) Puja, Salt Lake, 2008

pandal construction with bamboo, ply planks and cloth cladding, and of electrical lighting decorations. In place of the earlier practices of the distribution of commissions between separate groups of idolmakers, pandal decorators and light-bulb makers entered the period’s new notion of the ‘theme’ Pujas as an integrated unit of production, conceived and executed by a single designer and his work team. With the change in creative personnel came a new stake on individual authorship and style, and a new emphasis on synchrony and coordination between all parts of the tableau. (See 0.23. 0.24) As my study delves into these transmuting spheres of festival productions, what emerges are a complex set of negotiations and collaborations between older and newer practices, where we witness at different levels both a congealing and a dissolving of boundaries between the work of ‘artists’ and ‘artisans’. What also unfolds is the way the commercially endorsed, corporate-sponsored identity of the ‘theme’ Puja transforms the social and spatial logistics of the parar Puja and ends up both splitting and galvanizing the sense of the neighbourhood in which it stands. The physical entity of the Puja, in its artistry of conception, execution and display,

0.21 Award ceremony presided over by Trinamool Congress councillor and major political patron of this locality, Debashish Kumar, at the Tridhara Sammilani Puja, Monoharpukur Road, 2011

0.22 Gateways leading into the Rajasthani palace complex designed by Dipak Ghosh at the Tridhara Sammilani Puja, Monoharpukur Road, 2011

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0.23 Interior of a ‘theme’ pavilion designed by Amar Sarkar, Behala Agradoot Club Puja, 2008

0.24 Synchronized Durga image of the Behala Agradoot Club Puja, 2008

becomes the visible embodiment of the new cultural capital of a para and its ticket of entry into the season’s hall of fame. The image of the goddess group— sometimes brought in complete from an idol-maker or artist’s workshop, at other times sculpted and finished on site inside the neighbourhood pandal under the close direction of the artist designing the entire unit— doubles up in its many roles as an object of worship, collective adoration, and artistic connoisseurship. (See 0.25, 0.26) On its raised platform, it serves as the centre stage of the larger spatial conglomerate, around which are performed both the many rituals of the Puja and many intimate social interactions that constitute the inner public of the para. Around it also converges the anonymous mass of outside crowds, who are asked by local volunteers to constantly move on and not stand photographing and blocking the central item of display. Similarly, the structure of the pandal, in its many-splendoured artistic forms, innovations and simulations, produces its own sets of internal and external divisions as a space for communion and congregation. It functions, on the one hand, as the consecrated temporary ‘home’ of the goddess, transforming the everyday place of the street into a sanctified space where the neighbourhood bonds and plays out the rituals of her ‘homecoming’ through a cluster of activities—ranging from the morning anjali and the afternoon bhog to the evening arati and cultural performances, not least of all, the Dashami sindur-khela by the married women of the locality—even as it vies with other

paras for attention and awards. And it becomes, on the other hand, a live exhibitionary space into which are invited outside groups of judges, celebrities, political leaders and media persons for inaugurations and awards, into which are invested new notions of art-production and art-viewing, and through which also flows an undifferentiated mass of touring crowds. Seen thus as a combined unit of organization and production, the Puja will appear in this book in its many facets—as a space of neighbourhood synergy, pride and rivalries; as a target of municipal regulation and civic order; as an object of media publicities and corporate sponsorship; as a sphere where vernacular craft skills are contending with the talents of artists and designers; and as a vibrant field of popular spectatorship. Over and above these, the Puja will configure as a mercurial artistic entity: one which has taken on the names and claims of ‘art’, even as everything within this art form is made to be destroyed, dismantled and recycled. One of the central compulsions of my study lies in the insertion of a critical notion of ‘art’ into this ephemeral domain of festival productions. Both the demands and difficulties of such an insertion are at the crux of my concerns. What happens, I ask, to the received categories of ‘art’ and ‘artist’ when these are pitched into this temporary and unbounded space of mass festivity? Can the stakes on originality and authorship (that are so essential to the notion of ‘art’) survive in such transient public spheres?

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in the name of the goddess

0.25 Asthami Puja being conducted at CD Block Salt Lake, 2008

What explains the huge investment of funds, time, labour and creative energy in productions that are not intended to last beyond the week of the festival? What kinds of identities of artists and designers has the festival nurtured and what are the inbuilt constraints of the field that keeps destabilizing them? And how do the Pujas turn our gaze on the many lesser forms of artistic livelihoods within and outside the city, alerting us to the ever-slipping lines of distinction between the ‘artist’ and the ‘artisan’ in several such domains of practice? My study brings these questions to bear around the shifting graph of today’s ‘art’ or ‘theme’ Pujas in the city. In doing so, it addresses the epistemic ambivalence of the very category of the ‘theme’ Puja and its unresolved equations with the idioms and vocabularies of modern art. While I use the terms ‘theme’ and ‘art’ Pujas as interchangeable categories,

I do so with the awareness that the label of the ‘theme’ has an openness and a fluidity that has been able to accommodate a diversity of styles, practices and producers, which are not always reducible to the prevailing notions of ‘art’ and ‘artist’. Over the course of the period of my study, I will also look at the way ‘art’ and ‘theme’ Pujas begin to pull in contrary directions, whereby the ‘art’ Pujas seek out their distinction as the authorial productions of artists vis-à-vis the indiscriminate proliferation of ‘theme’ Pujas by all and sundry. But neither category, I will argue, congeal into fixed, stable entities. The divisions between the two keep blurring, as do the qualifiers separating out the modern professional artists from the group of amateur designers, pavilion makers and craft practitioners who have taken over the field. In the process, the notions of ‘art’ and ‘design’ themselves get extended and dispersed in multiple directions.

introduction

21

The Durga Pujas, in this current incarnation, have provided me with an important platform for intervening within the existing disciplines of contemporary Indian art history and visual studies. The festival can be located in that fluid zone where art history becomes visual studies, where the exclusive enclaves of the one field give way to the open-ended, popular spaces of the other. But it also flings open a domain of production and viewership where the labels of the ‘modern’, the ‘traditional’ and the ‘popular’ stand in constant need of interrogation and redefinition. The new genres of Durga Puja art are not ones that can easily belong to the established circuits of either traditional ritual art or modern/ contemporary art, nor to the much-studied sphere of mass-produced print iconographies.27 They invite us to think of new variants of popular art that are not reducible to the recognizable visual field of calendar art, Bollywood cinema or television serials that have dominated the study of the nation’s popular visual cultures, nor readily accommodated as a form of modern public art in its own right. I will be arguing that the urban festival has yielded an aesthetics that calls for its own criteria of evaluation and terms of analysis. And that despite its contingent status in this field, the idea of ‘art’ has served as one of the most ebullient transformative forces within the city’s Durga Pujas. Over the course of the book, we will see how the reconfiguration of the Durga Puja as a public art event is closely tied to the changing social profiles of Kolkata’s neighbourhoods, to the shifting hierarchies between elite and non-elite localities, to the transforming aspirations of local worlds of art practices, to the new blending of amateur and professional enterprise, and to the entry into the scene of art college-trained artists and designers from the graphic, film and television media. We will witness its spectacular effects in the visual metamorphosis of the city during the days and nights of the festival. We will also see how the claims of art mediate the excesses of awards, competitions and publicities within the current phenomenon. Most importantly, the book makes a case for ‘art’ as providing the best form of branding of the local festival, as well as its most effective secular garb in

0.26 Innovative ‘art’ Durga image on display, with a small worshipped idol in front, Beltala Sangha Puja, Bhowanipur, 2008

the public sphere. Whether by corporate sponsors or by the government, the Durga Pujas today are best marketed and propagated as a city-wide street art festival rather than as a mass religious occasion. The notion of a Sarbojanin utsab allows for the production of a loosely secularized public sphere of the Pujas—one where, to quote Craig Calhoun from his recent anthology on secularism, ‘public life at even the most cosmopolitan of scales is not an escape from ethnic, national, religious or other cultures but a form of culture-making in which these can be brought into new relationships.’28 Within such a public sphere, the folds of the

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in the name of the goddess

a time for ending

0.27 ‘Let the joys of the festival break through the barriers of religion’, Ei Samay Puja advertisement, October 2012. Courtesy: Ei Samay

religious easily expand into the capacious folds of the cultural, while the cultural profile of the event rises from the larger pool of Puja literature, music, fashions or food to find its most pronounced articulation in the season’s huge boost to art and craft productions. The forms of ‘culture-making’ in this public sphere can be seen to lead, on the one hand, into a vast output of festival art and craft, and, on the other hand, into the sweeping political takeover of the festival by the Trinamool Congress regime. Both the new proclivities of art and the new order of politics that have emerged in the name of the goddess reinforce each other on these specially constituted secular grounds of a ‘festival for all’. (See 0.27) So far, in keeping with the party politics of West Bengal, the Durga Pujas have not become the political tool of the Hindu rightwing.29 Instead, this biggest mass festival has best served the populist politics of the state, covertly under the many decades of Left Front rule, and now most assertively under Mamata Banerjee’s government, by deflecting the rhetoric of religion on to the ready-to-hand vocabulary of community, collectivity and social affect.

The political culture of the festival has not directly been a part of this work. However, it uses the arrival of the new government in West Bengal in the summer of 2011 and the dramatic political makeover of the festival in Didi’s Kolkata as a strategic cut-off point for its study.30 The changed political dispensation of the city has lent an altogether different hue (literally and otherwise) to the forms and styles of the Pujas, bringing the Chief Minister and her political coterie to the centre stage of the event, sharply interpolating its worlds of artists and art patronage, pushing the trends of festival inaugurations, propagations and revelries to new extremes.31 A different present has taken over the life and time of the festival, marking its break from the main years of my field-research. How does one bring a contemporary history of this kind to an end? Where does one draw the line for a research project that began in 2002, steadily grew through successive Puja seasons up to 2010, and continued to linger in the years that followed, as I struggled to bring the work to a close? By this time, each season was bringing a sense of sameness and repetititons, of weariness and saturation. At various levels, the festival was being riddled with signs of excesses and over-production. There was much within it that was now spilling over the brink, crossing all limits and proportions. The phenomenon of ‘theme’ Pujas itself seems to be bursting at its seams, with an indiscriminate proliferation that makes it increasingly difficult to mark out spheres of artistic innovation and distinction. Those who see themselves as ‘pioneers’ and ‘true artists’ in this sphere of Puja designing now have to struggle to retain their pride of place in a field where a nondescript range of persons can all turn designers and offer up ‘theme’ productions for Puja clubs with growing budgets and corporate and political backing. I began my research in 2002–03 by addressing a handful of Puja designers and their new styles of Pujas; years down the line, it became impossible to keep track of the count or separate out the wheat from the chaff. The same is true of the endlessly growing numbers of Puja awards that are on offer each season. In fact, the very intention of today’s Puja advertisements and awards is to generate

introduction

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0.28 Repeating advertisement banners of Shalimar products, Ultadanga junction, 2013

this sense of the impossibility of keeping count or marking differences. Their very purpose is to glut the field of vision, competition and consumption. We experience this most in the serial repetition of the same awards and advertisement banners across all parts of the city, and across the concentrated stretch of a single road or pavement. (See 0.28) The city of pratimas and pandals has been converted now into a city primarily of flex hoardings. Come the week of the Pujas, bamboo scaffolding for the mounting of these hoardings comes up on either side of pavements and along road dividers of main thoroughfares, with the same intensity with which they are erected during the months before for the construction of pandals. Not just all house fronts and open spaces of the roads, but often whole Puja pavilions today stand wrapped in gigantic flex banners, forcing these upon us as the all-pervasive objects of view. (See 0.29) Publicities are what must be now incessantly encountered and overcome to arrive at the key attractions of the Puja installations and their goddesses

The image of the Pujas as a special kind of public art event also seems to have turned a full cycle. If the individually authored and designed productions had been the mark of distinction of the new wave, by 2012–13, barring a few exceptions, there was a noticeable erasure of the credit lines of artists and designers from the signage around the Pujas—their names obliterated by the preponderance of the names of clubs and their political patrons. While the ‘theme’ Puja was what brought into being the new figure of the Puja designer, ironically, it is the current over-production of ‘themes’ that has ended up displacing the names of those who conceive and execute these displays. What began in the early 2000s as a shift away from the vulgarized culture of scale, opulence and glitter to a new premium on moderation, refinement and artistry has also reversed to renewed styles of sensationalism and gimmick, celebrity endorsements and a fanfare of inaugurations. Central to this turn has been the impassioned takeover of the Durga Pujas by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and her

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in the name of the goddess

political entourage in every major Puja ward and neighbourhood, leaving its inescapable imprint on all aspects of the visual culture of the festival. If Didi’s face now competes with Ma Durga’s for hoarding space, her round-the-year presence on the streetscape of the city taking on a new visibility in the season’s banners and hoardings, (see 0.30) she has also thrown herself into the fray as a ‘Puja artist’ herself, bringing in her trail other leaders and ministers who are making their debuts in Puja designing.32 The sharply transformed political life of the festival finds manifestation in newer scales of Didi’s largesse and licenses—as she doled out pre-Puja donations to local clubs, waived at will corporation regulations and taxes over commercial hoardings, made it mandatory for various municipal departments to sponsor ten Pujas in the city and one Puja each in the district,33 or as she moved into a Puja inauguration spree from Mahalaya with the same panache with which she inaugurated her new seat of government in Howrah on the eve of the Pujas of 2013. We have talked about how the Durga

Pujas serve as a trope for all that happens in the city. It is instructive to consider the way the Pujas today translate into an entire style of running the state, letting roll a never-ending series of state-sponsored festivals, dissolving all boundaries between the modes of festivities and modes of governance.34 What we may call the ‘festival mode’ of operation now engulfs all aspects of public political life in Bengal. As I wrote the final parts of the book during the festival season of 2013, it is this newest face of the present—its extremities and its absurdities—which made me to think of the Pujas of the 2000s and my deep engagement with their changing trends as becoming part of a time past. It allowed me to place the city’s Durga Pujas and my micro-history of the event within a specific chronology of the present. It pushed me to think about how my study of the Durga Pujas could be located at the crucial cultural and political cusp in the life of the city that marked the last years of the Left Front government with

0.29 Century Ply advertisement banner enveloping the full Puja pavilion, Chakraberia Sarbojanin Puja, 2012

introduction the thickening layover and transition to Mamata Banerjee’s Bengal. As I fought my own feelings of ennui and alienation from the contemporary turn of the Pujas, and laboured to bring to an end a book that I had begun researching ten years ago, the different years of the festival and the varying intensities of the research appeared to me in frames of gentle nostalgia—a nostalgia about an unsullied excitement and enthusiasm that the Pujas had then incited, a nostalgia also about those subtle yet distinctive touches of taste, simplicity, elegance and artistry that the festival had fast forfeited. I had a strong sense (whether rightly or not) that the best of the period’s wave of ‘art’ and ‘theme’ Pujas was over. It was time to look back on the decade that was.

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0.30 Hoarding with the Chief Minister’s festival greetings for Durga Puja, Id, Deepavali and Chhat Puja, 2013

Notes 1 I introduce the categories of ‘art’ and ’artist’, ‘design’ and ‘designer’ within quotes at the beginning to underscore the contingencies of their projections within this field of production and reception. This is a point that will be elaborated through the course of the book. I will refrain, however, from continuously putting quotation marks around the terms, and think instead of the way these get naturalized and assimilated within this festival milieu. The notion of ‘dispensation’ is used to suggest both a set of special creative skills and proclivities, and a set of attitudes and identities that can be seen to belong to the vocation of artists and designers. 2 This study has grown out of a collective research project, begun with my sociologist colleague, Dr. Anjan Ghosh, and carried out with a changing team of student researchers at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, over several Puja seasons from 2002 to 2011–12. The research has varied in its reach and intensity over this period (its most concentrated stretch being from 2003 to 2010), during which we conducted interviews with Puja organizers, designers, craftsmen, idol and pandal makers, sponsors, civic authorities, advertising professionals and event managers, compiled an array of media reports, and undertook an extensive photographic documentation of images and pandal tableaux across different areas of the city. This book makes use of this large archive we have assembled on the contemporary Durga Pujas of the city. 3 The Bengali domestication of the image of Durga, from a warrior goddess into the familial figure of a mother and a daughter, through the blending of the Shakta cult with Vaishnava devotional affect, has been analysed by many writers. For succinct accounts intended for a

general readership, see Sukumari Bhattacharji, ‘Durga Chandika Kali’, ‘Sati Parvati Uma Gauri’, in Legends of Devi, Mumbai: Orient Longman, 1995, pp. 26-46; and T. Richard Blurton, ‘The Goddess Durga’ in Bengali Myths, London: The British Museum Press, 2006, pp. 23-41. For more academic accounts, see Jawhar Sircar, ‘Durga Pratima: Juktibadir Binirmaney’, Sahitya Parishat Patrika, Year 111, No. 1, Baishakh-Ashar, 1811(2004), where he analyses this transformation through the lens of an emergent Brahmanical orthodoxy and patriarchy in medieval Bengal; or Rachel Fell McDermott, Revelry, Rivalry and Longing for the Goddess: The Fortunes of Festivals, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011, Chapter 3, ‘Durga the Daughter: Folk and Familial Traditions’, pp. 76-102, where she studies this process through the devotional lyric traditions of eighteenth century Bengal, quoting the songs of the Kali devotee, Ramprasad Sen, and Agamani and Bijoya songs. 4 This legend of Akaal Bodhan or the ‘untimely awakening’ of goddess Durga during autumn by her invocation by Rama to seek her blessings before his final battle with Ravana is a part of the Bengali Ramayana of Krittivasa, but not the Sanskrit Ramayana of Valmiki—making it again a specific feature of the Bengali tradition of Durga worship. It came to create the specific rituals of Durga’s Bodhan or ‘awakening’ on Shashti, the sixth day of Debipaksha, to inaugurate the Pujas, and of the Sandhi Puja at the juncture of Ashtami and Nabami, when she is meant to have appeared before Rama, and is worshipped through a elaborate dedication of 108 lamps, 108 lotuses, fire and traditionally animal sacrifice (now replaced in many household and all community Pujas by the symbolic

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in the name of the goddess cutting of a gourd). Gautam Bhadra, ‘Kshamata ladai-er bhinna nam, Akaal Bodhan’, Desh, Sharadiya Sankhya, 19 September 1998. Ralph W. Nicholas, Night of the Gods: Durga Puja and the Legitimation of Rural Power in Bengal, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan and RCS, 2013, contrasts the autumn season as the ‘night of the gods’ when worship is ‘untimely’ with the spring season as the proper time for worship, and shows how the Hindu religious year in Bengal is poised like the needle of a compass pointing to the ‘night of the gods’ in autumn, centred around the Brahmanical Sanskritic Durga Puja, leaving ‘the daylight of spring’ as the time for the popular, non-Brahmanical village ceremonies of Gajan and Charak. On a completely different plane, Kumkum Chatterjee, in her article, ‘Goddess Encounters: Mughals, Monsters and the Goddess in Bengal’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 47, issue 05, September 2013, makes a strong case for looking at the rising tradition of goddess worship among Bengal’s Hindu landed magnates during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a powerful form of vernacular assimilation of Mughal rule, with the goddess emerging as prime symbol of the assertion of regional authority. For a recent overview of this history, see, Rachel Fell McDermott, Revelry, Rivalry and Longing for the Goddess, pp, 11-75. The fuller, unfolding implications of the terms, Barowari and Sarbojanin, as marking the public and communitarian identity of the Pujas are discussed in Chapter 2. We could begin here with one of the first English books on Durga Puja by a nineteenth century Bengali writer— Pratap Chandra Ghosha, Durga Puja with Notes and Illustrations, Calcutta: Hindoo Patriot Press, 1871, which approaches ‘this chief national festival of the Hindus of Bengal’ from the perspective of comparative religion and mythology, provides a detailed iconographic description of the making and consecration of the goddess and lays out the full rituals of the different days of the Puja. Among recent works detailing the liturgical and ritual aspects of the Durga Pujas are books like Haripada Acharya’s Mahalaya Thekey Bijoya, Kolkata: Ramakrishna Mission, Narendrapur, 1991 and religious studies monographs like Hilary Peter Rodrigues’ Ritual Worship of the Great Goddess: The Liturgy of Durga Puja with Interpretations, Albany: SUNY Press, 2003. On the mythology, iconography and artistic repertoire of goddess imagery from all over India, two splendidly illustrated anthologies of essays are: Vidya Dehejia ed., Devi, The Great Goddess: Female Divinity in South Asian Art, Washington DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 1999, and Pratapaditya Pal ed., Goddess Durga: The Power and the Glory, Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2009. Two books that exemplify such a structural anthropology of ritual and kinship systems of the Chicago school of the

1960s and 1970s are Akos Ostor, The Play of the Gods: Locality, Ideology, Structure and Time in the Festivals of a Bengali Town, first edition, University of Chicago Press, 1980; new edition, New Delhi: Chronicle Books, 2004, and Ralph Nicholas, Night of the Gods: Durga Puja and the Legitimation of Rural Power in Bengal. Ostor’s book is based on the field research he did in the town of Bishnupur between 1967-69 and 1971-73; Nicholas’ 2013 book too is based on his 1960s survey of the yearlong calendar of Puja rituals at Ghosh Bari in the village of Kelomal in the district of Medinipur. 9 Kumkum Chatterjee, ‘Goddess Encounters: Mughals, Monsters and the Goddess in Bengal’; Tithi Bhattacharya, ‘Tracking the Goddess: Religion, Community and Identity in the Durga Puja Ceremonies of NineteenthCentury Calcutta’, Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 66, no. 4, November 2007; Rachel Fell McDermott, Revelry, Rivalry and Longing for the Goddess: The Fortunes of Festivals; Ralph Nicholas, Night of the Gods: Durga Puja and the Legitimation of Rural Power in Bengal. Sudeshna Banerjee, Durga Puja: Celebrating the Goddess Then and Now, New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2006, provides a good popular overview and a handy reference volume on the festival. 10 Ramratna Pathak, Durgotsab, Kolkata: printed and published by Ram Nrisingha Bandyopadhyay, 1281/1874; Yogesh Chandra Ray Vidyanidhi, Puja Parbon, Kolkata: Vishvabharati Granthalay, 1358/1951, ‘Sharadotsab’, pp. 10-23, ‘Durga Puja Sharatkalin Yagna’, pp. 125-31 talks of the autumnal Durga Pujas of Bengal as essentially a ‘Sharadotsab’, where the worship of the goddess was transposed on to a prior harvest festival celebrating the end of the rains and the autumn crops. 11 As will be discussed in Chapter 1, the term and the practice of ‘pandal-hopping’ (indicating crowds of spectators moving with determination and direction from one Puja pandal to the next) is quintessentially local and specific to the city’s Durga Pujas. ‘Where pandal-hopping is way of life for five days every year’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 28 September 2009. 12 It fits very well into the framework of movement, mobility, change and transculturality with which scholars have studied the performative spaces of present-day South Asian festivals, in Ute Husken and Axel Michaels, ed., South Asian Festivals on the Move, Weisbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2013. The essays in this volume provide a critical comparative framework of different kinds of public festival settings—ranging from temple rituals, pilgrimage processions, the Kumbha Mela to a contemporary art festival in New Delhi—for my study. 13 Giorgio Agamben’s, ‘In Praise of Profanations’, in Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort, New York: Zone Books, 2007, pp. 73-8. Agamben takes his position among those theorists of religion and secularism who have called into

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question Emile Durkheim’s classic formulation of the institution of religion in terms of the strict separation of the sphere of the ‘sacred’ from that of the ‘profane’, and interrogated the extent to which the practices of ‘religion’ can be easily set apart from the newly secularized practices of art, culture, education, or politics in modernity. Ibid., p.77 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam, London and Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993, Introduction, pp.12, ‘The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category’, p.54. Asad also offers an important gloss and elaboration on Agamben’s notions of the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’ in his essay, ‘What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like?’ in Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam and Modernity, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003, pp. 30-7. This is extensively shown, for instance, in Sukumar Sen, Kabikankan Mukunda-birachita Chandi-Mangala, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1975. This scenario is still enacted in several villages during the spring Gajan ceremony, when in Sawng performances, the hard-working village Chandi is annually dramatized, trailing behind Shiva as he goes begging from house to house. Described in Ralph Nicholas, Rites of Spring: Gajan in Village Bengal, New Delhi: Chronicle Books, 2008, pp.115-16. Chirosree Majumdar, ‘Pujo Promo’, Ananda Bazaar Patrika, henceforth, ABP, in the Notes, Rabibasariya, 22 September 2013. She writes, ‘One can tell all the best brands now that there is no need for film-stars, players or models. All their ads can be done by none other than goddess Durga herself ’ (my translation). Airtel used other Puja metaphors too for its World Cup campaign of 2010. One of its hoardings showed a family glued to all-night watching of the games on television, with the caption, Sara raat thakur dekha, with its association with night-long Puja touring. Thakur dekha was also the caption given to this final tableau, the term thakur easily spilling from the gods to the football stars. As an advertising gimmick, however, the tableau set up at a central location under the Gariahat fly-over fell flat because none of the ‘deified’ players made it to the World Cup Finals, and it carried none of the affective resonance of a goddess group within a Puja pandal. One of the most shameful consequences of this politics was seen in the unabated campaign of the Hindu rightwing against the paintings of nude goddesses by India’s veteran national artist, Maqbool Fida Husain, forcing him from 2006 into a life of exile in Dubai and London. Among the many writings deliberating on this infamous ‘Husain affair’, see, Salil Tripathi, Offence: The Hindu Case, London, New York, Calcutta; Seagull Books,

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2009, and the essays in Sumathi Ramaswamy ed., Barefoot Across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India, London: Routledge, 2011. The specific question of iconographies in tradition and history and contemporary rights and licenses over these is discussed in a symposium volume, Iconography Now: Rewriting Art History? New Delhi: Sahmat, 2006. 21 I touch on this theme in an essay where I contrast the erosion of the artistic prestige and immunity of Husain’s goddesses with the new-found artistic identity of Kolkata’s Durga Puja icons— ‘The blurring of distinctions: The artwork and the religious icon in contemporary India’, in Elleke Boehmer and Rosinka Chaudhuri ed., The Indian Postcolonial: A Critical Reader, London and New York: Routledge, 2011. 22 The final production took shape under only Pankaj Mallick’s music direction and involved over the years several different singers, until it took on the form of a set pre-recorded programme to be played without any changes year after year. Indira Biswas, ‘Jantrik Thekey Ajantrik: Kolkata Betar Kendrer Prabhati Anushthan, “Mahishasuramardini’”, Ekaler Raktakarabi, Sharadiya Sanhkhya, 1417/2010; ‘Mahishasurmardini: The Making of a Legend’, The Bengal Post, Kolkata, 7 October 2012. 23 Birendra Krishna Bhadra, ‘Purono sei diner katha’, ABP, 26 August 1977. Even after his live performance ended in 1968, Birendra Krishna Bhadra continued to spend the eve of Mahalaya at the Calcutta Radio Station because he could not bear to stay at home when his recording would be played. His colleagues at the radio station and his daughter interestingly talk of him as ‘an essentially non-religious’ person who donned his religious garb and persona only on this occasion, when in the intensity of his Chandi-path narration he claimed he would see Ma Durga before him. Priyasha Banerjee, ‘The Voice of Mahalaya’, Hindusthan Times, Metro, Kolkata, 4 October 2013. 24 My colleague, Anjan Ghosh, was particularly interested in studying the changing sociology of neighbourhoods and the public spheres of the Pujas. Some of his ideas on this theme are presented in two essays—‘Spaces of Recognition: Puja and power in contemporary Calcutta’, in Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 26, no. 2, 2000, pp. 289-99; ‘Contested Spaces: Puja and its Publics in Calcutta’, in Anjan Ghosh, Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Janaki Nair, ed., Theorising the Present: Essays for Partha Chatterjee, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011. 25 Two documentary film projects have been particularly important for my work: (i) art historian Sunanda Sanyal’s A Homecoming Spectacle (Kolkata, 2008, 58 minutes), which traces the works of a select few ‘theme’ artists across different parts of the city during the Pujas of 2007

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in the name of the goddess through a full month of their construction; (ii) freelance film-maker Nilanjan Bhattacharya’s Ninety Degrees (Kolkata, 2013, 38 minutes), which centres on a muchpublicized ‘collaborative’ production by the German installation artist Gregor Schneider, with conventional pandal-makers at the Ekdalia Evergreen Puja site during the season of 2011. Apart from newspaper and journal articles, the following are the main Bengali books I have closely worked with— of an older genre of writing, Bimal Chandra Datta, Durga Puja, Sekal Thekey Ekal, Kolkata: Ramakrishna Vivekananda Institute of Research and Culture, 1986, which serves as a standard reference on the subject; of a newer body of writing, Anita Agnihotri, Kolkatar Pratimashilpira, Kolkata: Ananda Publishers, 2001, Anjan Mitra, Kolkata o Durga Pujo (Kolkata: Ananda Publishers, 2003), and Sandip Bandyopadhyay, Durga Pujo: Borobari Thekey Barowari, Kolkata: El Alma Publications, 2011. As I was finishing my book, what also came to my aid is a slim anthology, Durga Pujor Note Book, edited by the journalist Samrat Chattopadhyay, Kolkata: Deep Prakashan, 2013, a useful compendium on the city’s ‘theme’ Puja phenomenon, containing a detailed directory on the city’s Banedi Pujas, Kumartuli image-makers, Puja awards and their year-by-year winners, and most important of all, the bio-profiles and contacts of today’s main Puja designers. Defining the new field of visual studies, the landmark works on this theme of popular print iconographies are Christopher Pinney, Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004; Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007; Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation; Mapping Mother India, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010. Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, Jonathan Van Antwerpen, Rethinking Secularism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, p.77.(Emphases added) ‘So far’ is the cautious qualifier I introduced after the election results of May 2014, which brought a BJP government and Narendra Modi to power in New Delhi with a sweeping mandate, and saw for the first time a huge rise in the BJP’s share of votes and political presence in West Bengal.

30 ‘Didi’ (meaning elder sister) has been the popular appellation for Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. 31 In a city where all official and public structures are being painted blue and white as the colours of the new government, there was even a Puja dedicated to Mamata Banerjee in 2012 (the 75 Pally Puja in her neighbourhood and assembly constituency, patronized by senior party members) where the pandal, idol and lights brandished the same colours. Between 2011 and 2013, the Chief Minister’s passion for inaugurating Pujas crossed all limits of time and numbers. In 2013, she is reported to have received 273 invitations for pandal inaugurations from Puja clubs across the state, and, in her haste to please as many Puja clubs as she could, she was ignoring police stipulations about inauguration time-lines by opening Pujas from Mahalaya onwards, and jumping protocols by opening Pujas that the Governor M.K. Narayanan was meant to be inaugurating two days later. ‘Idol worship starts, Didi gets 273 invites’, Hindustan Times, Metro, Kolkata, 7 October 2013. 32 At the end of Chapters 1 and 3, I touch upon Mamata Banerjee’s foray into Puja designing and her placing of her art work on the covers of the Police Puja road maps and public hoardings. In 2013, the name of her transport Minister, Madan Mitra, was also being publicized as providing the concept of the Bhowanipur Swadhin Sangha Puja, where the full work was actually conceived and executed by the designer Gouranga Kuinla (whose work is discussed in Chapter 6) without any public acknowledgements. 33 ‘CM plays Santa for Puja’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 28 September, 2013. ‘Civic body set to lose crores on Puja ad tax’, Hindustan Times, Kolkata, 7 October, 2013. 34 For instance, the endless proliferation of Puja awards provide the template for thinking about the growing culture of competitions, prizes and award ceremonies that have today swamped all aspects of contemporary cultural life in Bengal, spilling outwards from neighbourhood contests to a spate of corporate house, media and state awards. The rising graph of Puja awards find their match in the much-publicized and televised Ananda Bazar Patrika Sera Bangali award ceremony, or in the present government’s offer of the Banga Bhushan and Vibhushan awards to cultural personalities to match the national Padma Bhusan and Padma Vibushan counterparts.

ONE

The City of the Festival expansions in time and scale The Puja season was barely over in 2007. The Durga Puja hoardings from the past month were still lingering on street corners, as were remnants of architectural structures from Puja tableaux in many of the grounds owned by the organizing clubs. To quote a newspaper report, ‘even as the dhak of Puja 2007 rings in our ears’, one of the community Puja organizers of north Kolkata launched the novel initiative of flagging off a formal launch of the festival for the following year. On a Saturday evening in late November, the Hatibagan Sarbojanin Durgotsav Committee brought together five prominent Puja ‘theme-makers’ at a neighbourhood function, to unveil a logo and flag off a fundraising campaign for the following year’s Durga Puja. At a time of intense competition and rival bids for publicity, the aim of the organizers was to gain an edge in this teeming field, attract corporate sponsors and, most importantly, convey the sense (to both local volunteers and outside funding agencies) of the Pujas as a round-the-year enterprise.1 This small event aptly epitomizes the growing corporate ambitions and self-projections of this local city festival. It also encapsulates some of the main themes pertaining to the Durga Pujas in contemporary Kolkata that I will profile in this book. We are introduced to a small para club from a rundown residential locality in the traditional northern

quarters of the city as an archetypal key player in this festival phenomenon. Hatibagan as a Puja site, along with several other similar neighbourhoods and city alleys across the length and breadth of Kolkata, will come up often in this account. (See 1.1) We also come to know of the all-important role of a group of artists and designers, who are given the curious label of ‘theme-makers’ in local parlance, in keeping with the new genre of ‘theme’ Pujas that they came to specialize in. We encounter, in parallel, the predominant concerns with fundraising, advertisements, sponsorship and award contests that are integral to the economics of the current event. That the launch ceremony at Hatibagan featured a performance on the Durga legend by the masked Chhau dancers of Purulia (see 1.2) also points to the proliferating taste for the ‘folk’, for the many dying rural and tribal art forms from different parts of the country, in the new designer aesthetics of the urban Puja. We will return to many of these themes over the course of the book. For the moment, let me turn to the central trend that is presaged by the Hatibagan committee’s launch of the Pujas of 2008: the year-long stretching out of the calendar of this five-day autumn festival. As it sets out to paint in broad strokes the image of the festive city, this chapter tracks the shifting temporal and spatial registers of the annual event within the template of urban life and activity. It marks the different points of beginnings of the

30

in the name of the goddess all the community and apartment Pujas in the main metropolitan Hzone (at that time, dissected into 15 boroughs and 141 wards) tallied to around 3,400. This comprehensive list was made available by the Calcutta Electric Supply Corporation (CESC), whose territorial jurisdiction almost exactly matches that of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC).4 If we were to add to this the extra few hundreds of Pujas that have risen to increasing prominence in the satellite township of Salt Lake (officially called Bidhannagar),5 and other new residential extensions into the north, east and south of the metropolis, we are probably looking at a total tabulation of around 4,000 clubs and production units.6

1.1 Hatibagan Sarbojanin Puja site with the pavilion and image designed by Parimal Pal, 2006

festival in an indulgently stretched-out timeline of its conception and preparation, from the long months of its gestation to the weeks of its frenetic build-up and the crowning week of its full-blown glory. And it shows how the festival turns the entire metropolis into a vast venue of local tourism and mass spectatorship. The city’s media and its many circles of Puja enthusiasts, organizers and sponsors never fail to tell us that this favourite festival of Bengalis has today taken on the dimension of one of the world’s grandest urban celebrations.2 What was always big in the city seems to be taking on new dimensions every passing year. We find, however, that the measure of scale does not lie in any significant escalation in the number of community or household Pujas that are held in the immediate and greater municipality area. In the early 1980s, the rough count of the total number of Durga Pujas in the urban metropolitan area was said to be over 3,000; the count included all three categories of the Sarbojanin Pujas, the traditional Banedi Bari Pujas and the upcoming cluster of housing block Pujas. From 1982 to 1985, the number of Sarbojanin Pujas in the city, in fact, dropped from 1,075 to 1,029, with the closing down of some and a merger of a few others.3 In 2006–2007, an exhaustive list of

Yet numbers, difficult as they are to fully track, constitute only a small part of the story of the expanding dimensions of Durga Puja in the city. The transforming scale of the contemporary festival is best studied through a graph of rising budgets, new forms of sponsorships and promotional strategies, and a thickening cluster of ‘theme’ Pujas. As new orders of art and craft productions proliferate in this festival field, there is a greater density of the event to be experienced in pandals that crop up in every second alley, every other park or empty plot, and every few yards of a neighbourhood. (See 1.3) There is also greater and greater publicity for each Puja—especially those of the ‘theme’ variety—that

1.2 Hatibagan Puja launch, Chhau dance performance, November 2007. Courtesy: Joydeep Kundu

the city of the festival

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1.3 Tribal village complex designed by Prashanta Pal, Khidirpur 25 Pally Puja, 2010

floods the city space for weeks before and after the event. Sections of pandal structures often linger on in neighbourhood grounds and parks that do not need to be immediately vacated, to be slightly trussed up and put to fresh use eighteen days later for the Kali Pujas being organized in the same sites. Then, long after the pandals disappear and city spaces return to their earlier, everyday uses, Puja hoardings, prize announcements and Bijoya greeting banners continue to remind us of the festival that has gone by. In parts of the city, bamboo poles from dismantled pandals often remain stacked in the corners of open grounds through the year, waiting to be reused for the scaffoldings of the next season’s festivities. The resonance of the Pujas wraps the city thickly, and then slowly wears thin, but never seems to entirely leave it. This sense of visual permeation of the city by the festival belies the

statistics of relatively stagnant numbers and the fact that the city’s municipal corporation, fire and police services, overstretched as their resources are during this season, have not easily granted permission for new community Pujas within their territorial jurisdiction for several years now. The nature of the urban spectacle, as I will show in the next chapters, underwent a sea-change during the 2000s, with the priorities shifting from magnitude and opulence to an alternative streamlined aesthetics of art, craftsmanship and design. (See 1.4, 1.5) Yet smallness in scale went hand in hand with a heightened visibility of these new-look Pujas—a visibility that manifests itself in a spate of promotional posters, advertisements, newspaper and television reports that take us from their conception to the grand finale of judgments and awards.

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in the name of the goddess

1.4 An older-style opulent architectural structure made by traditional pandal-makers of Shantipur, Nadia, College Square Puja, 2007

1.5 A newer genre of a bamboo and jute pandal made by a local designer, Tapas Kharati. at the Puja of Beltala Vidyasagar colony, Bagha Jatin, 2007

The growing scale of the contemporary festival finds, of course, its most important index in the spending powers and escalating budgets of Puja committees, different proportions of which are invested in designer fees, costs of images and pandals, publicity and promotional campaigns, and also increasingly in website management and nominations for multiple awards.7 Reports in the Jugantar and Ananda Bazaar Patrika provide a rough estimate of the spiraling graph of expenditure of Sarbojanin Pujas from the 1950s. In 1957, with each community Puja spending on an average of Rs. 8,000 to 12,000, the collective expenditure was around Rs. 25 lakhs;8 in 1984 that total had risen to an approximate 2 crores, which was considered a phenomenal sum by the measures of the time.9 In 1987, the biggest community Pujas were said to have budgets ranging from 1.5 to 4 lakhs;10 twenty years later, our interviews with Puja organizers revealed that those figures had moved anywhere between 20 to 25 lakhs, with even the smallest varieties of ‘theme’ Pujas requiring a minimum of 7–8 lakhs at their disposal. A huge upward swing in Puja expenditure had already set in by the 1980s, as can be gauged from cases like the Babubagan Club Puja of Dhakuria, which began in 1961 with a collection of Rs.700, and had moved by 1987 to a budget of 2.5

lakhs, which would then double and treble, as the Puja rode the ‘theme’ wave of the 2000s.11 As my study ended, a Times of India report of 2012 highlighted a new peak in that season’s Puja spending—a total of 123.05 crores for a broad count of 3,577 Pujas—providing a statistical break-up of the city’s Pujas under the many heads of ‘small budget’, ‘medium budget’, ‘semi-big budget’, ‘big budget’, ‘semi-mega’ and ‘mega-budget’ Pujas.12 Significant to note in this rough tabulation is the vast range that continues to persist in the styles and spending powers of Pujas—which supports the case that I make in this book that the new waves, whether in Puja budgets or in their corporate and artistic profiles, never erase the older trends but keep forming thicker layers and folds over these. So, in this newspaper graph, while only 4 Pujas in the city had climbed up to the ‘megabudget’ range of 70 lakhs, and around 30 Pujas were placed in the ‘semi-mega’ and ‘big budget’ category of spending 30–40 lakhs, the numerical majority of community Pujas and home and housing block Pujas still fell in the medium and small budget range, moving downwards from 7 to 1.5 lakhs. The same year, a newspaper guide to all the residential block Pujas in the Salt Lake area similarly placed the broad

the city of the festival average spending of a block Puja between 8 and 10 lakhs, with around 5 Pujas shown to be spending between 12 to 15 lakhs (see 1.6), with only a single Puja in FD Block going overboard with its publicity and corporate sponsorship to announce an inflated budget of 50 lakhs.13 The bid for sponsors and media attention is, of course, at the crux of all these up-scaled, projected budgets. Dominating the post-liberalization festival economy is the mounting presence of corporate funds that now go into various levels of pre-Puja publicity, sponsorship of productions, awards, and ‘eventmanagement’ of shows and functions. This pushes Pujas in various small, non-elite neighbourhoods from ‘middle’ to ‘big’ budget categories, each leap in budget registering a greater pitch for advertisements and awards.14 The craze for awards takes on absurd intensities of local endeavour. In 2007, one of the bigger south Kolkata Pujas was said to have formed a twenty-member committee on briefing sponsors

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and judges on its ‘theme’, with the team divided into different time shifts, and members trained to talk differently to the television media or to various categories of judges, depending on whether they were artists, writers, actors or corporate sponsors.15 Speaking to the media had become by then a prime activity of Puja committee members. (See 1.7) By this time, the city’s Durga Puja had ‘gone corporate’ at multiple levels, ranging from the handing over of the organizational work of entire Pujas to event management firms, who also handled the award campaigns, contests and ceremonies—to several Pujas now being funded and publicized by single sponsors, by newspaper groups such as Ananda Bazaar Patrika or the Times of India, and Bengali TV channels like Star Ananda, Kolkata TV or Zee Bangla. (See 1.8) A member of the Jodhpur Park Puja committee spoke in 2007 of the different emerging patterns of sponsorship of these newspaper and television groups. In 2004, for example, Ananda Bazaar Patrika

1.6 A Salt Lake ‘theme’ Puja in the 12–15 lakhs budget range, BE Block (East) Puja, Salt Lake, 2012

1.7 Puja committee member being interviewed for a Bengali TV channel, FD Block Puja, Salt Lake, 2009.

1.8 Times of India sponsored Pujas of Ballygunge Cultural Association and Samaj Sebi Sangha on Lake View Road, 2011

the city of the festival ‘bought the rights’ only over a big gateway to the pandal and had some surrounding stalls carrying their publicities. During the next two years, the Puja organizers found it more lucrative to go in for a single sponsor, tying up in 2005 with Zee TV and in 2006 with Kolkata TV, whereby each of them paid the Puja committee a lump sum, bought rights for advertising over the entire site of the Puja, and sponsored in addition several ‘live events’ like cooking contests, chat shows and beauty contests among the women of the neighbourhood on the festival days, which were continuously aired on their channels.16 There are also instances of a New York-based advertising firm run by a Bengali buying the full rights to the hosting of the Badamtala Ashar Sangha Puja of Kalighat in 2008, channeling funds through its Mumbaibased Indian subsidiary firm and using the film star, Mithun Chakrabarty, as its brand ambassador. (See 1.9) Riding the environmental bandwagon, the Puja committee here also collaborated with an NGO, Indian Foundation for Sustainable Development (IFSD), which was involved in a large Kalighat cleanup and development project. In 2010, Badamtala’s was one of the 20 ‘art’ Pujas in the city that were being specially marketed by IFSD in association with Ananda Bazaar Patrika, the city’s biggest media house and cultural patron, in a new Ananda Angan programme where each of the Puja sites would host their publicities and sponsored events. The example shows how local kinship and club patronage networks are mobilized to bring corporate funds and the glamour of an ‘art’ Puja to an old, decaying neighbourhood like Badamtala near the Kalighat temple, with the sponsors using the language of branding and up-scaling the image of the parar Puja.17 (See 1.10) In 2006, a city advertising agency, Mudra Communications, and an event-management firm, Offbeat, worked with big corporate houses that were ready to invest one crore on different aspects of their Puja advertisements and award campaigns in a single season (a figure that increased three times over the next two years).18 The same year, newspapers were also reporting on the emergence of dozens of website and web portals on Puja productions, with several Puja committees (spanning across elite neighbourhoods like Bhowanipur, Lake Temple Road or Jodhpur

35

1.9 Sponsorship banner featuring actor Mithun Chakrabarty of the Badamtala Ashar Sangha Puja, Kalighat, 2008, with an invitation to guess the ‘theme’ of that year’s Puja from given options.

Park and the far less affluent areas of Putiary and Haridebpur) deploying the new technology to create a pre-Puja ‘e-presence’ for sponsors.19 Newness of scale, then, can be best gauged in the extent of corporate funding, the variety of promotional and marketing strategies and the intensity of attention that the local print and electronic media (both English and vernacular) has lavished on this single festival. How fully, it may be asked, do these trends of corporatization of this local festival feed into the larger scenario of capital flows and the growing post-liberalization consumer economy of the city? Despite the entry of corporate funds and a host of promotional endeavours, there is much about the Durga Pujas (like so many other aspects of life in Kolkata) which remains stubbornly inassimilable to the rationale of big capital, and still revolves around a largely unreconstructed economy of labour and artisanal endeavour. The modes of organization of the Pujas continue to hinge around the central agency of the para club and its social networks, just as its forms of production of images and tableaux continue to involve various groups of artisanal labourers and rural craftspeople who are brought into the city for this seasonal work. It is also worth noting that, notwithstanding their growing corporate self-image,

36

in the name of the goddess it clearly marks out its changing contemporary face, takes on different proportional implications when positioned within a broader context, both of Kolkata’s new economies of consumption and entertainment and of comparative festival budgets and spending in other metropolises.

1.10 Old house at Badamtala, Kalighat, with Puja sponsorship banner of IFSD of the Badamtala Ashar Sangha Puja, 2007

the Durga Pujas of the city remain thickly embedded in the dense overgrowth of a series of non-affluent neighbourhoods and the nondescript parks and alleys of Kolkata. The face of the city that the festival connotes and represents is distinctly not that of the plush high-rises, multiplexes and malls that have come up in newer parts of the metropolis. Rather, it is that familiar and decrepit face of Kolkata’s older middle and lower middle-class localities, where new forms of shopping marts and apartments are rapidly transforming neighbourhoods, but which nonetheless retain their marked separateness from the upscale commercial and office areas in the heart of the colonial city,20 or townships like Salt Lake or New Town Rajarhat. And, what is being projected as the extravagance of Kolkata’s current Puja budgets and corporate investments in the event appears relatively small when positioned against the scale of funds that go into the Ganesh Chaturthi festivities in a city like Mumbai, or into the Bengali Durga Pujas of Mumbai and New Delhi.21 The presence and power of corporate capital in this city festival, while

Tracking such comparative consumer and festival economies remains outside the scope of this study. My main concern in this chapter is to see how these altered economic profiles and escalating budgets of Kolkata’s Durga Puja make for a changing calendar and cityscape of the festival. Depending on the levels of production and organization, the timeline of preparations, orders and commissions has, for long now, stretched back to different points of time in the year. Ritually, the Rathajatra festival at the beginning of the monsoon season (usually celebrated sometime in the month of Ashar, between mid-June and mid-July) is meant to inaugurate the process of the making of the goddess—first by the symbolic consecration of a piece of cleaned and smoothened slit bamboo, and then with the building and worship of the wooden frame (kathamo puja) on which the straw-stuffed clay idols will be mounted.22 In the thicket of idol-making workshops at Kumartuli in the north or Patuapara at Kalighat in the south, the work of gathering, mixing and processing varieties of alluvial clay, of blending clay with straw chips, or of securing their annual trade licenses to avail of loans from banks and procure a basic working capital, must begin several months earlier, normally by the months of Chaitra–Baishakh (March–April). This was also the time by which the workshops of most of the renowned idol-makers (prime among them being the trio of the elderly Mohanbanshi Rudra Pal and his sons, Sanatan and Pradip Rudra Pal) would finalize and close the orders for Durga images they would supply for that autumn. In 2003– 04, Sanatan Rudra Pal’s workshop was taking up to 60 orders for Durga images per season, closing orders by April and having to forego many orders for lack of space and work hands, with the ‘master’ providing the designs and supervision for all the images and personally modeling and completing the face-casts of each of his goddesses.23 (See 1.11) A visit to the workshops in Kumartuli or Patuapara even during

the city of the festival the lean season that follows the conclusion of Saraswati Puja in late January/early February shows round-the-year activity, either on small painted clay deities that are on regular sale in all fairs and roadside stalls, or on smaller deities like Annapurna, Manasa or Shitala that are worshipped during the months of Chaitra–Baishakh, or on goddesses like Lakshmi or Kali, whose Pujas come after the Durga Puja, but whose images often need completing before the full rush of work begins on the Durga images, which are for most idol-makers the mainstay of their trade.24 The calendar of orders and preparation significantly varies with the new group of Durga Puja artists and designers. In the first wave of the ‘theme’ Pujas, these designers, like their idol-maker counterparts, seemed to work with a head-time of roughly six months, sealing contracts and planning themes by the Bengali New Year in mid-April. In current times, neighbourhood clubs rush to book the most soughtafter designers (the ones with the highest ratings on

1.11 Sanatan Rudra Pal working on the clay mould of the goddess’ face at his workshop at Telengabagan, Ultadanga, 2004

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the awards scenario) for the next year’s Puja within days of the ending of that year’s festival.25 Many of these designers also talked of being booked by certain Puja organizers (ones for which their work has been regularly drawing awards) for the forthcoming two years, which is why many newer clubs entering the ‘art’ Puja circuit often have to wait for two years and more before being able to draw a ‘star’ designer. By November–December, depending on the flush of prizes and media publicity, or on their relative stature or newness in the field, artists find themselves picking and choosing the two or three Pujas they will design from the many clubs that approach them, while newer entrants and aspirants, frequently with art college backgrounds, woo Puja clubs with portfolios of pavilion designs and themes.26 For decorator firms, handling orders for old and new style constructions, there is typically a far shorter time schedule (of usually no more than two months) for shifting their focus of work from wedding or fair pavilions to Durga Puja pandals, to give form either to their own stock of architectural models and replicas, or to implement the conceptions of the upcoming creed of ‘theme’ designers.27 Likewise, advertising units and corporate sponsors have their own competitive work calendars for conceptualizing and launching their Puja advertising campaigns or their Puja award contests. In a firm like Bates, which in 2011 had the Ananda Bazaar Patrika as its largest corporate client in the city and ran the advertising for several of the Bengali print and television productions of this media house, the planning for the Puja season to come began as early as January. This is when preparations started on the advertisements it conceived for all the different Puja annuals of this media group, with an intense spurt of activity in July, by which time it had to put out its advertisements for the lavishly-produced annual Puja issues of Desh, Ananda Bazaar Patrika, Anandalok, Sananda, Anandamela, and Unish-Kuri.28 (See 1.12, 1.13) These print and hoarding advertisements introduce the season’s first visual feel of the festival alongside the thick Puja annuals that newspaper vendors nowadays begin to take orders for in July, and start delivering by early or mid August. Thereafter, the fuller burst of the Puja sponsorship campaigns take up the major share of design activity and client

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in the name of the goddess

1.12 Ananda Bazaar Patrika, Sharadiya 1415/2008, advertisement designed by Bates, Kolkata

1.13 Desh Sharadiya 1418/2011, advertisement designed by Bates, Kolkata

time in such advertising firms in the month and the fortnight, leading to the Pujas, with the burden of work passing from the internal creative team to the departments and agencies in charge of outdoor promotions and publicities.

funds and organizing of Pujas can loosely stretch out over the year, be systematically plotted on a March to October schedule, or be compressed into a frenetic span of two months. The bigger the branding and publicity of the Pujas, the greater the hurry to clinch corporate tie-ups and begin the promotional launch.

The calendar of preparations in the organizing Puja committees also vary across bigger and smaller units in different neighbourhoods. The most intense pooling of time and activity usually marks out small non-elite para clubs—the ones with the largest reserve of unemployed or self-employed young and middle-aged persons who take on Puja planning with passion, and who have the biggest competitive stake in a high-publicity, award-winning Puja production.29 Depending on the age, social and professional backgrounds of the neighbourhood men and women who constitute these clubs, the time invested by Puja committees in the raising of

The organizing team of the Badamtala Ashar Sangha Puja signed their deal with Manhattan Communications by March 2008. Arup Biswas, an influential Trinamool Congress politician (now MLA and Minister in the state cabinet) and organizer of the big-budget, highly publicized Suruchi Sangha Puja at New Alipore (known for its theme parks on different Indian states every year), says the planning for their Puja begins each year on Basanta Panchami or Saraswati Puja at the end of January. Then, two months before the start of the festival, he coordinates

the city of the festival the work of multiple small committees, each delegated different responsibilities, from overseeing the Puja ‘theme’ production and liaising with award-givers and judges to handling announcements and tours at the Puja site and taking charge of the religious rituals and distribution of prasad (a task that has remained the special responsibility of a lady of the locality).30 The Suruchi Sangha Puja has also gone to the extent of having specially-designed uniform saris to dress up their reception team of women who handle publicity and receive VIP guests on the opening days of the Pujas (see 1.14), and introducing promotional ‘theme videos’ around its productions. In one of the newest publicity stunts, a Puja committee in the interiors of Selimpur Naskarpara used an advertising professional to launch its festival profile on Facebook at the stroke of the new year of 2011. It used the rapidly changing political climate of that election year to coin the slogan that it was taking neither the

39

‘left’ nor the ‘right’ paths, but keeping itself busy 12 months of the year with only its Durga Puja.31 The idea of a year-long calendar of preparations turns out, in most cases, to be more notional then real. But there is little that stands in the way of its affective authenticity in presenting a neighbourhood and its organizing community’s unalloyed engagement with the hosting of this key cultural event, and in making it the centre-point of all its activities.32 At which points of time do the planning and preparatory activities spill over from inside para club rooms, artists’ workshops, corporate offices, design studios and printing presses, and now Facebook sites,33 to the streets and skyline of Kolkata? What kinds of imprint of the festival do these leave on the crowded face of the city? With what momentum does a new cityscape emerge for this biggest cultural and commercial festival? For Bengalis, there are a host of

1.14 Women in specially-designed Puja saris, waiting to receive the judges at the Karnataka theme complex, Suruchi Sangha Puja, New Alipore, 2010

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in the name of the goddess gets thickly wrapped with the mounting excitement of the consumer spectacle.35 It is fully in keeping with the commercialized profile of the festival that it marks its first presence on the urban landscape as a marketing and advertising event, adding a new series to the city’s topography of product-promotional billboards. (See 1.16)

transfigurations of space

1.15 Typical autumn sky and pandal under construction, Baghbazar Sarbojanin Puja site, 2008

traditional associations with the sharat season which signal the time of the Pujas—the appearance of white kash reeds in open fields, a sudden crispness in the air, and a sparkling blue sky at the end of the monsoon. (see 1.15) The emotional resonance of the festival remains inextricably linked to such picturesque invocations of this sharat season. The city, however, produces its altogether different visual and sensorial ambience of the oncoming festival. Even if kash flowers or the autumnal sky fleetingly catch one’s attention in this congested metropolis, their poetic effects are speedily dispelled by the prosaic clutter of Puja publicities. It is instructive to look back on the way even nineteenth century accounts of the festival in Bengal rapidly move from descriptions of the onset of autumn into the cycle of festival consumption and frenzies of household preparations and buying in market places.34 We see how that longer social history of Puja commerce, family spending and feasting has given way today to a new festival topography of the city, where the physical feel of the autumn season

By July, with two months or more to go for the Pujas, when the monsoon is in full swing and hopes are still dim of the rains receding in time for the city to dress up for its grandest festival, announcement banners for various Pujas begin to crop up in different areas. Such banners—advertising themes and designers, coining titles and rhymes to match, and sporting a crowded mix of logos of sponsors—became a constitutive feature of the new genre of ‘theme’ Pujas, necessitated by their competitive bid for viewers, advertisers and media coverage. (See 1.17) In the first years of our survey, these had begun to make their appearances at the specific locations and main-road entrances of the city’s then select crop of new-wave Pujas. Soon, these began to defy all sense of locality and spilled across to distant, often distinctly non-Puja areas of the city. In 2007, we found announcements for the Pujas of Khidirpur and Santoshpur appearing in the office complex of BBD Bagh, that has never,

1.16 Puja banners among other advertisements at the Hiland Park crossing on the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass, 2007

the city of the festival

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to date, hosted any Pujas, and a poster for a small Salt Lake Puja coming up in a spot far south on the city’s Eastern Metropolitan Bypass—where the Puja committee publicized its awards and the past year’s prize-winning Durga image, to invite advertisers to set up stalls and hoardings in its precincts. Some of these new Pujas of Salt Lake began to invest as much as 15 per cent of their 10–12 lakh budgets on such banners and other forms of publicity across Kolkata.36 There is now a peculiar spatial integration of far-flung parts of the festival city through the commercial logic of such posters, enticing advertisers and potential viewers from all over the city into the promised spaces of these Puja productions. The financial and political clout of a Puja committee has come to rest increasingly on the scale and spread of its publicities across town.37 Promotional banners form, of course, only one segment in this information flow. Newspaper articles and television programmes that avidly plunge into Puja reporting weeks ahead of the festival provide an even thicker index of the media takeover of the event and its competitive publicities. Over the past decade, newspaper reporting has had to compete with a formidable flow of television features on the Pujas. The coming of cable television and proliferation of Bengali TV channels actively served to transform the Durga Puja of the city and the districts into a televisual event. During 2006–07, the most steady outpouring of information and visual feelers on the coming festival came from two daily evening programmes that were launched a full month before the Pujas by two prime Bengali television channels— Kolkata TV and Star Ananda. Each programme jostled with the other to provide a preview of a choice of Pujas in the city (and in the district towns), taking us from the first stages of the construction of pandals, through the week by week phases of their completion, closing in on a small line-up of the final contestants for the awards they offered. For both the Kolkata TV ‘Mahapujo’ and the Star Ananda ‘Superstar vs. Megastar’ contest, the intention was both to open up a wide coverage of the festival in time and space (beginning with as large a geographical spread and as early a time frame as possible), to seek out lesser-known eye-catching Pujas, and to capitalize on the endless potential for competitions

1.17 Puja banner with a rhyming title, advertising a production by Nirmal Malik, AE Block Puja, Salt Lake, 2011

and prizes.38 Honing in primarily on the ‘theme’ Puja category, the Kolkata TV programme made its initial selection of 300 Pujas out of the several thousands that applied for enlistment in its programme from not just Kolkata but all of West Bengal. The idea, as the producer explained, was to democratically reach out to as large a selection of Pujas as possible in the first rounds of coverage, before narrowing in on 100 as the productions neared completion, and finally announcing the 13 award winners from this pool on the first day of the Pujas.39 It thus presaged and played out over a month the kind of Pujo Parikrama (tour of Pujas) that had, over the past few years, become the staple of all Bengali television channels through the Puja week. Each year, as we have seen, there is an increasing investment of Puja committees, sponsors and the print and television media in building up the atmosphere of a countdown to the Pujas. The Pujas have always been about this sense of eager anticipation and waiting. The actual five days of the event come and go in a whirl. The month before is when a thickening feel of the festivities begins to spread both across the media and the physical spaces of the city, with clusters of bamboo poles and scaffolding of architectural structures appearing in the city’s parks, empty plots, streets and alleys, carrying the first signs of the

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in the name of the goddess

1.18 College Square Puja pandal under construction, 2007

spatial metamorphosis of the city. There are different logistics of space and work that determine the time at which pandal constructions can begin on public grounds and the pace at which they proceed. What we may call old-style pandals—ones that specialize in the fabrication of loose look-alikes of temples and palaces—usually erect the biggest bamboo and plywood scaffoldings. From as far back in time as I can remember, the most familiar landmarks of the coming Pujas were these giant architectural frames that would occupy most of Ekdalia Road and Dover Road on either side of the Gariahat crossing, or those that would loom from within Mohammed Ali Park, not least the one that would come up at the far end of the tank on College Square, tantalizingly pushing its form outwards over the waters. (See 1.18) Belonging then, as now, to the biggest Puja clubs of Kolkata, these scaffoldings would resonate with the promise of their metamorphosis over the weeks into the most spectacular Puja pandals. There would also be another kind of pandal structure sprouting on the narrower streets, arching over the road space, where the idols would be mounted either on the side or above the heads of the traffic and people moving through these structures. (See 1.19) In the recent past, the spreading category of ‘theme’ Pujas has brought a noticeable shift in the visual morphology of the pre-Puja city. For large numbers of Puja clubs and designers, who have only a small street at their disposal, and who are also now

working under a new regime of civic regulations, blocking roads over a full month or more has become unfeasible. This pushes much of the work on details of architectural decoration of pandals, and on the Durga image into the interiors of makeshift studios and nearby club houses, and allows for the putting together of the prefabricated tableaux on site only in the fortnight before the Pujas. (See 1.20) This was the case, for instance, with one of the most celebrated designer Pujas on an alley called Nalin Sarkar Street at Hatibagan, where the artist Sanatan Dinda fabricated much of the pandal panels in a club room in the alley, or later in his own art studios (once he was able to acquire and set up these far larger spaces), before beginning to sculpt the clay idol on site around a month before the festival. A contrasting setting emerges in Puja clubs that can take possession of public parks or private land plots, away from the street, where the entire grounds, big or small, can be cordoned off into a workshop site for different levels of the work force (artists/designers, their student teams, rural craftspeople and construction labourers) months in advance of the festival, with extraordinary time, efforts and resources invested in the simulation of village complexes, monuments and landscapes. In a park at Babubagan, Dhakuria, in 2004, a designer and his team laboured for months to dig a foundation and build a semi-permanent structure of an engraved clay tile temple. (See 1.21) For another designer, Dipak Ghosh, who came to specialize in

1.19 Khidirpur Kabitirtha Puja pandal, allowing the movement of cars and pedestrians through the structure, 2010

1.20 Sanatan Dinda’s Puja pavilion under construction, Nalin Sarkar Street, Hatibagan, 2010

1.21 Brick temple with carved terracotta panels under construction at the Babubagan Puja, Dhakuria, 2004

1.22 Dipak Ghosh’s Jaisalmer temple replica being assembled on site at the Lake Town Adhibasibrinda Puja, 2007

1.23 Chamba valley landscape and temple at the Himachal Pradesh theme complex designed by Dipak Ghosh, Suruchi Sangha Puja, New Alipore, 2006

1.24 Akshardham temple-style pandal, Ekdalia Evergreen Puja, Gariahat, 2007

the city of the festival exact architectural replicas in thermocol, almost a year’s work was necessary on the models he made of the Dilwara temple of Mount Abu at Jodhpur Park in 2002, of the Mukteswar temple of Bhuvaneswar at a road junction at Mudiali in 2005, or of a Jaisalmer Jain temple at Lake Town in 2007.40 (See 1.22) In each of these models, built nearly to scale, with the same intricacy of ornamentation as the originals, the bulk of the panels were created off site in the designer’s studio before their careful assemblage on the Puja site. Equal labour often goes into the landscaping of Puja sites—as, for instance, with the elaborate production of a hill of terraced step cultivation and a flowing river, alongside a temple structure from the Chamba valley to simulate a Himachal Pradesh landscape in the Suruchi Sangha Puja in New Alipore (see 1.23), or with the planting of real plants, weeds and creepers around a model of a deserted temple in a Puja off a small alley in Behala.41 Much of this work proceeds in cordoned-off spaces, away from public view. A new feature of the prePuja urbanscape is tin-sheet and tarpaulin enclosures and security personnel, guarding the sites of some of the best known of the city’s ‘theme’ Pujas. The high publicity that these Pujas seek out for their themes and designers goes hand in hand with the staged secrecy of their productions. Designers and club members explain this need for cover and policing in order to stave off the piracy of themes by rival clubs in this acutely competitive scenario. Claims to originality and copyright, I argue, become impossible to sustain in this public and ephemeral field of production. Nonetheless, one of the main identifiers of the newage Pujas lies in such strategies of self-promotion—in the ways in which they market themselves, whetting the appetite of the public through posters spread across the city, selectively wooing reporters, sponsors and judges into their tents for privileged previews of the promised spectacle, while pointedly shutting out others. So, while models of an Akshardham temple (see 1.24) or a Japanese Shanti Stupa materialize in the open, a different stock of archaeological sites, theme parks, craft villages or folk art installations takes form inside these carefully covered and coveted sites, in the race up to the final week when Mahalaya inaugurates the ten days of Debi-paksha.

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Somewhere in the week before Mahalaya (the ritual beginning of Durga Puja), we see a dramatic escalation in the tempo of the visual transformation of the city. There are several markers of this escalation— newspapers and hoardings that announce an endless range of Puja fashions and products, alongside mega sales and discounts; a feverish pitch in the scale of buying and selling that sweeps all spaces, from the pavement garment stalls to electronic goods stores to the city’s rising crop of high and low-end malls; and most of all, agonizing traffic congestions that choke the city’s main vehicular arteries, and spill over into the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass. This frenzy of shopping, like the escalation of crowds and traffic, begin to take over city life for weeks before the Pujas, reaching chaotic heights in the final days leading to the beginning of the festival. A 2009 billboard of the shopping outlet Spencers, announcing that it would be ‘hosting its guests’ over a whole month (the term in Bengali was Atithi Apyayan) plays out this sense of the extended time-scale and build-up of shopping during the Durga Pujas. The festival lives up more and more to its reputation as a huge consumer carnival: the biggest business event in Bengal’s calendar.42 In 2003, the West Bengal government paid out over 70 crores as Puja bonuses and festival advances; that same year, a market research company calculated consumer spending estimates in Kolkata in the two months before Durga Puja at over 350 crores.43 By 2011, a survey of Puja consumers, consumption areas and product retailers in Kolkata was boldly citing a figure of 10,000 crores as the composite ‘Bengali Puja Market’.44 The excess of product advertising during the Durga Pujas, whereby the advertisements themselves signify the visual feast of consumption, makes the event emblematic of Jean Baudrillard’s idea of ‘The Festival of Buying Power’.45 We are reminded in particular about his polemics on contemporary advertising as ‘an irremovable aspect of the system of objects by virtue of its disproportionateness.’ Advertising, he writes, ‘is pure connotation. It contributes nothing to production or to the direct practical application of things, yet it plays an integral part in the system of objects not merely because it relates to consumption, but also because it itself becomes an object to be consumed.’ The giant billboard advertisements that invade the

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in the name of the goddess repeat standardized motifs like the spear or the three eyes of the goddess. As with everything about the Pujas in Bengal, in advertising too, the imperative of hard selling comes with an ‘accent on emoting’, with advertisers emphasizing the need to forge an emotional connection with consumers.48 In the build-up to the festival, however, the emotive gets sucked into the all-pervasive spectacle of today’s Puja advertising, as it has moved from the print media to the giant illuminated flex sheets mounted on steel frames and opened itself to every new-age brand, product and design idea.

1.25 Boroline advertisement, using a Pahari miniature painting, ABP, October 1980. Courtesy: ABP

city carry the most visible signs of this orchestration of product marketing and the commodity culture of the Pujas. There was a time in the 1970s when the most memorable Puja advertisements were associated with a small selection of Bengali consumer products, with striking visuals and copy in the print media. There was, for instance, Boroline antiseptic cream, with its reproductions of images of Mahishasuramardini from the sculpted reliefs of Mahabalipuram or from Pahari miniature painting, accompanied by the still-remembered slogan, Banga Jibaner Anga (‘An integral part of Bengali life’),46 and Shalimar hair oil, with its serial line-drawn mythological illustrations by Ranen Ayan Datta. (See 1.25) The Bata shoe company was the first multinational company to enter the scene with their festival catchphrase, Pujoy Chai Notun Juto (‘New shoes for the Pujas’). Veteran advertising professionals in the city look back with nostalgia to these ‘soft-feel’ Puja advertisements of yesteryears, which they claim ‘touched the Bengali heart’ in a way that none of the current aggressive campaigns can, as they scramble to ride piggyback on familiar Puja themes.47 They continue to mark out the distinction between Bengali advertisements that are generated out of Kolkata agencies, which lay a different premium on the creative use of Bengali copy (highlighting, in this context, the special importance of reading and the power of words for Bengalis) and other all-India brands like Raymonds or Vimal who

These design conceptions vary from the use of conventional, all-time favourite scenes of the sindur khela as a metaphor for bonding to more minimalist and dramatic graphics, with a colloquial invocation of the goddess that sets one off on a journey on Dunlop Tyres. (See 1.26, 1.27) While a local shoe brand, Khadim, came to upstage Bata with its Puja advertisements, international and local fashion brand names that have swept the Indian market today continuously cash in on the iconography of the goddesses. (See 1.28) Keeping up earlier trends, new music releases from Bengal’s singing stars occupy significant portions of billboard space, as do the latest in gold jewellery styles, featuring the newest young models in Bengali Puja attire. Quoting a comparative graph on festival consumption in different Indian cities, market researchers talk of clothes, shoes, toiletries, beauty products and jewellery’s continued dominance of the city’s Durga Puja market, as against the high demand for cars, televisions, electronic goods

1.26 Puja hoarding of the adhesive, Dendrite, Bandhaner Utsab, invoking a festival of bonding, 2004. Courtesy: Sunanda Sanyal

1.27 Puja hoarding of Dunlop tyres, with the invocation Dugga Dugga that wishes one a safe journey, 2008

1.28 Puja hoarding of Khadim’s fashion brand store, Egaro, 2007

1.29 Puja advertisement banners of Imperial Blue whisky, Rashbehari Avenue, 2011

1.30 Raghu Rai’s photograph of a Durga image being uploaded on a truck at Kumartuli, used as an Aircel hoarding carrying Puja greetings, 2008

the city of the festival

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Ganesh playing computer Batman games, Kartick swinging to music on his I-pod, Lakshmi surfing the World Stock Market, and Saraswati immersed in her E-book reader.49 It is with this visual burst of advertisements that the city and its citizens ready themselves each festive season for varying grades of ‘an image make-over’.50

1.31 Durga and family in a car, cartoon from Puja Power: A Brandwatch Bengal series, ABP market survey volume, 2011. Courtesy: ABP

and technological gadgets in the Diwali or Pongal festival markets of north and south India. But here too we find an ever-expandable range of new services and goods—from hospital offers on laparoscopy to computers and alcohol brands —deploying the theme and motif of the Pujas as its optimum device of seasonal promotions. (See 1.29). What matters most is less the product, more the ingenuity of the advertisement, which itself becomes the prime object of consumption. In the past decade, as cell phones became the fastest selling consumer gadget in the state, the Puja advertisements of cell phone service providers —Airtel, Hutch, Reliance, Tata Indicom or Simoco—predominated the city skyline, often with serial rhymes to mark each of the five days of the Pujas, also with new types of SMS voting contests for selecting viewers’ choice of Pujas. In 2008, we saw a mobile service brand riding the Puja advertising bandwagon, making dramatic use of enlarged black and white photographs of the city’s Durga Puja by the eminent photographer Raghu Rai, to announce its arrival on the eastern Indian circuit. (See 1.30) Equally striking these days are a range of animated graphics and humourous illustrations which pack the goddess and her full entourage into swish cars (see 1.31), or depict Durga surrounded by her Blackberry, laptop and shopping bags, Shiva booking internet tickets on MakeMyTrip.Com,

Every year, the rains remain the biggest spoilsport in this climate of burgeoning preparations and rising anticipation. Lingering into late September and early October, often unleashing its worst furies on Kolkata’s streets and Bengal’s countryside in the days immediately before the Pujas, the monsoons leave idol makers, pandal decorators and Puja designers in greatest quandary, even as they deprive small shop owners and pavement stalls of the season’s buying spree, and drive Puja committee members to the brink of despair. Newspapers typically carry photographs of half-finished idols in the damp and dingy hubs of Kumartuli, protected from the rains with plastic sheets (sometimes garbed in fashionable raincoats, see 1.32), and of painted images being

1.32 Idol protected against the rain, Kumartuli, Mahalaya, 2008. Photograph by Mrinalini Vasudevan

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in the name of the goddess

1.33 Celebrity judges at Naktala Udayan Sangha Puja on Chaturthi afternoon, 2012

blow-dried to meet the deadlines of completion. On the day of Mahalaya, the main form of the goddess and her entourage must be ready to have their eyes ceremonially painted to mark their ritual consecration. In ‘theme’ Puja sites, filled with mud and slush, with rains washing away decorations and paint, the work atmosphere is even more frantic in the days leading up to Mahalaya, with designers and their teams working through the night, and a single designer often travelling huge distances between the extreme north and south of the city to supervise their productions at each of these places. In this final phase, the pressures are intense on all groups of the work force to deliver their goods by the promised date and have every detail of the Puja tableaux ready to be thrown open to the public. Going by rituals, the goddess is meant to be unveiled only on the evening of the sixth day of Debi-paksha, with this sixth day, Shashti, serving as the first day of Durga Puja. But in the current extended calendar of the festival, we see every club rushing to complete their productions by the third or fourth day after Mahalaya. A different kind of mileage is to be gained with television channels, sponsors and judges with the extra two days added by these early inaugurations, than by the extension of these tableaux for two days after Bijoya Dashami.51 From the mid 2000s, there has been a tendency for judges to begin their selecting rounds of the Pujas from Tritiya or

Chaturthi evening (see 1.33), and also for spectators to catch an early view of the season’s productions, before the rush of crowds set in or before they leave the city on vacation. So, early beginnings are imperative, as are the rituals of inauguration, with clubs competing to find celebrities to launch their Puja: celebrities ranging from the powerful to the popular, from the governor to film stars to child stars like Budhia, the marathon runner from Orissa.52 By 2011–2012, with Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee taking on her all-important role as personal patron and inaugurator of Pujas on a scale unprecedented in the history of Bengal politics, the dates of these Puja inaugurations came forward even further, to the first or second night after Mahalaya, and thereafter to Mahalaya itself. By this time, the Durga Puja had been transformed from a five-day into a weeklong and, in cases, even a ten-day long event, with the deadline for the immersion and dismantling of pandals stretched for another three days after Bijoya Dashami. While the Chief Minister went each night on her Puja inaugurating spree, often opening as many as ten Pujas over a three hour and crowded 5 kilometre stretch, Puja committees and the pandalmaking workforce were left scrambling to have their productions ready in time, and often needed a further two days for the final finishing of the pandals, before opening their Pujas to the public.53

heterotopias and time-travels We have arrived now at that keenly awaited beginning when, each year, the entire city unfurls, piece by piece, into a mega-exhibitionary site and a spectatorial complex. For the week that follows, Kolkata stands transformed into an ephemeral fantasy land—of make-believe palaces, fortresses, temples, mosques, churches, sometimes even glittering barges on a river. (See 1.34) The specialty of the city’s Durga Puja has, for decades now, centred on the production of spectacles, whose effects revolved around the creation of huge architectural replicas and elaborate light bulb illuminations. Every year, the small electrical firms of the district town of Chandannagar, who came to monopolize the work of the illumination of the metropolitan festival, vied with the pandals to keep up with the times. Hundreds of tiny coloured bulbs,

the city of the festival

1.34 College Square Puja, illuminated barge-shaped pandal, 2003

wired on to bamboo frames, brought to life dinosaurs and beauty queens, train accidents and literacy drives. It was routine to see, in these lighted panels leading into the pandals, events ranging from the very local to the global—from the garlanding of a tiger by a drunken man in the Kolkata zoo, the assassinations of Rajiv Gandhi or Phoolan Devi, the parallel deification of Princess Diana and Mother Teresa in the year of their deaths (1997) and the destruction of the World Trade Center towers in 2001. Where pandals are concerned, there have been no limits to what could be fabricated by decorator firms with bamboo, cloth, plywood and plaster, and later material like thermocol or fibreglass. All kinds of structures, global and local, historical and mythical, ancient and modern, could be (and continue to be) transplanted on to the most congested parts of the city, without the least sense of irony or incongruity. Alongside the nation’s own historical monuments, an ever-widening range of world monuments entered the repertoire of these pandal makers, be it the Egyptian

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Sphinx on Lake Terrace in 2007, or the façade of the Paris Opera House in a Salt Lake park in 2009. (See 1.35, 1.36) The trend seems to have had its biggest boom from the 1980s.54 Typical of this festival were the looseness of these remakes, and the randomness of the mix of structures that vied for attention in these overgrown spaces. Equally important was an irrepressible taste for the cosmopolitan and contemporary. For example, a model of the proposed Ramjanmabhumi temple was presented in 1990 by a Beleghata Puja at height of the Ayodhya campaign, the gigantic wreck of the Titanic was dreamt up by a Salt Lake Puja in 1998, the year of the release of the blockbuster film, and a model of the Columbia Space Shuttle in 2003, the year of its crash. Never to miss out on the most topical of themes, the season of 2008 even saw the never-to-materialize Tata Nano factory on display at the Santosh Mitra Square Puja at Sealdah. (See 1.37) A remarkably modernist tubular installation, with a vast dangling lock and a yellow model of everyman’s cheap dream car, it was surrounded by banners exhorting the case for the factory at Singur, compounding the irony of Tata’s announcement of withdrawal of the Nano project from Bengal that year on the eve of the festival. Anything, it seems, can go in this field of Durga Puja pandals and lighting. For a festival that has, for several decades now, geared itself to the production of spectacles, there has always been unfettered local

1.35 Sphinx-shaped pandal at a Lake Terrace Puja, 2007

1.36 Facade of the Paris Opera House created by a suburban pandal making enterprise, GD Block Puja, Salt Lake, 2009

1.37 The imagined Tata Nano factory, Santosh Mitra Square Puja, Sealdah, 2008. Photograph by Dayanita Singh

the city of the festival license to copy, reproduce and reinvent whichever monument or contemporary event caught the fancy of producers and the public. It is the unapologetic catholicity of this representational field that became the hallmark of its secular mass identity —even as it laid it open to the constant charge of desacralization and trivialization of the festival. The late 1990s and the early 2000s brought a series of paradigmatic shifts in the forms of the city’s Puja tableaux, propelling an internal metamorphosis of the festival from a ‘low’ to a ‘high’ culture profile, with different ethnic tastes and artistic identities furrowing this social space of festivity. What kind of broad transformation did this bring about in the landscape of pandal architecture in the city? How did earlier worlds of fantasy and makebelieve begin to co-exist with new, more coordinated spaces of art and craft viewing or archaeological tours? And what are the cumulative effects of continuing and changing genres of productions in our travels through the festival city?55 One obvious contrast presents itself between the earlier freewheeling style of copies and the new

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style of exact replicas. In the former, decorator firms continue to put together a mixed assemblage of palaces, mosques or temple look-alikes. In models that claim inspiration from the Jaipur Hawa Mahal, the Bangalore Vidhana Soudha or the Satya Sai Baba Mandir at Puttapurthi (example 1.4), there is no great burden of authenticity, either for viewers or for their creators. The copy stands in its own right as a simulacrum, reveling in all its local accretions and excesses. Thus, fibreglass statues of dancing nymphs can line the interiors of an Akshardham temple replica, and carpeted floors and glittering chandeliers remain the biggest attraction inside pandals that proudly recreate banquet-hall interiors inside temple exteriors. It is as a conscious departure from such constructions that a different genre of laboriously reconstructed replicas of temples and entire archaeological sites began to sprout across the city. It could be the perfectly carved model of the Mukteshwar temple that designer Dipak Ghosh set up amidst the apartment blocks at Mudiali near the Dhakuria Lakes in the season of 2005 (see 1.38), or the remnants of a Tantrik Chaushatti Yogini temple

1.38 Replica of the Mukteshwar temple of Bhubaneshwar, designed by Dipak Ghosh, being completed at the Mudiali Puja, 2005

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in the name of the goddess

1.39 Folk art village of Chattisgarh, designed by Subodh Ray, Behala Agradoot Club Puja, 2006

from Orissa that the television set designer Sanjit Ghosh recreated in a neighbouring vicinity at Lake Temple Road in 2002. The points of pride here were research and scholarship, exactitude and faithfulness to the original, and also popular, public pedagogy, with sites often replicating the blue Archaeological Survey of India signboards. The public was enticed to step in, see and wonder, equally to learn and know about the original structures and sites. Pandalhopping was taking on the guise of ‘theme park’ touring, where the viewer was being treated to an entire archaeological complex or to an integrated package of the architecture, sculpture, handicrafts, dances and food of a region. An even more prominent presence in today’s festival city are a series of little village tableaux that crop up at every street corner and park, presenting a repertoire of thatched or tiled roof cottages, with a selection of rural crafts and tribal arts alongside a folk-art goddess. A new emphasis on field research and investigation into the country’s disappearing folk

and tribal art traditions have governed this booming genre of Puja productions, with the new creed of designers acting as the main conduit for seeking out communities of craftspeople from far and near to work both on and off site on these fabricated villages. The Pujas here became a popular surrogate for the urban crafts mela or emporium, a prime forum for displaying the authenticity and richness of the nation’s folk traditions and for enacting their salvage and preservation. There are a large number of designers in this field today who have come to specialize in this genre of folk art installations, who have moved from the recreation of village settings to subsuming the ‘folk’ within their own individualized stylistic idioms. Becoming the most recognizable face of the booming genre of ‘art’ or ‘theme’ Pujas, these village and folk art pandals (as will be detailed in Chapter 5) provide the most resonant examples of what scholars termed the ‘folklorization’ of urban India. Over the years, we have seen a taste for such rural complexes proliferating across different types of neighbourhoods, spreading from localities like

the city of the festival

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transfigurations, creating formal possibilities that are open to new readings and uses). These Puja pandals become ‘fungible spaces’, analogous to borders and borderlands, in their ‘ability to slip out of the material and metaphoric and also to lay hold of both’.56 In this sense, a simulated archaeological site or a richly decorated folk art pavilion in the midst of a Kolkata street can be seen to perform their effects both through the materiality of the fabrications and through their ability to move beyond the material structures into metaphors of other imagined sites.

1.40 Village complex decorated with Santiniketan batik leather work by Shibshankar Das, Ashok Trust Baishakhi Club Puja, Gangulybagan, 2006

Behala (which, one could say, pioneered the genre) through neighbourhoods like Kasba, Santoshpur or Gangulybagan into the satellite township of Salt Lake. (See 1.39, 1.40) Old or new style, authentic historical architecture or a perfectly simulated craft village, there is an inescapable thinness and ephemerality to these Puja spectacles. We enter these spaces with the full awareness of their location within the everyday space of the city and the special event of the Durga Puja. We are no less aware of the fragility and impermanence of these structures, knowing all the time that these illusions in bamboo, plywood, plaster or fibreglass will soon disappear. Yet it is also clear that such knowledge seldom diminishes the seduction of these travels in space and time, nor the imagined identification of the viewers with these simulated sites. These ephemeral street displays creatively function on what Swati Chattopadhyay terms a principle of ‘fungibility’: a term that implies both ‘interchangeability’ (whereby the space of the street becomes momentarily interchangeable with a fabricated medieval temple site or an ancient cave complex, before it is returned to its earlier everyday meanings) and ‘iterability’ (whereby a single space can be made to bear multiple interpretations and

It is this time of the year when the familiar turns unfamiliar, when one willfully loses oneself in the maze of known streets and paras.57 The incongruity of pandal structures curiously dovetails into their organic connections with the spaces out of which they sprout. It becomes impossible in this milieu to separate the actual from the fabricated, especially when a Puja at Bosepukur puts up a standard twostorey house, like any other in the neighbourhood, and calls it an old-age home in whose precincts the worship of the goddess takes place. The city’s pandal makers had, in the past, often drawn on the city’s own stock of architectural landmarks, not thinking twice about putting out a look-alike of the Akashbani Bhavan in an alley off Central Avenue, or the thennew movie auditorium, Nandan, on the Howrah Maidan. But a different order of tricks and illusions are in store for today’s spectators, when the remake

1.41 Public toilet designed like the Sydney Opera House, near Golpark on Southern Avenue

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in the name of the goddess

1.42 Remake of a Tibetan Buddhist pagoda at the Ahiritola Sarbojanin Puja, 2004. From the Ananda Utsab website, courtesy: ABP

merges with the real structures around it. In the contemporary city, where new buildings flaunt the strangest mix of ornamental architectural styles, or where even public toilets are made to simulate the Sydney Opera House (see 1.41), it is hard to determine where the representational world of the Puja ends and the world outside begins. The lines of distinction between the artificial and the real continuously dissolve. This could be seen as a fundamental condition of the object worlds of modernity, of a society of commodity and spectacle, where the real can only be apprehended as part of an endless regime of illusions and representations. This is what Timothy Mitchell conceptualized as the ‘world-as-exhibition’: a world organized and grasped as though it was an exhibition, where one is continually pressed into service as a spectator.58 The festivalscape of twenty-first century Kolkata, however, defies comparison with the ‘world exhibitions’ of late nineteenth century Paris that Mitchell analysed to lay

out the new visual worlds of capital and modernity. Here, where the world of the exhibition ends, begins not a city of arcades, departmental stores and ordered vistas, but one of dark alleys, decaying neighbourhoods and crowded streets. Here, every step outside the simulated displays returns spectators to a different order of the everyday city, before they move on to other fabricated sites that they keep entering and exiting at every point of touring. In a landmark, now translated essay, ‘The Heterotopias of Puja’s Calcutta’,59 the sociologist Pradip Bose has analysed this exhibitionary world of the city’s Durga Pujas by drawing on Michel Foucault’s notion of ‘heterotopias’. How, he asks, do we designate these temporarily fabricated spaces in the city and the illusions they create? Utopias, as Foucault explains, are purely imaginary worlds: they are ‘sites with no real place’ or ‘fundamentally unreal spaces’ that have an inverted analogy with the real space of society. What he terms ‘heterotopias’ are,

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fleeting, transitory, precarious aspect, to time in the mode of the festival’.61

1.43 A Ghana village complex recreated on the grounds of the Barisha Sahajatri Puja, Behala, 2004

by contrast, something like alternative spaces or counter sites, in which all the real sites that can be found in a culture are ‘simultaneously represented, contested and inverted’.60 It is the simultaneity of all these functions that renders a replica of a Tibetan Buddhist pagoda or the recreation of an African village in a Kolkata neighbourhood into resonantly heterotopic sites. (See 1.42, 1.43) If, following Foucault, we were to work with the first principle that all cultures in the world constitute heterotopias, and the second that each of these heterotopias will have very different connotations depending on their time, place and social context of occurrence, then the city’s Puja productions can be seen to effectively lend themselves to the third defining principle of heterotopias—their capacity for juxtaposing in a single real place several imaginary sites that are in themselves incongruous and incompatible. And they also invite us to think of the fourth principle of heterotopias, which he terms ‘heterochronies’, which involve a radical disjunction of one’s sense of linear, everyday time. Unlike the accumulation of time in the heterotopic spaces of museums or libraries ‘in which time never stops building up and topping its own summit’, the heterotopias of Kolkata’s Pujas are linked to a contrary mode of ‘time in its most

The city of the festival offers innumerable instances of such a mélange of multiple emplacements, where time and history can be indiscriminately collapsed and the whole country and the world randomly brought home to local spectators. Let us consider some of the cumulative effects of such emplacements across city spaces during a single season. For instance, in 2002, it was possible in the course of a tour through south Calcutta to be transported from the Sanchi Stupa in Garia to the Dilwara temple of Mount Abu in Jodhpur Park, then to an imaginary historical bamboo fortress of Titumeer, a nineteenthcentury millenarian peasant leader of Bengal, in Dhakuria (see 1.44), and also to encounter remakes of the city’s own colonial buildings, like the Victorian Gothic structure of the Calcutta High Court on Anwar Shah Road and the now-demolished neoclassical Senate Hall of Calcutta University in Park Circus.62 The leaps across space and time are often concentrated within a much smaller zone—as was the case, in 2007, when viewers moved backward in history from the site of a late medieval palace of the Deccan, embellished with real and simulated bidri ornamentation, to two separate sites of the ancient Inca and Indus Valley civilizations, all within the space of the neighbourhoods of Putiary and Haridebpur

1.44 Recreation of the bamboo fortress of the Muslim peasant rebel leader, Titumeer, Babubagan Club Puja, Dhakuria, 2002

1.45 Durga image of the Tantrik art pavilion, Hindusthan Park Sarbojanin Puja, 2006

1.46 A television compere hosting a live interview at the Tantrik art pavilion, Hindusthan Park Sarbojanin Puja, 2006

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Potter’s castle at Hogwarts which, by getting dragged into a last-minute copyright controversy, gained even greater publicity and became the biggest crowd-puller of the season.63 (See 1.47) On the other hand, the taste for vernacular, ethnic chic echoed across a series of elegantly designed craft and rural art ensembles across the township, each featuring a different local craft form. (See 1.48) There is something on offer, then, every season, for all tastes and types of viewers. However, a unique characteristic of this citywide display is the impossibility of keeping apart these multiple strands and levels of spectatorial interests and of maintaining any firmly sealed circles of social distinction.

1.47 Remake of the Hogwarts castle of the Harry Potter stories, FD Block Puja, Salt Lake, 2007

in the interior regions connecting Tollygunge and Behala in the deep south of the city. (See 5.48. 5.49) Every year, we notice an accumulative and spreading taste for certain art forms and design modules across different Pujas of the city. For instance if, in 2004, African tribal art reigned as the ingenious flavour of the season, in 2006 we saw varieties of colourful Tantrik art designs sweeping across pandal installations in the city, and working their way deep into the aperture and iconography of the goddess. (See 1.45, 1.46) The varieties of new genres of ‘art’ and craft Pujas never entirely displace older styles of architectural remakes or gimmicky tableaux. Even as ‘art’ Pujas came to draw out from obscurity a series of little neighbourhoods and chart out newer and discrete maps for Puja touring, festival productions across different areas of the city continue to cater to all types of tastes and viewers. In the Pujas of 2007, this multiple layering of artistic and spectatorial preferences was best seen in the variety of Puja tableaux in Salt Lake. On the one hand, the taste for the global and the spectacular found its newest attraction in a remake of Harry

Clearly, a lot is at stake these days for Puja organizers in reaching out to a discerning viewership and in boosting their socio-cultural profile by claiming an ‘art’ or ‘designer’ tag for their productions. What is equally at stake, though, is the ability of these Pujas to draw large crowds to their precincts, through media publicity and prizes—for on this single factor depends their potential appeal for sponsors and advertisers and the securing of corporate funding for the following season. Every new order of creativity must somehow pass the test of mass viewing and popular approbation, just as it must also magnetize media attention to make that Puja site an attractive

1.48 Pavilion designed with patachitras painted by Medinipur patuas, Salt Lake Labony Puja, 2007

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1.49 Crowds in the narrow lane of the 66 Pally Puja site at Badamtala, Kalighat, 2010

investment for advertisers. To draw a large viewership has become one of the main paradoxes in the aspirations of the city’s proliferating breed of ‘art’ and ‘theme’ Pujas, generating an unresolved tension at their core, often denying the neighbourhood’s senior residents access to their own Puja and alienating them from the Puja committee.64 ‘Theme’ Pujas are left even more frequently to grapple with the problem of large crowds in small neighbourhoods and narrow streets that were never meant to sustain them. (See 1.49)

puja cartography For an event that has long been about touring and journeying through the city, Kolkata produces a special festival map every season. These cartographic guides to the key Puja pandals spread out over the main municipality areas have come to stand over time as a unique product of the festival city. Made for no other festival, because none other has the same encompassing hold over the entire urban zone, Kolkata’s Durga Puja maps offer one more way of

marking the singularity of the phenomenon and its embeddedness in the spatial graph of the mapped city. Like the tourist guide maps that schematically lay out routes through the city, connecting different monuments, architectural landmarks and other touring destinations, these Puja road guides connect the city through a selection of the major Puja pandals that are marked out on a navigable grid of main avenues and streets. (See 7.18, 7.37) Unlike the tourist maps, though, they are intended largely for a local population and are designed to turn one into a temporary tourist in one’s own city. Their aim, Swati Chattopadyay writes, is to articulate the nodes of an alternative city geography: the temporal and the ephemeral congeal as points of recognition and acquire legitimacy through representation. The map projects this reconstituted landscape of the Puja in a universally recognizable form of representation: the cartographic image thus claims to control the unmanageable sites of festivity.65 What kinds of encoding and coverage of urban spaces do these maps offer? How effectively can the

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Through the 1970s and 1980s, it was the tyre company Dunlop that, in association with the city’s police authorities, supplied the city’s festival public with their most familiar Puja road guides. The city, in these guides, remained restricted to what came under the territorial jurisdiction of the Calcutta Police, and would be condensed into three main Puja zones—a north and central zone running from Baghbazar and Kumartuli in the north down to Sealdah; a south zone bounded by Park Circus on one end and the Lakes and Anwar Shah Road on the other; and a west zone comprising mainly of the Khidirpur area. Together these zonal maps signposted the locations of some 30 to 40 of the big community Pujas in these areas, that could be reached by car and public transport

along the main arterial roads of the city. Carrying also the public bus routes to a selection of the big pandals and a set of emergency phone numbers for police, ambulance, fire and car break-down services, these Dunlop maps became a regular feature in all English and Bengali newspapers during the five days of the Pujas. In the mid-1990s, as Dunlop faced its industrial shutdown, its maps came to be replaced in newspapers by near-identical ones, presented by the petroleum companies Bharat Petroleum and Indian Oil, once again in collaboration with the city’s police. During the 2000s, Kolkata Police (so renamed in 2001 with the official renaming of the city) teamed up with Indian Oil to bring into circulation the newest, redesigned incarnation of the Puja road maps. Moving from the black and white newspaper page into a colourful foldout pamphlet, distributed from petrol pumps, police booths and stations, these Puja guides strikingly kept pace with the new design aesthetics of the Puja. (See 1.50, 1.51) Printed in English and Bengali, they came to feature, each year, a cover image of Durga by one of Bengal’s reputed

1.50 Calcutta Police-Indian Oil Puja Guide cover, featuring a Durga by artist Prakash Karmakar, 2000

1.51 Lay-out of maps of different Puja zones of the city, Kolkata Police-Indian Oil Puja Guide, 2005

heterotopic spaces of the Pujas be morphed on to a cartographic grid of city streets and localities? How representative are these maps of the new touring routes opened up by the spreading genre of ‘art’ and ‘theme’ Pujas? And what kinds of uses and functions are today served by these guide maps?

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1.52 Bidhananagar Police Puja Guide cover, with Mamata Banerjee’s sketch on the back cover, 2012

modern artists, alongside a changing layout of border decorations, logos and advertisements. Not unlike the contemporary genre of ‘theme’ Pujas in the city, these Kolkata Police-Indian Oil Puja guides came to aspire to the status of a collectible, visually appealing artwork. What is particularly striking, though, is the way the territorial coverage of these Puja guides remained largely static over this period, confined as before only to the core municipality areas that came under the direct law and order jurisdiction of the Kolkata Police, excluding the wider belt that often came under its traffic purview but fell under the different administrative charge of the West Bengal Police. The same three urban zones that featured in the old Dunlop guides keep appearing in the later foldout maps, now in coloured, larger format diagrams, but unchanged in their boundaries and spatial spread. The number of Pujas marked out

within this conspicuously limited zone only slightly increased over the years. Between 2000 and 2006, the south Kolkata zonal map, for instance, made room for about ten additional Puja locations, including two of the main new ‘theme’ Puja sites: the Badamtala Ashar Sangha at Kalighat and Suruchi Sangha at New Alipore. But the little that was added slipped into insignificance vis-à-vis the vast stretches of the most dense and animate of the city’s Puja neighbourhoods that remain occluded from these maps—such as the deep south beyond Jodhpur Park consisting of Jadavpur, Santoshpur, Bagha Jatin, Garia or Patuli; or another deep southern stretch beyond Mudiali that takes us into Tollygunge, Haridebpur, Thakurpukur and Behala. Through the 2000s, to confine ourselves to the Kolkata Police-Indian Oil guides would have meant missing out on some of the most vital segments of the city’s contemporary Puja landscape, and its award-winning ‘theme’ Pujas.

the city of the festival The situation began to change at the end of the period of my study. As the new West Bengal government, in its attempt to administratively integrate larger sections of the city, brought an additional 104 square kilometers under the charge of the Kolkata Police in 2011, including the busiest Puja zones of Behala and Kasba, the territorial spread of the Puja road guide also expanded to feature a new ‘South Suburban and South West’ zone.66 The same year also saw the carving out of a separate Commissionerate of Police at Bidhannagar, and an integration under its charge of large stretches of the north-eastern zones of the city—to be duly followed in the season of 2012 by the release of another Police Puja Guide Map covering all these zones, in collaboration with the cellphone service provider Airtel. That the Chief Minister, never to lose out on an opportunity to publicize her profile as an artist, put her own drawing on the covers of these 2011 and 2012 Durga Puja road guides (see 1.52), and ceremonially presided over their

1.53 Early evening crowds at the Mudiali Club Durga Puja, 2010

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public launch at the Town Hall on the eve of the festival, confirmed all the more the cultural and official value of such maps, even as it trod heavily over its earlier aesthetic propensities.67 At a time when the city’s police force is putting its Durga Puja road maps online, and allowing for detailed web tracking of Puja locations on Google maps of neighbourhoods, the function of the large printed foldout map, notwithstanding its extended coverage of urban zones, has become increasingly ornamental. Nonetheless, it has come to represent the most publicized festival document of the Kolkata Police. More than serving as a handy guide for touring crowds, such maps speak of the elaborate controlling arrangements of the Kolkata Police over vehicular and pedestrian traffic throughout sections of the festival city that fall under its charge. Like the city itself, its thickly sprouting Puja landscape refuses to be disciplined and coded as a map. Nor do the vast

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1.54 Frenzy of photography at the Badamtala Ashar Sangha Puja, Kalighat, 2008

crowds that throng this landscape remain contained and guided by such touring maps. Yet, like all official cartographic endeavours, these Kolkata Police Durga Puja road guides have their central imperative in a desire for management of populations and spaces, and the creation of an ordered festival topography. pandal-hopping and mass spectatorship

The ordering and regulation of festival crowds becomes the greatest challenge, and also the greatest success story, of the city’s police. Central to the identity of this festival is its long history as a mass spectatorial event. And the defining element of the contemporary event remains the growing number of people it brings to the streets, on a scale that has few parallels in any other festival’s history. (See 1.53) Massive crowds, moving through the length and breadth of the city, swelling to their greatest numbers in the evenings and nights when the full splendour of the illuminations and lighting effects can be

experienced, have long been the defining image of this festival phenomenon. Just as there is a frenetic pitch to the preparations for the Pujas, there is an equally frenetic quality to the touring, viewing and photography. (See 1.54). It is the transient ephemeral nature of the event—the knowledge that the spectacle will disappear in no time—that makes for the particularly intense forms of mass participation in the festival. There are some favourite metaphors that are continuously invoked in all Bengali reporting of the event in the print and electronic media. The talk is invariably of utsaber jowar and manusher dhal, of the high tide of festivity and the descent of people on to the streets like a rush of flood water or a landslide off a mountain slope. The picture is always of a continuously moving mass of people, using all modes of the city’s ground and underground transport to go from one to another part of the city, and then touring the pandals on foot. The tours can never be done from a car or a bus, because every pandal site is constructed in a way that

the city of the festival requires viewers to move deep inside, to partake of the ambience and decorations of the interiors, and to encounter the ensemble of the goddess and her family. There is a sense in which all these sites, whether of caves, architectural ruins, palaces, temples or villages, replicate the idea of a hidden interior, of an inner sanctum that must be entered to meet the goddess in all her regalia. So, even in this secularized domain of mass festivity and revelry, no visit to a pandal site is ever deemed complete without the effort of pushing inside and paying one’s homage to the star attraction of the image of Durga on her lion, killing the buffalo demon, surrounded by her four children. At the same time, the pressure of the crowds, and the imperatives of continuous movement through these Puja sites, makes for a particularly fleeting and distracted form of viewing. There is inevitably a passing, hurried quality to this spectatorship, in keeping with the markedly transitory nature of these exhibitionary sites. There is little scope here for lingering and detailed observation for quiet, intimate viewing as in an art gallery, or for the intense experience of a darshan inside the sanctum of a temple, where the crush of crowds at the scheduled times of the opening of the doors of the sanctum make for an even greater pitch of devotional engagement. In the Puja sites, seeing occurs in a constant state of motion—as one is constantly pushed around by crowds and hurried along by local volunteers and uniformed security guards, whose duty it is to exhort viewers to keep moving, not to touch the exhibits, and not to stand around taking photographs. It is the impossibility of any long or close viewing that makes for the increasing frenzy of crowd photography inside every spectacular pandal, before every stunning Durga image. The epiphany of darshan is displaced here by the climactic act of the clicking and storage of images. The fleeting nature of these tours must be compensated by the photographs that will remain for sharing and relishing long after the festival is over. The rituals of ‘pandal-hopping’ nowadays are thus as much about walking from Puja to Puja, grouping with friends, or hanging around at roadside eating stalls, as about continuously taking photographs on cell phones and digital cameras, many of which begin to immediately travel on the internet and circulate

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on social networking websites. (See 1.55) I am reminded, in this context, of John Frow’s analysis of the way photography ‘as witness, as commemoration, as aesthetic framing partakes of just that mix of the sacred and poetic’ that transforms a mass touristic practice in such impersonal crowded spaces into a form of personalized experience and intimate possession of the moment of viewing and touring. 68 In discussing the centrality of photography to the mass tourism of the twentieth century, Frow points to the hermeneutic circle between the culturally authorized representations of brochures or guidebooks, the experiential capture of images for oneself, and the later processes of authentication of the different sets of representations in their relation to the real. The obsession with photography in today’s Puja spectatorship rests on a similar process of authentication between origin and trace—where the ephemeral experience of the tours finds its main gratification in the permanence of the clicked image, and in the pleasures of its future consumption and sharing. This also leads us to reflect on how today, more generally, photography as mass practice is a continuous source of postponement of the ‘lived’, where the act of seeing is always deferred to the future prospect of recall of images. As with many contemporary events, especially such as cricket matches, the Pujas too could have become primarily a drawing-room television experience. It is increasingly possible these days to gain a thorough and detailed view of all the Pujas flung across distant parts of the city and its outskirts through the many Pujo Parikrama programmes that are continuously televised through the festival days by all the Bengali channels. Television provides the kind of geographical coverage of pandals across the city and the whole state that is never physically possible, also the kinds of close-up views of the goddess and of details of decorations and art work that is difficult to observe in these overcrowded sites. One is also invited nowadays to experience the Pujas in their entirety in cyberspace—to take a visual tour of all the choice pandals on a growing number of websites, to hear the dhak beats and drummer contests, to see the evening arati in performance and even to give the morning offer of anjali online. While they have reached out primarily to Bengalis living abroad, Puja websites

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like www.anandautsav.com also came to target a select class of local viewers—exhorting them to surf the net rather than walk the streets.69 Yet, despite these sitat-home alternatives, the Pujas in the city have never ceased to draw larger and larger crowds out onto the streets, and have remained quintessentially a mass public event. The Pujas’ self-promoted presence on websites and Facebook pages in recent times is intended less to substitute, more to drive the desire for on-site touring. In 2001, the rough estimate of the number of people going around the city on the night of Ashtami was reported as over 14 lakhs.70 In 2007, media reports referred to a crore of people on the streets on a peak festival night.71 Whatever credence we give these inevitably loose numerical estimates, there is no denying that the crowds grow more and more formidable each season, making for an unparalleled

crush of people on the streets of the city. Given its scale and its compression into the narrow, congested arteries of city lanes, this touring crowd is uniquely disciplined and self-regulatory—rendered all the more so by the increasingly strict monitoring of its flow, volume and movement within and between Puja sites by the city’s police, security personnel and local club volunteers. (See 1.56) That it never descends to unruliness and disorder is what makes it distinct from the volatile mass gatherings at football matches, political rallies and demonstrations, or religious fairs like the Kumbh Mela. What lends it its special character is a mix of social classes and cultural tastes, with suburban crowds blending with those of the city, the working classes with layers of the middle class, local Puja enthusiasts with a growing component of national and foreign visitors, as new initiatives have been floated to market the Durga Puja as the city’s best-selling tourist event.

1.55 Posing for a photograph at the Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja, 2010

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1.56 Orderly, monitored crowd movement at the Badamtala Ashar Sangha Puja, Kalighat, 2010

The recent history of the festival has witnessed the forming of a new creamy layer of spectators and the cultivation of a public taste for authenticated historical sites and art and craft productions. This has resulted in marked shifts in the distribution of viewing crowds across the space of the festival city, as the ‘theme’ Pujas carved out their special touring routes within the larger Puja map of the city, drawing people away from the known pockets of fame and popularity. A newspaper report in 2007 attempted to chart this shifting spatial topography of crowds on the night of Ashtami across the city’s pandals. It placed at the head of the popularity chart the Pujas of Suruchi Sangha in New Alipore, Badamtala Ashar Sangha at Kalighat, and Mudiali and Shibmandir of the Dhakuria Lake area, showing the numbers rising at each of these sites as the night proceeded.72 This list, the report clarified, cited only the new crowdpulling Pujas of the season, leaving out those older

ones already renowned and still undiminished in their capacity for drawing mega-crowds. It is significant that many among the pioneering creed of contemporary Puja designers articulated their intentions in terms of the new social viewership and corporate sponsors they wished to attract through their productions towards non-elite neighbourhoods. For Amar Sarkar, who launched a new style of folk art villages in a small Puja site at Barisha in Behala, the stated aim was to pull crowds away from the elite Pujas of south Kolkata and draw the attention of ‘corporate Kolkata’ to this socially humbler locality.73 Bandhan Raha, whose spectacular pandals made of different organic materials (like earthen tea cups or sugarcane fibre) put the Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja at the nerve centre of the festival map of the city, took great pride in the way he had reversed the flow of crowds, and attracted high-end sponsors

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1.57 Traditional ekchala daker saj Durga image of the Maddox Square Puja, 2008

and advertisers of a kind who would once never deign to look their way. There was a time not too long ago, a Puja committee member recalled, when the people from the poor and lower middle-class neighbourhoods of Kasba flocked across the railway lines and the then-newly constructed bridge to the big Pujas of Gariahat, Rashbehari Avenue and beyond. In a dramatic reversal of direction, the early 2000s saw the full force of the Puja crowds moving across the bridge to Bosepukur to what had become one of the most viewable new Pujas of the city.74 In 2001, it was the unprecedented rush and queues of visitors at their earthen tea-cup pandal that allegedly induced volunteers of the Bosepukur Puja to charge spectators Rs. 20–50 each for putting them

at the head of the line. Similar allegations were also afloat that year about older crowd-pulling Pujas, like the one at Santosh Mitra Square, resorting to the sale of guest cards to queuing spectators for similar prices. What were presented as allegations in the media were received as a positive suggestion by the Santosh Mitra Square Puja Committee, and they regularized this practice by selling visitor’s cards for Rs. 50 each in advance—a sale of 10,000 such cards would then bring them an income of Rs. 5 lakhs. Market research experts even came up with the proposal that some of Kolkata’s star Pujas could begin charging fees for foreign visitors and setting aside special time slots each day when only these special category viewers would be allowed into their pandals.75 Was the city’s Durga Puja about to

the city of the festival be transformed into a ticketed tourist phenomenon, with special viewing slots for privileged categories of paying spectators? Was the scheme of tickets to be a means, not just of managing crowds and increasing the funds of Puja committees, but also of boosting the social prestige of organizers and publics? Fortunately (or, some may well say, unfortunately), such plans came to naught. That none of these proposals came to be implemented in the ensuing years comes as a reassertion of the openness of this spectatorial event—its resilient identity as the ‘festival for all’, and its resistance to be divided into exclusive enclaves.76 Notations of artistic and social pedigree in this domain have to be fought for and negotiated, in more subtle ways, on a shifting topography of public tastes, viewer profiles and neighbourhood identities. Star status is a value that is continuously up for grabs, as old claimants find themselves competing with a ceaseless flow of new entrants into the ‘theme’ Puja circuit

1.58 Maddox Square Puja pandal adda, sponsored by Zee TV, 2008

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of current times. There are, of course, some select Pujas, especially in south Kolkata, whose ‘elite’ status directly devolves from the social distinctiveness of the upper-class localities to which they belong. These constitute exclusive spaces of clustering of the city’s fashionable elite, young and old, where the viewers themselves are on display as much as the pandals and their goddesses. The Puja at Maddox Square, with its resplendent and unfailingly traditional image of Durga and famous pandal addas, has been the most prominent of such Pujas (see 1.57, 1.58): a place as much to see as to be seen in. With its location within a South Kolkata elite neighbourhood, this Puja has kept up its singular social status and appeal, clinging to an unchanged old-style temple mandap (open on all four sides to allow for the maximum congregation of crowds), a traditional ekchala daker saj goddess and an evening arati, performed by a senior Kalighat priest, that continues to be one of its biggest attractions. The changing times brought in new kinds of sponsors and youth cultures to Maddox

1.59 Judges and spectators in the narrow alley hosting the Hatibagan Nabin Pally Puja, Saptami morning, 2010

1.60 Women of the para celebrating the winning of an award at the Hatibagan Sarbojanin Puja, Saptami morning, 2010

the city of the festival Square, transforming this Puja site into a youth fashion show venue and televised addas sponsored, as in 2008, by the Zee Bangla television channel. But what became far more typical of the new festivalscape of the city were another order of ‘art’ and ‘theme’ Pujas that began to densely proliferate across a host of markedly non-elite, lower middleclass paras of the city. In all these cases, it was the reputation of an established Puja designer and the distinctiveness of his creation which became the main means through which these small clubs and localities staked their place on the festival map of the city, and sought out social groups of viewers and sponsors who would otherwise seldom find themselves in those areas. Each year, the winning of awards by these clubs also played a pivotal role in drawing bigger and bigger crowds to these far-flung, little-known quarters of the city. As the pool of Puja prizes has kept expanding, so has the media coverage and publicity surrounding each of these. Their effects on Puja spectatorship are intense and cumulative, as we find multiple award schemes competing with each other to direct the attention of the media and the flow of Puja spectators towards their chosen Pujas. When the earliest of these Puja awards, the Asian Paints Sharad Samman, was initiated in 1985, its announcement of the three best Pujas (selected for the best idol, best pandal and the best lighting) would be announced on the final day of the Pujas. Within the next decade, the time of the prize announcements had moved forward to the day of Ashtami and had become an important factor in guiding the dynamics of mass movement across the city on the last two nights of the festival. Asian Paints also set a trend of viewers’ participation in its award contest— viewers were invited to fill in entry coupons and chose their own best three Pujas

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to match the final selections, for a cash prize. Today, the Asian Paints ‘Sharad Samman’ has to jostle for a place among an explosion of awards on offer and several varieties of viewer’s voting contests, through television channels and cellphone SMS networks. There is also a race these days by all the different groups of award-givers to announce their selections of the prize-winning Pujas on television, in newspapers, and on billboards by Saptami itself, the first main day of the Pujas. One of the characteristic sights of today’s festival city on the nights of Shashti or through the morning and afternoon of Saptami are of panels of judges (comprising of a mix of the city’s senior cultural personalities with newer ‘page three’ celebrities) doing their rounds of pandals, welcomed and feted at every step by Puja organizers and para residents.(See 1.59) Another common scene on these same afternoons is of ecstatic jubilation and dancing on the pandal site by neighbourhood women, from the young to the middle-aged, when, for instance, a television channel like Star Ananda brings the tidings of the selection of their Puja under their ‘Star’, ‘Superstar’ or ‘Megastar’ category. (See 1.60) These performances are intended both for live television airing and for the immediate crowds of onlookers, and have become constitutive of the media’s heightened role in the contemporary festival. A key imperative of these early and multiple prize announcements lies in generating a particular momentum and direction to the phenomenon of pandal-hopping, in continuously pumping new energy into it, and in stretching out its flow over the extended time-span and spatial graph of the Pujas. It is with this frenzy of mass touring and spectatorship that I will move from this chapter to the next, which will feature the city of the festival from another angle of civic regulations, public governance, and contesting rights over urban spaces.

Notes 1 Sudeshna Banerjee, ‘Durga before the dhak beats fade’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 26 November 2007. Central to the aural and visual culture of the Pujas are the beating of the

dhak and the presence of village dhakis (drummers who flock in large numbers to the city to take up this seasonal occupation).

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2 There is a long-standing scholarly as well as journalistic discourse on the pivotal place of the Durga Puja in the cultural life of Bengal, and of Bengali communities across India and the world. The Bengali print and electronic media (and lately, the local English media as well) routinely wax eloquent on the umbilical emotive chord that ties the city of Kolkata and Bengalis all over India and the globe to the festival, creating the adage that you can take Bengalis anywhere in the world but you cannot take Durga Puja out of them. What is more recent is a discourse, orchestrated largely by corporate and advertising professionals, that talks of the Pujas as one of the grandest festivals of the world and aspires for a global branding and marketing of the event. 3 Reports in ABP, 28 and 29 September 1984, 13 October 1985; Raghab Bandopadhyay, ‘Barowari ar barchhey na’, ABP, 29 September 1987. 4 A detailed mapping of all 141 wards of the KMC, with street directories is provided in Kolkata, Kolkata: D.P. Publications & Sales Concern, revised and corrected edition, 2001, seventh impression, 2007. For a complete ward by ward listing of all Durga Pujas of 2007 in the KMC area, I am grateful to Mr. Prabir Mitra of CESC, earlier of the West Bengal State Electricity Board (WBSEB) and to Mr. Alapan Bandopadhyay, then Chief Municipal Commissioner, KMC. 5 In 2007, the Bidhannagar Municipality had in its records over 100 community Durga Pujas, for which it was providing its own roster of regulations, licenses and permissions on par with those of the KMC, and for which there were a separate set of municipal and corporate awards on offer by the late 2000s. A more specific count of Durga Pujas was provided during 2011–2012 by the newly-formed Police Commissionerate at Bidhannagar, which included under its jurisdiction not just the 4 thanas of Bidhananagar (North, South, East and the Electronic Complex) but an extended zone of 5 more thanas at Lake Town, Baguihati, New Town Rajarhat and the Airport complex at Dumdum. During the season of 2012, the office of Bidhannagar Police Commissionerate mentioned that it had granted permissions for 283 Pujas over this extended zone, and there were some 60 others which took place, without their formal clearance due to some incomplete paperwork. 6 This number of approximately 4,000 Durga Pujas in the Kolkata and Greater Kolkata area tallied with the number of city Pujas mentioned in the short promotional film on the festival that was produced by Asian Paints in 2009 and screened on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of its ‘Sharad Samman’ Puja award, at the Science City Auditorium on 14 September, 2009. For more on this award campaign and this anniversary celebration, see Chapter 3. 7 During the mid 2000s, it became common for several

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of the larger Puja committees to have separate persons handling publicity, dealing with sponsors and advertisers, and creating websites on their Puja concepts for award enlistments—as emerged, for instance, in my interviews with Shakuntala Bhattacharya, who called herself the ‘Assistant Secretary of the Publicity and Communication Department’ of the 25 Pally Puja Committee of Khidirpur, on 21 September 2006, and with Anirban Bose, General Secretary of the Jodhpur Park Sharadiya Utsav Committee at the Jodhpur Park Puja site, on 3 September 2007. Jugantar, 20 and 24 October 1958. Cited in Sandip Bandyopadhyay, Durga Pujo: Borobari Thekey Barowari, p. 37. Tushar Sanyal, ‘Durgotsab: Tin dashaker tukro khobor’, ABP, 1 October 1983, reports on comparative budgets and expenses of Barawari Pujas in the city of the past and present, and places the estimated collective Puja expenditure of that year against a rough estimate of a spending of Rs. 5 lakhs by 60 Barowari Pujas in the city in 1963. Report in ABP, 25 September 1987, which referred to the College Square Puja as having one of the biggest budgets that year, exceeding Rs. 4 lakhs. Interview with Suman Chatterjee, Working President of the Babubagan Club Puja, on 15 September 2003. This Puja, which began in 1961 as the Dhakuria Sarbojanin Durgotsav, is organized by a local club which still calls itself the Dhakuria Cultural Centre. Subhro Niyogi, ‘At Rs.123 crores, Puja spend(ing) touches new high this year’, Times of India, Calcutta Times, 27 October 2012. ‘Puja Guide’, The Telegraph, Friday Salt Lake supplement, Calcutta, 19 October 2012. A detailed overview of the new kinds of corporate advertising, awards campaigns, sponsorship and ‘eventmanagement’ of the Durga Pujas in Kolkata is provided in a special issue of India Today (Bangali edition), September 25, 2006, on the theme ‘Pujo Jekhaney Ponyo’, with a lead article by Manisha Dasgupta, ‘Pujor Bipanan, Bipananer Pujo’, pp. 21–5. ‘Ananda Plabaneyi Ekakar Utsaber Shilpa o Larai’, ABP, October 19, 2007. Interview with Anirban Bose, General Secretary of the Jodhpur Park Sharadiya Utsav Committee, on 3 September 2007. There were later complaints from the Puja committee about their experience with Kolkata TV turning sour, with a hold up of almost Rs 11 lakhs of post-Puja payment to the committee, as the television channel’s fortunes plummeted. By the end of the 2000s, gateway installations put up by different advertisers had begun to take over the approach to all the heavily sponsored Pujas. The charges for these gateways move

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upwards from Rs. 30,000–80,000 and more, depending on the neighbourhood and the closeness of these structures to the main pandal, with their installation and lighting costs borne by the Puja committees. While several primelocation Pujas are still opting for single big sponsors like the Times of India group, the bulk of Puja organizers seem to prefer multiple sponsors as a more secure and lucrative source of funds. ‘Durga Puja goes corporate’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 26 July 2008. Interview with Sayantan Pathak, member of IFSD and Badamtala Ashar Sangha Puja Committee, 14 September 2010. For instance, the event management firm Offbeat introduced that year a new contest for dhakis called the ‘Rhythm Dhaker Ladai’, giving Rs. 20,000, 15,000 and 10,000 as first, second and third prizes to competing groups of drummers (along with Rs. 10,000, 7,000 and 5,000 to the Puja committees employing these drummers), with a view to aiding the poor rural dhakis who take on this seasonal occupation every Puja. Manisha Dasgupta, ‘Pujor Bipanan, Bipananer Pujo’, p. 24. Discussion with Kausthuv Bhadra, then Director, Mudra Communications, Kolkata, 19 August 2009. ‘Formula 3 for Festivity’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 17 September 2006; Anirban Das Mahapatra, ‘Puja in the times of the Net’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 1 October, 2006. The competitive status of a Puja and the social resources of a neighbourhood came to be reflected in its access to this new form of web promotion. Thus, in 2006, while the Abasar Sarbojanin Puja on Townsend Road used a segment of its Rs. 7 lakh budget to organize a press conference and screen a short film on their ‘sand sculpture’ theme for the year at Saturday Club, and the 66 Pally Club of Kalighat floated a website with the financial and technical help of NRI para networks, the Lake Pally Club of Santoshpur regretted that they were not able to mobilize adequate funds to get a website designed. This belt of the older colonial city—around Alipore, Park Street, Camac Street, Loudon and Rawdon Street, Chowringhee, Esplanade and BBD Bagh—hosts few Pujas and remains outside the festival topography. By the mid 2000s, something akin to Kolkata-style ‘theme’ Pujas and award-contests had begun to spread through different parts of New Delhi, from Mayur Vihar and Model Town to Safdarjang Enclave, Chittaranjan Park and Surajkund, near Faridabad, with budgets that were three to four times higher than the most ostentatious Kolkata Pujas. One measure of this higher outflow of funds was the Times of India ‘Durga Devi Namastute’ award that was begun in 2005 with a first prize of 1 lakh, when the highest Puja prize denominations in Calcutta were between Rs.25,000 to 50,000. See, ‘“Nari Shakti” bags TOI pandal award’, and ‘Tribute to a living

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tradition’, Times City, New Delhi, Times of India, 30 September 2006, 20 October 2007. There is also nothing comparable in Kolkata’s Durga Pujas to the ostentations and scale of funds that flow from politicians, underworld dons and film stars into the Mumbai Ganapati festival. The city’s most expensive Pujas cannot compete in their wealth with Mumbai’s ‘richest Ganapati’ of the GSV Seva Mandal, which in 2011 was said to have received Rs, 5.75 crores in cash, and ornaments worth Rs. 15 crores. Shashi Baliga, ‘On either side of Ganesha’, The Hindu Magazine, Sunday, 16 September 2012. In a move from the inner idol-making worksheds to public street sites, some prominent Puja organizers are now using the day of the Rathajatra festival to formally announce the inauguration of their Durga Puja season. Interview with Sanatan Rudra Pal at his Ultadanga idolmaking workshop, also called the Jayanti Art Museum, 31 August 2003, 20 September 2004. The full annual cycle of Pujas in Bengal, the varying tempo of seasonal demands for different kinds of idols at the workshops of Kumartuli, and the centrality of the Durga Puja, seconded by Kali Puja, in the work calendar of idol makers, is laid out in Moumita Sen, Enframing Kumartuli; A Study in Space, Practice and Images, M.Phil. dissertation, Jadavpur University and the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, June 2011, pp. 29–33. During the period of my study, this was true of the most sought-after Puja designers in the contemporary festival field—like Amar Sarkar, Gopal Poddar, Dipak Ghosh, Bhabatosh Sutar, Sushanta Pal, Prasanta Pal or Shibshankar Das. Their careers and productions are discussed in Chapters 5 and 6. In 2007, the Jodhpur Park Puja committee mentioned that they had received ‘design quotations’ from 13 designers and pandal-makers, which were considered by 10 members of the core committee before they approached Dipak Ghosh and placed their bets on a Himachal temple replica design he proposed. Dipak Ghosh, who resides and runs his graphic design studio in the vicinity and specializes in exact replicas of historic architecture (see Chapter 5), began his Puja designing career in 2001 at Jodhpur Park when he had first approached the Puja with a design of a ruined zamindari mansion. Thereafter, he made his mark on the festival scene out of his work for this Puja. Interview with pandal makers, Anjan Pal of Pal Decorators of Shantipur, Nadia, at the College Square Puja, 13 September 2006, and Sukesh Mondal of Mondal Decorators of EC Block, Salt Lake, at the FD Block Puja, Salt Lake, 15 September 2007. Interview with the copy-writing and creative team (with Sudipta Aich Bhowmick, Souvik Misra and the head of the firm, Abeer Chakrabarty) of Bates, Kolkata, at the firm office, 5 August 2011.

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29 This became evident from the interviews we conducted over different years with Puja committee members in several small non-elite neighbourhoods—like Telengabagan near Ultadanga, Lalabagan at Maniktala, Nabin Pally and Nalin Sarkar Street at Hatibagan (all in north and north-east Kolkata), the 25 Pally Club at Khidirpur (in west Kolkata), the Rajdanga Naba Uday Sangha and Bosepukur Shitala Mandir clubs of Kasba (in east Kolkata) or the Ajeya Sanghati and 41 Pally clubs of Haridebpur (in the deep south). The availability of young people in these paras and the socio-economic profile of its residents, many of whom run local shops or small businesses, allows for a particular investment of time and passion for organizing the Pujas. This is in marked contrast to elite localities like Ekdalia or Jodhpur Park, where the equivalent age groups either live abroad or in other Indian cities, or are employed in highlevel professions that allow little time for such activity. For instance, with Anirban Bose of the Jodhpur Park Sharadiya Utsav Committee (interviewed on 3 September 2007), we had a different social category of Puja organizer in keeping with the character of the neighbourhood. At 29, he was an associate regional manager of ICICI Prudential Bank, but took pride in the time he carved out for planning and seeking sponsors for his parar Puja. He bemoaned the lack of similar involvement with the Pujas of today’s younger generation at Jodhpur Park, leaving the Puja organizing primarily in the hands of older residents, leading often to bitter frictions between the older and newer generation of committee members. 30 Arup Biswas, ‘Mission Durga Pujo, Start Basanta Panchami-tei’, ABP, 3 October 2011. 31 Times of India, Calcutta Times, 27 August 2011. 32 While a number of mega Pujas like Arup Biswas’ Suruchi Sangha Puja at New Alipore present a highly managerial and systematized picture of their organizational activities, as is apparently the requirement of today’s brand of theme Pujas, the archetypal picture of a standard parar Puja is of a spontaneous and chaotic coming together of a mixed bag of local die-hard Puja enthusiasts. For them, ‘it’s not just about organizing a community event…It’s about defeating the mundane, rising above 9 to 5 jobs, finding appreciation in the eyes of pandal-hoppers, giving interviews and feeling like a star’. Kundan Chakrabarty, ‘Festive Fervour (A peek into the behind-the-scene action that goes in to the making of a barowari Durga Puja)’, Graphiti, The Telegraph Magazine, 14 October 2007, provides one of several such light-hearted accounts, with animated illustrations by Debasish Deb. 33 Durga Puja’s arrival on Facebook began to make special news from 2008, with a forerunner here being the Bakulbagan Sarbojanin Durgotsav committee, which put up its 81-year-old history that year on Facebook, along with its theme production for that season on the Vitthala

temple of Hampi. Poulomi Banerjee, ‘Facebook address for autumn festival’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 26 August 2008; ‘Devi now logged on FB’, Times of India, Calcutta Tines, 27 August 2011. 34 Ramratna Pathak, Durgotsab, pp. 4-8, 14-15. 35 Srijata, ‘Dharma Jokhon Utsab’, in India Today (Bengali edition), 25 September 2006. 36 ‘Crowd-pull Policy’, The Telegraph, Friday Salt Lake supplement, Calcutta, 28 September 2007. 37 Now it no longer surprises us to find banners of Pujas from distant corners in the north and south-west of the city, like Tala Park and Behala, coming up in the Gariahat region, or an advertisement for a Puja of Beleghata vying for attention in the crowded Park Circus circle. 38 Interview with Sabyasachi Dasgupta, producer of the Kolkata TV ‘Maha Pujo’ campaign, 9 October 2006. He had been earlier associated with the rival Star Ananda ‘Megastar-Superstar’ programme, and drew heavily on that experience in conceiving and running the 2006 Kolkata TV contest on a slightly bigger scale, ensuring that he had better manpower and infrastructural support than he had had at Star Ananda in conducting the final rounds of judging and selection. Rivalry between Puja clubs and their productions gets reproduced in the equally fervid competitive politics of these television sponsors. 39 The claims of a non-partisan fair judgement is important for all sponsors, and accordingly, Kolkata TV kept the two Pujas at Jodhpur Park and 66 Pally Kalighat that it was wholly sponsoring out of this Maha Pujo contest. 40 These particular fabrications, and the labour and logic of their elaborate simulations of historic architecture, are discussed in Chapter 5. 41 The former was the production of the architectural replica specialist Dipak Ghosh, the latter of the film set designer Rono Banerjee, who had made his name in simulating entire settings of ruined temples and forts in jungles, which became the big crowd-pullers at Pujas like Badamatala Ashar Sangha and Behala Natun Dal. 42 There is a continuous commentary on Durga Puja becoming primarily a festival of consumerism, whereby along with various products and services on offer, the Puja itself becomes a prime object of consumption. See, for example, India Today (Bengali edition), 25 September 2006, on the theme ‘Pujo Jekhaney Ponyo’, and Anjan Ghosh, ‘Durga Puja: A Consuming Passion’, Seminar, no 559, March 2006. 43 ‘If it’s all about money, so be it’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 20 September 2003, cited in Sudeshna Banerjee, Durga Puja: Celebrating the Goddess Then and Now, p.61. 44 Puja Power, A Brandwatch Bengal Series, 2011, Vol.1. ‘Mapping the Festive Spirit’, Kolkata: ABP, July 2011,

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compiled and edited by Anutapa Bera, Research and Market Intelligence, ABP and GFK Mode. I am grateful to Ram Ray of the advertising firm Response, for bringing this volume to my attention. Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict, first published 1968, London: Verso, 1996, pp. 178, 187–90 (emphasis mine). I refer here specifically to the Boroline advertisements appearing in ABP on 11 and 16 October 1980, where the focal theme is Aithijhya (Tradition/Heritage), where this scented antiseptic cream (which was then marking half a century of its manufacture) was said to be as deeply a part of Bengali tradition as the Devi was part of these age-old artistic and iconographic traditions. (See 1.25) ‘Not a commercial affair’, The Statesman, Calcutta, 25 September 2006. The article is based on interviews with both veteran ad professionals like Ram Ray of Response and younger professionals like Souvik Misra of Bates and Kaustuv Bhadra of Mudra, Kolkata, who all voiced the same preference for the ‘soft feel’ Puja advertisements of the past and commented on the lack of creativity and innovation in the advertising clutter of the present. Interview with Joy Aich Bhowmick and Souvik Misra of Bates 141, 5 August 2011, and with Ram Ray of Response, 31 August, 2011. These examples are all drawn from the cover story by Sumanto Chattopadhyay, Creative Director, Ogilvy and Mather, South Asia, called ‘The Divine Network’ which talks of how ‘The Thakur family’s annual vacation is a tech-savvy affair this year’, in Graphiti, The Telegraph Magazine, 2 October 2011. Chandrima S. Bhattacharya, in ‘Living the Pujas’, Graphiti, The Telegraph Magazine, 1 October 2006, pens a witty account of such a build-up to a city-wide ‘image makeover’, one that spreads from the ads, promos and campaigns to the ‘theme’ Pujas of every neighbourhood and to herself as a consumer. ‘Bigger, Better, Longer Puja’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 14 October 2007. For a satirical take on these inaugurations and the way Puja organizers were searching the whole country with a fine-tooth comb for ‘openers’ for their ‘four day long innings’, see The Statesman, Notebook, Calcutta, 25 September 2006. It is worth noting that, in the mid 2000s, the rush for inaugurations by politicians, celebrities and newsmakers of all kinds were marking out the older styles of Puja as against the newer genre of ‘art’ Pujas which saw themselves as reaching out to a different kind of public and kept away from such publicity gimmicks. Currently, these distinctions have disappeared as the Chief Minister and the Governor’s competing race for inaugurations have taken over all high-profile Pujas, and have brought

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all artist-designed Pujas within its fold. Newspapers are now flooded with photographs of Mamata Banerjee’s Puja inaugurations, especially in clubs directly patronized by Trinamool Congress ministers and councillors. See, for example, ‘Mamatamay Udbodhan’ [a pun on the name that means mercy and kindness], ABP, 8 October 2013. 54 A newspaper report of 1985 takes us on a mind-boggling journey past a 68 feet high combination of the Konarak and Thanjavur temple at Mohammed Ali Park, a 100 feet high Buland Darwaza of Fatehpur Sikri at the Ekdalia Evergreen Puja and the Delhi Red Fort near Wellington Square, and thereafter to the Russian Bolshoi Theatre, the Moscow National Library and the new Paris Airport Terminal all cropping up on the streets of Sealdah, Beleghata and Howrah. Debashish Bandyopadhyay, ‘Pujoy notun ki kora jay tar beporoya proyas’ ABP, 20 October 1985 55 For an analysis of the early face of the new art profile of the festival, with studies of four diverse types of ‘theme’ Pujas strewn across four equally diverse neighbourhoods, see my article, ‘From Spectacle to Art: The Changing Aesthetics of Durga Puja in Contemporary Calcutta’ in Art India (The Art News Magazine of India), special issue on ‘The Festival Aesthetic’, Volume IX, Issue III, Quarter III, 2004, reprinted in Pratapaditya Pal, ed., The Goddess: The Power and the Glory, pp.54–81. 56 Swati Chattopadhyay, ‘Fungible Geographies’ in Unlearning the City, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, pp.228–9. She quotes from Mary Prat Brady, ‘The Fungibility of Borders’, Nepantla: Views from the South, 1:1, 200, pp.170–91. 57 The heading of a Bengali newspaper article—Debashish Bhattacharya, ‘Chena Rastaye Hariye Jawar Din’ ABP, 29 September, 1987—aptly captures the spirit of these Puja tours. 58 Timothy Mitchell, ‘The World as Exhibition’, Comparative Studies in History and Society, Vol. 31, No. 9, 1989, reprinted as ‘Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Complex’, in Donald Preziosi, ed. The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 460–61. 59 The original Bengali essay, titled ’Pujor Kolkatar Bikolpolok’, was published in Baromas, Sharadiya, 1997. The English translation by Manas Ray appears in Amit Chaudhuri, ed., Memory’s Gold: Writings on Calcutta, New Delhi: Penguin/Viking, 2008, pp 291-304. 60 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, trans. by Jay Miskoweic, Diacritics, Spring 1986, pp. 22–7. The text is based on a lecture given by Foucault in 1967, which was posthumously published in the French journal, Architecture-Mouvement-Continuite, in October 1984. 61 Ibid., pp. 25–6.

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62 Discussed in my essay, ‘From Spectacle to Art’, Marg reprint, pp. 65–7. 63 ‘Summons for Potter Pandal’, and ‘Pandal wins reprieve’, in The Telegraph, Calcutta, 11 and 13 October 2007. The paradox of the copyright violation charges brought by Penguin India, as the distributor of Harry Potter books in India, against this festival remake, and the pyrrhic triumph of the local copy over these charges is dealt with in my article, ‘Conceits of the Copy: Travelling Replicas in Colonial and Postcolonial India’, in Partha Chatterjee, Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Bodhisattva Kar, ed., New Cultural Histories of India: Materiality and Practices, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014. 64 This rift was particularly manifest in the case of the main Jodhpur Park Puja, especially in 2002, when massive external crowds at the splendid replica of the Dilwara temple of Mount Abu created here by |Dipak Ghosh, disallowed local residents from giving their morning anjali on Ashtami morning. The animosities in this neighbourhood have a long history, resulting in the late 2000s in a bitter legal battle over custody of the park Puja between older residents and the Puja committee. 65 Swati Chattopadhyay, ‘Fungible Geographies’, p. 220. 66 ‘Puja challenge for new Kolkata police set-up’, Times News Network, 30 August 2011. Kolkata Durga Puja Road Map, 2011. 67 ABP, September 30, 2011. Mamata Banerjee’s ‘art work’ (something she claims to have done ‘in no time at all’) that went on these Kolkata and Bidhananagar Police Commissionerate Puja Guide Maps of 2012 was an eye-sore, but had to be featured by her police force in tune with the new political order of the day. What seemed particularly jarring was its inclusion on covers

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that had earlier featured works of artists like Jamini Roy, Ramananda Bandopadhyay, Prakash Karmakar, or K.G. Subramanian. John Frow, ‘Tourism and the Semiotics of Nostalgia’ in Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997, p. 93. To quote a 2004 Internet service provider banner on the street, Hetey noi, netey dekhun. The humourous rhyming of the words ‘hetey’ (walking) and ‘netey’ (on the net) is lost in translation. The Telegraph, Calcutta, 25 October 2001. ‘Aaj Ashtami’, Times of India, Calcutta Times,, 2 October 2007. ‘Mahashtamir Janasrot’, ABP, 19 October 2007. Interview with designer Amar Sarkar, at the awardwinning Barisha Shrishti Puja, Behala, 19 September 2002. Interview with designer Bandhan Raha and Subir Ghosh, treasurer, Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja Committee, 27 September 2003. ‘Market Forces Sneak into Puja Pandals’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 26 October 2001. But a trend of privileged ‘ticketed’ spectatorship is once again surfacing, driven by the hyper-publicity of the media and the pressure of crowds. In 2013, there was a report of an organization selling VIP passes for a selection of twenty of the city’s ‘theme’ Pujas, charging Rs. 85 for each Puja and offering a package pass for Rs. 1,700 covering all twenty. The offer was being promoted on the organization’s website, with the facility of having the passes delivered to buyers by Shashti. Some 2000 such passes were said to have sold online. ‘Taka dileyi VIP pass, sahaj Durga-darshan’, ABP, 9 October 2013.

TWO

The Making of a New Civic Event administering the pujas As Kolkata gears up every year for its grandest public festival, an elaborate scheme of preparatory arrangements commences among the city’s municipal administration, with the Kolkata Police playing the key role of initiator and organizer. Five weeks before the start of Durga Puja, the Police begin setting up coordination meetings in the city, to ensure the ‘peaceful celebration’ of the forthcoming season of festivals.1 Like the Puja road guides, the invitation cards to these coordination meetings are also given a special festival look, with the motif of the three eyes of the goddess gleaming against an autumn sky under the logo of the Kolkata Police.2 These meetings bring together the divisional heads of the police force with the executive authorities of all the main branches of urban municipal services—the Public Works Department (PWD), the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC), the Kolkata Municipal Development Authority (KMDA), the Kolkata Improvement Trust (KIT), the Calcutta Electrical Supply Corporation (CESC), the West Bengal State Electricity Board (WBSEB), the West Bengal Fire Services, the Calcutta State Transport Corporation (CSTC) and the Kolkata Port Trust. It is, by all counts, a formidable gathering of bureaucracy. Also drawing in representatives of some big Puja committees, these meetings are intended to arrive at

a set of commonly agreed rules and regulations for conducting the Durga Pujas, as well as the Lakshmi and Kali Pujas that follow. The emphasis of these meetings is on creating a climate of agreement and dialogue between the civic authorities and the Puja community, to make for a disciplined law-abiding festival: one where rules and norms are to be voluntarily observed, rather than imposed from above. For the Pujas, we are constantly reminded, constitute a unique time in the life of the city, the state and its people, a time of conviviality, goodwill, and harmony between classes and communities. The message is driven home in large festival hoardings that are routinely put up by the information and cultural wing of the West Bengal government. (See 2.1) The work of all sections of administration is to facilitate this mass public celebration by putting in place, to their best capacity, all municipal facilities and services and by extending all their help for the management of the festival. Conversely, the onus is on Puja organizers and the public to abide by the prescribed regulations, to temper their revelries with restraint and respect for the rights of other citizens. However, notions of civic rights and obligations, like those of licenses and limits, remain highly fraught in this domain of popular festivity. What keeps surfacing are contesting definitions of the ‘public’ and the ‘civic’,

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in the name of the goddess resist the orderliness and self-discipline that goes with the epithet of ‘civic’.5 I will be arguing, on the contrary, that the claims of the ‘civic’ have continually been at play in the changing character of Kolkata’s Durga Puja celebrations, in the past, and even more powerfully in the present. One of my key concerns in this chapter is to locate the changing face of today’s Durga Pujas within the broader transformations of the public culture of Kolkata, and its manifold drive towards the refurbishing of civil society.6

2.1 Government hoarding appealing for peace, communal harmony and goodwill during the festival season, 2010

that pitch authorities against different localities and communities, and divide the many who are deeply invested in these celebrations from those who wish to steer clear of them and resent the many inconveniences they cause in the already chaotic life of the city.3 What kinds of special liberties can Puja organizers and publics claim in the name of the city’s all-important festival? And how are differing notions of citizenship and rights to urban spaces and amenities played out in the current scenario of Puja festivities? The Pujas as a time of dramatic metamorphosis of everyday existence—as a carnivalesque escape from the drab and the mundane, as an annual salve for lives otherwise steeped in poverty and calamities, as the season of celebration that Bengalis await the whole year through—is brought face to face here with the festival as a new object of urban governance. It is commonplace, from both a historical and contemporary perspective, to pitch the unruly plebian cultures of such mass festivals in opposition to the regimes of municipal control, to see these as continuously testing the limits and resources of civic administration.4 It has even been suggested that the notion of a ‘civic festival’ is something of an oxymoron—that the popular, plebian dimensions of events like the Durga Pujas in Bengal or the Ganesh Utsav in Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu inevitably

The making of a civic, secular event, it will be shown, has a long lineage going back to the early history of the festival in the colonial city. This history has produced its own narratives of a critical shift from the hedonisms and decadence of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century to new cultures of urbanity and civility of the early twentieth century, as the Durga Puja moved from the courtyards of wealthy mansions to open streets and was transformed from the festival of the elite to the famed ‘festival of all’.7 It is important, I argue, to set off this earlier history of the forging of the new, cleansed Sarbojanin Pujas with the recent moves to revamp the image of the festival. Much of the ‘newness’ of today’s Pujas can be seen to lie in a perceived transition from the ‘low culture’ event of the 1970s and 1980s to the new ‘high culture’, civic-minded festival of the present: one that lays a high premium, not just on artistic innovation and refinement, but equally on community spirit, public safety, social service, protection of the environment and nonencroachment of public spaces.8 We will be looking at the way this sense of a transition is catapulted from the past to the present and variously played out in new regimes of administrative regulations as well in a changing gamut of corporate promotional strategies, producing a close equation between the new ‘artistic’ and ‘civic’ contours of the event. Let me begin by considering some of the main issues of deliberation and surveillance that emerge from the police coordination meetings. One of the first of these deals with the granting of civic licenses to all community Pujas, with Puja committees given a deadline for submitting their application for clearance of permission on authorized forms to the local police station. Permission, in each case, has to

the making of a new civic event be simultaneously cleared with multiple bodies, on payment of the requisite fees—with the Electricity Board for temporary connectivity during the festival, with the Fire Services for adhering to the prescribed norms of fire safety in the material and design of pandal constructions, and with the KMC and the police for holding the Pujas on public roads. Permission must also be granted by the last two authorities to each Puja for the immersion of its images, with strict rules laid out about completion of all immersions within the three days after Bijoya Dashami, on specified locations on the city’s river banks, with immersions also permitted within certain neighbourhood water bodies. In a concession to the extended time scale of the festival, the dates for the Durga Puja came to be marked out for six days, from Panchami to Dashami, and the period for immersions stretched for a further three evenings and nights.9 Over the past years, the Kolkata Police has, every year, congratulated itself on sticking to the West Bengal Government guidelines of disallowing any new community Puja, and of implementing the prescribed schedule of beginnings and endings for each Puja. A similar roster of rules and regulations were also brought into effect by the new Bidhannagar Police Commissionerate during 2011–12 for all the Pujas under its purview—with a clear notification that permission would be granted only to already existing Puja in their previously sanctioned locations.10 There is a strict monitoring of time and numbers, with the entity of the authorized Puja becoming a model of a monitored civic festival. Another important set of guidelines and obligations concerns the use of public spaces—where there is a close trade off between the municipal services that are to be provided and the rules that are to be enforced. In a city that is notorious for its potholed roads, waterlogging during every monsoon, and open garbage dumps, it becomes a prime responsibility of the KMC and PWD to clear garbage and sewerage and complete road repairs by a targeted date before the Pujas. There are inevitably many lags between intention and execution in these undertakings, most of which come up for discussion at the coordination meetings.11 It is also the responsibility of municipal authorities to improve lighting arrangements on all streets and pandal sites, especially along the stretches of the Strand Bank Road and the river ghats where the

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immersions take place. Even more than the conducting of the Pujas, the safe conducting of the immersions seems every year to be the greater preoccupation of the KMC, KMDA and Kolkata Police, with the Port Trust, River Traffic and Circular Railway officials drawn in to ensure the removal of overheard cables and iron bars to allow the smooth passage of the large idols en-route to their immersion in the river. With the installation of overhead high-tension lines along the rail tracks between Baghbazar and Prinsep Ghat stations, the Circular Railways authorities are asked to suspend train services on the nights of the immersions. And the same concerns of safety have led the police to regulate the height of the Durga idols, exhorting clay modelers and Puja clubs to ensure that the height of the images, placed on trucks for transportation, do not exceed 17.4 feet and can pass beneath the overhead cable lines and bars.12 (See 2.2)

2.2 Regulating the height of Durga images after their loading on trucks. Outside the workshop of Pradip Rudra Pal, Telengabagan, Ultadanga, 2009

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2.3 Road space left free beside the Hindusthan Park Puja pandal, 2007

Balancing its road repair and clean-up drives are a set of controls that the KMC imposes on the extent to which public spaces are to be given over to Puja organizers, sponsors and surrounding stallholders. As part of permission procedures, Puja committees have to submit and clear with the corporation a pandal circulation plan that is expected to leave 75 per cent of the space free for crowd movement. Pujas being organized on public thoroughfares are also obliged to keep a minimum of 10 feet of road space free for the passage of pedestrian and vehicular traffic. (See 2.3) Furthermore, display of commercial banners and hoardings is discouraged (although, as is increasingly evident every season, never effectively prohibited) within 50 metres of important road intersections to prevent traffic interference and obstruction.13 (See 2.4) More contentious were the KMC’s attempts during 2006 to extract taxes from all advertisers for commercial banners and stalls that were installed on public grounds around pandal sites. Complaints kept surfacing against these impositions—both among

the smaller Puja clubs who feared the driving away of potential advertisers from their neighbourhoods, and equally among the large Pujas of College Square or Ekdalia Evergreen Club, who asserted their own right to collect these taxes from stalls and banners.14 Conversely, the municipal authorities argued that, if the Pujas had become primarily about commerce, publicity and big money, then they too had a claim to a small slice of this cake.15 Throughout the administration of the festival, we found ripples of such contending definitions of public property and interests, with the KMC’s custodial assertions over spaces and services set off by their efforts to spruce up the festival city and keep it free for the unhindered movement of pedestrians and vehicles. In recent years, the most powerful of these regulatory regimes has been brought into force by the CESC and the WBSEB,16 over the temporary electric connections that are granted for the illumination of Puja pandals. Here, again, the concerns are as

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2.4 Cluster of Puja announcement banners at the crowded Gariahat Road-Bijon Setu junction, 2009

much about public safety—about securing the pandals against electrical accidents and hazards—as about the government’s rightful revenue, and the prevention of illegal power lines and pilferage.17 The tightening of administrative control over the festival during the past decade has been best operationalized in the police drive to prevent illicit tapping of power in Puja lighting, and in the threatened cancellation of licenses and imposition of heavy fines on all erring Puja clubs.18 In turn, Puja committees, both big and small, tend to be most resentful of what they see as the inflated electricity bills that are extracted in advance from them, on the basis of the previous year’s festival consumption, as the condition for the installation of a temporary meter, with no provisions for refunding unspent amounts. This has been one of the recurrent themes of complaint of the representatives of big Puja clubs against the CESC authorities at the police coordination meetings.19 Outside these meetings too, we encountered the anger of members of the small Puja club of Santoshpur against what they termed the ‘Tughlaqi’ despotism of the CESC.20 A people’s festival, it is argued by many like them, should not be used as an occasion for the enhancement of government earnings.

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On a variety of fronts, a sense of public dues is constantly pitted against the activities of the administration. What has also surfaced is a deep rift within the notion of the public, with the Calcutta High Court and municipal authorities playing an active role in sifting out one order of civic rights and claims from those of the unregulated public sphere of the Pujas. The assumed freedom of Pujas to temporarily block roads and alleys with their pandals have to contend more and more with new assertions about public inconvenience and infringement of citizens’ rights. Thus, the Singhi Park Sarbojanin Puja on Dover Lane, known for its mega-sized pandals that were said to have ‘stirred the hornet’s nest of encroachment on public space’, (see 2.5) began opting for the ‘vertical route’ in 2006, leaving 13 feet of road space free and keeping the pandal open on three sides for vehicles and pedestrians to pass through.21 Particularly striking are banners that began to come up at Puja sites, proclaiming the civic duty of organizers to abide by the High Court rules about permissible road space that can be taken up by the festival pavilions (see 2.6)—even as sections of the local print media have continued their unrelenting campaign against what they term ‘road-hog’ pandals.22 According to these Court guidelines, the broader the road, the greater must be the space left free by pandals coming up on these.

2.5 Singhi Park Puja pandal occupying almost the entire width of Dover Lane, 2006

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in the name of the goddess all-importance of corporate funding in sustaining the current festival has, in most cases, rendered neighbourhood subscriptions of token value, pushing fund-raising endeavours on to a different plane of wooing corporate sponsors and enlisting for Puja awards. Loud day and night music at the pandals was another long-standing Puja indulgence that came under discipline and surveillance. Among the many rules handed out to Puja organizers in the police coordination meetings are increasingly stringent norms about the locations of microphones, the permissible times of their use, and the sound decibel limits that need to be observed. In each of these cases, as with numerous areas of public civic activity in the contemporary city, the Kolkata Police and Municipal Corporation have at their aid the resolutions of the Calcutta High Court and the threat of judicial injunctions to enforce this regulatory regime.

2.6 Puja organisers’ banner, apologizing for occupying road space at Padmapukur Road, 2007

Going by a roughly one-third distribution of spaces, pandals occupying roads over 30 feet wide are now rule-bound to keep 10 feet of space open. Much of these contentions between civic authorities and Puja organizers about blocking roads are contingent on the spatial morphology of a neighbourhood. So, while in the narrow alleys of Hatibagan such banners are as necessary as Puja installations that have no option but to fully block house fronts and occupy the entire road space (See 2.7), these restrictions fall smoothly in place in a township like Salt Lake with a radically contrasted Puja topography, where every block Puja has its own park that it can legitimately occupy. (See 2.8, 2.9) Under equally strict scrutiny is another sphere of public violation and indiscipline of earlier Pujas, one that brought them their greatest notoriety. Gone, we are told, are the bad days of the forced extortion of subscriptions from para residents, when gangs of young men resorted to their infamous terror and harassment tactics. Instead, it is now contingent on all Puja committees to abide by the norms of voluntary contributions, to collect subscriptions only on duly authorized, stamped books that are available at local police stations, and that are to be handed back to them for their records of donors and amounts.23 The

A new wave of environmental awareness also rose to prominence within this structure of civic regulations, registering its presence in the formation, in the mid 1990s, of a state Pollution Control Board (PCB) which has been striving to curb several polluting practices of the Puja festivities. Noise pollution has been a long-term concern, going back in time to the 1980s, well before the coming into being of the PCB,

2.7 Narrow alley hosting the Hatibagan Sarbojanin Puja, 2009

2.8 Buddhist pagoda tableau housed within the park grounds of BE Block (East) Puja, Salt Lake, 2009

2.9 Large temple complex under construction in the sprawling park at the FD Block Puja, Salt Lake, 2010

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2.10 A ‘Green Puja’ installation designed by the artist’ group, Environmental Art Collective, at the Barisha Club Puja, 2010. Photograph by Rituparna Basu

when we find the municipal corporation routinely imposing penalties on Puja clubs, not just for road blockage and electricity pilferage, but also for the unrestricted use of loudspeakers on pandal sites.24 It also seems to have been the one area of relative success of the government’s prohibitory strategies in controlling sound decibels in the city. In marked contrast to the continuing violations, every season, of the High Court orders banning the sale and use of loud fire-crackers during Kali Puja and Diwali, the Durga Pujas set a new trend since the 2000s of ‘loud speakers playing soft in most pandals’ across the city, with only 18 Puja committees fined in 2001 for flouting the sound decibel limits.25 In keeping with the changed imperatives of coordinated melodies to match the new artistic themes of Durga Pujas, most organizing units came to have little problem with abiding by the 65 decibel limit on their use of loudspeakers, easing the work of the eight PCB

mobile teams which have been keeping vigilance on the festival sound levels in Kolkata proper, Salt Lake and Howrah. Protecting the tree coverage in the city has been another new area of intervention by ‘green’ activists and the State Forestry Department. In 2004, the latter pressed upon the corporation officials to provide Puja committees with a set of strict codes and guidelines for the trimming of trees in their localities at the police coordination meetings, and worked out a scheme for special ‘green squads’ at pandal sites to prevent illegal damage of trees.26 Going progressively ‘green’ has been a particularly striking feature of the contemporary city Pujas, an issue that swings from activism to a spreading fashion and fad, spilling over from the concerns of authorities into those of the media and Puja organizers, generating a range of environmental-themed productions for the Pujas.27

the making of a new civic event (See 2.10) Over the past years, we have seen local English dailies, prime among them the city edition of the Times of India, carrying on a concerted ‘Green Puja’ campaign and giving it full page coverage in the build up to the festival, and special environmental ‘Green Puja’ awards by the Rotary Clubs adding to the festival’s ever-expanding awards scenario. (See 2.11) In 2010, the colour ‘green’ of Kolkata’s Durga Pujas took on both an ecological and political hue28—with the city flooded with hoardings announcing a Puja designing venture by Mamata Banerjee (then Chief minister-in-waiting) at Bakulbagan in Bhowanipur on the theme of a more ‘humanitarian, improved earth’. (See 3.35)

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Far more contentious and difficult have been the moves to check river pollution and regulate idol immersion procedures. The campaign to save the Ganga and Hooghly stepped up from 2003, when some NGOs in the city took up the cause alongside

the PCB, collecting water samples from the river to prove the phenomenal rise in river pollution after the immersions.29 From that year onwards, there have been continuing attempts to enforce several kinds of regulations and corrective arrangements. There has been, for instance, a concerted move to encourage idol makers and Puja designers to switch to lead-free paints for the images, a more expensive option that some of the designer, big-budget Pujas have taken on and publicized, but which very few of the artisanal groups of clay modelers can afford.30 Among the earlier measures, firstly, special bins and cages were placed along the riverbank, for depositing all toxic, non-biodegradable or reusable material, which were to be stripped off the idols before placing them in the waters. (See 2.12) Secondly, the KMC was made responsible for clearing the river of all idol residues within 24 hours of the end of immersions, and asked to extract the costs of this laborious task from the Puja organizers. For several years, neither

2.11 A pavilion on tree worship with the ‘Green Puja No Smoking’ sign, Jatra Shuru Sangha Puja, Garia, 2012

2.12 West Bengal Pollution Control Board immersion regulations notice, 2008

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arrangement found a satisfactory response. In 2003, the Congress Mayor, Subrata Mukherjee (a major champion of Puja festivities in all their excesses), was accused of ‘soft-footing’ the orders for the river cleanup and refusing to alienate Puja clubs by charging them extra fees for this work. In the years that followed, in a reversal of stand, the CPI(M) Mayor, Bikash Bhattacharya, threatened to move the High Court for a ban on immersion of Durga idols in the Hooghly if the litter removal and cleaning operations were not enforced. It was at his suggestion that the KMC raised its fee for granting licenses to Pujas to raise the 25 lakhs that was needed in 2007 to clear the Hooghly of immersion refuse —a suggestion that threatened to drive a deeper wedge between the civic authorities and the Puja organizers.31 Several questions have begun to hang darkly over the festival city.32 How far can a celebration that is constitutively embedded in the open public sphere of the city survive this regime of rules and prohibitions? To what extent can its long-standing practices— especially those as crucial to the tradition of Durga worship as the immersion of idols in the river—be transformed to fit the new environmental demands of a cleaner, unpolluted Hooghly? Conversely, as many within the interventionist lobbies would ask, if the Durga Puja is to continue in its current megadimensions, how realistic are these moves to save the city from the unavoidable wear and tear of this mammoth annual extravaganza? Can the Durga Puja, in its thick spread and in-growth within the

city, ever be hemmed in and relocated like Kolkata’s other cherished cultural event, the annual Book Fair? The years from 2006 to 2008 saw Kolkata’s political leadership, municipal administration, booksellers and public deeply divided over the prohibition of the book fair on the sprawling greens of the Maidan, and its shift to other fairground sites. The right to preserve the Maidan (the city’s precious green lungs) found itself pitted against equally volatile assertions of public rights to hold the Book Fair on an unreduced scale on the very grounds of its prohibition. As intellectuals and environmentalists, organizers and citizens relentlessly battled over these rights to return or not to return the Book Fair to the Maidan, the indulgences of the same administrative regime vis-à-vis the mauling of public parks, roads and the river by Durga Puja festivities inevitably crept into these debates. This brings us back, once again, to the issue of the exceptionality of the Durga Puja in the life of the city—a status that is held high as much by those by whom the festival is hosted as by those wishing to discipline and contain it. As a people’s festival and as the biggest consumer event in the state’s calendar, the spirit and congeniality of the celebration must be left untarnished, even as its excesses need to be controlled and its image revamped to suit the changing demands of civil society. The maintenance of ‘goodwill’ between administration and citizens during the time of the Pujas has always featured topmost in all discourses on the festival, with a

A strong civilian discourse on communal harmony during the Durga Pujas dates back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the years of Moderate and Swadeshi nationalism. Newspapers like the Bengalee (Editorial, 29 September, 1906), appealed, ‘let us profit by the legend of the Bijoya Dashami ceremony, and once again let the voice of amity and good-will be heard among all [Hindu, Muslim and Christian] sections of our great community’ and others like the Hindoo Patriot (October 15, 1904), notwithstanding its critique of idol worship, upheld the festivities as a time of social harmony among communities. In recent times, we find a different kind of intervention by police authorities against the use of socially or communally sensitive themes in Pujas. So, in 2006, the idol maker Dilip Pal was censured for modeling his Asura in the image of the controversial coach of the Indian cricket team, Greg Chapell, just as Asuras resembling Osama Bin Laden had been strictly forbidden in 2001. And light-makers, who specialize in depicting the most topical themes, were asked not to portray that year’s college trekking trip tragedy in the Purulia hills, where three female students mysteriously died. As the Deputy Commissioner of Police ruled, ‘The retelling of the mishap will trigger an unsavoury controversy, just as the Indian cricket coach as demon may be provocative in the home town of Sourav Ganguly.’ (The Telegraph, Calcutta, 6 September 2006).

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continuous guard against any possible communal provocations or offence to public sensibilities in Puja themes and motifs. (See text box) Thus, we find that what balances the regimes of bans and fines on errant Pujas each season, are unparalleled offers of services and facilities from all levels of civic administration, particularly the police. While the city gives itself over to unlimited revelry, we are reminded of how certain offices and persons—of the CESC, the fire brigade and, most of all, the police— are subjected to a gruelling week of unrelieved duties.33 The ‘Revelry Report Card’ and ‘Festival City Guide’ that The Telegraph carries each year on the first of the Puja days, provide a good index of these regulations and services. There is information, for instance, on traffic restrictions and ‘no entry’ zones on the city’s roads and the noise ‘decibel bar’ to be observed; a list of emergency phone numbers for police and KMC control rooms, fire brigade, electric supply, ambulance, blood bank, and taxi booths; and a guide to day and night bus, metro and suburban train services, as well as to Puja bus tours organized by the West Bengal State Tourism Department.34 In tune with the social-awareness profile of the current Pujas, there are special tours organized by the government and by NGOs for the city’s senior citizens, old-age home residents, underprivileged street children and groups of mentally challenged persons. (See 2.13) There are also ‘kid patrol squads’ doing the rounds, adjudicating on the environmental and public safety arrangements at different pandals, and Puja designers choosing to involve various groups of ‘differently-abled’ children in doing the artwork for their pavilion.35 The most elaborate are the police security arrangements and round-the-clock postings throughout the festival city, with their greatest concentration at the most crowded pandal junctions. The Police Assistance Booths are intended to serve as composite camps for law and order, missing persons search and public relations. (See 2.14) Detailed ‘Pedestrian Circulation’ plans for the most crowded Puja zones, like Ekdalia in Gariahat or Santosh Mitra Square near Sealdah, are prepared and distributed among the force to provide for the ordered flow of ‘pandal hoppers’.(See 2.15) More significant are the specific instructions

2.13 Differently-abled persons being taken on a tour of the ‘Tiger’ theme pavilion, Khidirpur 25 Pally Puja, Saptami, 2007

handed out to all service personnel on duty during the festival days, to serve as ‘true friends and guides’ of the public and ‘always speak to the people with a smile’.36 This language of affect is never erased, even as the festival has had to take on a high-security profile in an age of global terror, with the police putting out citizen’s alert notifications, training volunteers from Puja committees on ‘vigilance and disaster responses’, and having CCTVs placed in the most crowded pandals.37 (See 2.16) For a much-maligned police force that has been under mounting public criticism for its political partisanship, its complicity in crimes, rape and murders, its delayed action at accident and burglary sites and, most glaringly, for its open fire on protestors at Nandigram in Medinipur in March 2007,38 there is a dire need for such an image boost. The same year as the Nandigram firing, on the eve of the Durga Pujas occurred the tragic death of the young Rizwanur Rahman, for the ‘crime’ of marrying beyond his community and class, with the police directly implicated in the harassments leading to Rizwanur’s suspected murder that was to be passed off as a suicide.39 It was once again the Durga Puja festival that came to the aid of the Kolkata Police. With the ouster of the Police Commissioner, Prasun Mukherjee, along with four other officers under him,

2.14 Police assistance booth near Star Theatre, Bidhan Sarani, set up a week before the Pujas, 2011

2.15 ‘Pedestrian Circulation Plan’, Ekdalia, Kolkata Police Puja road map, 2006

2.16 Kolkata Police Security Alert advertisement during Durga Puja, 2009

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2.17 Policemen on evening duty at the Selimpur Road crossing, 2007

2.18 Policemen on duty at the Suruchi Sangha Puja, New Alipore, 2008

Gautam Mohan Chakrabarty took over the post with the statement that the conducting of the festival that was about to begin would be the best way of regaining the confidence of the people and cleansing the image of his demoralized force.40 Ironically, it is only its stellar service in the control of crowds and the running of a tension-free Durga Puja that lends any credence to the slogan of the Kolkata Police, ‘We care for you’, or its Bengali equivalent, Apnar sahayatay nijukta (‘At your help and service’).41 (See 2.17, 2.18)

constructed in journalistic and scholarly writings, in contending frames of nostalgia and negation.

of times past and times present Let me now turn from the sphere of administrative regulations to the internal imperatives that have propelled a transformation in the temper of the Durga Puja festival in the recent past, even as the celebrations scale new heights of spending and publicity. To what extent does this self-willed recasting of the image of the festival accord with the new regimes of civic governance and the all-important demands of corporate sponsorship? What are the different temporal registers within which this sense of change, its continuities and breaks with earlier times, is played out within the discourses of the city’s Durga Puja? The Pujas have always thrived on an obsessive remembrance of times past. The discourse of past traditions has been crucial in the production of an identity and ambience in the present. This section will take a detour from the contemporary setting of the urban festival to consider some of the forms in which a historical memory of the city’s Durga Puja has been

The nostalgic has, of course, been the reigning trend, with its unfailing hold on public emotions and the poetics of the event. At the centre of this cultural nostalgia are the many surviving Banedi Bari Pujas of the city, each priding themselves on their long unbroken history, each striving to keep going the fading grandeur of their thakur-dalans (central courtyard columned altars) in otherwise crumbling mansions and competing between themselves as the last bastions of traditionalism in the rituals of worship. (See 2.19, 2.20) Their contemporary public promotion as Bengal’s ‘heritage’ Pujas, by the media and the government, has powerfully fuelled a collective imagination of the aristocratic, authentic pasts of the festival, and chanelled new resources into the architectural renovation of these mansions and their thakur-dalans.42 Even outside the rubric of these wealthy household Pujas, the trope of nostalgia finds a wider circulation in a continuous harking back to the purer ritual event of yesteryears, a yearning for the homeliness of the village, the family or the small neighbourhood Puja, and a despair at the commercialization of the present-day event. Memory serves here as a therapeutic site of continuity, as a restorative gesture in reconstituting a Bengali middle class community through its deep identification with a once-pristine form of the Pujas.43 The contrasting of the past and present of the festival (Pujor ekal o sekal) has come to stand as a well-honed narrative genre, reproducing itself across newspapers, Puja annuals

2.19: One of the bestknown ‘heritage’ Pujas of north Kolkata—the pratima of the older Shobhabazar Rajbati of Raja Nabakrishna Deb

2.20 The ornate multi-column thakurdalan of the older Shobhabazar Rajbati

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and miscellanies, memoirs and social histories, now finding its way even into Puja themes.44 Tracking the past three decades of the Ananda Bazaar Patrika, we come across a regular feature of Puja reminiscences by the city’s eminent artists and writers, invited each year to roam the festival city, who inevitably set off their experience of the present with an outpouring of nostalgia for the village or the city Pujas of their childhood.45 There is a recurrent strain of distaste in these writings for the new-age consumer festival. In 1980, the artist Chintamoni Kar looked askance at pandals that had taken on the look of shop windows and theatre stages, and at individually positioned figures of Durga and her children who appeared to be queuing up for worship (queues being the order of city life).46 In 2006, the writer Samaresh Majumdar sardonically referred to today’s Durgas as contenders in a state-wide beauty contest and fashion pageant. ‘She may be made of clay, she may not be able to walk, but, for five days, she will still hold her own as West Bengal’s topmost model. And there is no relationship between her and religion.’47(See 2.21) The last phrase contains the crucial indictment. The emptying out of the ‘religious’ from a festival that is now only about selling, buying and entertainment becomes a repeating trope, generating a large body of representations which lament the conversion of the Puja into pure consumption and commerce,48 (see 2.22) and decry a present that always falls far short of a past that is conjured as a time of pure tradition and deep familial bonding. But how historical or accurate is this construction of the past of the festival? This idealized past, in all its affective value, needs to be objectively positioned vis-à-vis other circulating histories of the chequered career of Durga Pujas in nineteenth and early twentieth century Kolkata. The early biography of the urban festival in wealthy mansions and its conversion into a middle-class community event presents a far more complex memory for negotiation. Let us see how another equally prominent vein of writing dramatically reverses this past-present evaluation of the city’s Durga Puja—where the history of the elite household Pujas is offered up as shameful ostentation, bacchanalian revelry and unending entertainment, and contrasted by the emergence

2.21 A fashion model-like Durga image, Hindusthan Park Puja, 2002

of a new civic culture and public sensibility in the latter-day Barowari and Sarbojanin Pujas that came to dominate the city. The city’s Durga Puja, it could be shown, was from its very inception all pomp and spectacle, driven less by any devotional ardour than by the competition of the wealthy to outdo each other in the show of money and status, especially in the scale of feasting and performances that they could host in the name of the goddess. At what stages, and in what ways did a reconstituted profile of religiosity and a public communitarian spirit inflect this history, and mark out a new bhadralok identity for Kolkata’s Durga Puja? More specifically, how can we draw out from the present to the past a persisting quest for new orders of civility and moderation, and a desire for a homely, traditional Puja? Let me juxtapose here, two examples of narratives of the pasts of the urban Puja. A collection of short essays that Nikhil Sarkar (using the pen-

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in the name of the goddess blended with newspaper reports from Samachar Chandrika, Samachar Darpan and Bangadut, verses from the mid-century poems of Ishwar Gupta and Dinabandhu Mitra’s Suradhuni Kabya, the later essays of Bankimchandra and the memoirs of Amritalal Basu. Like the authors he cites, Sripantha’s main intention is to hold to ridicule a style of Durga Puja celebration that mirrored the vanities and decadence of the city’s colonized elite.

2.22 India Today, Bengali edition, cover on ‘Puja as commerce’, 26 September 2006 . Courtesy: India Today

name Sripantha) wrote for over a decade for his neighbourhood Puja annual stands exemplary of the genre of Bengali belles-lettres writing on the theme, embellished here with the author’s expertise on the print and visual cultures of nineteenth century Kolkata.49 In the trail of Sripantha’s literary specialization, the Durga Puja festivities of the Banedi and Babu circles of the old city are central to the historical memory he constructs for his Puja readership. There is a rich body of nineteenth century Bengali poetry, farces, proverbs, doggerels, memoirs and newspaper accounts that he brings to his aid in conjuring a vivid parody of the Durga Puja celebrations in the homes of the rich and fashionable of early nineteenth century Kolkata. The most brilliant, sceptical witness of this early history of the festival is the ‘observant owl, Hutom’, unsparing in the sarcasm he pours on the frolics and foibles of the goddess’ early hosts in the city.50 Descriptions of the Puja in Kaliprasanna Sinha’s much-cited Hutom Pyanchar Naksha of 1861 are

We are reminded, for instance, of the curiously colonial history of the launching of the first large public Durga Pujas by those landowners and commercial agents who made their fortunes by backing the British at the battle of Plassey, most notably Raja Nabakrishna Deb at his newly-built palace at Shobhabazar. It is hardly surprising thereafter that the entertainment of British sahibs and memsahibs remained a crucial feature of the worship of the goddess in Kolkata’s zamindari mansions, occasioning the hosting of ‘nautches’ and performances by the best-known courtesans of north India.51 The songs, dances and theatre, we are told, peaked on the night of Nabami, as did the drunkenness, feasting and jesting of the babus, leaving the heights of their unruliness to be enacted on the streets during the immersion processions on Dashami. Fortunately, Sripantha writes, such extremes of merry-making and ostentation did not last beyond the middle years of the nineteenth century. Over time, as the lights went off the glittering stage of the Banedi Bari Pujas, a new group of players entered the scene: those who had watched from outside, with a mixture of awe and envy, the spectacle of these Pujas but had been barred from entering those exclusive premises. With them began the age of the Barowari Pujas.52 As has been often recounted, the name Barowari refers to a founding event at the end of the eighteenth century, when twelve Brahmin elders broke away and organized a community Puja by raising a public subscription at Guptipara in Hooghly. What motivated this move, according to different accounts, was either the closing down of the zamindari Puja of that area or the denial of entry of this group to that household festival. With as much as seven thousand rupees raised for its cause, the first Guptipara Barowari Puja was staged

the making of a new civic event

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on as grand a scale as its zamindari predecessors, drawing baiji singers and dancers and spectators from Calcutta.53 First spreading across district towns, the Barowari Pujas took off in Calcutta by the mid-nineteenth century, where they invited once again the scorching satire of the fictional owl, Hutom. In the eyes of Hutom, the organizers of these early Barowari Pujas in the city indulged in the same caprices and revelries as their zamindar counterparts, featuring their own repertoire of popular entertainment (khamtas, kheyurs, jatras and sawng), with the added antics of the forced collection of Puja subscriptions from residents by terror and deceit.54 To quote Sripantha, the Janker Pujo (the Puja of glitter and spectacle) of the early nineteenth century gave way to the Jabardastir Pujo (the Puja of demands and extortions) of the later century.55

This Puja, he argues, epitomizes the true spirit of Barowari, and the notion of a pally (a term that stems from the village and marked the main municipal divisions in the nineteenth century city prior to the formation of the boroughs and wards, and continues to be widely used by neighbourhood Puja clubs across the city).

The author, however, has an investment in also recovering a different identity for the Barowari Pujas of the past. Their very name and conception, he writes, signalled a democratic impulse: a move to include a larger public in the festival of the goddess, an implicit protest against the confinement of the celebrations within the exclusive precincts of wealthy homes. That it degenerated into the decadent pleasures and indulgences of the city’s babus was an aberration—for, he believes, at the heart of this transition in the format of the Durga Puja was a new notion of a public civic event and a drive to reform the image of the festival. That promise was to be fulfilled much later, in the early twentieth century, as we will see, in the wake of a bhadralok nationalist culture that nurtured a new populist identity for the Pujas (exemplified in the changed prefix, Sarbojanin), and used the festival as a key platform for the mobilization of an anti-colonial public sphere. For Sripantha, what becomes more important is a model of a civic communitarian Puja that he locates in a lived present and continuously positions vis-à-vis the inglorious histories of the nineteenth century festival. One of the main purposes of his book is to contrast the excesses and immoderations of both the Banedi Bari and Barowari Pujas of colonial Calcutta with the simplicity, decency and neighbourly spirit of the residential block Puja of his Salt Lake home in the 1980s and 1990s.

This unity of spirit of a community singled out what were then the small Pujas of Salt Lake from the general run of the big, spectacular Pujas of the rest of the city. From the narratives of the past, our attention is brought forward to the recent history of the development of the township of Salt Lake from the 1970s on the north-eastern belt of the city over reclaimed marshlands, its rising importance as a middle-class residential hub and its current induction into the fast-moving elite lifestyles of the city.57 During the 1980s and 1990s, the small block Durga Pujas of Salt Lake served to forge new community solidarities and recreate the feel of a para for all who had moved here from older neighbourhoods.

In this pally, the metaphorical ‘twelve’ who are the initiators of the Durga Puja are also its organizers and work force, its designers and its worshippers. This is possible here because the pally and the residents of the pally are still a body united in spirit. The residents are the ones who pay subscriptions and collect them from one another, they are the ones who conduct their own Puja and participate in their own cultural functions.56

Before we return to these contemporary histories of the Pujas, let me balance Sripantha’s account with a different academic analysis of the Durga Pujas of nineteenth century Calcutta by Tithi Bhattacharya. ‘Tracking the Goddess’ in the changing forms of her invocation and worship in Bengal over several centuries, her article brings the transmuting premodern image of Durga as a non-Brahmanical deity—a fearless virgin, a fierce warrior and a benevolent mother—to bear on a more specifically modern urban history of her celebrations, first in the Banedi homes, and then in the new forms of the Barowari and Sarbojanin Pujas of the nationalist era. If the processes of ‘secularization’ of the religious

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and ritual event over this period (during which ‘the religiosity of Durga began to be steadily replaced by the sociability of her worship’) is a pressing concern for the author, her interest lies equally in unravelling the new affective powers of the goddess in middle class sensibility and in a rising political rhetoric of Hindu nationalism.58 In her passage from the courtyards of nouveau-riche mansions to the open streets of the community Pujas of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Durga acquired not just an inalienably civic identity but also a novel kind of sacral aura. Divested of her wild Tantric pasts, removed also from the unruly celebrations of the less reputable, she would now reign as much in her domesticated role as a Bengali married daughter as in her nationalist role as a reawakened mother-goddess. Rescued from the clutches of sahibs, banias, baijis and sawng performers, she would be rendered into a new object of bhadralok devotion. From Sripantha’s vignettes we arrive here at a more layered account of the transition in the character of the Durga Pujas of colonial Calcutta. The urban, the civic and the public dimensions of the event are each thrown open to scrutiny. Tithi Bhattacharya makes a central argument about the way the expanding city began to recognize an integral connection between itself and the festival. Among a populace lacking in social cohesion, the annual performance of the Puja allowed new settlers a means of marking their distinctiveness among their peers and of exercising their sway over a larger public. In a city that was still a sum of its parts, where people belonged to respective localities rather than to the whole city, the Pujas were what best mapped out paras, clans and social networks. And the lavish entertainments that they occasioned lent a distinctly secularized, urban status to the festival. At the same time, for all its notorious nonreligious activities, the worship of the goddess also served to infuse a sense of tradition and cultural belonging within what was seen as the alien and immoral space of the city. While the ancestral Pujas of village homes never ceased to beckon Calcutta’s zamindars and babus, the city’s Pujas began to lay a competing claim on their loyalties, emerging both as a site of renewed tradition and a new forum of civic duties.59

The main thread of change that this history pursues is the forming of a new civil society around Durga Puja. The fading away of the Banedi Barir Puja by the middle years of the nineteenth century, and the rise of the Barowari Puja, with its criticisms as well as its grudging admiration for the splendours of the past, is once again placed at the centre of this change. The barowari puja seemed to be an ideal cultural compromise between the new discourse of educated gentility and the liberal guilt around puja splendour. Dissociated from individual glory, the barowari ceremony granted to the goddess the true status of a communitarian idol. Diffused among the many, the extravagance of a few was dissolved in a new regime of local and collective entrenchment. The local puja accorded to the new generation of devotees a novel sense of civic responsibility.60 It required thereafter the maturing of a new bhadralok public sphere and nationalist politics in the city to transform the Barowari into the Sarbojanin Puja, and fulfill some of its broader civic and communitarian claims. With this, the urban festival entered a new phase, one where the religious entered the language of militant nationalist politics and the warriorgoddess, turned mother and daughter, became the emotive symbol of a Bengali Hindu nation. The author ends her study on the note of the congealing of a new bhadralok and majoritarian identity of the Durga Puja in the early twentieth century city. She shows how ‘the dominant’s religion, masked into everyday existence, was revitalized as the festival of the many, while other religious practices remained the sharp and obvious ‘ritual’ of the few.’61 There are many ways in which this recounted history feeds into the present, even as this present seeks to discretely set itself apart from this past. The descriptions of the rivalries and extravagances of Durga’s nineteenth century hosts—their flaunting of wealth, their revelries and their conspicuous consumption—will find many parallels among the competing Puja committees of our time. As will the predominant life of the early Pujas of the city as spectacle, entertainment, and suspension of

the making of a new civic event normal life. In each case, what have changed many shades are the social players in the event, the styles of production and performance, the sources of funds and the scales of spending. But what remains uninterrupted is the ability of this festival to use the worship of the goddess as an excuse for a megaextravaganza. What has also continued into the present is an ever-thickening connection between the conducting of Durga Pujas and the production of Kolkata’s localities and urban cultures. From the early nineteenth into the early twenty-first century, this festival has remained the crucial marker of the unique identity of the metropolis, the main site for a perennial reproduction of rituals and traditions, and also the main barometer of its shifting social, economic and topographic dimensions. In today’s metropolis, as in its historical counterpart, the Durga Pujas offer one of the best ways of mapping the geographical spread of the city and the spatial graph of old and new neighbourhoods. Despite strict municipal control on their proliferation and restrictions on the sizes of idols and pandals, the Pujas have remained the unfailing measure of the pride of numerous humble as well as affluent neighbourhoods, of youth aspirations, and community lives and solidarities within these. The idea of the Puja community becomes a way of both invoking what is fast disappearing and of actively forging networks that never existed before. While many of the city’s biggest club Pujas represent neighbourhoods that are no more than nominal, and many others act as a way of energizing old, run-down localities with the new designer touch and corporate profile of the festival, there are also a large number of Pujas of the past three decades that have served to recreate a lost sense of para, in new habitations. This is especially true in a township like Salt Lake or within the city’s burgeoning crop of lower, middle and upper income group apartment blocks. As the nature of these middle class housing complexes has changed, from the earliest multistoried apartments of the 1970s to the new gated luxurious enclaves that have come up in various locations of the city, the hosting of the Durga Puja continues to be the surest way of sealing the residential community from within, of laying out fresh boundaries of exclusion and cohesion.62

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the ‘festival of all’ History has shown how the community Puja, as the avowed ‘festival of the many’, has always excluded publics as much as it defined and congealed its own.63 Let us see how this entity of the Sarbojanin Puja, in its organizational practices and claims, became in recent history a key arena of the production and division of publics. The early nationalist career of this new form of the community Puja brings with it a tendentious conflation of the term ‘Sarbojanin’ with the idea of the ‘universal’. An anonymous, undated booklet titled Bharater Sarbojanin Durgotsav (translated as ‘The Universal Durga Festival of Bharat’) ingeniously appoints ‘all newspaper editors committed to national welfare’ as purohits to this new form of the Puja, and exhorts all ‘nationalist minded persons’ to go about propagating it. A manual on the rituals of worship comes heavily couched in the political rhetoric of Hindu nationalism of the early twentieth century and its majoritarian appeals to communal harmony, which starts by asking ‘all children of Bharat… (whether) Hindu, Muslim or Christian’ to unite in ‘brotherly affection and worship of the mother for the sake of their motherland’.64 Another account refers to the birth in 1926 of the first Sarbojanin (again translated in English as the ‘universal’) Puja in the vicinities of Maniktala in the north, that came to be dubbed at the time as the ‘Congress Puja’, with the local press hoping that this new public form of the festival would draw in ‘Hindus of all classes and denominations without the least distinction of caste’.65 It was the political imperative of the time that this biggest public festival of Bengali nationalists took on an anti-caste, anti-communal tone. But how effectively could this rhetoric of inclusiveness cut across the deep divisions of caste and religion in mobilizing the community for the Pujas? As scholars have asked, did not the Sarbojanin Puja, in the name of ‘national’ integration of publics and ‘secularization’ of the goddess as motherland, end up eroding earlier worlds of social interactions and hardening the associations of the festival with the activist community of the Bengali Hindu bhadralok?66 The Pujas were always a time when the homes of the wealthy, in the city as in the villages, opened up to the ordinary masses. As makers of different ritual

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objects and providers of a variety of services (ranging from the crafting of the idol and its ornaments, to the playing of the dhak and sanai, the cleaning of the altar, the cutting of fruits and vegetables and the offering of the ritual sacrifice), Hindu lower castes and Muslim artisans had their work slotted for them in these festivities. In his chronicle of the socioritual world of this autumn festival, Yogeshchandra Vidyanidhi paints a vivid picture of the ways in which these multiple caste groups were crucial to the infrastructure of the festival, each in their strictly hierarchized occupational roles.67 The involvement of Muslims—whether they were performing ‘nautch girls’, tailors skilled at producing fashionable attire, or artisans making silver foil weapons or the jute-fibre hair of the goddess and the mane of the lion—gave the festival its multi-religious service community. There are also occasional period accounts of Muslims travelling from neighbouring villages to the city to offer their salam to the goddess.68 Festival times were when the poor also entered the exclusive premises of wealthy households as objects of philanthropy, for the mass feeding and distribution of clothes that were a regular feature of the Durga Pujas of the rich. Not to be excluded from the benediction of the goddess, nor denied their peek at the lavish entertainment, the lower orders were retained in clearly cordoned off spaces of seating and congregation. While the Barowari Pujas brought a distinct change in the social community of the festival, they left largely undisturbed the involvement of various artisanal castes and service-providers in the conducting of the ritual event, without ever integrating them into the civic life of the celebrations. The memoirs of the dramatist Amritalal Basu invoke a fairly typical ambience of a neighbourhood (pally) in late nineteenth century Calcutta, in which we see a new middle class evolving a rhetoric of social inclusiveness that would draw into their sense of their local community the para’s grocer as well as the itinerant peddlers of snacks (muriwala and chanachurwala), the Oriya palanquin bearer as well as the blind Vaishnav beggar who came singing for his alms.69 Keeping these service populations of a para firmly in the subordinate strata they inhabited, the bhadralok could build an image of togetherness that seamlessly extended from their immediate to their larger family, from their own home to all other

residents as well as the subaltern classes who made up their pally.70 We can presume that this inclusive sense of a local residential community of the emergent middle class paras of this period is what also fuels the new communitarian discourse of the festival, as it transforms itself from individual household celebrations into a neighborhood public event and traverses the fine line from its more tight-knit Barowari to its more open-ended Sarbojanin form. To what extent did the Sarbojanin Puja bring about a change in the segregation of the many castes and classes of a para? Did its new identity as a people’s Puja allow a more undifferentiated urban mass to graduate from the place of the ‘other’ to the place of the ‘public’ of the festival? These questions remain to be fully probed. Compared to the rich literary archive on the nineteenth century Pujas, the Sarbojanin Pujas in their rise and spread across the twentieth century Bengali metropolis have not found the same order of raconteurs.71 There are contending versions of which constituted the first recognizable form of the Sarbojanin Puja in the city. Some accounts confer the distinction on the Sanatan Dharmotsahini Sabha, begun in 1910 by the residents of Balaram Basu Ghat Road in Bhowanipur, also referring to similar initiatives in the same years in other neighbourhoods in the area.72 Better known are the rival claims of the Baghbazar Club and the Simla Byayam Samiti in the far north of the city to have started the first Sarbojanin Puja. The former was begun in 1918 as a protest against the exclusiveness of the Banedi Pujas, especially that of the Shobhabazar Debs, but acquired its nationalist fame only in 1937 when a Swadeshi fair of indigenous manufactures and a display of Bengali wrestling and physical prowess was held alongside the Puja. Almost a decade earlier, in 1926, the Simla Byayam Samiti (which, as the name suggests, began as a physical fitness gymnasium) launched a community Puja to fight the government ban and provide a subterfuge platform for the gathering of revolutionary nationalists. Emerging neck to neck with these first entrants were the Sarbojanin Pujas of Kumartuli and Hatibagan, one beginning in 1933, the other in 1935. Most historical accounts concentrate on the intense, though brief, nationalist careers of these first Sarbojanin Pujas, and their close association with militant

the making of a new civic event leaders like Atindranath Basu, Bhupendranath Dutta (brother of Swami Vivekananda), Upendranath Bandyopadhyay, Sarat Chandra Bose and Subhash Chandra Bose.73 With Subhash Bose taking on the role of celebrity inaugurator of the Simla Byayam Samiti Puja and secretary of the Pujas of Kumartuli and Baghbazar during 1938–9 (blazing the trail for a long connection between Congress politicians and the Pujas), the religious festival came to be firmly cast within a political public sphere. In the place of licentious baiji, sawng or jatra performances came the new spectacle of Swadeshi industrial fairs, wrestling matches, gymnastic and martial displays, with their appeal for a new disciplined mass public. The emotional sway of the festival over this mass viewership would have increased manifold, as Durga occasionally took on the form of Bharat Mata, framed against the map of India, or as her son Kartick was made to don a Congress cap. Such nationalist liberties with iconographies, as they spread from the city to rural Bengal, had to carefully evade the threat of colonial censorship, bringing to the event the added thrills of secrecy and dissent. Writer Sunil Gangopadhyay recalled how, in 1944, the kumor, who made the idols each year on site at their Faridpur village Puja, went about his work in an unusually secretive manner, and how the village was stunned to see the police arrive on the eve of the Puja to stop the event. That is when they found that in the place of Kartick stood a life-sized statue of Netaji in full military gear, and that Mahishasura had been replaced by a British general being mauled by Durga’s lion. The idols were forcibly removed, and that year, their village Puja had to do no more than a ‘ghoter pujo’ (the worship of a painted pot).74 The phase of direct nationalist engagement with these community Pujas was relatively brief. It was concentrated mainly in the period from the late 1920s to the 1940s, restricted in the city to a few large community Pujas of north Calcutta, the very zones that had once been dominated by the wealthy household Pujas. There is a telling contrast here with the history of the Ganapati festival in Maharashtra, which is embedded in a far longer history of militant nationalist politics. This goes back earlier in time to the 1890s when the new form of the sarvajanik

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festival was inaugurated by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and stretches to the post-Independence years, when its nationalist fervour was kept going within the Shiv Sena’s new trajectory of communal populist politics.75 In the case of the spread of the Sarbojanin Durga Pujas of Bengal, I would like to suggest a different shift of location over the mid twentieth century from a nationalist ‘political’ arena to a middle class ‘social’ realm. This realm constituted itself through the forming of para clubs, mobilization of youth cultures and congealing of a collective identity of residents of a locality around the organization of an annual Durga Puja. In fact, the spreading spatial graph of the Sarbojanin Durga Pujas in the immediately preand post-Independence decades serves as a crucial index of the dense growth of Bengali residential neighbourhoods in the extending territorial belt in the west, east, and south of the metropolis. The late 1930s and 1940s saw a number of Bengali paras in the areas of Khidirpur, Bhowanipur, Kalighat, Ballygunge, Tollygunge and Behala registering their presence on the new urban map of community Pujas. The Mudiali and Shibmandir Pujas in the region around the newly laid-out Dhakuria Lakes; the Maddox Square and the Ekdalia Club Pujas in the more elite areas of Ballygunge and Gariahat; the Sanghasree Puja as the one of the oldest representatives of the community Pujas of Bhowanipur; the Behala Tapoban Club as the first of the Behala public Pujas; the Kabitirtha and 25 Pally Pujas from the nineteenth century enclave of Bengali Hindu residences in the otherwise largely Muslim neighbourhood of Khidirpur; or the Park Circus United Club Puja, begun in 1951, as a distinct marker of Hindu-Muslim goodwill in another Muslim-majority locality—these emerged as the first main counterparts of the Sarbojanin Pujas of north Calcutta.76 In the aftermath of Partition, as the influx of over 700,000 Bengali Hindu refugees radically altered the demography and geography of the metropolis, the beginnings of small community Durga Pujas served vitally to solder para identities across the proliferating refugee settlement colonies in the southern stretch from Jadavpur to Tollygunge and Behala.77 If through the traumatic 1940s, through the dark years of the war, famine, communal riots, the Partition and the arrival at Sealdah station

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in the name of the goddess character. The Sarbojanin Durga Puja, it is said, had a way of drawing Hindus and non-Hindus, Bengalis and non-Bengalis, the wealthy and the poor within its folds. But there remained a constitutively Bengali Hindu bhadralok core to this urban mass festival. As against the aristocracies of wealth and culture which had dominated the eighteenth and nineteenth century Pujas, as against also the nationalist elite who presided over the first Sarbojanin Pujas, a middle and lower middle class segment of the city’s residents now asserted their presence as the active community of the Durga Pujas.

2.23 Dashami sindur khela at a community Puja, still from the documentary film, Durga Puja in Calcutta, Calcutta Film Society, 1966

of trainloads of refugees, the goddess was unfailingly invoked in the name of the suffering multitudes,78 the spreading form of the small neighborhood Puja of the 1950s would also play a therapeutic role in keeping the city’s battered and dislocated residents going.79 Nirmal Bose’s social survey of the metropolis of 1964 shows ‘Bengalis’ (indicating mainly Bengali Hindus, excluding the Bengali-speaking Muslims who were tabulated under the category of Muslims) as making up only half of Calcutta’s population, but dominating the middle-income group and constituting therefore more than three quarters of the city’s middle class. It also posited that, more than any other ethnic group, the Bengalis were the ones for whom the city was ‘home’, and that Bengalis were to be found dispersed in all quarters of the city, providing ‘a Bengali matrix in which other ethnic groups assert their identity’.80 During these years, the mushrooming of community Durga Pujas throughout the residential localities of the city can be seen as a crucial matrix of what Nirmal Bose identified as its essential Bengali and middle class

From the 1950s, this social group became the key organizers as well as consumers of the festival. In every locality, it would be a loosely defined but largely cohesive middle class, usually with small salaried jobs or fledgling businesses, which would constitute the work force of the para club—and also the main devotional community that would fuel the emotional charge of the occasion. The density of habitation in the city’s typically crowded neighbourhoods made for (or, we could say, enforced) an intensity of shared activities and emotions. If the planting of the first bamboo poles for pandals in the narrow alley or small playing ground of the para would send ripples of anticipation among the old and young, Birendra Krishna Bhadra’s radio recitation of Chandi-path on the dawn of Mahalaya would reverberate across transistors running in every home, to arouse the entire locality to the onset of Debi-paksha. The middle class male youth, whose displays of physical prowess and oratory had energized the first Sarbojanin Pujas, continued to make up the local para clubs, the activities of which stretched from the hosting of the annual Durga or Kali Puja to the organization of local sports or sit-and-draw competitions for children, the running of ambulance or hearse services, and the setting up of blood donation (or, more lately) cataract-operation camps in the neighbourhood. Through the post-independence decades, the economically stagnant, over-populated refugee city had no dearth of unemployed youth in every para that could pour their pent-up energies into these clubs and their Pujas.81 Moved out of individual households into the neighbourhood, gender divisions remained tightly in place within this participatory community.

the making of a new civic event In a still overtly masculinized public sphere, the menfolk monopolized the organizational work of the festival, leaving the women to carry through the ritual processes of worship and lend their talents to the evening functions.82 In this intensely local event, the community came to be defined on the lines of all those who belonged to the para. And it was activated through the collection of subscriptions and souvenir advertisements, the delegation of organizational duties, the eating together of afternoon bhog through the three main days of the Pujas, the presentation of evening programmes of songs, dances and plays, the participation in the sindur khela of married women and in the immersion procession of the boys and men of the para (see 2.23 2.24), and, finally, through the congregation after Bijoya Dashami, when the residents met to lift the gloom that follows the departure of the goddess. (See text box) This was and has remained the quintessential image of the homely parar Puja—one that could resuscitate the community, retain the collectivity of the neighbourhood, and temporarily boost the spirits of a depressed middle class. The sense of community that circulated here was one of a markedly non-affluent middle class—where, like today, the ordinariness of a locality and its residents would frequently be offset by the feverish pitch of its investment in the Puja, and where it was believed that what made a para Puja

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2.24 Immersion procession of a community Puja, still from the documentary film, Durga Puja in Calcutta, Calcutta Film Society,1966

special was less a show of wealth and spectacle, more the involvement and the bonding of its people. In the reminiscences of elders of many Puja clubs, the story is fondly returned to the times of the first small refugee colony Pujas in the far south of the city that began in the 1950s, when subscriptions would range from Rs. 1 to 5, when the entire Puja budget would be no more than Rs. 1,200, and local residents would pitch in their efforts at even erecting the pandal and

All of these make up the indelible memories of my childhood Pujas of the 1960s, spent in my mamar bari (home of my maternal grandparents) in New Alipore. New Alipore, as a new middle-class residential colony in the deep south of the city, was then just over a decade old. Originally from Dacca and Chittagong, living in Kolkata from 1943 in a rented home in the narrow Pataldanga Street in the north, my mother’s family had moved to New Alipore in 1952. My grandfather (a retired university teacher, responsible for a large family) had struggled to build his new home that was then one of the early five or six houses in the area. The New Alipore Sarbojanin Puja, still held in the triangular park on Nalini Ranjan Avenue, was the main centre of gravitation for all. I remember, in particular, my grandmother’s intense involvement with the cutting of fruits and vegetables and preparation of bhog, along with a group of other para women, who all treated it like their own home Puja. And I recall also the fervour with which my youngest uncle flaunted his talents as a singer in the evening music and theatre performances at this Puja, and danced with his friends before the goddess left for immersion. Living as I did with my parents and brothers in a more westernized locality that hosted no Puja, this New Alipore Puja became our own—a place for congregating with cousins, for hanging-out in new clothes from morning to night, and watching in awe the flirtations and fashions of the young women and men of the para.

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installing the idols.83 Smallness was a matter of pride, the mark of a community’s tightness and will to survive. In fact, the best way this model of the small unsullied para event came to be perpetuated was by setting it apart from the competitive, commercial careers of the big Sarbojanin Pujas. It became a losing struggle to keep intact the neighbourliness and collective life of the club Puja in economically transforming residential zones, in the face of the spreading tentacles of new commercial capital, political patronage and showmanship. The ideal never receded, but became more and more removed from the changing urban reality of the Durga Pujas. And the grip of the neighbourhood Puja over its local community gradually loosened, to make way for a different collective of mass spectators who were drawn to tour pandals across the span of the city and who would gradually transform the festival into a new exhibitionary event.84 The shift from local participation to mass spectatorship was one of the main changes in the form of the urban festival. The history of the city’s booming crop of public Pujas in the decades after Independence and Partition comes to be recounted in terms of the growing size, style and swagger of the big players in the field, the mounting rivalries between Puja clubs in the images and pandals they displayed, and the decline of the festival once again into ostentation and excess. There is a sharp swing that is mapped from the civic, nationalist orientations of the early Sarbojanin Pujas of the 1920s and ’30s to a ‘low culture’ of showbiz and entertainment that began to reign from the 1960s and ’70s. It is difficult to fix a specific timeline of these shifts and swings. But in most accounts of the recent past of the festival, the Durga Pujas of the 1970s came to epitomize what the city’s elite and Left intellectuals would declaim as apasanskriti or, more pointedly, as bourgeois abakshay (decadent bourgeois culture).85 And the main ‘villains’ of this scenario were the bigbudget, brashly spectacular breed of Sarbojanin Pujas of the city—the likes of College Square, Mohammed Ali Park, Santosh Mitra Square, Ekdalia Evergreen, Singhi Park, Park Circus or Sreebhumi Pujas—the ones that became near-autonomous regimes in their defiance of law and command of crowds, and the

ones that still preside in today’s preparatory meetings with the police and civic administration. The Pujas of this period have been impressionistically grouped by one writer into three broad social types. At two opposite ends of the pole were, on the one hand, the Banedi Pujas of elite homes, dominated by the elderly who strove to maintain all traditions and rituals of worship and, on the other hand, the Pujas of ‘loafers’ and ‘anti-socials’, spreading from the big brash Pujas of College Square or Ekdalia through the impoverished slum areas, where loud Hindi film music, obscene dancing, catcalls of local youth, extortions and night brawls were the order of things. An in-between category were the middle class community Pujas (madhyabitta parar pujo), which were seen to also veer towards filmy tastes in fashions, music and the appearance of the goddess, but where the larger culture of the para incorporated these trends within more marked boundaries of cultural respectability. In these Pujas, the cult of Uttam-Suchitra movies and modern Bengali songs jostled with those of Hindi cinema, and violence and rowdiness were kept to the edge to clearly distinguish the middle class para from the basti para (slums) on its outskirts.86 There is a clear discourse of taste and class in this sense of the social and cultural divisions that cut through the public sphere of the urban festival. The discourse also takes on distinct political and ideological overtones, as the notion of the ‘low culture’ extravaganza of the Pujas comes to be specifically associated since the late 1960s with local Youth Congress patronage. A recurrent image in these accounts is that of the degeneration of para youth, always the driving engine of the community Puja, into gangs of rowdies, involved with various levels of anti-social and extortionist activities. Local Congress politicians were the ones who had evolved their strongest networks with many of these local clubs and gangs and the Pujas they hosted. Through the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, this deepening connection would be starkly contrasted by the ideological distancing of Left politicians from this religious festival, and their vociferous disavowal of the Pujas as ‘apasanskriti’. There was, of course, a parallel growing infiltration

the making of a new civic event 101

The Left Front government’s duplicitous stance towards the Pujas came in for as much criticism in the media, as did its latter-day forms of accommodation and embrace of different aspects of the festival. The report ‘Sharad holey apatti nei’, ABP, October 8, 1975, talks of CPI(M) ministers agreeing to inaugurate Pujas as long as the festival’s nomenclature was changed from Durgotsab to Sharadotsab. One of the most biting critiques is to be found in Raghab Bandopadyay’s article, ‘Banglar Mahishamardini bonam Marxbahini’, Desh Sharadiya, 19 September, 1998, pp. 59–62, where he scornfully talks of how for the Communists of Bengal the ‘opium’ of religion has turned to ‘nectar’, and how Durga has used her martial skills to bring her once great enemy to her altar and festival.

of parties like the Forward Bloc, the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) and the CPI (M) into the activities of these para clubs, especially in the refugee colonies and lower middle class settlements in the south of the metropolis—but these parties retained a deliberate ambivalence regarding their involvement in Puja activities. All through the turbulent period of the rise and fall of the two United Front governments (1968–69 to 1970–71), the launch of the CPI (ML) and the Naxalite agitation, and the coming to power of the Left Front regime in 1977, the Durga Pujas, and even more, the Kali Pujas, remained the stronghold of local Youth Congress politics. Visible sections of the city’s intelligentsia and educated middle classes pointedly kept themselves apart, not just from the ostentations of the big-budget Pujas, but also from the smaller Pujas of their own paras. These were the years of a pronounced splitting of the bhadralok public sphere of the Pujas, along a series of overlapping lines of class, ideology and politics. My memories of the Pujas of my college days in the city during the mid 1970s are filled with resonances of such splits and divides. One of its most ironic manifestations was the red book-selling kiosks of the

CPI(M), that would be prominently positioned at the entrances of almost all the big Sarbojanin Pujas of the city, where a routine selection of Progressive Left and Soviet literature would be sold by unsmiling party volunteers. With their backs pointedly turned on the pandal and the goddess inside, as also on the revelries of the season, these kiosks would use this gathering of crowds for Left political propaganda. (See 2.25) To disclaim the religious event, to balk at the conspicuous spending on pandals, lighting, feasting and entertainment, yet to make capital of this truly mass festival has always set the tone of the Left government’s attitude towards the Pujas. (See text box) In a more subtle but cutting indictment, the distaste for the festival would be writ large in the desire of large sections of the city’s intelligentsia to escape from the crowds and chaos of the city. The Puja holidays have long been a peak season for Bengali middle class travel, a choice time for the inveterate tourists among them to go on their annual Bharat-darshan jaunts, with the Indian railways laying out special trains each year to meet the rush of the season’s tourism.87 But this other going away had a different edge to it, motivated

2.25 CPI (M) book-stall, with the face of the-then recently deceased leader Subhash Chakrabarty, GD Block Puja, Salt Lake, 2009

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less by the popular demands of tourism, more by a determination of a dominant section of the middle class to shut out the raucous festivities and protect themselves from its assault and inconveniences. It is important to note the way the Pujas came to reinforce the impression of an unruly mass public sphere. During the 1960s and 1970s, the spectre of extortions in the collection of Puja subscriptions (chanda) once again loomed large over the city, with gangs of youths laying bare their terror tactics over neighbourhood residents, shops and business houses. The menace of chanda collections came heavily armed with political patronage, as the mobilization of cash for the festival regularly fed into and poured out of what was referred to as the ‘slush funds’ of the Congress. The blocking of public thoroughfares for the erection of huge pandals, weeks in advance of the festival, also thrived as a routine phenomenon, one for which Puja organizers had the implicit sanction of police and civic authorities. The Puja organizers claimed a series of exceptions from the normal order of civic life, in the name of the city’s biggest mass celebration—the license to disrupt vehicular traffic, the right to treat themselves to makeshift electricity connections to illuminate their productions, and their insistence on deafening day and night loudspeaker music. In sections of the media, the unashamed extravagance of Puja clubs was as much a point of criticism as their presumed right to overturn all civic regulations and the rights of other citizens in indulging in a free run of festivities. An Ananda Bazaar Patrika editorial of 1978 set the tone for the kind of cynicism, as well as the new public expectations that were being generated around the Pujas.88 Welcoming the news about the government’s efforts that year to prohibit the obstruction of major roads by Puja pandals, to restrict the use of loudspeakers and to fix the deadline for the immersions, the article expressed the hope that the Puja environment would now grow to be healthy, normal and disciplined, allowing all citizens to enjoy the festival in a peaceful manner. But it ended on a note of déjà vu as, two week before the onset of the Pujas, it found innumerable pandal structures flouting road block prohibitions with impunity. And it vented its main criticism on the Left Front

government’s complicity in these violations under the stance of religious neutrality, especially on the police’s reluctance to dismantle these ‘temple structures’ once they come up. What was so sacrosanct about these makeshift contraptions, the article asked, that they could ride over all prescribed rules and civic conveniences? Were all these indulgences of the administration propelled by sensitivity to religious sentiments or merely by a degenerate populism? Another strand of criticism in the press was directed against the perceived trampling of rituals and traditions, in the forms of worship and, even more, in the forms that were given to the goddess and her entourage. The doing away with the traditional ekchala stylized iconography of the goddess (see 2.26) in favour of realistic, theatrical and individually positioned figures of the goddess and her family (see 2.27) became one of the main targets of caustic comment. Through the 1980s, the artists and intellectuals who were asked each year by Ananda Bazaar Patrika to evaluate the season’s productions, looked askance at the newfangled styles of images and pandals; at the lack of harmony and blend between the idols, the backdrops and the outer structures; not least of all, at the fad of using the strangest of materials (nails, blades, coconut shells or red chillies) for the construction of images.89 Rejecting the gimmicks of current styles of Puja décor, these accounts would keep returning to the traditional daker or sholar saj image as the true devotional icon and the unchallenged favourite of all times. On many such grounds, the revulsion for the unregulated, tasteless culture of this mass festival rang loud among sections of the city’s bhadralok society.

the pujas and ‘civil society’ Was there a way of bridging the deep gulfs that set apart the bhadralok and the more plebian public sphere of the Pujas during the 1970s and ’80s? Were the frictions that spilled into this domain of festivity to be explained, in the words of Anjan Ghosh, as ‘a trade-off between the preference of the masses and the grouse of the classes’, where ‘the choice was invariably for the former’?90 Or was there not a set of changing notions of the ‘civic’ and the ‘public’ that had begun

2.26 Traditional ekchala daker saj Durga image, Baghbazar Sarbojanin Puja, 2007

2.27 Individually positioned and dramatised figures of the Durga pantheon at a Behala Puja, 2008. Photograph by Meaghan Vaughn

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to assert their rights within the prevailing practices and proclamations of the mass festival? The idea, as every level of Puja administration, organization and sponsorship will insist, is never to divest the festival of its populist dimensions, but to reclaim this public sphere in the cause of a more law-abiding, civicminded festival. This makeover drive manifested itself, from the mid and late 1980s, in a series of High Court injunctions and punitive governmental actions against Puja clubs, each of which, of course, would be countered by protests and resentments. The year 1983 set the ball rolling with a landmark Calcutta High Court injunction enforcing a set of new rules on all Sarbojanin Puja committees. Propelled by a Public Interest Litigation passed by a Citizens’ Rights Protection Committee, the Court ruled that no new community Pujas should be allowed that year, that a prescribed measure of public roads must be left free for pedestrian and traffic movement in all pandal constructions, that Puja subscriptions were to be collected only on authorized books sanctioned by local police stations, and that all immersions were to be completed within three days of Bijoya Dashami, after which electricity connections to the club would be severed.91 The system of penalties on Puja clubs for violating rules on the use of loudspeakers and temporary electricity connections also came into place in the following years, with the periodic threat of withdrawal of license to these clubs. Through the 1980s and early 1990s, newspapers would report on the way the city’s Sarbojanin Pujas were staggering under the increasing burden of prohibitions and licensing fees.92 There are references to road blocks on Gariahat to protest the CESC’s cutting of electricity lines to the Ekdalia Evergreen Club on the charge of illegal pilferage—and to the virulent objections to the 10-foot height bar imposed on the size of Durga images in 2001 by many Puja clubs, like the Simla Byayam Samiti, Kumartuli Sarbojanin or Santosh Mitra Square, whose main attractions had been their mega-sized idols.93 The Kolkata Police authorities feel that a marked turn in the modes of self-governance of Pujas took place from about 1996, when many of the regulations concerning legal electricity lines, fire safety in pandals, nonblockage of roads, or immersion deadlines began to fall more peaceably in place. This turn, they would

like to believe, was made possible by a change in public attitudes and citizen’s demands for a more orderly festival. Let me touch upon on some combative encounters from the early 2000s that belie the notion of any consensual public stance on the rights and wrongs of the Pujas, while also signposting the move towards the present civic regime of the festival. In the build up to the season of 2002, the city’s English language newspaper, The Telegraph, profiled a series of statements by the city’s local councillors and the Mayor, Subrata Mukherjee, justifying the blockage of roads by the Puja pandals they patronized. The series was pointedly captioned, ‘Why I flout the rules’. The arguments were hardly new. Each politician (mostly of the Trinamool Congress) invoked a state of exception for the few days of the Pujas, and prioritized the pleasures of the masses that thronged these pandals vis-à-vis the inconveniences of a few complaining citizens. That the Mayor, the city’s first citizen, unabashedly took on the role here of the President of the Ekdalia Evergreen Club and a defender of its law-flouting Pujas, made for the greatest travesty. A key figure in the Youth Congress politics of the 1970s and its championship of the Pujas, the Mayor had, the previous year, protested the imposition of a height bar on Durga images as an ‘attack on a 100-year-old tradition’, and now stoutly defended the rights of his Puja to occupy as much of the Ekdalia thoroughfare as it wished. His argument was that all work was in any case suspended during these festival days, and that the temporary disruption of traffic should be treated in ‘the Puja spirit’.94 If in the colonial city the same arguments about the exceptionality of festival time could be asserted by the native population as a way of subverting official work culture and freshly bonding as a community,95 their invocations in today’s Kolkata stand riddled with contention. The point to be emphasized is not merely this defiant stance of a municipal authority on the rights of the Durga Pujas, but the campaign that began to be launched by The Telegraph against the festival’s violations of civic order. As a representative of a new upper middle class, The Telegraph dug its heel deep into the many excesses of the Pujas, even as it built up in the same years its persistent critique of

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2.28 Snowcem Paints award signage and interview by a local TV channel anchor at the site of the Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja, 2006

the Bengali’s work inertia and bandh culture, and became during 2006–2007 the chief voice of the lobby of environmentalists and concerned citizenry which battled to ‘save’ the Maidan from the damages of the annual Book Fair. During 2008–2009, the same newspaper group launched a persistent campaign on two other prominent public issues— on the environmental hazard posed by old polluting auto-rickshaws which refused conversion to the new Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) fuel system, and on the ‘defacement’ of the city’s public walls by political election graffiti—all for the cause of a cleaner and beautified city. We must therefore locate the drive of this media house since 2002 to reform the Pujas—and its later stepped-up tirade every Puja season against the menace of road-blocking pandal structures—as a part of its larger self-projection as the civic and environmental guardian of the city and its concerted

endeavours to revamp its public spaces and cultures. These drives must also be seen in conjunction with an unprecedented spurt of promotion and sponsorship of the new styles of Durga Pujas through promotional awards in the same newspaper, in parallel with several other English language newspapers, all of which today compete to give this city festival the kind of coverage that only the Bengali press would devote to it in the 1980s and 1990s. Such bitter turf battles would periodically spill over from the media into the physical sites of Puja pandals. This happened during the early 2000s at the Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja on the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass, when the police and municipal authorities came down heavily on the Puja organizers for the ‘unmanageable’ crowds and disruption to vehicular traffic that was being caused by theirs and

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2.29 Entrance banners and crowds at the Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja, 2010

a neighbouring Puja at Talbagan. The ruling of the Calcutta High Court and Police that the venues of these Pujas must be shifted away from the main avenue to alternative interior grounds was bitterly contested.96 What emerges from these tensions at Bosepukur are not just custodial clashes over urban space but also countering notions of what makes for a civic, people-friendly celebration. Confronting the traffic police’s rights over the larger thoroughfare was the Bosepukur’s claims over its small grounds, and its staunch resistance to move its Puja to a place that was not considered its para. The Puja, it was argued, was not portable like the Book Fair and belonged organically to one’s own neighbourhood space. What was also resented was the administration’s prioritization of the flow of vehicular traffic over the mass movement of pedestrians, whose passage in and out of these Pujas through barricaded pavements had been closely regulated.97 Long queues, crowds and slow traffic were accepted as essential features of the

mass festival—and, as the media pointed out, had never brought similar court orders on many other such ‘traffic-stopping’ Pujas. Another issue in this debate was the Bosepukur club’s proud assertion of the orderliness of its Pujas despite the growing pressure of crowds, emphasizing the efforts of its volunteers in the harmonious management of spectators and prevention of ‘eve-teasing’ or rowdiness. There was a crucial investment in its own civic profile, to support which it also underlined its own moves during 2002– 2003 to involve a cluster of three other Pujas of the vicinity and the local police station in working out a set of effective traffic and pedestrian arrangements for the festival days, blaming the police and rival clubs for the failure of these talks. Over the subsequent years, as it entered the full swing of designer productions, the cultivation of the image of a law-abiding, artistically tasteful, socially aware Puja would bring rich dividends of corporate

the making of a new civic event 107

2.30 Airtel Puja advertisement hoarding, with the slogan, Care kori, tai share kori ‘We care, so we share’, 2012

sponsorship along with new social groups of viewers to this neighbourhood. (See 2.28, 2.29). What was true for Bosepukur would also be true for a large number of similar non-affluent neighbourhoods across the city as they rode the period’s ‘theme’ Puja wave. A decade later, Kajal Sarkar, a long-time member of the Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja Committee, looked back on the critical and unceasing importance of corporate sponsorship in the success graph of this Puja in the ‘theme’ and awards circuits of the past decade. By now, he and this Bosepukur Puja had reached a new prominence as one of the initiators and heads of a new organization in the city, called the Forum for Durgotsav, that had been formed in 2010, and had brought 175 Pujas (including all the prominent award-winning ‘theme’ Pujas) under its fold. Significantly, the chief concern and activity of this Forum was to mediate between Puja committees, potential advertisers and sponsors, and the many regulations and prohibitions that were being constantly imposed by the municipal authorities.98 The changing times are best reflected in an Ananda Bazaar Patrika editorial of 2010, that stands in sharp contrast to the earlier one cited on 1978, in the way it welcomes a new sensitivity to environmental pollution, sense of discipline and civic responsibility within the city’s Durga Pujas. It congratulated as much the will towards self-regulation of Puja crowds and committees as the administration’s

efforts towards the enforcement of order and rules. In the mutual recognition of benefits of such order by the public and the government, the season’s justcompleted mass festivities were seen to have set a lesson for the city.99 In this context, what is worth noting is the degree to which media publicities and the awards scenario together came to produce a new vista of synergies towards a more supple governmentality. The crucial role of the corporate media in redefining and upgrading the character of the festival is now widely acknowledged in the field. If commercialization still invokes its share of distaste and yearning for the small homely Pujas of the past, what has also come to be recognized is the power of corporate capital today in both propelling the drive towards a visibly rule-abiding event and in producing a new discourse of community, bonding and social awareness within the festival. (See the advertisements in 2.30, 2.31) It is imperative for Puja clubs today to submit all their permission clearance certificates from the KMC, CESC, Fire Brigade, Calcutta Police and even the PCB to the corporate management bodies, to underwrite their eligibility for sponsorship and award contests. The age of the sponsors and the age of the new civic festival stands one and indivisible. The growing involvement of the corporate sector in the festival and the institution of an ever-expanding range of prizes for the best, most innovative and artistic productions, no less for the most civic, law-

2.31 Puja award banner by an NGO, ‘Prothom Alo’, working with street children, at the Hindusthan Park Puja, 2009

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2.32 ‘True Spirit’ award signage at the Baishakhi Club, Asoke Trust Puja, Gangulybagan, 2007

abiding units, came to create a new trend of what is now widely referred to as the ‘award-centric’ Puja. In the mid-1970s, the West Bengal government and the Calcutta Police had initiated the first competitions in their early attempts to work more closely with the north Calcutta Puja committees, but without much success. The snowballing effects of the awards phenomenon would come two decades later. Beginning with the Asian Paints, ‘Sharad Samman’ in 1985, which still remains the most prestigious of all Puja awards (and will be discussed in detail in the next chapter) there are now over a hundred prizes offered by different corporate firms, manufacturing houses, newspaper groups and television channels, with even various departments of the municipal administration joining the fray. These awards are offered in multiple groups for categories ranging from the best pratima, pandal or lighting and best idol-maker and designer, to the apartment block Puja

with the show of greatest group solidarity, to the best performance of dhakis, the ‘best child-friendly Puja’, or the most safe and law-abiding Puja (an award offered by the Fire Services and Kolkata Police and Municipal Corporation). The list today is endless, and the phenomenon shows little signs of waning.100 In 2003, The Telegraph, true to its campaign to make a ‘Durga Puja with a difference’, launched two of the newest award campaigns on the scene. (See 2.32) The first, jointly hosted with the CESC and a citizen’s group called PUBLIC (‘People United for Better Living in Calcutta’) was called the ‘True Spirit Puja’ award, and was offered for tiers of ‘two, three, four and five-star Pujas’ and a single ‘model’ Puja each year, presented itself as a contest which ‘prioritizes safety, not big budgets, sensitivity, not sensation’ and carried the slogan, ‘Caring for Calcutta’. The second, launched with the insurance company ING

the making of a new civic event 109 Vysya, and Sony Entertainment TV, was given the name ‘Hand-in-Hand’ community Puja award, and was intended specifically to promote Pujas in housing block complexes in the city, where it began to sponsor a series of children’s, ladies and community events in each apartment block that enlisted for this award. Every year, both these award contests have generated a growing publicity in print and in street hoardings, with newer, slicker and smarter advertising slogans and images. In one, Puja organizers were asked to ‘illuminate’ their pandals with ‘care and concern’; in another, a living Mahishasur pleaded with all blaring loudspeakers to ‘give his ears a break’ and to ‘make the Pujas fun for all’ (see 2.33); in a third one, in a hand-drawn graphic, a petulant Durga announces to her family on Mount Kailash that ‘If everyone is not a part of my Puja, I am not going down to earth’. (See 2.34) Now competing with a slew of other awards with the same targets and criteria, The Telegraph ‘True Spirit’ and ‘Hand-in-Hand’ housing block awards rule the scene today as the most powerful representatives of the contemporary corporate identity of the mass festival—an identity that seeks to celebrate not just the creativity or novelty of productions, but equally the community spirit, social work and civic awareness embodied by a Puja. It is my central argument that the new artistic profile and design aesthetics that have come to enervate the Pujas are inextricably embedded in these changing discourses on public life and urban governance. It is within

this corporatized frame of a civic festival that the Durga Puja today strives for its new ‘brand’ identity as the city’s unique cultural event.

2.33 ‘True Spirit’ award advertisement in The Telegraph, Calcutta, September 2008

2.34 ‘True Spirit’ award advertisement, in The Telegraph, Calcutta, September 2009

Two advertisement hoardings from 2008 will serve well to round up this chapter. A Zee TV advertisement, from a season when this channel came to sponsor entire Pujas and broadcast televised Puja addas at prominent locations like Maddox Square, dramatically used the traditional elongated iconography of the eyes of the goddess and the phrase Amio Dekchhi (‘I am watching too’) to conjure the image of a continuously watched-over, closely-monitored festival. (See 2.35) In contrast, the hoarding of the real estate and investment firm Shrachi, which launched a series using the once well-known Puja advertising slogan of Bata (Pujoy Chai Notun Juto), played purely with the power of the copy and the rhyming of words. Replacing the words ‘theme’ for ‘dream’, ‘saj’ (dress and décor) for ‘kaj’ (work), it links the corporate ‘dream’ for a reformed Durga Puja with its desire for a new workculture and a larger image makeover of the city of Kolkata.101 Anomalous though it may seem, notions of discipline, self-regulation and civic improvement had come to thickly infiltrate the discourse around the contemporary city festival. Turning inside out the opposition between ‘work time’ and ‘festival time’, the latter sought for itself a sense of order and communitarian motivation that was seen to be sorely wanting in the former.

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2.35 Puja hoarding of Zee TV, Amio Dekchhi (‘I am watching too’), 2008

Notes 1 Police Arrangements in connection with Durga Puja and Lakshmi Puja, for the years 2002–2007 (paperback bound documents, issued each year by the Deputy Commissioner of Police, Headquarters, Lalbazar, Kolkata). I am grateful to Mr Shibaji Ghosh, then Deputy Commissioner of Police, Lalbazar Headquarters, for giving me an extended interview on 13 September 2007, and handing me this material in his office. 2 Example, invitation titled, ‘Sharadotsab’, to the first coordination meetings of the Kolkata Police, to be held at the Kolkata Police Auditorium, Bodyguard Lines, 11 and 12 September 2007, 6 pm. 3 For instances of deeply negative views of the city’s Durga Pujas, see Sova Sen, ‘Spectacle of Collective Madness’, Hindustan Times, Kolkata, Puja Special, 3 October 2002, and Soumitra Das, ‘Apocalypse Now—Desperate Search for Happiness’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 18 October 2007. Sova Sen, theatre and film personality, wife of actor Utpal Dutt, pours out her venom from an old-guard Marxist discomfort with the religious/social phenomenon: ‘Puja signifies a sheer waste of time and money…People go wild with merry-making at this time, and that’s something I can’t stand…On all four days of the festival, people crowd the streets, screaming and elbowing their ways to the front, determined to catch a glimpse of the idols. I feel ashamed as a human being to see people

going berserk for the sake of having fun. Religion, indeed, is the opium of the masses. Why else would so many people behave as if they were intoxicated?’ And on an equally stern note, journalist Soumitra Das writes on how he has always ‘tried to keep Durga Puja at bay. The sight of thousands of human beings—an apocalyptic vision of the ocean of humanity gushing out of a tap—turning into zombies that trudge mindlessly from one pandal to another is forbidding and frightening…’ 4 Shifting our perspective away from Kolkata’s Durga Pujas, we find this image of the ‘ungoverned’ mass public sphere of the Ganesh Chathurthi festivities in the cities of Mumbai and Pune resonating throughout the study of Ramindar Kaur, Performative Politics and the Cultures of Hinduism: Public Uses of Religion in Western India, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003. In the period of militant nationalism (the 1890s and 1900s), the Ganapati festivities are shown to have devised their effective mechanisms for escaping government regulations and the charges of ‘sedition’ and ‘civil disorder’. The latter-day public life of the festival in Maharashtra, where the religious event came to be thickly inflected with the populist politics of the Shiv Sena, is also portrayed as a phenomenon whose spontaneous and organic connectivity with people’s lives sets it apart from the more orderly state rituals like the

the making of a new civic event 111 Republic Day parade. However, even in this context, Raminder Kaur traces a growing civic concern in recent years with the regulation of the Ganapati festival, with the forming of an umbrella coordinating authority, the Brihanmumbai Sarvajanik Ganeshotsav Samanvay Samiti under which 2,000 of the 7,400 mandals in Greater Mumbai were registered.

on Rabindra Sarani (Chitpur Road) due to severe rains, and the work of M.G. Road (Harrison Road) being stalled due to dumping of granite stone pieces by CTC for work on the tram tracks. Minutes, Commissioner of Police, Kolkata, 12 September 2005. 12 Minutes, Commissioner of Police, Kolkata, 28 August 2003, item no. ix, p. 7; 17 August 2006, item no. vii, p. 2.

5 The point was brought up and debated by MSS Pandian at a seminar presentation I made on this chapter at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, on 28 October, 2009.

13 Ibid., item no. vii, p.8; item no. v, pp. 1–2.

6 I would like to place my micro-study of the new ‘civic’ culture of Kolkata’s Durga Pujas against the larger canvas of urban transformations laid out in Partha Chatterjee’s essay, ‘Are Indian Cities Becoming Bourgeois at Last? Or, if you prefer we could exclaim: Are Indian cities becoming bourgeois, alas?’ and Janaki Nair’s essay, ‘“Social Municipalism” and the New Metropolis’ in Mary John, Praveen Kumar Jha and Surinder S. Jodhka, ed., Contested Transformations: Changing Economies and Identities in Contemporary India, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2006.

15 Interview with Alapan Bandyopadhyay, Chief Municipal Commissioner, Kolkata Corporation at his office, 5 September 2007.

7 Dwelling on the term Sarbojanin, writer Syed Mustafa Siraj in his article ‘Sarbajaner Utsab’, ABP, Puja Supplement, 29 September 1987, provides an eloquent statement on the way the Pujas have become the ‘festival of all’. 8 This dispensation may be aligned with what Janaki Nair defines as an emergent trend of middle class ‘social municipalism’, in the context of the formation in 1999 of the Bangalore Agenda Task Force (BATF), which appealed to citizens to see themselves as ‘stockholders of the city corporation’ on the understanding that the municipal system may not be able to adequately meet the changing infrastructural demands of metropolitan improvements (‘Social Municipalism and the New Metropolis’, pp. 125–6). 9 Discussions on these regulations and guidelines repeatedly feature in each year’s pre-Puja coordination meetings, organized by the Kolkata Police. Minutes of the Coordination Meetings held by the Commissioner of Police, Kolkata at the Briefing/Conference Room at Lalbazar (hereafter referred to as Minutes, Commissioner of Police, Kolkata), on 28 August 2003 (for the season of 2003); on 3 September 2004 (for the season of 2004); on 12 September 2005 (for the season of 2005); on 17 August 2006 (for the season of 2006). 10 Guidelines Pamphlet, Sharadotsav 2012, of the Bidhananagar City Police, issued by the Police Commissioner, Bidhannagar. 11 So, for instance, in his report on the progress of road repairs, Uday Sankar Sengupta, Director General (Civil), KMC, talked of work being severely hampered

14 Interview with Badal Bhattacharya, chief organizing secretary, College Square Puja Committee, 20 September 2006.

16 Now renamed the West Bengal State Electricity Distribution Company Limited (WBSEDCL) 17 In 2003, to curb the continuing incidences of electric ‘power thefts’, the CESC had to lodge as many as 278 complaints with police stations against offending Puja committees. ‘Metro Matters’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 7 October 2003. 18 It is not a mere coincidence, then, that the most comprehensive and updated listing of all public community Pujas (of clubs and housing blocks) in the KMC area is available from the offices of the CESC, whose territorial jurisdiction almost exactly matches that of the city’s corporation. 19 In the two successive coordination meetings held at Lalbazar on 22 and 23 August 2006, the representatives of the Bagbazar Sarbojanin Durgotsav Committee and the Muhammed Ali Park Puja Committee were the most vociferous in their complaints about the ‘exorbitant charges’ imposed by the CESC, with a request to bring down the charges ‘taking into account the biggest festival of Bengal where millions take part to enjoy the spirit of the Puja’. Announcing that no fresh hike in charges would be made that year, SK Poddar, General Manager, CESC, said in their defence that they had to work ‘under regulatory compulsions laid down by the regulatory authority, and (that) question of hostile attitude does not arise.’ Record of Discussions held during Durga Puja Coordination Meeting at Drill Hall, Lalabazar, on 22 and 23 August 2006, pp. 4–6. 20 Interview with Asim Mahalanobis and Debashis Saha, members of the Santoshpur Trikone Park Durga Puja Committee, 15 September 2006. 21 Sudeshna Banerjee, ‘Go Vertical, Make Space’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 12 September, 2006. Following a PIL filed by a neighbour in January 2006 against their road-obstructing pandals, the Dover Lane Puja committee members talked of how they were having to closely follow the restrictions in pandal size, as prescribed by the police for their width of the road, for which they were gaining the greater support of local residents.

112 in the name of the goddess 22 The city’s English daily, The Telegraph, has played a specially active role in supporting the police and court orders regulating the height and width of pandals on public roads, as evident, for example, in this cluster of reports from 2009—‘Court demands rule rein on roadhog pandals’, ‘Axe on road-hog pandals’, ‘Puja Peeves: rules and prices’, 3, 16, 17 September 2009. 23 These modalities of collecting para subscriptions were laid down in a Calcutta High Court order, dating back to September 1985, but came to be effectively operationalized and pressed upon in the pre-Puja police coordination meetings mainly in the past decade. Instances of violence and harassment of residents over collecting Durga Puja chanda, however, has never entirely receded, and has kept resurfacing in recent times. 24 Some of the earliest notifications of police restrictions on the times and volume of use of loudspeakers appear in ABP, 15 October 1980 and 8 October 1986, while the new active role of NGOs along with the West Bengal Pollution Control Board in controlling ‘noise pollution’ during the Pujas begins to feature in the newspapers from the mid 1990s. See for example a report in The Telegraph, Calcutta, 14 September 1995. 25 ‘Loud speakers play soft in most pandals’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 28 October 2001. 26 Reports in The Telegraph, Calcutta, 6 and 13 September 2004. 27 These ‘environmental’ themes range from the oblique to the overt. In 2006, for instance, while the Khidirpur Pally Saradiya Puja showed the goddess arriving in a palki (palanquin), as a form of protest against today’s suffocation of the city by traffic fumes, the Behala Club Puja turned to the paintings of the Gond tribes to demonstrate the close communion with nature of this tribal community and the Nabapally Puja on Charu Avenue took on what would become an increasingly popular theme of protecting and planting trees as the only remedy to save planet earth. (‘Dushan Akranta Prithibir Sushrusha Ki Bhabey, Sei Barta Mandapey Mandapey’ ABP, 21 September 2006). The trend also came to be reflected, for instance, in the large spectacle of a globe encircled by fire that the FD Block Puja created on the theme of ‘Global Warming’ in 2008— and in forms of experimental art, as with an installation by designer Shibshankar Das at a Haridebpur Puja of 2010, titled Gachh Parban Pala, which used a variety of ‘found objects’ to create an ambience of trees, foliage and birds. 28 The Trinamool (meaning grass-roots) Congress has green as its colour, and a two-stemmed sapling as its symbol. 29 ‘Drive to clean water bodies after bisarjan’, Hindustan Times, Kolkata, Puja Special, 25 September 2003.

30 ‘Ban Likely on Puja Lead Paint’, Times City, Times of India, Kolkata, 5 August 2008. The article presents a detailed survey of the symptoms of heavy metal poisoning of water through the paint used for the idols and raised the ‘cancer scare in bhasan wake’. While the FD Block Puja of Salt Lake was among the first to publicize lead-free paint in its idols of 2008 (‘Ecofriendly colours for Durga’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 8 September 2008), most idol-makers of Kumartuli were finding lead-free paint too expensive an option, and even a reputed image-maker like Sanatan Rudra Pal said that over 60 per cent of his images were still painted with colours mixed with lead. (‘Artisans still bank on lead paints’, Times of India, Kolkata, 15 September 2008). 31 ‘Save the Ganga order given the go by’, Times of India, Kolkata, 7 October 2003; ‘Joint Panel to clean river after immersions’, ‘Puja clean-up diktat: Civic bodies free to slap a fee’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 6 and 8 September 2008. This theme will come up again in the Epilogue. 32 A similar set of concerns are also being voiced around the excesses and violations of law of Mumbai’s megascale Ganapati festivities. Several mandals, we are told, continue to defiantly flout the 18-foot height limit for Ganesh idols; immersion processions refuse to abide by the prescribed routes and traffic regulations; postimmersion, the Arabian sea front and beaches lie clogged with parts of gigantic idols that are being made not of traditional clay but of non-biodegradable material like plaster of Paris. See Shashi Baliga, ‘On either side of Ganesha’. 33 This theme reigns predominant in the deliberations recorded in each year’s Minutes, Commissioner of Police, Kolkata, and has also been taken up in recent forms of Puja advertising. For instance, in its serialized chain of social ‘feel-good’ advertisements on the eve of the Durga Pujas of 2012, Ei-Samay offered special Puja greetings to those like the police who had no holidays (The slogan was, Jader chhuti nei, tader jonyo-ow shubechha). And the trend was also taken up during 2011–12 by some of the private hospital chains in the city, which announced Apnader Chhuti, Amader Noi (‘Your holidays, not ours’). 34 See, for example ‘Claps and Raps in Revelry Report Card’, or ‘Reality Check, Revelry Road Map’, The Telegraph Mahashashti Puja Guides, 15 October 2002 and 3 October 2003. 35 ‘Welcome to Special Puja: Themesong, Sapnar Bagan’, Hindustan Times, Live Kolkata, Pujascope, 10 September 2009, reported on designer Somnath Mukhopadhyay involving physically and mentally challenged children from institutions like the Manovikas Kendra, Srijonsabha and the Autism Society of India for his Puja at Kankurgachhi which he titled Ebar Pujo Amadero (‘This time it is also our Puja’).

the making of a new civic event 113 36 Interview with Mr. Shibaji Ghosh, then Deputy Commissioner of Police, Lalbazar, 13 September 2007. 37 These measures became most urgent in the Pujas of 2008 following the serial blasts in New Delhi, raising the fear of a terrorist attack even in a city which has so far largely been spared such attacks. ‘Don’t have a blast’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 21 September 2008. But not be missed in the police security alert notifications were the three watchful eyes of the goddess and phrases like ‘Lets celebrate happiness together’. (See 2.16) 38 This 2007 incident of violent confrontation between the state police and the villagers of Nandigram in east Medinipur in West Bengal, who had for months been resisting the forcible acquisition of landholdings by the state for setting up industries and Special Economic Zones stirred up a ferment of political and civic protests. It is now looked upon as the beginning of the end for the weakening three-decade-old CPI (M) rule in West Bengal, which would finally face its massive rout in the elections of the summer of 2011. 39 On the story of Rizwanur Rahman, the breaking up of his marriage with the daughter of a rich Marwari industrialist, Priyanka Todi, by the Todi family in active collusion with the city’s top police brass, his subsequent mysterious death on train-tracks far from the slum quarters where he lived, and on the public candlelight vigil and civic protest that grew around this case, see Pradip Kumar Datta, ‘Collectives Today: The Novelties of the Rizwanur Movement’ in Anjan Ghosh, Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Janaki Nair, ed., Theorising the Present: Essays for Partha Chatterjee, pp. 273–315. 40 The Durga Puja build-up was entirely sidelined that year in the local media by the front-page coverage of the Rizwanur case and the candlelight vigil, leading to this story of the new Police Commissioner’s takeover. ‘The Departed and the Incumbent’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 18 October 2007. 41 The Bidhannagar City Police offers a similar social message, with the three words ‘Courage, Care, Commitment’ featuring under its newly created logo. 42 Anjan Banerjee, Sri Sri Durga Parikramanika (Kolkata: Mayurakshi, 2007) is a recent example of the many visual and textual accounts of these Banedi Barir Pujas of Calcutta, presented here in the innovative form of a handy illustrated guidebook and diary. For a substantive scholarly account of the past and present histories of these Pujas, based on interviews with members of thirteen different Puja households, see McDermott, Revelry, Rivalry and Longing for the Goddess, Chapter 1, ‘Puja Origins and Elite Politics’, pp. 11–38. See Chapter 7 for a discussion of the West Bengal government’s promotion of ‘heritage’ Durga Puja tours around a selection of these aristocratic homes of north Kolkata.

43 McDermott (pp. 37–8) productively draws here on the work of Svetlana Boyn, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001) and Jan Assman, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). 44 The range here moves from books and anthologies, like Bimal Chandra Datta’s Durga Puja, Sekal Thekey Ekal to Puja themes, such as the one titled Pujor Ekal o Sekal at the Shibmandir Puja on Lake Temple Road in 2006. Featuring the designer Purnendu Dey and his father, the Puja led viewers back in time from a contemporarylook metallic pavilion and Durga image of Purnendu Dey to a thatch-roof mud hut structure and traditional ekchala Durga image made by his father. Next to this, in the same season, was a remake of a double-storeyed aristocratic home and a thakur-dalan, at Mudiali Puja, a repeating form on the Puja landscape of the city during the 2000s, with this resonant feel of past heritage. 45 Examples: writer Sunil Gangopadhyay, ‘Chhelebelay Jemon Dekhechhilam Temon Thakur Aar Nei’, ABP, October 13, 1983; artist,Karuna Shaha, ‘Ma-key Ebar Jemon Dekhlam’, ABP, 21 October 1983; designer Raghunath Goswami, ‘Murti Rachanar Karigar’, ABP, Anandamela, 3 October 1983. 46 Chintamani Kar, ‘Ebar Pratima Jemon Dekhlam’, ABP, 21 October 1980. 47 Nehat Matir Toiri, Hantey Paren Na, Tobu Paschimbanger Sera Model Hoye Tini Thakben Panch Din. Ebong Er Songey Dharmer Kono Samparka Nei—Samaresh Majumdar, ‘Amar Pujo’, ABP, Rabibasariya, Sunday, 17 September 2006. 48 See, for example, Manisha Dasgupta, ‘Pujor Bipanan, Bipananer Pujo’, pp. 21–5. 49 Sripantha, Smritir Pujo (The Pujas of Memory), Kolkata: Punascha, 2003. 50 ‘Kolikatar Baroyeary Puja’, ‘Durga Puja’, in Satik Hutom Pyanchar Naksha, ed. Arun Nag, Kolkata: Subarnarekha, 1398/1991, Part I, pp. 60–122, Part II, pp. 235–50. Ranajit Guha, in ‘A colonial city and its time(s)’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 145. no. 3, 2008, pp. 329–51, provides a new reading of Kaliprasanna Sinha’s satirical and effervescent portrayal of festivals in nineteenth century Calcutta, using the period genre of the Naksha to argue that all the excesses and transgressions that are described of ‘festival time’ can be seen as the main route of escape of the colonized population from the strictures and drudgeries of official ‘work time’. 51 Sripantha, Smritir Pujo, ‘Saheber Durgotsab’, ‘Baiji Pujor Badaley’, pp. 31–49. 52 Ibid., ‘Prankrishna Haldarer Durgotsab’, p. 36. 53 Ibid., ‘Baroyeary Noi, Barawari’, pp.50–53. The author

114 in the name of the goddess plays closely on the linguistic distinctions of the two terms, Baroyeary (‘yeary’ meaning friends, which Hutom Pyanchar Naksha repeatedly uses as a frivolous term for the ganging together of merry-makers and revellers for the many entertainments of the Durga Pujas) and Barowari (which has its associations with the term biradari, and carries a different social sense of fraternity and community in the hosting of a public Puja). 54 For vivid descriptions of such nightlong revelries of Jatra, Bai Naach Majlis, Khyamta or Kabi Gaan performances at what Hutom calls the Baroyeary Pujas of babu homes, along with the detailed annotations of the editor, Arun Nag, see Satik Hutom Pyanchar Naksha, pp. 94–122. 55 Sripantha, Smritir Pujo, pp. 25–28, 61–4. 56 Ibid., p. 52 (translation mine). 57 The official name of the township is Bidhannagar, named after the West Bengal Chief Minister Bidhan Chandra Ray, who was the main moving force behind the conception and execution of its plan. D.P.Chatterjea, ‘Bidhannagar: From Marshland to Modern City’, in Sukanta Chaudhuri, ed., Calcutta: The Living City, Vol. II, Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. 176–80. 58 Tithi Bhattacharya, ‘Tracking the Goddess: Religion, Community and Identity in the Durga Puja Ceremonies of Nineteenth-Century Calcutta’, Journal of Asian Studies, vol.66. no.4. November 2007, pp. 919–62. 59 Ibid., pp. 946–9. 60 Ibid., p. 950. 61 Ibid., p. 958. 62 In the first years of field work, our research team began to survey the Pujas in a few of these early large apartment block complexes of south Kolkata, such as Saptaparni on Ballygunge Circular Road, Parijat apartments on Ekdalia Road, and Chaturanga apartments at Chetla. But this aspect of the research was not pursued, nor carried in its logical extension into the newer high-range luxury residential enclaves that came up in both older and newer extensions of the city during the 1990s and 2000s. In each of these units the celebration of the Durga Pujas has served a crucial role in forging a sense of an internal community, and in fostering a notion of the orderly communitarian nature of these Pujas as against the chaotic crowdpulling Pujas of the streets. Kept outside the scope of this work, the phenomenon of apartment block Pujas across a widening social and geographic spectrum of the city, and their current thick incorporation into Puja promotional awards and media publicities, calls for a study of its own. 63 This point is particularly highlighted in Tithi Bhattacharya, ‘Tracking the Goddess’, pp. 940–44.

64 Cited in ibid., pp. 955–6. Since I was not able to access this book in the libraries of Kolkata, I remain unsure whether the translation of the term ‘sarbojanin’ as ‘universal’ is that of Tithi Bhattacharya or of the original unnamed author. 65 Amrita Bazaar Patrika, 19 October 1926; The Bengalee, 2 October 1926, 30 September 1927. Cited in McDermott, Revelry, Rivalry and Longing for the Goddess, pp. 65–6. 66 Tithi Bhattacharya, ‘Tracking the Goddess’, pp. 957– 8; McDermott, Revelry, Rivalry and Longing for the Goddess, pp. 67–8. The latter quotes, in this context, from an article in the ABP of 19 October 1926 on how Muslims who had been ‘joining in the Puja celebrations of the last five to six hundred years’ (a loose ahistorical estimation of time) were now turning away from the festival, and how the ‘new Pirs’ were to be blamed for stirring up this new communal division. 67 Yogeshchandra Ray Vidyanidhi, Puja Parbon , pp. 11– 16. 68 Citing some of these instances, Tithi Bhattacharya, ‘Tracking the Goddess’, p. 941, talks of how the nineteenth century Durga Puja became ‘a reinterpreted arena of social exchange in which the participant became a devotee by default’. But she also questions the extent to which the social and religious ‘other’ could ever effectively become part of the devotional community of the Pujas. 69 Amritalal Basur Smriti o Atmasmriti, edited by Arun Kumar Mitra (reprint, Kolkata: Sahityalok, 1982), pp. 97–8, cited in Swati Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism and the Colonial Uncanny (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 210. 70 Swati Chattopadhyay (Representing Calcutta, pp. 194– 211) provides an analysis of the emergence of some of the early middle class paras in north Calcutta, in the vicinities of the aristocratic homes of the Shobhabazar Debs and the Pathuriaghata Mullicks, through a close study of the reconfigurations of residential and public spaces in the city. The new forms of bhadralok public sociability are studied through the fragmentation of plots and innovations in the architectural frontages of houses and structures of their courtyards, verandahs, street front rooms and ro’aks (public seating areas skirting the outer front of homes that became a quintessential part of street life in the traditional city). 71 While a larger study of early Sarbojanin Pujas would have to scour Bengali novels and memoirs to piece together this social history, the existing literature on the subject provides few leads. Bimal Chandra Datta, Durga Puja, Sekal Thekey Ekal, pp. 138–52, gives no more than a skeletal list of the first Sarbojanin Pujas

the making of a new civic event 115

72 73 74 75 76

77

78

79

80

of north and south Calcutta. Sandip Bandopadhyay, Durga Puja: Borobari Thekey Barowari (pp. 12–17, 24–32) offers a sketchy but more vibrant account of the growth of these community Pujas (where he clubs the term Barowari with Sarbojanin) from the high nationalist 1920s through the politically turbulent years of Independence, Partition, the refugee influx and the Naxalite movement. Bimal Chandra Datta, Durga Puja, Sekal Thekey Ekal, pp. 138–9. Ibid., pp.143–144; Sandip Bandyopadhyay, Durga Puja: Borobari Thekey Barowari, pp. 12–14 Sunil Gangopadhyay, ‘1944: The year that was’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, October 1, 2006. Ramindar Kaur, Performative Politics and the Cultures of Hinduism, Chapters 1 and 2, pp. 1–69. Bimal Chandra Datta, Durga Puja, Sekal Thekey Ekal, pp. 146–51; Interviews with members of many of these Puja committees. Prafulla K. Chakrabarti, The Marginal Men, Calcutta: Lumiere Books, 1990, Chapter 3, ‘Deux Ex Machina: The Squatter Colonies’, pp. 33–66, describes the forming of the first of these refugee ‘squatter colonies’ of south Calcutta between January and May 1950, through the tumultuous land-grabbing operations spearheaded by the Nikhil Vanga Vastuhara Karma Parishad (NVBKP). In the subsequent years, these isolated colonies would be welded together to form larger units under the organizational banner of the Dakshin Kolkata Sahartali Bastuhara Samhati (DKSBS) and the ‘squatter’ settlements transformed into closely interconnected lower middle class paras. Sandip Bandyopadhyay, Durga Puja: Borobari Thekey Barowari, pp. 24–5. The newspaper reports of the time write about how these calamities never stalled the festival and how community Durga Pujas steadily spread through these tortuous times. By 1948 the number of Sarbojanin Pujas in the city had risen to nearly 200. For an evocative account of life in one such squatter colony, Netaji Nagar, that captures the larger social world of such colonies and their transformation into middle class paras, see Manas Ray, ‘Growing up Refugee’, History Workshop Journal, issue 53, 2002, pp. 149–79. Nirmal Kumar Bose, Calcutta: 1964, A Social Survey Bombay: Lalvani Publishing House, 1968; ‘Calcutta: A Premature Metropolis’, Scientific American, September 1965, Vol.213, no.3, pp. 96–99. In the book, in the chapter on ‘Voluntary Institutions: Bengali Community’(pp. 57–9), Bose briefly considers the neighbourhood ‘baroari pujas’, along with other religious, caste-based, social-service and recreational organizations as markers of the Bengali community.

81 For a rare study of the early activities of these para clubs around the hosting of community Durga Pujas, see Jyotirmoyee Sharma, ‘Puja Associations in West Bengal’, Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 28, no. 3, May 1969, pp. 579–94. 82 These gendered divisions of activities have remained largely in place, even as the young and middle aged women of a para have today come into a growing media visibility. Nowadays, they can be seen playing a premier role in the publicity of the Pujas, hosting judges and media persons, appearing in live chat shows on the Puja venue, performing a series of their ‘traditional’ activities like conch blowing, painting alpanas or smearing each other with sindur for television channels and award competitions. They also now outdo the local men in dancing before the goddess before she leaves for the immersion. Women of different age groups dancing in public on the evening of the immersion, in both elite and lower middle-class neighbourhoods, is a new social phenomenon, growing out of the all pervasive influence of north Indian marriage customs and popular Hindi films. 83 Sudeshna Banerjee, in Durga Puja: Celebrating the Goddess Then and Now (pp. 44–5) cites here the reminiscences of a resident of Adarsha Pally of Behala, where around 60 refugee families from East Bengal had bought residential plots at very cheap rates, and settled here between 1948 and 1952. 84 Jyotirmoyee Sarma, ‘Puja Associations of West Bengal’, pp. 586–7, mentions the trend of thousands of city dwellers, along with masses coming in from the suburbs, thronging to the pandals from early afternoon to one or two o’clock in the morning, with vast attendant traffic jams on city streets. She also writes of the coming into place by this time (the 1960s) of opening ceremonies, growing competitions between Puja committees over the artistry of their goddesses and pandals, and the growing publicity of the festival in the local media. 85 This distaste for the extravaganza of these Pujas is largely gleaned from verbal accounts in our interviews with older Puja committee members, sponsors and designers, all of whom wished to underline their break from this trend that they dated broadly to the 1970s and 1980s. A more pointed critique is in an article by Ashis Ghosh, ‘Pujor arthaniti o sanskriti niye toliye bhabar somoy eshechhey’ ABP, 17 October 1985. The article lashed out particularly at the huge wastage of funds by the Ekdalia Evergreen Puja of the Congress politician Subrata Mukherjee, where the Congress centenary was being commemorated that year in an elaborate light display. It used the term bourgeois abaskhay (‘bourgeois decadence’) as well as ashlilata (obscenity) to condemn not only such lavish festival expenditure in a poor country, but also the loud music, indecent dancing and

116 in the name of the goddess the subscription extortion that were associated with these Pujas. 86 Sandip Bandyopadhyay, Durga Puja: Borobari Thekey Barowari, pp. 36–7. 87 The Durga Pujas as prime holiday and travel time in Bengal is an important theme for a separate study. McDermott, Revelry, Rivalry and Longing for the Goddess, pp. 47–57, looks back to one aspect of this theme in nineteenth century history, in which colonial officials, the English press and early liberal nationalists all accepted the Pujas as a time of vacation and an opportunity for a getaway from the city, even as they consciously kept themselves apart from the religious festival. 88 ‘Path, Puja. Prashasan’ ABP, Editorial, 6 Ashwin, 1385/23 September 1978. A later editorial the same season, ‘Pujor Diney Prarthana’ ABP, Editorial, 20 Ashwin 1385/7 October 1978, put up a particular appeal to temper the excess of expenditure and revelries of the Pujas keeping in mind the devastating rains and floods in Bengal that year. One of the worst in living memory, the floods of 1978 hit Bengal on the night of 26–27 September 1978, a few days after the first editorial quoted here. 89 See, for example, Chintamani Kar, ‘Ebar Pratima Jemon Dekhlam’, Sunil Gangopadhyay, ‘Chhelebelay Jemon Dekhechhilam Temon Thakur Aar Nei’ (cited earlier), or Sunil Das, ‘Mayer Songey Baro Ghanta’, ABP, 25 October 1983. 90 Anjan Ghosh, ‘Puja as Performance: Transgressing Public Space’, paper presented at a panel he convened on Calcutta at the ‘City One’ conference organized by SARAI, CSDS, New Delhi, in January 2003. For a revised version, see Anjan Ghosh, ‘Contested Spaces: Puja and Its Publics in Calcutta’, op. cit. pp. 253–72. 91 Reports in ABP, 7 and 15 September 1985. 92 ‘Nana Bidhinishedher Aropey Sarbojanin Onishchit’ ABP, 11 September 1990.

Puja

93 Such protests against the forced scaling down of the size of the Durga idols continue from that period into the 2000s; see reports in ABP, October 8, 1986 and in The Telegraph, Calcutta, 4 October 2001. 94 The Telegraph, Calcutta, 10 and 11 October 2002. Discussed in Anjan Ghosh, ‘Contested Spaces: Puja and Its Publics in Calcutta’, pp. 255, 264.

95 Ranajit Guha, ‘A colonial city and its time(s)’, pp. 341– 50. 96 ‘Full stop for traffic stop twins’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 13 September 2003; ‘Many a bottleneck to be cleared,’ Hindustan Times, Kolkata, 14 September 2003. 97 Interview with club member Subir Ghosh, and designer Bandhan Raha, at the Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja. 27 September 2003. 98 Interview with Kajal Sarkar, at the site of the new art gallery housing a selection of Durga creations at Rabindra Sarovar, 10 November 2012. 99 ‘Alo Chromey’ ABP, Editorial, 20 October 2010. 100 I use here examples from two years—2001 and 2006— to give a sampling of the kinds and numbers of ‘Puja excellence awards’ that began to pour out over this decade. 2001 saw the following awards on offer among others: (i) the Asian Paints Sharad Samman awards for the best pandal, best pratima, best overall conception, and three further categories called ‘Discovery of the year’, ‘Innovative Excellence’ and ‘Artisan of the year’ (each of these categories have continued into the present); (ii) the Snowcem Ananda (ABP) Durgotsav Arghya, offering a first, second and third prize; (iii) a new award for the ‘Best Child-Friendly Puja’ offered jointly by UNICEF, Nerolac (a baby-food brand) and Prayasam (an NGO working with underprivileged children); (iv) M.P. Birla Foundation Puja Utkarsha Awards for the best image, best pandal and best ambience; (v) the IBP Red (a battery producer) ‘Shera Singha’ award (an award for the best lion); (vi) the Kolkata Municipal Corporation first, second and third awards; and (vii) Indian Oil-Impact Fire Safety Awards, also for the best three Pujas, In 2006, we find: (i) the ABP Sharad Arghya awards being co-sponsored by Dettol and UCO Bank, and expanded over a broader territorial range to cover the Pujas of Greater Kolkata, including Salt Lake, Dumdum and Howrah; (ii) BSNL (the government cell phone service provider) competing with its own three prizes decided upon through SMS voting, and (iii) The Statesman and its Bengali edition (Dainik Statesman) offering ten awards under its ‘Mukut Sharad Mahasamman’ scheme for the Pujas of north, east and central Kolkata, along with three additional awards for the Pujas of Greater Kolkata and Salt Lake. A more detailed listing of Puja awards up to 2012 is provided in Samrat Chattopadhyay, ed., Durgapujor Note Book. 101 The slogan in the Srachi hoarding ran as follows - Pujoy chai notun theme (dream), pujoy chai notun saj (kaj).

THREE

Pre-Histories of the Present: On Artists and Awards

Like all events of our times, the Durga Pujas have taken on the contemporary vocabularies of ‘theme’ and ‘design’. Widely used in the local media, invoked as freely by artists and designers as by club members, sponsors, and the average spectator, the term ‘theme’ Puja eludes any easy definition. Yet, in all its imprecision, it has continued to circulate, and has been a subject both of passionate espousal and disavowal, generating a host of rivalries between types of Pujas and different groups of creative and production personnel in the field. Despite its looseness and elasticity, the term has come to stand in for a clearly recognized wave of Puja productions that came of age during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Emerging out of the idea of public ‘theme parks’, which became a distinct feature in Indian urban spaces during the 1990s, the ‘theme’ Puja has been laterally expanding into the area of ‘theme’ parties and ‘theme’ weddings of the elite, where the pavilions can take on the look of a Rajasthani fortress, an Indo-Saracenic palace, or village huts with Madhubani or Worli wall paintings. (Example, 3.1) Where the Durga Puja was concerned, the notion of a themed production came to signal far more than just the adaptation of a subject or a simulated location for the designing of the Puja site. It brought into the fray a new social and professional group of artists and designers, alongside a range of local amateurs, new claims of artistic practice and

experimentation and new notions of public art and spectatorship. But, before we enter the thick of the contemporary phenomenon, we will be looking back to different points of time in the pasts of the city’s Sarbojanin Durga Pujas to suggest the ways in which they can be positioned as precursors of recent trends. There is much at stake, as I have argued in the last chapter, in bringing the present face to face with the complexities of its own multiple pasts—to test out the lines of what makes the present both continuous and discontinuous with these pasts, and to show how discourses about art and a reformed and cleansed identity of the Pujas has reverberated across a longer history. It becomes particularly pertinent to push from the present into the past the issue of the heterogeneity of the notions of ‘art’, ‘creativity’ and ‘innovation’ in this field of Durga Puja productions. As a series of Puja clubs and designers all claim to have launched the new genre of ‘theme’ Pujas, marking the origins of the trend becomes extremely difficult.1 This chapter and the next suggests some of the ways in which different points of beginning may be brought into play, while opening out the question of what may have served as alternative definitions of ‘art’, ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ in times past. In this chapter, I trace two earlier trends in art production

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3.1 ‘Theme’ Puja grafting on the idea of a ‘theme’ park, featuring a Rajasthani fortress and palace, Suruchi Sangha Puja, New Alipore, 2004

and corporate engagement in the city’s Durga Pujas that have served, each in its own way, to inaugurate a contemporary history of the festival. These trends can be seen to outline a specific lineage for the present that belongs to the 1970s and 1980s: one where the figure of the modern artist and the commercial sponsor make their first pointed entrance into the festival scene. With them arrive a specific investment in artistic innovations in the image of the goddess and a cultural upgradation of the image of the festival that would directly lead to the present-day orchestration of these concerns. The chapter also considers how the resonances of these pioneering trends linger in contemporary festival memories, enabling them to still determine benchmarks of quality and standards in a field that has grown in many directions.

different beginnings Art-er thakur (The ‘art deity’) The term has had a currency in Kolkata’s Durga Puja for several decades now. In different periods, it came to stand in for varieties of experimentation by idol-makers in the form and size of the goddess group and its animal bearers. In the first years of the city’s Sarbojanin Pujas of the north, the experiment with enlarged, individually posed, realistic figures, freed from a single frame unit, would have carried the period’s strongest charge of the unconventional and the ‘modern’. We could cite the example of the gigantic Durga that Netai Chandra Pal (of the main clay modelers’ hub at Kumartuli), is said to have made for the Simla Byayam Samiti Puja in 1939, the year Subhash Chandra Bose launched the

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for these ‘Oriental-style’ Durga images, with Shrish Chandra Pal of Kalighat Patuapara making his name as the creator of this special type of iconography, rivaling the work of another imagemaker of Bhowanipur, Prahlad Pal, who had come to specialize in an alternative genre of realistic animated divinities, using cinema set effects, at the Sanghasree Puja.3 (See 3.4)

3.2 New style of realistic Durga iconography by Gopeshwar Pal, 1939. Reproduced from McDermott, Revelry, Rivalry and Longing for the Goddess, p.112

Puja; or of the realistic, action-charged Durga and Asura figures that the Europe-returned Gopeshwar Pal (from the older lineage of clay modelers of Krishnanagar) began to make for the Kumartuli and Hatibagan Sarbojanin Pujas in the same years. (See 3.2) Side by side with the two predominant types of the traditional, single-frame, stylized and the realistic, separately-standing figures of the goddess group, the 1950s saw the evolution of a third category of imagery, that went by the name of Oriental murti or Art-er thakur, where the idolmakers drew on the traditional genres of Indian temple sculpture, as well as on the modern ‘Indianstyle’ paintings of Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose and Jamini Roy.2 (See 3.3) Instances are cited of Netai Chandra Pal of Kumartuli, of the gigantic Durga fame, also initiating a style of Durga images modeled on Abanindranath Tagore’s paintings, and of Nandalal Bose’s paintings influencing a series of ‘Oriental-style’ Durgas created in the 1950s in different areas of south Calcutta. The Hazra Road, Bhowanipur and Kalighat areas of south Calcutta would emerge during these years as a special locus

In this range of innovations, how did one style of Durga acquire greater artistic credentials over another? Did it have to do with the individual stature and success that an idol-maker like Shrish Chandra Pal was able to gain within his trade, or did it have to do with the fact that this ‘Oriental style’ carried distinct references to the art of both ancient and modern India? There are significant parallels to track here in the way notions of ‘art’ get wedged in the divide between Academic Realist and ‘Indianstyle’ paintings in the modern art milieu of early twentieth century Bengal,4 with competing artistic claims playing themselves out in the images of Durga during the 1950s and ’60s. We will have occasion in the next chapter to look more closely into this largely undocumented history of changing styles of Durga iconography among the idol-makers of the city, to

3.3 Contemporary example of the goddess modelled on Abanindranath Tagore’s painting, Bharat Mata, AG Block Puja, Salt Lake, 2007

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in the name of the goddess whenever we now encounter any unusual elements in the image of the goddess, we immediately give it the appellation of an art-er thakur? The term, it was felt, carried an incongruence, as if the attribute of ‘art’ was being added on to an area of creation where it did not belong. Obliquely, a case was being made for acknowledging the skills and creativity of the clay modellers of the goddess, for whom the image of Durga has always been an area of stylistic change and experimentation.

3.4 Example of a dramatized Durga at a Kalighat Patuapara workshop, 1982. Courtesy: Shanu Lahiri

ask what longer histories may be unraveled for the notions of ‘art’ in this iconographic field. We will also be dwelling on the difficulties of securing the designations of ‘art’ and ‘artist’ within the social field of the idol-making profession in particular, and of Durga Puja productions in general. There were to be no easy transitions, then or now, from the identity of an ‘artisan’ to that of an ‘artist’—from being a mritshilpi or pratima-shilpi to becoming a pure shilpi.5 These nomenclatures play on the polyvalence of the term shilpi, linking it in the one case with the specific art of clay-modelling and idol-making, and leaving it prefix-free in the other case to make it analogous to ‘artist’. The 1970s and ’80s would bring face to face the distinctly different worlds of modern art and idolmaking, and bring a whole new twist to the notion of art-er thakur. When during the Durga Pujas of 1983, the weekly feature of Ananda Bazaar Patrika, ‘Kolkatar Korcha’ reflected on what may constitute an art-er thakur, it ended up tying the category to the particular contemporary phenomenon of the shilpir pujo (the artist’s Puja).6 The visualization of Bengal’s unique composite iconography of Durga had always involved the imagination of the clay sculptor or the painter of the past and allowed for many variations in forms. Why is it then, the writer asked, that

At the same time, what was being welcomed was a new trend of modern painters and sculptors taking on the creation of Durga imagery. The trend was not entirely new. There are occasional references in the 1950s to art school-trained artists taking to the sculpting of special ‘art’ images of the goddess—as was the case with the College Square Puja in 1954, or with the Milansathi and 23 Pally Club Pujas of Bhowanipur in 1954 and 1958, where, in one case, the artist gave the Durga icon the look of a Gandhara sculpted panel, and, in another, the style of a Nandalal Bose painting.7 The trend, however, acquired a more concentrated thrust and locus from 1975, when another parar Puja of Bhowanipur (at Bakulbagan) began a new serialized initiative of inviting a well-known city artist every year to design their Durga image, and where, in 1983, the sculptor

3.5 Debabrata Chakraborty’s relief sculpture of Durga at the Bakulbagan Sarbojanin Puja, 1983. Courtesy: Bakulbagan Puja committee

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Debabrata Chakrabarty created a relief panel of Mahishasurmardini. (See 3.5) There seemed little doubt for the writer in Kolkatar Korcha that the ‘modern’ artist could claim the kind of imaginative and creative prerogative that was never available to the ‘traditional’ clay modeller, whatever may have been the latter’s departures in form and composition. The boundaries between the ‘modern’ and the ‘traditional’ had to be specially negotiated in this area of Puja ‘art’—for these lines were what firmly set apart the shilpi from the mritshilpi, even as they laid out a new domain in which the modern artist could experiment with the iconography of the worshipped goddess. From being an open-ended category, a new equation had fallen into place between the idea of the art-er thakur and this standalone venture of the Bakulbagan Durga Puja, which would invite each year a modern artist to create a special ‘art pratima’ for their Puja. Many years later, even as art and craft productions flooded the festival sphere, this equation continued to linger. A 2006 article titled ‘Art-er Thakur’ recounted its story of Durga Puja ‘art’ almost solely in terms of the works done two decades ago by a selection of senior artists for the Bakulbagan Puja.8

Let us pause to consider here the importance of Bhowanipur as a Puja venue—a place with its existing practices of idol-making at Patuapara, bordering the Kalighat temple, and an earlier history of experimentation with new types of realistic and ‘Oriental-style’ Durga images. Bhowanipur emerged over the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as one of the first prominent residential clusters of the Bengali professional elite, just south of the ‘white town’ area of Chowringhee, Alipore and Lower Circular Road.9 A much older area of settlement of occupational caste groups (among them, communities of painters and clay-modellers) had existed in the area bordering Kalighat, contiguous to the Adi Ganga stream, with roads leading up to a series of small ghats (landing points on the rivulet). In contrast, a new Bhowanipur with residences of propertied Bengali professionals,10 an influx of Sikh and Gujarati traders, and an institutional complex of schools, hospitals and religious organizations spread out eastwards, off the present Ashutosh Mukherjee and Shyama Prasad (S.P.) Mukherjee Road.11 (See 3.6) The spatial and social divides between the older and newer parts of Bhowanipur would be also marked out in its Puja histories.

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in the name of the goddess hub; by the middle years of the twentieth century, the son dropped the title Chitrakar and took on the caste title, Pal, (which at one time had a monopoly over the clay modelling trade) and made his name in innovative ‘Oriental-style’ idol-making.12

3.7 Kalighat Patuapara, with unfinished Saraswati images, 2010. Photograph by Jeet Chowdhury.

The idol-making hub at Patuapara (colloquially called ‘Potopara’) is integrally a part of the older dingy locality and the artisanal trades that had grown over the nineteenth century around the Kalighat temple. (See 3.7) The very name of the place is an indication of the preponderance here of the art of the patua as against that of the kumor, in what had been the home of the famous school of Kalighat painting of the mid and late nineteenth century. While the inimitable patachitras of Kalighat, with their vibrant blend of mythological iconographies with topical social lampoons, flourished around the pilgrim trade of the temple, the orthodoxy of the temple priests, we are told, placed a strong injunction on the making of any other kind of sculpted idols in a region that they wished to preserve as the sole turf of the idol of Kali of Kalighat. It is only towards the 1930s and 1940s, with the growing demand for clay images for the first Sarbojanin Pujas that grew in this area, that the sculpting of deities began to gradually replace the dying art of the Kalighat painters, while the traditions of the painted chalchitra and sora continued into later times side by side with clay image-making. Shrish Chandra Pal’s father, Rajani Chitrakar, is said to have been among the last of the patachitra painters in this

These older vicinities of Bhowanipur, stretching outwards from the Kalighat temple along the Adi Ganga canal, were also host to one of the city’s first public Durga Pujas. Here, in 1910, the Sanatan Dharmotsahini Sabha, a religious organization affiliated to two old Shiva temples on Balaram Bose Ghat Street, is purported to have begun the city’s first community Puja, which still continues on the same premises.13 (See 3.8) In 2009, the Puja was all set to celebrate its centenary, with promotional banners on the main Harish Mukherjee Road.14 With other traditional Durga images of south Kolkata being made in this temple courtyard alongside its own (see 3.9), and with the Durga image of the neighbouring Bhowanipur Mallick Bari still immersed, by convention, in the Adi Ganga stream at this ghat, this Puja carried the thick resonance of a traditional Barowari affair. Notwithstanding the renovations of the twin temples and the courtyard where the Puja is held, the surrounding dilapidated structures and the filthy mud-filled canal that is today the Adi Ganga makes the site typical of this older vicinity of Bhowanipur.15 Visibly different are the elite residential quarters of the new Bhowanipur, where the Bakulbagan Club Puja began in 1928 as one of the earliest Sarbojanin Pujas of south Kolkata. (See 3.10) The new trend of community Pujas had their first dense southwards spread in these areas between Hazra Road, Bakulbagan Road, Ritchie Road, Harish Mukherjee Road and Kalighat, spilling from east to west, connecting the newer and older quarters of Bhowanipur. It is within this cluster that we have the Durga Pujas of clubs like Sanghasree, Sanghamitra or Muktadal, in the older zones of Bhowanipur adjoining Kalighat (all begun in the 1940s), coming up with the first innovations in decorative pandal designs, and with dramatized tableaux of the goddess against painted backdrops of mountains and clouds, competing with another type of ‘Oriental-style’ iconographies of Durga. The idol-makers of Patuapara continually fuelled these diverse tastes for Durga imagery, among whom a Shrish Pal or a Prahlad Pal were at the

3.8 Renovated Shiva temples on Balaram Bose Ghat street, the site of Sanatan Dharmotsahini Sabha Puja, 2008

3.9 Durga idol being made on site at the Sanatan Dharmotsahini Sabha Puja, 2008

3.10 Neighbourhood of Bakulbagan Road, Bhowanipur, 2008, with one of the gracious houses from the 1930s

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forefront of the experiments with different genres of ‘Indian-style’ and realistic Durgas.16 A brief cameo of the Puja of the Sanghasree Club, situated at the juncture of Bhowanipur and Kalighat, allows us to consider how the neighbourhood had made festival history in a different era, and offered the most popular novelties of the period. When this Puja began in 1946, introducing even a sculpted image of Durga was a challenge, for all idol worship was still prohibited in the areas immediately adjacent to the Kalighat temple. With only the worship of sora and patachitra permitted, the clay idols made at Kalighat Patuapara had to fight to find their place in the first Sarbojanin Durga Pujas of this locality. The influential Congress connections of the Banerjee family, which began the Sanghasree Puja, held it in good stead— and helped it to actively cultivate, during the 1950s and 1960s, its associations with a host of celebrities from the world of Bengali cinema, music, literature and politics.17 The matinee star Uttam Kumar, and the singer and composer Sachin Dev Burman performed at their Bijoya Sammilani functions, while novelists like Ashapurna Devi, Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay

3.11 Durga image of the Sanghasree Puja, 1374/1967. Courtesy: Sanghasree Puja committee

and Premendra Mitra wrote in different years for their souvenir volume. During these years, the distinctive feature of the Sanghasree Puja was its cinematic animations of the Durga pantheon in sets that came to be called ‘cycloramas’.18 It set a trend in its time of inviting film set technicians to produce light and sound effects around sculpted tableaux of mythological figures against painted backdrop scenes and cardboard cut-outs, which would culminate in the centrepiece of Durga’s celestial battle with Mahishasura. (See 3.11, 3.12) The ambience was that of a popular fairground spectacle, drawing crowds from suburbs and all parts of the city to witness the staging of divine miracles inside the darkened tent pandal. Over the many decades (1950s–1990s) through which such cinematic tableaux remained the highlight of the Sanghasree Puja, its technicians shifted from the Radha Film Studio of Tollygunge to the local Kali Studio. All along, their main goddess group continued to be commissioned from Jitendra Nath Pal of Kumartuli who, in the 1960s, was working in parallel on film set models for the Tollygunge studios. We see here a coming together

3.12 Durga image of the Sanghasree Puja by Jiten Pal, 1398/1991. Courtesy: Sanghasree Puja Committee

pre-histories of the present of the circuits of film and Durga Puja productions, propelled by demands at both ends. Older club members recall the huge popularity and brisk sales of photographs of Jiten’s Pal Durga images at the Puja site (example, 3.12), from which came a sizeable chunk of earnings of the Sanghasree club, which it would hand over each year to the idol-maker. This was a time before sponsors had taken over the financing of Pujas, when local subscriptions and a few advertisement banners were the main resources of the organizers, with their political connections going a long way towards making the Puja ‘cheaper on their pockets’. Sanghasree, we are told, had also led the way in on-site Puja advertising. In 1978, a local company, Badal fans, had filled the walkway to the Puja pandal with whirring open-air ceiling fans, to become an additional crowd attraction at the site. Juxtaposing the case of the Sanghasree Puja with that of Bakulbagan is instructive, for it points to the divide between forms of popular spectacle and highbrow art in the same social space and neighbourhood. Similarities in the socio-cultural profile of the Puja organizers, including the common Congress connections of many in the Bakulbagan Puja committee, underscores the difficulties of attributing simple class dimensions to the distinctions between different styles of Puja productions. There was a tenuous, sliding line holding apart what could qualify as ‘tasteful’ or ‘artistic’ from all that had failed the test in this field. In the previous chapter, we saw how the city’s festival memories of the 1960s and 1970s stand laden with a sense of degradation of taste in Puja productions, throwing into oblivion the period’s existing genres of the ‘art-er thakur’ and the talents of their creators. The same sense provides the driving motive behind the coming into being of the new ‘artist’s Puja’ at Bakulbagan, which set itself up as an alternative not just to the Sanghasree style of cinematic spectacle but also to the popular fad for Durga imagery made of the oddest of materials, like nails and pencils, or edible ingredients like red chillies, rice grains or biscuits.19

The ‘artists’ Puja’ When, in 1975, a senior resident of Bakulbagan, Dilip Bose, persuaded his artist friend Nirode Majumdar, to design the Durga for their Puja, the

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recourse to ‘art’ grounded itself squarely in a return to ‘tradition’ and a desire to bring back taste and purity to the image of the goddess. Nirode Majumdar, who had been working on a series of paintings on the legends and iconography of Chandi, now took on the challenge of the conceptualization of a threedimensional sculpted image for a Puja pandal.20 (See 3.13) The ritually prescribed alluvial clay became Nirode Majumdar’s chosen medium, and of almost every other artist who followed his lead. The use of clay (as against other non biodegradable, durable material) underlined the modern artist’s conformity to the traditional tenets of the form of the goddess and drove home the imperatives of immersion even of the artists’ creation, especially where it was made to serve the purpose of worship. In this festival field, Durga’s status as an artwork has always needed careful balancing with her ritual life as a worshipped icon. This has also powerfully regulated the modernist stylistic idioms that came to be invested in the imaging of the goddess. In their endeavour to involve the best-known artists of the city, the Bakulbagan Puja drew on artists working in a range of styles—covering, to use the loosest grouping, both ‘Western-style’ and ‘Indianstyle’ modernist painters and sculptors of Bengal.21 Alongside the Calcutta Group ‘Progressives’, represented at Bakulbagan in the first three years (1975, 1976, 1977) by Nirode Majumdar, Rathin Maitra and Paritosh Sen (see 3.14), in 1978 the Puja featured Ramananda Bandopadhyay, the doyen of Bengal’s lingering genre of ‘Indian-style’ painting (an artist who would continue in later years to work on designing Durgas for his neighbourhood Puja at Golf Green). ‘Abstract Expressionist’ sculptors like Sarbari Roychowdhury took their place (in 1981) side by side with a modernist ‘folk’ style practitioner like Meera Mukherjee (in 1979 and 1990). (See 3.15, 3.16) Over the late 1980s and ’90s, many from the city’s leading art group, the Society of Contemporary Artists, like Bikash Bhattacharya, Shyamal Dutta Ray and Isha Mohammed, also joined the fraternity of Bakulbagan Puja artists. In a field where women artists and designers have remained conspicuously absent, the Bakulbagan Club set a different precedent by drawing into their league several women sculptors and painters, like

3.13 Nirode Majumdar’s Durga at the Bakulbagan Puja, 1975. Courtesy: Shanu Lahiri

3.14 Paritosh Sen’s Durga at the Bakulbagan Puja, 1977. Courtesy: Bakulbagan Puja committee

3.15 Meera Mukherjee’s Durga at the Bakulbagan Puja, 1979. Courtesy: Bakulbagan Puja committee.

3.16 Meera Mukherjee’s second Durga at the Bakulbagan Puja, 1990. Courtesy: Bakulbagan Puja committee.

pre-histories of the present Meera Mukherjee, Shanu Lahiri, Uma Siddhanta and Dipali Bhattacharyya.22 A taste for the ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’ would drive its choice of artist each year. Thus, for instance, in the year of the mounting Ramjanmabhumi agitation of 1992, that would culminate in the catastrophic destruction of the Babri Masjid, the Puja committee made a special gesture of inviting a Muslim artist, Isha Mohammad (then Principal of the Government College of Art, Calcutta) to design their Durga, to show how the goddess as an object of art and worship could transcend all communal divides.23 (See 3.17) Yet, looking through the repertoire of the artists’ Durgas that were produced at Bakulbagan over two decades, we find ‘modernist’ styles continuously distilled into a range of vernacular, often identifiably folk and tribal art idioms, introducing types of forms and compositions that have many similarities with the ethnic look of goddesses in today’s ‘theme’ Puja circuit. To bring modern stylistic idioms to work within a clay-modelled image of the goddess meant an inevitable recourse to a ‘vernacular’ aesthetic. The ‘vernacular’ becomes the all-important term to think with, in this new genre of ‘modern art Durgas’, with the Bakulbagan ‘artists’ Puja’ setting the trail for the present. We see how the ‘vernacular’ would set the parameters of the modern within this field of work but could never be adequately modernist.24 Hence, the Durga images designed at Bakulbagan remained, in most cases, uneasily lodged within the artist’s larger modernist oeuvres, seldom finding the same attention and importance as their other works.25 While their images flagged the arrival of modern art in the sphere of the festival and its iconography of the goddess, the work produced in this sphere never quite travelled back into the worlds from which it had emerged. The difficulties of this transaction, we find, were lodged even at the points of entry of modern art into this sphere. To move from the artist’s own run of art productions to the creation of a Durga for a Puja pandal, even when it carried the acknowledged tag of an art-work, was never an easy transition for the contemporary artist. In later interviews, many of the artists who worked for the Bakulbagan Puja—like Shanu Lahiri and Bikash Bhattacharya —talked about their reservations

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in taking on the work of sculpting an image for a public Puja. There were artists like Ganesh Pyne, whose style of imagery would have aptly lent itself to the conceptualization of a Durga, but whom the Bakulbagan Puja committee never succeeded in involving. There were also others like Sunil Das who never refused but kept deferring their invitation. Doing the rounds of the city’s Durga Pujas in 1985, Sunil Das admitted his inability to build up in himself the sensibility that was needed to sculpt images of the goddess.26 To what extent where they, as ‘modern artists’, equipped to produce an image for worship? How effectively could their artwork find public acceptance and engage the average Puja viewer? These were questions that seem to have continuously troubled the artists who were invited to work over different years for the Bakulbagan Puja. Most of them recalled the complete autonomy that the Puja committee gave them in their conception of the goddess, as well as the logistical support with labour and material that was at hand at every stage of work. The constrictions when they came were self-imposed, and they largely revolved around issues of how far their liberties and innovations would find popular approbation and not go against the grain of the devotional icon. The measure of success in this sphere turned out to be invariably tricky: the artists’ sense of their own satisfaction with their work did not always translate into their popularity with the public and the media. So it was that a Meera Mukherjee primitivist Durga (the second one she created at the Bakulbagan Puja in 1990, see 3.16) was seen to have ‘not quite worked with the masses’, while the narrative tableaux created by Bikash Bhattacharya in 1991 and by Isha Mohammed in 1992 ended up being hugely popular.27 (See 3.17, 3.18) The idea that the creation of images of Durga required not just a special kind of skill but also a special temperament was one that would link the artist and the idol-maker. But it would also produce fresh hierarchies between the two. The ‘artistic’ imagination of the one would be set off by the occupational skills and standardized work patterns of the other. The Bakulbagan ‘artists’ Puja’ reinforced a new kind of division of labour. While

3.17 Isha Mohammed’s Durga at the Bakulbagan Puja, 1992. Courtesy: Bakulbagan Puja commitee

3.18 Bikash Bhattacharya’s Durga at Bakulbagan Puja, 1991. Courtesy: Bakulbagan Puja commitee.

pre-histories of the present the artist worked out a painted image of Durga, with sometimes a mini model in clay or plaster, the services of a traditional artisan from the neighbouring Patuapara were necessary to make the straw-stuffed clay image in the age-old procedure. Every year, Prafulla Pal of Patuapara, in his own cramped workshop, would prepare the inner form of the idol according to the artist’s conception, up to the first layering of clay, leaving the outer form and colouring to be completed by the artist, often with his close assistance. (See 3.19, 3.20) This was the production procedure in almost all cases where the invited artists at Bakulbagan were painters—only the sculptors handled the process of the making of the image themselves with their own work team. But even a sculptor like Meera Mukherjee, working at Bakulbagan for the second time in 1990, took the help of a hereditary idol-maker in the preparation of the internal bamboo frame and straw-stuffed clay mould of the figures, with a keen interest in understanding the traditional work processes involved in the making of these images.28 This relationship between the modern artist and the idol-maker, however, was never a comfortable one. There would be little equanimity or reciprocity in this sharing of skills and conceptions. The artists’ sense of the relative success of their work in this field would hinge on the kind of cooperation they had from the idol-maker, or, contrarily, on the extent to which they were able to operate independent of his help. Interviews taken with some of the artists who worked at the Bakulbagan Puja bring to the fore the frictions in this interaction.29 Many of the artists complained of the inability of the idol-maker to fully understand their conception and the resultant compromises they had to accept in the final clay image of the goddess. Paritosh Sen, for instance, wanted to give his goddess a rough and textured colouring, that retained the mark of brush strokes and scratches, while the idol-maker continued with his own practice of smooth, polished colouring, forcing the former to give over this final phase of work to a team of art college students who carried out the painting to his exact specifications. Debabrata Chakrabarty, a sculptor himself, decided to bypass the involvement of Prafulla Pal by carrying out the entire execution of his relief sculpture over

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3.19 Shanu Lahiri at work with the idol maker on her Bakulbagan Durga. Photograph by Suman Datta, 21 October 1982. Courtesy: Shanu Lahiri

four months in his own studio, replacing the clay medium with plaster tablets on a wire and iron frame. (See 3.5) He continuously underscored the ‘sculptural quality’ he brought to his icon of the goddess that, he said, was seldom a part of the work of the mritshilpi. There are no interviews taken with Prafulla Pal to understand what may have been his reaction to this experience of working with modern artists—to ask whether the non-comprehension or intransigence attributed to him may not have been a case of his insistence on following his own working methods and styles in the making of idols. When I later asked whether Prafulla Pal might not have felt unduly sidelined in this process, an elderly member of the Bakulbagan Puja committee unhesitatingly made a counter case. He talked of the immense privilege for idol-makers like him to have the opportunity to work with these great artists.30 The Bakulbagan Puja brought into the field the notion of a purely voluntary artists’ creation. In striking

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3.20 Shanu Lahiri’s completed Durga at Bakulbagan, 1982. Photograph by G. Bhattacharyya. Courtesy: Shanu Lahiri

contrast to the current circle of Puja designers, the artists at Bakulbagan took pride in working free of charge. As established professionals in the world of modern art, they found in this Puja an opportunity to lend their signature to a popular display. Instances were not uncommon, in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, of local artists and art students turning to producing the Durga idols, and to designing the entire tableaux for their para Puja, with the club meeting the costs only of the production material. Such trends continue to be in place: the growing profile of Puja designing as a professional livelihood has never fully displaced the figure of the local amateur and his ‘labour of love’ in designing a neighbourhood Puja. What was unusual at Bakulbagan was the Puja committee’s ability to line up, free of charge every season, the best-known names in the city’s art world, trying never to repeat the same artist in their repertoire. The singularity of each of these ‘art’ Durgas was offset by the standardized paid labour of the idol-maker, Prafulla Pal, and of the pandal decorators, Rakshit & Company with their office in nearby Deshapriya Park, who were called

in each year to make a simple architectural structure in bamboo, plywood and stretched cloth. The noncommercial nature of the ‘artists’ Puja’ was crucial for its reputation. It endowed its productions with the cultural capital of pure ‘art’. Yet, such a formulation was never fully in place. One surmises that the monetary arrangements were different with some whose names are listed as the creators of the Bakulbagan Puja Durgas. Sharing the credits with artists like Rathin Maitra, Paritosh Sen, Ramananda Bandopadhyay, Bikash Bhattacharya or Shyamal Dutta Roy were a few professional idolmakers—like Ananta Malakar of Birbhum, a specialist in the craft of shola, who was then making news by traveling abroad to make Durgas for Pujas in the USA; or Ramesh Pal and Mohanbanshi Rudra Pal, two of the city’s senior and most reputed mritshilpis, with their respective studios at Shobhabazar and Kumartuli.31 Their participation in this special Puja would have blurred some of the dividing lines between the artist and the idol-maker, between the popular

pre-histories of the present dazzlingly-ornamented realistic icon and its more avant-garde incarnations, and lent a new ‘art’ status to the productions of the professionals in the trade. Intended for preservation, a terracotta Durga made by Ananta Malakar in 1982 found its way from the Bakulbagan Puja site into the art section of the Indian Museum, to become one of the first of a new variety of collectible Durga images. During 1975– 6, the two painted clay Durga images by Nirode Mazumdar and Rathin Maitra, although not made to last, were also picked off the pandal by the art patron Lady Ranu Mukherjee and displayed for a few years at the foyer of the city’s premier art gallery of that time, the Academy of Fine Arts. Sometime in the late 1980s, as impulsively as they were acquired, these two Durga images vanished from the entrance of the Academy’s galleries, immersed (the story goes) at the whim of Lady Ranu in the pond at the back of the arts complex. Both then, as now, the life of Durga idols as collectible works of art has never been stable. That the bulk of the ‘artists’ Durgas’ created at Bakulbagan, notwithstanding their distinction, came to be immersed at the end of the Pujas, like all other festival images, underlines the extent to which ‘art’ production in this field had to conform to prevailing traditions and sensibilities about the worshipped deity. While the Bakulbagan ‘artists’ Puja’ appears as the most significant precursor of the later genre of ‘theme’ Pujas, it also stands apart in many ways. From being a select occurrence at a single location, the claims of art production in the field of Durga Pujas would manifest themselves from the late 1990s as a cognitively different trend, mushrooming across various localities in the city, and laying out a special map for the discerning spectator. If the Bakulbagan Puja made its name by capitalizing on the reputation of already famous names of the modern art world, the ‘theme’ Pujas, by contrast, opened out an arena for a different group of artschool trained practitioners or aspiring amateurs, whose artistic stature would revolve largely around their success in the field of Puja designing. The field now nurtured a new category of the Durga Puja designer or ‘theme-maker’: one that had no equivalent in the career of the Bakulbagan ‘artists’

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Puja’. An even more important difference can be noted in the modes of production of the new form of ‘theme’ Pujas. The artists at Bakulbagan seldom extended their brief beyond the designing of the Durga image. The construction of the pandal was left to the decorators’ firm, and its structure remained deliberately simple, to offset the centrality of the artist’s production. This left unaltered what was then the standardized division in the production of the Puja tableaux among the makers of the image, the pavilion and the illuminations. It was through a sharp break with this prevailing practice that the new breed of artists and designers began to conceive of their ‘theme’ projects as a tightly-coordinated production, where the Puja in its entirety—the pandal, the image, the lights, the colours, the ornamentation and even the music—came to be laid out in an integrated installation. The absence of corporate sponsors and awards at Bakulbagan presents yet another significant point of contrast. While the ‘artists’ Puja’, in its early years, thrived on the considerable attention it drew from the media (consisting then primarily of the Bengali print media), the Bakulbagan Puja Committee members bemoaned the inability of their Puja in later years to ride what they termed the ‘awards band-wagon’. It is important to see how, in their own perception, there is a clear distinction between the form of the ‘artists’ Puja’ which they pioneered and retained as their proud monopoly, and the new form of the ‘theme’ Puja, which they turned to from 2000–2001 after the former practice dwindled, but in which they never gained the same scale of success.32 The pursuit of the new genre of ‘theme’ Pujas and the chasing of awards and sponsors, they argue, are closely linked, for the one relies on the kinds of budgets and publicity that only the other can adequately provide. Their deficiency in attracting new-age media and corporate sponsorship was seen to directly rebound on what they saw as their relatively low profile in the contemporary ‘theme’ Puja circuit. This touches on a crucial conundrum and a set of infra-structural configurations that mark the coming of age of the ‘theme’ Pujas. To take on this issue of commercial sponsorship, let me now move away from the history of the Bakulbagan Puja into a parallel history of the launching of the earliest and longest-lasting corporate

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3.21 Asian Paints ‘Sharad Samman’ placard, Rajdanga Naba Uday Sangha Puja, 2009

award scheme in the city’s Durga Pujas, to suggest another pre-history of the present.

the ‘oscars’ of kolkata’s durga puja33 Over time, an award initiated by one of the country’s largest wall paint companies, Asian Paints, has come to acquire this uniquely coveted stature. In today’s overcrowded scenario of contests and prizes, offered by innumerable clusters of brands in partnership with the print media, radio and television channels, the Asian Paints ‘Sharad Samman’ (translatable as the ‘Honours of the Autumn Festival’) has succeeded in retaining its singularity and distinction. Much of this is due to its standing as the first in the field, its avowed role in infusing a new pedigree of tastes and temperaments into the city’s Durga Puja, and its ability in the present to hold its own through sheer understatement and low publicity. (See 3.21, 3.22) The story goes back to the year 1985, when this Bombay-based paints company was searching for ways of breaking into the unresponsive

Calcutta market and building a new brand loyalty among Bengalis. With a generous budget of Rs. 12 lakhs at their disposal to run the Asian Paints campaign, the advertising firm of Ogilvy and Mather (O&M) of Calcutta decided to branch out of printbased advertising to link the product, instead, with this all-time favourite cultural event of Bengal. As explained by the advertising professional Sumit Roy, who spearheaded this campaign at O&M in its founding years from 1985 to 1987, the idea was to find ways of associating the brand with things that were ‘quintessentially Calcuttan.’34 ‘Culture’ offered itself as the richest field for mining. The Asian Paints Calcutta endeavour had begun, the previous year, with a set of annual creative excellence awards (titled the Asian Paints ‘Shiromoni Puraskar’) that it handed out to city-based artists in the fields of literature, art, music, dance, theatre and film. The choice of Durga Puja as a complementary area for awards came as a logical extension of this scheme, with the ‘Shiromani Puraskar’ awardees serving as the final panel of judges of the best Pujas in the first years of the ‘Sharad Samman’ contest. To use current day advertising terminology, this campaign set a new trend of ‘brand communication’, turning the Durga Puja festival of the city into a unique ‘brand phenomenon’. For Asian Paints, there were rich dividends to be reaped: dividends whose measure was as much economic as it was cultural. Looking back on two decades of the ‘Sharad Samman’ awards, the house journal of Asian Paints of November 2004 talked of the stellar success of these awards in increasing the market share of the company in Kolkata and in building a special relationship between the corporate brand and the city’s festival. ‘You must visit Kolkata during Durga Puja,’ the brand manager writes, ‘to see how a brand is associated with a festival. It is the best example in the country.’ Even more important was the company’s perceived role in ‘reviving’ what it saw to be the declining culture and tradition of Bengal’s Durga Pujas. At the time Asian Paints launched this award scheme, the city’s Durga Pujas were said to be ‘dwindling in terms of quality’, with organizational costs spiralling and ‘unnecessary elements’ starting to fund the Pujas. ‘The entire Puja scene was on a decline, and Kolkata was fast losing what it was known for.’ 35 This self-congratulatory

pre-histories of the present

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account gives the ‘Sharad Samman’ awards full credit for reversing this process and bringing about a sea change in the cultural profile of the festival. Without the least sense of irony, a corporate firm and its publicity professionals could claim to have brought back taste, ‘spirituality’ and ‘reverence’ to the festival. It was no less paradoxical that it was the city’s celebrated Left-wing poet, Subhash Mukhopadhyay, who helped coin the slogan for the advertising campaign of O&M, during an evening’s tea in the exclusive precincts of the Calcutta Club on Chowringhee Road.36 Contrary social worlds could uncontroversially come together in generating a new middle class desire for sanctity, orderliness and discerning tastes in the Pujas. The poet’s chosen slogan was Shuddha shuchi sustha ruchir sera bachhai (‘The best selection of refined sensibility and taste’). Throughout the first years of the Asian Paints ‘Sharad Samman’ contest, the terms that were repeatedly used to boost their image makeover of the Durga Pujas were shuddhata and pabitrata (purity and sanctity), alongside those like utkrishta paribesh (improved ambience) and shilpagata man (artistic prestige).37 It is important to locate these reformist intentions of the Asian Paints awards within the period’s larger concerns with swinging the trend away from the ‘low culture’ festival of the 1970s and 1980s. It vividly mirrored the criticism of large sections of the city’s elite and intelligentsia of what were seen as the tasteless revelries, hedonism and lawlessness of the large Sarbojanin Pujas, even as it firmly held on to the event itself as an increasingly endangered cultural symbol of Bengal. There are important parallels to be tracked here between the Asian Paints endeavour and a comparable wave of civilian regulatory initiatives that intervened within the Ganapati festivities in Mumbai, also during the 1980s. There was the case, in particular, of the Girnar-Loksatta Ganeshotsav (GLG) competition, propelled by the Girnar Tea Company in association with Loksatta, the city’s major Marathi newspaper organization. Pitching themselves in a similar vein against what was seen as the increasing ‘vulgarization’ of the Ganapati utsav—with the same allusions to loud Hindi film music, wild dancing, loutish behaviour, extortion rackets, and Ganesh murtis made to resemble movie

3.22 Asian Paints awards banner (centre) among other Puja awards banners at the Behala Club Puja, 2008

stars—the GLG competition organizers wished to recall the historical nationalist ideals of the festival and bring back to it the spirit of both devotion and social responsibility. Drawing also on a team of culturally high profile judges (art teachers, artists, writers, playwrights, editors and music and film directors), this largest and most prestigious of the award competitions also aspired to infuse a new spirit of social respectability and artistic culture within a plebian communalized festival.38 It is in keeping with the history of the Sarbojanin Pujas in Kolkata that the Asian Paints Durga Puja campaign, in contrast to the GLG competition in Mumbai, steered clear of invocations to the nationalist past of the festival or to issues of secular solidarity and laid greater emphasis, instead, on the theme of artistry and cultural refinement. Common to both cases, though, is the way in which gods and goods came to exist in close rapport in this new ‘business of religion’, and the spirit of commercial competition sat comfortably with reinvented discourses of social and cultural goodwill during the time of the festivals. So it was that a corporate marketing endeavour like

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3.23 Advertisement of Lafarge Duraguard featuring god Kartick with fire safety and first aid arrangements at Puja sites, outside 25 Pally Puja, Khidirpur, 2012

that of Asian Paints could absolve itself of the taint of commercialization of the Durga Pujas and easily turn itself, instead, into a flag-bearer of tradition and religiosity, civility and refinement within the festival. With the Asian Paints ‘Sharad Samman’, which for more than a decade remained the sole well-publicized Puja award on the scene, we arrive at an early moment of corporatization of the festival: one where commercial sponsorship becomes an integral factor in the revamping of the image of the Durga Pujas. It opened the gates for the flood of advertising, promotional campaigns and awards of the 2000s, which have endlessly cashed in on the affective resonance of the event and competed between themselves to further their positions as brand ambassadors of an upgraded civic-minded festival. (See 3.23) An important point of pride for the organizers of the Asian Paints campaign in the 1980s was the way they mobilized teams of volunteers to physically scour the festival city during the Puja nights in search of excellence in production. A new order of social and cultural interest was in the process redirected to this space of mass festivity. The operative element in

this selection process was the formation of a closelyknit network of ‘short-listers’ and ‘supervisors’, put together from a group of young and senior professionals from the art, media, advertising and corporate circuits, who volunteered to participate in these night-long frenzies of touring different zones of the city, covering as many Pujas as possible, sending in their selected lists to the supervisor of the zone.39 The premium on voluntary work, and on a deep civic involvement in the city’s Pujas, has been central to this award campaign, from its inception into the present, allowing it to cultivate a profile that could rise above the mere commercial logic of advertising.40 In the first years of the campaign, the selectors spanned out over eight demarcated zones of the city, using the Dunlop Puja Road Guide, conducting their selections over the main nights of the Pujas, to make the final announcements on Dashami. Very soon, the territorial coverage of the Pujas expanded to include zones like Behala and Salt Lake; a larger team of short-listers and supervisors were distributed across sixteen spatial zones of the city to make the first set of selections; the nights for doing the rounds were brought forward to Panchami and Shashti, beginning

pre-histories of the present nowadays with Chaturthi. According to this schedule, the group comes together on Saptami morning to draw up a composite short-list ranging between twelve to fifteen Pujas, with a different team returning at times to cross-check the credentials of a selected Puja if it became a matter of differing opinion. This brings on the final phase, when the celebrity judges go on a bus tour of the short-listed Pujas on Saptami night, following which the awards are announced on Ashtami morning.41 In these heady days and nights of the festival, there is nothing to detract from the seriousness of this judging enterprise, nor anything to diminish the intensity of involvement of all who pitch their efforts into the campaign. As it set out in the first years to select the three finalists under the categories of ‘best pratima’, ‘best pandal’ and ‘best lighting’, the contest claims to have devised new sets of criteria for searching out the relatively small and unknown Pujas, for prioritizing artistic tastes, refinement and simplicity over the expensive and glitzy, pushing the case that the big budget Pujas were not necessarily the best. Sumit Roy talks about the value placed on the goodwill and transparency of their selections and the move to create an award that could win the ‘trust’ of the paras. Much of this trust, it is believed, rested on the quality of the teams of selectors, especially on the creative and intellectual standing of the final team of judges, drawn from a circle of artists, writers, singers, dancers, actors and film-makers. Like the Bakulbagan ‘artist’s Puja’, the Asian Paints ‘Sharad Samman’ can be seen to ride high on a sense of social and cultural capital as against mere commercial gain. This award even today has a stature that soars far above the money on offer. Even as the numbers and categories of prizes expanded, the cash award of Rs. 10,000 for each selected Puja remained unchanged until the 2000s, when it was increased to amounts of Rs. 20,000 and 25,000. Underscoring the continued distinction of judging in this Asian Paints award in the crowded awards scenario of the 2000s, advertising professionals at O&M talked of how other award-givers enticed their judges with generous payments and gifts. In contrast, the Asian Paints contest continued to persuade the city’s cultural personalities into becoming its judges on the grounds only of prestige and goodwill.42

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Over the years, this sense of specialty has powerfully reverberated among various groups of awardees— Puja clubs, mritshilpis, and new creeds of designers— who have continued to rate this as the most coveted of all awards. For instance, the veteran mritshilpi, Mohanbanshi Rudra Pal, looked back on his winning the Asian Paints award in 1987 (at a time when it was the only award on the scene) as the turning point of his career: the point from which his and his sons’ names would become the most successful, ‘branded’ names in the idol-making trade.43 In the same years, it was the Asian Paints award over four consecutive years (1985–1988) which catapulted a small Puja in the interiors of Ballygunge —the Adi Ballygunge Puja—onto the tour map of the festival and gave the designer of its pandals, Ranadhir Dhar, his biggest taste of fame and success. Much later, in the 2000s, even as a host of new award contests burst upon the festival, one of the foremost of the new crop of Puja artists, Bhabatosh Sutar, would look upon the winning of the Asian Paints award as an unachieved target of his Puja career: one that he finally attained in 2006.44 In 2010, I found one of the latest, awardwinning Puja designers, Gouranga Kuinla, again ruing the fact that none of his Pujas were in the Asian Paints awards list.45 Their hankering for this, above all other awards—these designers tell you—is because this has the kind of history, lineage and discerning standards that none of the others can claim. On the part of the organizers, such prestige has freed them of the need for fresh publicity and promotional drives. There was a time, they recall, in the late 1980s, when the Asian Paints ‘Sharad Samman’ had led the way in new kinds of publicity. It was the first, for instance, to initiate an interactive public participation in its contest, inviting readers to fill in entry coupons in newspapers to choose their own best Pujas to match the final selections for a prize of Rs. 5,000.46 Another strategy it adopted was the full-page newspaper advertorial in The Statesman, The Telegraph and the Ananda Bazaar Patrika, which would have the appearance of a normal newspaper page and carry various kinds of Durga Puja news, while carrying in one small corner the Asian Paints awards logo, reports on the judging tours and the final list of awardees.47 This continued up to a time in the early 1990s until the form of the ad vertorial itself went out of currency.

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3.24 Bhabatosh Sutar’s Asian Paints award-winning production at the Lake Town Natun Pally Pradip Sangha Puja, 2006

Also crucial to the campaign in these early years were the huge street hoardings that were designed to come up in specific parts of the city, where the signboard painters would wait on Ashtami mornings to paint the names of the award-winning Pujas as they were announced. Those were still the days of hand-painted enamel hoardings, when such ‘Sharad Samman’ signboards would not have to compete with today’s excessive clutter of Puja advertisements and giant flex billboards. Confronted nowadays with what they see as an overkill of festival advertising, it has been a conscious decision of the Asian Paints contest to remain small and low-key.48 With every Puja sponsor and award scheme clamouring to outdo each other in newspaper and billboard spaces, its reticence has become its special mark of stature. The contest has, of course, kept pace with changing times. Over the 1990s, as its territorial coverage of the city expanded, so did the categories and number of its awards. Breaking out of the separate heads of the best pratima, pandal and lighting, the judges began to search out the three ‘best composite Pujas’ and select a few others under the heads of ‘Discovery/Wonder of the Year’ (Bochhorer Bismo), ‘Creative Excellence’ (Nobbo Nakshi), and Sera (Best) Protima-shilpi.49 An earlier consumer poll and a post-Puja award ceremony at Rabindra Sadan,

where prizes would be given to both the winning Puja committee members and persons who had sent in the right choices of winners, came to be replaced by an on-site award event on Ashtami morning. As with all contemporary publicity events, the selection and judging process came to be outsourced by O&M to an event-management company called Splash, with the former handling only the creative design work of advertising. But what still singles out this award is its carefully maintained low publicity. Along with the earlier brand ambassador of Asian Paints— Gattu, a tousled-haired cheeky urchin, dangling a paint can and a brush—appeared colourful child art cut-outs and small stand-alone placards that were set up before the winning pandals only after Ashtami. (See 3.24, 3.25) This stands in sharp contrast to most other contemporary award schemes which enlist large numbers of eligible Pujas, and require each to carry their large promotional banners on their pandal site. The Asian Paints ‘Sharad Samman’ made its pointed statement through the avoidance of the all-pervasive form of the large banner, ensuring at the same time that its award announcements effectively circulated through small newspaper announcements, television channels and mobile phone messaging. To what extent did the Asian Paints campaign beget the trend of the ‘theme’ Pujas? What importance do we attach to the claims of the campaign organizers, echoed by many Puja clubs and artists, that this award is what first boosted a spurt of artistic taste and creativity in the city’s Durga Pujas? Can a new wave of art production that takes off from the early 2000s be seen to germinate in a makeover drive that began in the mid 1980s? Or, is there scope for laying out another chronological trajectory of this discourse on moderation, artistry and improvement, to see how much of it flows into and how much of it stands apart from the latter-day careers of the ‘theme’ Pujas? That the Asian Paints awards, until the mid 1990s, were given out under the three heads of the best pratima, best pandal and best lighting, automatically places us at a time prior to the rise of the new composite styles of productions that would take on the nomenclature of ‘theme’ Pujas. The first recipients of these awards, we find, were also not always the small, low budget, little-known productions. The

pre-histories of the present illumination awards in the first three years went, for instance, to the two of the biggest Pujas of the city, those of College Square and Jodhpur Park, both famous in the 1980s for the mega crowds they drew for their spectacular lighting, spread out over the entire College Square tank and the full Jodhpur Park avenue leading to the park, with the lighted motifs touching on the most topical events. The first choices of the best pratima favoured again two well-established Pujas of Baghbazar in the north and Maddox Square in the south, each reputed for their unchanging monumental goddesses, in single frames with resplendent silver and gold decoration.50 (See 1.37, 2.26) Given the period’s popular fashion for realistic, individually positioned figures of Durga and her entourage, and the many expressions of elite distaste for such forms, the Asian Paints award made a special point of highlighting the ‘traditional’ ekchala daker saj image, selecting two of its most splendid samples as a marker of the purity and reverence it wished to recover within the corrupted festival. And when the Asian Paints awards did seek out an obscure neighbourhood Puja of the Adi Ballygunge Club and awarded it over four consecutive years —three years for excellence in pandal design, and one year for the best image— it is worth scrutinizing what kinds of productions and practices it was promoting. Like many of the small para Pujas of this part of south Kolkata, the Adi Ballygunge Puja began in the 1950s as the community event of a small middle class neighbourhood in the interiors of Ballygunge. In keeping with the trend of many Sarbojanin Pujas of its kind, it turned its attention in the 1970s from collecting para subscriptions to attracting sponsors and advertisers through souvenirs and banners. The key figure that scripted the success story of this Puja with the Asian Paints awards was a local designer and interior decorator, Ranadhir Dhar, who from the 1980s began to produce pandals in the form of monumental architectural replicas. Ranadhir Dhar recalls a ‘time before’ when the decorator firms put up pandals of nondescript shapes in a standard mix of blue and white or red and white pleated cloth. He takes the credit for starting, from 1983, a new trend of giant architectural structures resembling various temples—first, a terracotta temple of Bishnupur

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and next, the Golden Temple of Amritsar—using what were the standard ingredients for all pandal constructions: bamboo poles, batam (thin plywood frames) and stretched and pleated cotton cloth. It was his innovations with erecting a set of vast architectural structures with pure white cloth (as with the model of the Japanese Shanti Stupa at Dhauli in Orissa that was created in 1985) or with cloth dyed in gilt or pastel hues (as with a 100-foot model of a Burmese Stupa he made in 1986, and of the Bahai Lotus temple of Delhi that he made in 1988) that earned him the Asian Paints award for three years. (See 3.26) The main point of appreciation from the judges, he tells us, was the marvel of these architectural elevations that were raised in a narrow street with material as light as cloth and plywood, where mere cloth could take on the sheen of white marble or coloured stone.51 Through the Asian Paints awards of the 1980s, we encounter an early persona of a Puja designer: one who specialized only in pandal structures, and worked closely with a professional decorator firm that implemented his architectural designs and ideas. The winning of the Asian Paints Sharad Samman in 1985 coincided with the club’s hiring of Modern Decorators of Chittaranjan Avenue, then

3.25 Asian Paints award child-art placards at the Lake Town Natun Pally Pradip Sangha Puja, 2006

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in the name of the goddess career graph of success and establish his family brand of Durga imagery, quite independent of the work of pandal designers. Using the examples of creative personnel like Mohanbanshi Rudra Pal and Ranadhir Dhar, the next chapter will consider the broader worlds of image-making and pandal constructions in this field of festival production, and to see how these have generated their own changing ideas of ‘art’ and ‘creativity’, sometimes in conjunction with, more often parallel to, the phenomenon of ‘theme’ Pujas.

fast forward to the present

3.26 Architectural replica pandal designed by Ranadhir Dhar, Adi Ballygunge Puja, c.1987-1988. Courtesy: Ranjana Dasgupta

one of the city’s biggest decorator firms, placing at Ranadhir Dhar’s disposal an ample stock of funds, construction material and skilled labour. Such collaboration, crucial as it was for his success, points to a pattern of work and tableau design that would continue into the present but also stand separate from the production formats of latter-day ‘designer’ Pujas. Dhar also lays claim to setting up another kind of collaboration in the same period, this time with the senior idol-maker of Kumartuli, Mohanbanshi Rudra Pal, whom he drew in to make Durga images for his architectural replica pandals, and who won for Adi Ballygunge the ‘best pratima’ award in 1987. With this, we come closer to the contemporary trend of Puja designers often teaming up with a mritshilpi from a hereditary lineage to synchronize the look of the goddess with their ‘theme’ installations. The difference in the 1980s lay in the way a mritshilpi like Mohanbanshi Rudra Pal would ride his own

Before we enter that story, let me bring the histories of the Asian Paints award and the Bakulbagan Puja into the present. In 2009, a few weeks ahead of the Pujas, the city was surprised, after decades, to see again the large hoardings of the Asian Paints ‘Sharad Samman’ campaign, that came up to commemorate the completion of 25 years of the award. The award by now could confidently proclaim its ‘heritage’ status. The notion of ‘heritage’ had over the years become a part of its new promotional slogan, Aithijhher pujo, uddiponar utsab (‘The Pujas of heritage, the festival of exuberance’), and found its way into its key promotional event that year, that came to be inelegantly titled ‘The Saga of a Heritage’. To demonstrate its pride in its history, an exhibition of select ‘art’ photographs of its award-winning Pujas from the past two decades was placed on view in the spacious gallery of the Science City auditorium in the centre of the city.52 (See 3.27, 3.28) In a sphere where we find little documentation of festival productions of earlier decades, where neither Puja committees nor designers have systematically preserved images of their productions from the 1980s, 1990s or even the early 2000s, the Asian Paints exhibition had on offer a rare photographic archive of past Pujas (which has subsequently been expanded and made available on the award’s website). Even here, the bulk of the photographs were from the mid and late 1990s, with only a few images of prize-winning pandals that could be recovered from the 1980s. At a time of ubiquity of digital images, when Puja enthusiasts all have in stock their own reserve of cellphone and digital camera photographs to match the array that greets us in the print, television and electronic media, such

3.27 Entrance to the Asian Paints ‘Sharad Samman’ 25th anniversary exhibition at Science City, 2009

3.28 One of the galleries at the Asian Paints ‘Sharad Samman’ 25th anniversary exhibition, Science City, 2009

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in the name of the goddess that went into the staging of the celebrations—the clay pot associated with the kumor; the bamboo poles with the pandal decorator; the dhunuchi with the priest and the local boys who dance with it during arati and bisarjan; the drum with the dhakis; the microphone with the neighbourhood sound technician; the light bulbs with the makers of the illuminated panels. (See 3.29) That year, the urchin Gattu (whom Asian Paints had long ago dropped as their advertising symbol, but who remained specially associated with the ‘Sharad Samman’ award) figured at the winning Puja sites as a larger cut-out figure playing the dhak. (See 3.30)

an exhibition alerted us to the relative rarity of the photographic image even two decades ago and the absence of any imperative of visual documentation.

In the kinds of cultural affect it has produced around the Durga Pujas, the Asian Paints award hardly stands alone. Almost all of today’s Puja promotional and advertising imagery cash in on a similar stock of emotions and symbols. Yet there is a strong sense of singularity that the ‘Sharad Samman’ team, past and present, can still mobilize on behalf of this award campaign. The mastermind of the campaign, Sumit Roy, looked back on how the Asian Paints awards could compete with the media in the mid 1980s with its stock of photographs of the finest productions of the season. Soon after the

If the exhibition sought to invite new public interest in an archive of the city’s recent festival history, of manifestly greater importance was the gathering it garnered—of Kolkata’s main community of Durga Puja designers, along with artists, writers, singers, actors, journalists, photographers, advertising and corporate professionals—and carried into the evening’s launch of the 25th anniversary celebrations. Here, the screening of a short film on the Pujas and the history of the award was followed by a panel of speakers—which brought to the podium the writer Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, art historian Sovon Som, the magician P.C. Sorcar and his wife, theatre actor Bivas Chakrabarty, singer Prateek Chowdhury, artist Shuvaprasanna, and the Puja designer-turned artist Sanatan Dinda—all of whom waxed eloquent on the unparalleled emotional and creative ethos of this festival. At the same time, those partaking of this cultural assemblage were alerted to the way the cartoon graphics of that year’s ‘Sharad Samman’ hoarding acknowledged all the little crafts and trades

3.30 Asian Paints’ Gattu dominating the awards signage, Dumdum Park Bharat Chakra Puja, 2009

3.29 Asian Paints ‘Sharad Samman’ 25th anniversary exhibition banner, 2009

pre-histories of the present award began, he remembered how he had told the advertising manager of Ananda Bazaar Patrika that they could give their photographers a holiday on Bijoya Dashami, because his touring and selecting team could easily supply them with images of the best Pujas of the year.53 Sharmishtha Deb, who handled the Asian Paints campaign at O&M from 1992 to 1996, could also proudly assert that this campaign did more to market the festival than any initiative of West Bengal Tourism.54 Heerak Nandy, freelance copyrighter, writer and photographer, who has long been part of the ‘Sharad Samman’ team, lays particular stress on the way the Asian Paints awards put out a new map for festival tours, pushing spectators to areas and Pujas that were frequently not marked in the Dunlop Puja Road guide. There is also the case of Kaushik Datta, who began his career in the early 1990s as an O&M stringer and selector for the awards, and thereafter formed his own event-management company, Splash, that soon took over the full organizational charge of the awards event. In 2010, Kaushik Datta talked at length of the sheer passion and commitment to the Pujas that holds together their voluntary team of supervisors and short-listers. Each year, he pointed out, these people willingly and enthusiastically take time out off their regular professional work to devote three nights to touring the city and searching out the best of the season.55 Two and a half decades later, there was clearly no dearth of effusion and emotional commitment to keep the self-image of the Asian Paints ‘Sharad Samman’ intact. By contrast, the memory of the ‘artists’ Puja’ hangs uneasily around today’s Bakulbagan. Residues of that special artistic history survive in fragments of recollections of elderly residents and Puja committee members of the neighbourhood, among whom one had to search hard for personal collections of photographs and newspaper cuttings from the 1970s and 1980s. There was no systematic attempt by the Bakulbagan Puja committee to assemble a full visual documentation of the many art-er thakur that were once the talk of the festival and pride of the para. The pamphlet for souvenir advertisements that the Puja issues each year merely carries a list of all the artists who were invited to make their images from 1975 to the 2000s. While the club members have a

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3.31 Shuvaprasanna’s Durga being made at the Bakulbagan Puja, 2004

marked sense of the trend of the ‘artists’ Puja’ waning by the late 1990s, the list provides no clear sense of the break. During the 2000s, the works of artists like Shuvaprasanna, Wasim Kapoor and Dipali Bhattacharya appear side with side with those of the professional idol-maker, Sanatan Rudra Pal. (See 3.31, 3.32) By this time, the Bakulbagan Puja was, in any case, having to compete for attention with a growing cluster of art and craft productions of the new ‘theme’ variety that were cropping up all around it, along the adjacent stretches of Townsend, Rakhal Mukherjee and Priyanath Mallick Roads. While Pujas like that of Abasar Club began to more successfully bring in designers and awards from the mid 2000s, the Bakulbagan Puja kept up with the times with its own varieties of village tableaux or temple replicas. (See 3.33, 3.34) If established artists like Shuvaprasanna or Wasim Kapoor were occasionally still invited to make their Durgas, their work seemed to be

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in the name of the goddess public festival was only to be expected. All the more so, as Didi has plunged wholeheartedly into every religious/cultural celebration of Bengal, most of all the Durga Pujas, while continuously sponsoring an ever-growing range of fairs and festivals as her chosen mode of governance. Her dalliance with the ‘fine arts’ of painting and poetry came as no surprise to the people of West Bengal. What came as a jolt, though, in the Pujas of 2010 was her selfcasting in the new role of a Durga Puja designer. That she should assume this role at a site that was once famous for its one-of-a-kind ‘artists’ Puja’ makes a mockery, as much of the past history of the Bakulbagan Pujas, as of all the artistic talent and labour that is now invested in the designing and setting up of the city’s Durga Puja displays.

3.32 Sanata Rudra Pal’s Durga at the Bakulbagan Puja, 2002

getting lost amidst the neighbourhood’s proliferating wave of ‘theme’ Pujas. Then, in 2010, we found the Bakulbagan Puja taking an unprecedented leap into gimmickry and publicity, with its banners suddenly invading all parts of the festival city, proclaiming as its designer none other than Bengal’s new political icon, Mamata Banerjee. Her name in these banners appeared in large lettering, larger than even the name of the Puja, followed in small script by the names of all those who were working on the image, the pavilion, and the lights to execute her concept. From the previous pages, we are aware of the long-standing political affiliations of Kolkata’s Durga Pujas, with a specific association from the 1970s of some of the biggest Sarbojanin Pujas, like those of Santosh Mitra Square and Ekdalia Evergreen, with Congress politicians like Somen Mitra or Subrata Mukherjee. This earlier legacy of Congress patronage made way for a thickening climate of involvement of Trinamool Congress politicians with their neighbourhood Pujas. The most flamboyant instances are the promotion over the past decade of the Suruchi Sangha Puja of New Alipore by Arup Biswas, or, more recently, of the rise of the Chetla Agrani Club Puja under the patronage of Firhaud Hakim.56 That the Trinamool wave in Bengal’s politics should have brought Mamata Banerjee into the fray of the city’s biggest

It is a sign of today’s high public prestige of the art of Durga Puja designing that Mamata Banerjee so readily lent her name to it—and gave up precious time from her political work (we were told) to prepare a concept note on a topical environmental theme about an improved earth, and a painted model of the pavilion and image that was left to be implemented by others. It was also a sign of the period’s mounting trend of political publicity and patronage that the Bakulbagan Puja could turn its back on its own artistic history and barter that cultural capital for another kind of political mileage. Most disturbing, perhaps, was the aggressive assertion of Didi’s ‘artistic’ stature by the new spokesman of the Bakulbagan Puja committee, and his placement of her in the same ranks as Ganesh Pyne or a M.F. Husain, the two other artists who the Puja is said to have missed out on in their previous line-up of eminence. This spokesman was not willing to brook any scepticism about Didi’s standing as an artist, nor admit the travesty of comparing her with the likes of Husain and Ganesh Pyne. Nor was he in any mood to answer questions about her actual involvement, if any, in the production process.57 In an igloo-shaped pavilion, with painted relief panels of trees and landscape (see 3.35), Mamata Banerjee’s Durga had a non-anthropomorphic octopus-like form, with no face or body but only hands carrying symbols. Surprisingly, or perhaps not so surprisingly, there was no media criticism of the image, nor any debate on its acceptability as

3.33 Pavilion designed by Kishore Das at the Abasar Club Puja, Bhowanipur, 2007

3.34 Replica of the Vitthala temple of Hampi at the Bakulbagan Puja, 2008

3.35 Pavilion designed by Mamata Banerjee at the Bakulbagan Puja, 2010

3.36 Mamata Banerjee’s Durga motif transferred on to a fibreglass plaque, Rajarhat, New Town, 2012

pre-histories of the present

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either an artistic or a religious icon. This image first circulated as a greeting card that season and then, within two years of the coming of her government, became enshrined as a relief plaque at a prominent road junction at New Town Rajarhat. (See 3.36) The Bakulbagan Puja had made its transition into changing times, bartering the cultural capital of ‘art’ for the political capital of the present. A brief postscript needs to be inserted here. With the change of government in Bengal in 2011 came a further political slant in the profile of the ‘art’ Pujas of this neighbourhood—shifting attention to a neighbouring park Puja of Golmath in Bhowanipur, that had also recently begun to compete with the Bakulbagan Puja with its designer productions. Here, the Puja designer Subodh Ray made no bones about his political colouring in giving his stylized goddess (a weaponless figure before a kneeling praying group, placed in an elegant bamboo pavilion) the name Bangey Durga. (See 3.37) The sense conveyed is less one of ‘Durga in Bengal’, more that of ‘Bengal’s Durga’. The Chief Minister had been catapulted from her debut venture as Puja designer to becoming the goddess herself, with the festival discourses in 2011 powerfully resonating with such equations and analogies.

3.37 Subodh Ray’s image titled Bangey Durga, Golmath Puja, Bhowanipur, 2011

Notes 1 Several of the new creed of Puja designers, whose works and careers will be described in Chapters 5 and 6 (among them, Amar Sarkar, Subodh Ray or Sanatan Dinda, for instance), jostled with each other to present themselves as pioneers of the new genre of ‘theme’ Puja, going back in their career to the late 1990s. 2 There is little written information and even less visual documentation on the changing styles and form of Durga pratimas of the city’s twentieth century Sarbojanin Pujas. My information here is drawn mainly from three recent works: (i) Anita Agnihotri, Kolkatar Protimashilpira, (ii) Sandip Bandyopdhyay’s essay, ‘Kolkatar Durga Pujo’, in the little magazine, Lok, Krorpatra; Bangalar Janapad, Kolkata, November 2002, pp. 26–36, and his book, Durga Pujo: Borobari Thekey Barowari, pp. 18–29, and (iii) Mc.Dermott, Revelry, Rivalry and Longing for the Goddesses of Bengal, Chapter 4, ‘The Artistry of Durga and Jagaddhatri’, pp. 103–29.

3 Sandip Bandyopadhyay, ‘Kolkatar Durga Pujo’, pp. 29, 31. The special novelties at the time of the Sanghasree Puja of Kalighat are discussed later in this chapter. 4 This theme is discussed at length in my book, The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c.1850–1920, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992; digital reprint in paperback, 2008, and in Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India: Occidental Orientations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 5 Like the Bengali term shilpa which means both ‘industry’ and ‘art’, the word shilpi too has an elasticity that could extend to both the artisan and the artist. The idol-maker here takes on the now widely used designation of ‘clay artist’ (mritshilpi) or ‘artist who makes images of deities’ (pratima-shilpi). 6 ‘Lokey Boley Arter Thakur’, Kolkatar Korcha, ABP, 11 October 1983.

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7 Sandip Bandyopdhyay, Durga Pujo: Borobari Thekey Barowari, p.27. 8 Arindam Datta, ‘Art-er Thakur’, in the little magazine, Cha-Book, Puja Sankhya, 1413/2006, pp. 41–65. 9 Radharaman Mitra, in his study of old Kolkata placenames and neighbourhoods, refers to two late eighteenth century European residences at the Chowringhee end of Bhowanipur: (i) a large garden house of a judge of the Supreme Court, Sir Robert Chambers, at the site of what is now known as Jadubabu’s (colloquially called ‘Jagubabu’) Bazaar. Rani Rashmoni acquired the place in the mid nineteenth century and set up a bazaar here, which she bequeathed to her grandson, Jadunath Chowdhury, after whom the bazaar was named; (ii) a garden house built over a water pavilion, as a summer residence for his bibi, by a Company official, Henry Pitts Forster, who served as Registrar at the Sadar Dewani Adalat and later as Master of the Calcutta Mint. Called ‘Forster’s Folly’, this house stood opposite the United Missionary Girls’ School. Radharaman Mitra, Kolikata-Darpan (Kolkata: Subarnarekha, first published 1980, fifth printing 2008), pp.48–9. 10 Two well-known Bengali novels—Ramesh Chandra Dutta’s Sangsar (1886), and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyaya’s Nishkriti (1917)—offer vivid descriptions of the homes of the new Bengali professional elite, mainly of the legal profession, who built their family residences in these new parts of Bhowanipur. In the first novel, we are taken in the course of the story into three new affluent residences of Bhowanipur: of Debiprassana-babu, a nouveau-riche clerk of a British agency house, of Dhananjay-babu, a wealthy absentee zamindar; and of the most tasteful, respectable and progressive gentlemen among them, Chandranathbabu, a lawyer at the Calcutta High Court. The second novel is fully set within the upper middle class home of the Chatterjee joint family of Bhowanipur, where the two brothers Girish and Harish are both eminent lawyers who had made their wealth through their profession and are first-generation residents and property-owners in this locality, and support the third brother Ramesh who tries his hand at several failed businesses. 11 This spatial division of older and newer parts of Bhowanipur is discussed in Keya Dasgupta, Genesis of a Neighbourhood: The Mapping of Bhabanipur, Occasional Paper no. 175, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, March 2003. 12 I have found no detailed sociological study of the imagemaking trade and occupational practices of the Kalighat Patuapara over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, of the kind that exists for the clay modelling quarters of Kumartuli. A brief sense of the place is provided in Sandip Bandyopadhyay, ‘Kolkatar Durga Pujo’, pp. 28–9, Durga Pujo: Borobari Thekey Barowari, pp. 22–3, based on interviews he conducted in 1978 with the two oldest image-makers of Kalighat’s Patuapara, Barendranath Chitrakar and Shrish Pal.

13 Bimal Chandra Datta, Durga Puja: Ekal thekey Sekal, pp. 141–2, categorizes the Bhowanipur Sanatan Dharmotsahini Sabha venture as a Barowari rather than a Sarbojanin Puja organized by a group of men from the eminent families of the locality. The Puja was thereafter entrusted to the Dharmotsahini Sabha as a governmentregistered trust, with its office at the Ray Bahadur house on 33 Balaram Bose Ghat Road. 14 Sudeshna Banerjee, ‘Baroari bastion gets budget boost in 100th year’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 10 August 2009. 15 Interview with a Puja committee member at the Sanatan Dharmotsahini Sabha Puja site on 27 September 2008. He talked of the Mukherjee family who had built the two Shiva temples here in the early nineteenth century, whose descendents remain the main custodians of the temples even though they have moved out of this area to an apartment nearby, and of the reputation of this Puja as the oldest and most ritually pristine in Bhowanipur. 16 Sandip Bandyopadhyay, Durga Pujo: Borobari Thekey Barowari, pp. 27–29. 17 Interview with Samya Banerjee, one of the organizers of the Sanghasree Puja, Kalighat, 15 September 2011. The interviewee said that his grandfather, uncle and father had been prominent Congress politicians, and that his father’s elder brother, Malay Banerjee, was the founder of the Sanghasree Puja. 18 The term ‘cycloramas’ was explained to us by the designer Sushanta Pal, who in 2011 was producing at Sanghasree, for the first time, a new order of installation art, where he was trying to give a new twist to the sound and light effects that the Puja was well known for. Interview with Sushanta Pal, Sanghasree Puja, Kalighat, 15 September 2011. 19 Interview with Suman Bhattacharya, member of the Bakulbagan Puja committee, 17 September 2003. 20 Interview with artist Shanu Lahiri, on 29 September 2010, on her elder brother Nirode Majumdar’s inaugural ‘art’ venture at the Bakulbagan Puja. Inspired by her brother’s Durga, Shanu Lahiri’s own production at Bakulbagan in 1982 suffered a terrible jolt with Nirode Majumdar’s death on 26 September of that year, just days before the onset of the festival. 21 The earlier divide between Academic Realism (connoting the ‘Western style’) and the work of the Bengal and Santiniketan schools of painting (broadly categorized as ‘Indian’ or ‘Oriental style’) had undergone many transmutations over the second and third quarter of the twentieth century. By the 1960s and 1970s, the terms ‘Western’ and ‘Indian’ style were no longer at the centre of modern art-critical vocabulary. However, I use these loose groupings to mark out, on the one hand, a range of artistic styles in Bengal of that period that clearly aligned with the languages of twentieth century Euro-American

pre-histories of the present modernist art movements and deployed these to suit local motifs and themes, and, on the other hand, a spill-over of the artistic lineage of ‘Oriental-style’ painting, alongside the styles of Jamini Roy or Nandalal Bose, into newer trends that foregrounded the inspiration of local folk and primitive art traditions. For a brief survey of postIndependence Bengali modern art, see Ella Datta, ‘Quest for a New Language, 1940-2000’ in Art of Bengal: Past and Present, Calcutta: CIMA, 2000, pp, 57–79, and the essays by Nandini Ghosh and Nanak Ganguly in Art Etc, News and Views, July 2012, ‘Art of Bengal II’, pp. 31–40. 22 Bakulbagan Sarbojanin Durgotsav pamphlet for advertisers, 81st year, 2008, provides a full list of artists who have created the Bakulbagan Durga images from 1975 to 2007, saying ‘We are proud to be associated with these artists’. Dipali Bhattacharya appears in this list for three years, in 1999, 2001 and 2005, at the dwindling end of the career of this ‘artists’ Puja’. 23 Interview with Suman Bhattacharya and Ram Kumar Dey, a more senior member of the Bakulbagan Puja committee, 19 September 2008. 24 I draw here on Kajri Jain’s important formulation— ‘Vernaculars are normal but not normative; they can be modern but not modernist’—as she deploys the term as a central analytic trope for studying the calendar art industry in post-Independence India. She unravels the multiple signification of the prefix ‘vernacular’ in framing the aesthetics and the field of practice of calendar art, and in defining the space of the bazaar economies in which it resides. Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art, pp. 13–16. 25 This is reflected in the striking paucity of information and visual documentation of the images they made for the Bakulbagan Durga Puja within the personal archives of these artists, or in the existing writings and catalogues of their work. Hardly any photographs or sketches of their Bakulbagan work exist with them, or with art writers and critics, driving home the point that this work found little accreditation and importance as ‘art’ outside the sphere of the festival. Barring the images of Nirode Majumdar and Shanu Lahiri, which I got from the latter’s collection, my archive of the Bakulbagan Durga images of the 1980s and ’90s was gleaned entirely from one member of the Puja committee. 26 Satyi boltey ki, pratima garar manasikata nijer modhye gorey tultey parlam na (‘To be truthful’, he reflected, ‘I could not build up within me the mental dispensation for sculpting an image of the goddess’)—Sunil Das, ‘Mayer Shonge Baro Ghanta’ ABP, 25 October 1985. 27 Arindam Datta, ‘Art-er Thakur’, pp. 54–5, 61–3. 28 Ibid. pp. 52–53 29 Ibid. pp. 48–64

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30 Interview with Suman Bhattacharya and Ram Kumar Dey at Bakulbagan, 12 September 2008. 31 Ramesh Pal made the Bakulbagan Durga in 1987, to be followed by Mohanbanshi Rudra Pal during 1988 and 1989. Mohanbanshi’s son, Sanatan Rudra Pal, who in the 2000s became one of the most prominent figures in the Kumartuli idol-making trade, was invited to make the Bakulbagan pratimas in 2002 and 2003—by which time the identity of the artist’s Puja here was fast slipping away. The careers of these pratima-shilpis are discussed in the next chapter. 32 Interview with Suman Bhattacharya and Ram Kumar Dey, 19 September 2008. 33 This analogy with the Oscars, that has often cropped up in conversations with different people involved with the Asian Paints awards, was used specifically by advertising professional Sujoy Roy, of the firm, Ogilvy & Mather (O&M), Calcutta, that had for long handled this awards campaign. It was also invoked in the course of our conversation with Sharmishtha Deb, who was in charge of this campaign from 1992 to 1996 before moving to Bombay. Interview with Sharmishtha Deb and Sujoy Roy, O&M office, Auckland Square, Kolkata, 27 October 2006. More recently, the term has been hijacked by other Puja award-givers, such as the television news-channel NewsTime’s offer of Puja ‘Oscars’ during 2011–12. But none of these awards, as will be shown, has even been able to compete with the prestige of the Asian Paints award. 34 Interview with Sumit Roy, at his apartment at Sunny Park, Ballygunge, on 25 September 2006. Sumit Roy had left the city in the late 1980s and had then returned after a long gap to set up his own communication and brand-management consultancy. Called ‘Univbrands’, it presented itself as ‘the world’s smallest learn-by-earning university’, which aimed at ‘growing people who grow brands’. 35 ‘Asian Paints Sharad Samman completes 20 years: Changing Cultures’, Spandan, The quarterly house journal of Asian Paints, vol. 11. November 2004. 36 This occasion was specially remembered by Derek O’Brien, who worked at O&M in the 1980s and had been part of Sumit Roy’s team, which had conceived and organized the Asian Paints campaign. O’Brien, now a Trinamool Congress politician, remains an avid enthusiast of the city’s Durga Pujas. Interview with Derek Brien at his office on Nazar Ali Lane, off Ballygunge Circular Road, 31 October 2006. 37 Reports on the Asian Paints Sharad Samman, ABP, 10 October 1985 and 22 October 1990. 38 Discussed in Ramindar Kaur, Performative Politics and the Cultures of Hinduism, in the chapter ‘Mandal, Media and the Market’, pp. 125–53.

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39 Raminder Kaur (op.cit, pp. 134-5) refers to a similar intensity of participating in these short-listing and judging tours of Ganapati mandaps till late into the night as part of the GLG awards, during her fieldwork in Mumbai, from 1994 to 1998, and again in 2001. 40 This pride in the intense voluntary civic involvement in the awards campaign came through in the interviews with both Sharmishtha Deb and Sujoy Roy at O&M, on 27 October 2006, and in a later interview on 4 November 2010 with Kaushik Datta, head of the event-management company Splash, which took over the running of this Asian Paints ‘Sharad Samman’ campaign from the mid 1990s. 41 As a participant observer, I travelled with the team of judges in the final round of selection on Saptami night on 25 September 2009, the year the Asian Paints awards scheme was celebrating its 25th anniversary. I am grateful to Andrew Williams, Brand Marketing Manager at Asian Paints in Mumbai, and the event manager of the competition, Kaushik Datta, for allowing me to be on this team. The tour began at the Salt Lake Stadium Stadel Hotel at 7 pm. The group toured the final set of twelve shortlisted Pujas—beginning with the Khidirpur Pally Saradiya in the south-west of the city, then moving through the South Kolkata Pujas (Chakraberia Sarbojanin; Shibmandir, Lake Temple Road; Suruchi Sangha, New Alipore; Bosepukur Shitala Mandir and Rajdanga Naba Uday Sangha, Kasba). It assembled for dinner at the Stadel Hotel around midnight, and thereafter proceeded to cover the Pujas of Maniktala, Lake Town and Dumdum Park in the north and north-east. It was nearing 4 am when the tour ended. The final list of 6 award winners under different heads were announced the following morning in newspaper advertisements, in hoardings on the prize-winning Puja sites, and could be accessed through the Internet and cellphone messaging services. 42 Interviews with Sharmishtha Deb and Sujoy Roy, O&M, 27 October 2006. 43 Interview with Mohanbanshi Rudra Pal at his workshop in Kumartuli, 31 August 2003. 44 Interview with Bhabatosh Sutar at the Natun Pally Pradip Sangha Puja in the interiors of Lake Town, 25 August 2006. 45 Interview with Gouranga Kuinla, Salt Lake, 1 September 2010.

46 ABP, 29 September 1987. 47 Interview with Heerak Nandy, freelance journalist, copyrighter and photographer, who wrote many of these advertorials in the 1980s for the Asian Paints awards and continues to be actively involved in the campaign. Heerak Nandy was interviewed along with Kaushik Datta at the Splash office, Lakeside Club, Narkelbagan, on 4 November 2010. 48 This point was repeatedly highlighted by Sharmishtha Deb in the interview with her and Sujoy Roy, O&M, 27 October 2006. 49 The new award category called ‘Discovery of the Year’ was the first to be added on in 1994, along with the awards for the three best Pujas. To these were added in 2000 two further award categories called ‘Creative Excellence’ and ‘Artisan of the Year’. The full list of awards, awardees and judges, from 1985–2005, was circulated by the Asian Paints Sharad Samman campaign. 50 Mentioned in the Asian Paints Sharad Samman Winners List poster: ‘Honouring two decades of excellence’, September 2004. 51 Interview with Ranadhir Dhar at the Adi Ballygunge Puja club, 5 September, 2007. 52 ‘The Saga of a Heritage’, an exhibition of photographs of the award-winning Pujas of the Asian Paints ‘Sharad Samman’, Science City, 13–15 September 2009. 53 Interview with Sumit Roy, 25 September 2006. 54 Interview with Sharmishtha Deb, O&M, 27 October 2006. 55 Interview with Heerak Nandy and Kaushik Datta, 4 November 2010. 56 Both Arup Biswas and Firhaud (Bobby) Hakim moved from being local councillors to becoming important ministers of state in Mamata Banerjee’s government which came to power in May 2011. While the growing city-wide publicity and high-budget productions of the Suruchi Sangha Puja, under the patronage of Arup Biswas, goes back more than a decade, the Chetla Agrani Sangha Puja sponsored by Firhaud Hakim was known more for its Kali Puja, in keeping with the social profile and Puja traditions of this locality. It evolved a new ‘theme’ profile for its Durga Pujas only in the late 2000s. 57 Interview with an unnamed organizer of the Bakulbagan Puja, who was deputed to speak about the Puja that year, 24 September 2010.

FOUR

Pre-Histories of the Present: On Pratima and Pandal Makers Between them, they represent the two oldest skills and trades associated with the city’s Sarbojanin Durga Pujas. Together, they lay out the main resource pool of creativity, innovation and labour that have gone into the earlier history of festival productions and sustained the changing tastes and styles in the images of the goddess and her temporary abodes. This chapter will look at the way these existing occupational practices of clay image making and pandal construction provide a pre-history that both stands apart and flows into the contemporary trends of ‘theme’ Pujas. What kinds of histories can we reconstruct for these largely undocumented, ephemeral spheres of production, that have few chronological accounts to their credit, but whose pasts richly resonate in festival memories? How far back can we stretch the timelines of this history? In what ways have these practices of pratima and pandal making connoted a hereditary, artisanal domain of work to be pitched against the new worlds of ‘art’ and ‘artist’ that have intervened in the city’s Durga Pujas? And to what extent are these boundaries dissolving and mutating in current spheres of Puja ‘art’? There is a strong perception that the changed social groups and production forms that have swept today’s festival field have marginalized these older ‘traditional’ trades, and taken over the work that was once their monopoly.1 Such narratives of

competition and displacement, however, need to be juxtaposed with parallel stories of adaptation and reorientation. These older areas of expertise survive as a thick layer within the newer worlds of Puja designing and art productions, sometimes collapsing, at other times reinforcing the hierarchies between the two. There are also lines to be traced here that will allow us to periodically configure the ‘artist’ among communities of idol makers, or to pursue the transitions in careers and modes of work that take us from the pandal decorator to the Puja ‘designer’. Let me begin by moving from our brief incursion in the previous chapter into the Kalighat Patuapara to Kolkata’s biggest and oldest hub of clay image making at Kumortuli (also spelt as Kumartuli): one which has undergone a more significant diversification of skills and been sharply catapulted from past histories into present times.

the legacy and plight of kumortuli This place in the far northern reaches of the city, cloistered between Upper Chitpur Road (renamed Rabindra Sarani) and the river embankments, takes its name from the artisanal community of potters and clay modellers (kumors), who are said to have first settled in this region from a time before the coming into being of the colonial city.2 Skilled in

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4.1 Map showing Kumortuli’s location in the far north of the city, with the cluster of idol making workshops shaded in ochre.

making various kinds of utensils, ritual decorative objects as well as human and animal figures, these kumors built their main reputation, from the end of the eighteenth century, around the sculpting of clay images of Hindu deities for household and community worship. Present-day Kumortuli, with its dense agglomeration of nearly 500 clay-modelling workshops shanties and residences, cramped within a total area of about 6.6 acres within a larger 15 acre ward of the same name, stands as one of the oldest settled areas of Kolkata and one of the few surviving examples of a traditional caste-based occupational zone of the kind that once existed in various clusters of the old eighteenth and nineteenth century city. (See 4.1) The lack of development of this quarter— the makeshift hutments and the abominable conditions of living and working—has meant that Kumortuli has never been able to outgrow its identity as a ‘basti’, or registered slum. At the same time, the homogeneity of the caste group residing here (the majority of them carrying the title Pal, several among them descendents of the Pals of Krishnanagar and Shantipur in Nadia) and the persistence among them of an unbroken hereditary trade of image making in

clay has made this basti a unique location in the city.3 Old timers in Kumortuli recall a time when the place also hosted several patuas (folk painters) along with the mritshilpis, and was known, like the Kalighat Patuapara, for the intricate beauty of the painted chalchitras and the different styles of soras that they produced for various Pujas. But these other artisanal arts are said to have died out over time, giving the place over to the primary and proliferating trade of the pratima makers.4 The art of sculpting clay idols, which has continued here over generations, follows a largely unchanged format. The first stage consists of constructing a wooden frame, on which is mounted a bamboo armature, which in turn is developed into a strawstuffed mould that is secured to the frame by nails to form the inner core of the image. The mould is thereafter layered with different varieties of alluvial clay, mixed with straw and jute chips and prepared in different densities, to create torsos, limbs and faces. A critical ritual purity is attached to this medium of unfired clay—clay that is primarily earth and water is seen to be purest and most suitable for sculpting

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4.2 Skin colour paint being applied over the anatomy of the goddess, Baishnabghata Patuli workshop, 2006

the bodies and faces of the gods.5 There is a curious ritual of including in this alluvial clay a clump of earth scooped from the threshold of a prostitute’s house, to sanctify in the process both the soil and the tainted locality from which it is drawn.6 This practice has come under increasing recent criticism from organizations working for the dignity and rehabilitation of sex workers.7 However, Kumortuli’s proximity to the city’s oldest red-light quarters at Sonagachhi has allowed for a notional continuation of the custom, whereby, a month ahead of the Pujas, sex workers sell soil to the clay modellers at prices ranging between Rs. 10–20 for a bag—while the bulk of the clay required for the image is sourced at far greater expense from the river bank and boats carrying it across from other parts. The process of mixing and modelling clay is an intricate one, involving often seven different types of clay, with one type of thick sticky clay (called entel mati) used to layer the base frame, to form what modellers refer to as the ‘bones’ of the figure, and another softer smoother variety (called ganga or beley mati) used to model what they call the ‘flesh’ of the anatomy. Special mixes of entel and ganga mati are required to give bodies their volume

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and their softness, while the shaping of the deities’ fingers requires jute fibres to be kneaded into the stickier variety of clay. The torsos of the deities are constructed without the heads; the faces are made separately as clay casts out of plaster moulds and attached to the bodies. The Durga’s face moulds, in particular, are retained for reuse each season and carefully protected by individual workshops as their trademark image of the goddess, the specialty of Durga’s face marking out the individual style of several master mritshilpis. The final stage involves the coating of the clay figures with a layer of chalk paint and tamarind seed gum that forms the binding for different colours in which they are painted (see 4.2), the adding on of the hair, clothing, ornaments and weapons to the figures (see 4.3), and the painting of the background frames supporting them. The process culminates in the painting of the eyes of the central figure of Durga, marking the symbolic bringing to life of the icon—a ritual that is most effectively played out on the morning of Mahalaya.8 (See 4.4) This art of image making in unbaked clay can be seen as one of the oldest and most flourishing of Bengal’s urban folk arts. It is also one that has an umbilical connection with the spreading career of Kolkata’s Durga Pujas—where the rising demand for clay

4.3 An idol maker attaching the hair and ornaments of the goddess, Kumortuli, 2011

4.4 Sanatan Rudra Pal painting the eyes of Durga at his Ultadanga workshop, Mahalaya, 2003

4.5 Clay figures of the Durga pantheon being made at a Kumortuli workshop, 2008

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images of deities stands closely linked to the histories of Banedi Bari Pujas and the transition to the newer varieties of Barowari and Sarbojanin Pujas in the city. The road leading off Chitpur Road, that runs through Kumortuli and is registered on most of the workshop addresses, is called Banamali Sarkar Street. The name now carries the only trace of the wealthy Dewan and Deputy Trader of the East India Company who once owned a palatial mansion in these precincts. It also invokes memories of other grand residences in the vicinity, of more famous eighteenth century Bengali bania gentry, like the infamous Govindaram Mitra, the Deputy Collector who earned the title of ‘Black Zamindar’ for his land-tax extortions, who is said to have organized the first Durga Puja here in the 1720s. His 165-foot nine-spire temple, where (the legend goes) Lord Clive stopped to offer prayers after his victory at Plassey, stood at the spot now marked by the Siddheswari Kali temple. Or, the house of Raja Nabakrishna Deb at Shobhabazar, on a road that still borders the larger ward of Kumortuli, whose Durga Puja celebrations epitomized the pomp and extravagance of the early Banedi Bari Pujas. The rise of Kumortuli as a hub of migrant clay modellers and idol makers is directly tied to the history of the celebration of Durga Puja in early colonial Calcutta: to the patronage of these elite families and the growing demand for images of deities in the Pujas of these households. Very early in the history of this settlement, image making became the specialized skill and trade of the potters who found their home at Kumortuli, with kumors and kumbhakars taking on a new occupational identity as pratima-shilpis.9 Thereafter, it has been the steady market for clay images of deities for temporary worship during the year-long calendar of household and public Pujas in Bengal. And of all the images of gods and goddesses that are fabricated here round the year10, the creation of the Durga ensemble has always been the most prestigious aspect of this industry and the mainstay of the trade. (See 4.5) Conversely Kumortuli, as a place where gods and goddesses of all shapes and sizes are crafted every year from the ritually sacred soil of the Ganga, became an inalienable part of the identity of the city’s Durga Pujas. Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,

4.6 Idol making on the pavement outside the Jatra Shuru Sangha Puja, Garia, in the far south of the city 2006

similar, though far smaller, clusters of idol-making workshops came up in other stretches of the city in tandem with the spreading spatial networks of public and community Pujas across the neighbourhoods of south, west and east Calcutta. Among the oldest and most thickly inhabited of these other clusters is the one we have already visited at Patuapara in Kalighat, bordering the trickling stream of the Adi Ganga and the sacred shrine of Kali. Together, the image-making hubs at Kumortuli and Patuapara came to span two ends of the old pilgrim route of the city, charting the passage along the river from the Chitteshwari temple in the extreme north to the Kalighat temple in the south.11 In a more recent history, we see the trade of the idol makers spilling well outside the territorial boundaries of Kumortuli to spawn workshops, large and small, permanent and temporary, in different areas of Kolkata.12 (See 4.6) This proliferation of temporary workshops is most intense in the immediate vicinities of Kumortuli where, as the season approaches, every available shed and house courtyard in the by-lanes leading to the main hub stand stuffed with half-finished clay idols. With Kumortuli’s own workshop spaces filled beyond capacity, the mritshilpis are forced to take these additional spaces and workers on hire to maximize the volume and pace of their productions. (See 4.7)

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in the name of the goddess clay modellers and the sensuous body parts they sculpt, observe in detail the plastic quality and animation of these faces and limbs of unfired clay, trace the fine cracks that appear on dried clay layers before they get covered up in paint, and stand at tantalizingly close quarters vis-à-vis the flexing muscles of Samson-like Asuras and fiercely growling lions. (See 4.8, 4.9) And this is where one can experience at close quarters the bringing to life of the goddess through the painting of her enlarged eyes in the final stage, and the backbreaking labour of transporting the massive figures out of these alleys into the trucks that will carry them to their pandal sites. Over the years, photography, both professional and amateur, has played a signal role in rendering Kumortuli and its art of image making more and more iconic.14 (See 4.10)

4.7 Courtyard of the Gokul Mitra house, neighbouring Kumortuli, rented out for idol making, 2011

Yet, the more the entire city seems to give itself over to this frenzy of idol making, the more the attention keeps reverting to Kumortuli as the original, defining site of practice—with this one place epitomizing both the tradition and romance of the art, as well as the stark poverty and appalling work conditions of the idol makers. The narrow by-lanes of Kumortuli, brimming with naked clay torsos of multi-armed deities in various stages of preparation, have been a dream subject for every photographer of the city. The semi-finished figures appear lined in dark shanties, set out to dry in the sun, or protected with tarpaulin sheets against the never-ending rain that marks the build up to the Puja season. As they stand waiting to be completed and consecrated, they assume a parallel resonance as burgeoning photographic images, which move from newspaper pages to advertisements and hoardings, from individual image archives to glossy picture albums.13 There is little to match the visual poetics of these compositions and the eloquence of their silent subjects. The aura thickens as we move from the photographs to the place itself. This is where one can encounter the goddess most intimately. Here, we come within touching reach of her voluptuous unclothed torso, feel the promiscuities between the

At the same time, the place has also continuously invoked a picture of the unrelieved degradation of the mritshilpis—with our attention turned to the cramped conditions in which they live and work, and the extreme financial insecurities in which they persist in this trade. The celebration of the art of Kumortuli has gone hand in hand with an outpouring of concern in the media about the plight of the artisans and the threatened state of this cottage industry. Accounts of Kumortuli, past and present, tend to push in two broad directions—one, which highlights the traditional labour-intensive nature of this art form, and its incomplete transition from subsistence to a profit economy; the other which dwells on the urgency of the need for state intervention in this area and the long-deferred promises of rehabilitation of the workshops. Squalor and congestion has long been the order of the day in the Kumortuli basti. Already, in 1876, the population density of this settlement was recorded in the census as the second highest in the city, with 163 persons per acre. The figure moved in 1951 to 342 persons per acre.15 The spill-over of the trade to other quarters has never reduced the space crunch, nor the dense inhabitation of labour in this hub, with Kumortuli carrying several locational advantages over many of the newer workshop sites. The older advantages of its closeness to the main river ghat, where the straw and clay-laden boats arrive from the Sundarban and Diamond Harbour, are compounded by its newer advantages of being the main organized centre of

4.8 Unclothed torsos of goddesses at the Kumortuli workshops, 2008, 2011

4.9 Close up of Mahishasura and Durga’s lion, Kumortuli, 2009. Photograph by Jeet Chowdhury

4.10 Photographers, amateur and professional, crowding the lanes of Kumortuli, 2012

4.11 Coolies transporting a semi-finished Durga idol to the pandal site, Kumortuli, 2010. Photograph by Jeet Chowdhury

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the industry, with its main registered office and mritshilpi unions. In the peak of the Puja seasons, more than 50 per cent of those congregated here are migrant seasonal labour, like workers from Bihar who specialize in the mixing of different kinds of clay, or the coolies from Andhra Pradesh whose job is to carry, load and offload the idols on their journey from Kumortuli to the main sites (see 4.11, 4.12), or the many clay modellers from Krishnanagar, Shantipur, Bardhaman and Medinipur, who temporarily camp here to tap the biggest demand for idols in this city. Clustering around the idol-making workshops are also a series of smaller stalls, where the decorations, ornaments and weapons of the deities are crafted in gold and silver foil, in glittering zari and brocade, in white shola pith or (now, as rising costs have made shola craft an expensive emporium product) with its look-alike in thermocol. The neighbouring marts of Barabazar have always supplied much of the decorations and clothing of the deities, while some more specialized accessories were earlier sourced from distant rural pockets. For instance, the supply of the goddess’ hair and the lion’s mane, made in jute fibre, would once come from a group of Muslim women from a single village in the Amta district of Howrah, until nylon hair used widely in plastic doll-making units began to displace their craft.16 Most of the decorationmaking stalls that came to be set up within Kumortuli operate with a tighter link with the clay modelling workshops, and fall within the direct purview of the larger idol-making trade of this area. The permanent resident population of Kumortuli in 2006–07 presented a count of roughly 527 families and 450 practicing mritshilpis, 300 of whom were registered under their main union (Kumortuli Mritshilpi Sanskriti Samiti) and the remaining 150, consisting mainly of a group that had migrated from East Bengal/East Pakistan, covered under a second rival union (Kumortuli Mritshilpa Samiti).17 As they eke out their living in these claustrophobic workspaces, rising costs and insufficient capital flow have remained a perennial problem for these artisans. Newspapers in the 1980s were continuously reporting on the way the Kumortuli modellers were fighting with their backs to the wall, facing eviction

4.12 Massive Durga image being carried by coolies out of Pradip Rudra Pal’s workshop at Telengabagan, 2009

by real estate hawks who were eyeing this land.18 Through the 1990s and 2000s, the media carried stories every year on the spiralling costs of clay, hay, paint, fuel and labour, which is never matched by a parallel increase in the selling price of idols, and the continued dependence of these artisans on traditional moneylenders and their exorbitant interest rates. A major benefit of the unionization of the trade lay in making available low-interest bank loans from three nationalized banks, up to a maximum of Rs. 2.5 lakhs per workshop. Under the current regime of licensing and regulation, the mritshilpis are required to secure annual trade licenses from the KMC in order to approach banks for loans, and to avail of oil at subsidized costs from the Food Corporation of India to burn their blowtorches for artificially drying the idols. There has remained an unabated insecurity among these idol makers about their ability to avail of and repay bank loans, with the annual loan forthcoming only if the previous year’s loan has been repaid.19 Greater capital flow for many of these workshops has come with a diversification from the idol-making trade into the making of other kinds of public statuary and decorative sculpture in durable material

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in the name of the goddess handful of cases, as with the workshop of Sunil Pal, do we find a complete change of practice from idol making to statues and interior decoration. (See 4.16) Most Kumortuli families, even in their switch to other sculpting practices, continue to straddle the twin domain of statue and idol making and retain their homes and workshops within the main cluster. And it is in this mix of work styles and livelihoods that we will later locate the careers of some of the most successful of today’s generation of Kumortuli pratima-shilpis, including those who have adapted to the demands of today’s ‘theme’ Pujas.

4.13 Realistic plaster statues of Krishna and Gopini at Monty Paul’s studio, Kumortuli, 2010

like plaster, fibre, marble or bronze, that bring more money and round-the-year orders. Kumortuli, as one of the union leaders told us in 2007, is no longer bound only to the medium of clay. The mritshilpis today work with a variety of other sculpting material, supplying statues and busts of public personalities; figures for outdoor and interior décor, mythological sculptures and wall reliefs for temple complexes in other states, and now varieties of fabricated sets for the booming local television industry.20 (Example, 4.13, 4.14) There are earlier histories too of the kumors of Kumortuli working with lime plaster, taking on orders for sculpting architectural ornamentation and European-style statuary for the wealthy residences of north and central Kolkata homes.21 This other kind of work, as it required members of the Pal community to take on the new skills of realist image making, gradually created their new trade identities as ‘sculptors’. Rows of new kinds of ‘art and sculpture’ workshops came up over time along the main stretch of Rabindra Sarani, outside the idol-making clusters, with greater visibility for clients and more shop floor space for work and display. (See 4.15) In this spatial redistribution, many of the ‘sculpture studios’ continue to advertise a separate workshop address within the internal cluster on Banamali Sarkar Street, where a section of the family continues to make clay idols of gods and goddesses. Only in a

From the end of 2009, a wind of change began blowing through Kumortuli, with the implementation of a long-talked-about government move to upgrade and renovate the site. After several years of proposed municipal interventions, the state government in 2006 had floated a Kumortuli rehabilitation project of Rs. 27 crores, to be funded by the central government’s Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) plan and the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID). The project aimed at temporarily relocating the mritshilpis to a different site, demolishing the present shanties, and constructing what was then planned as a four-storied building over an extended zone, with new studios

4.14 European-style fibreglass sculptures at the Atindra Art Studio outside Kumortuli on the main Chitpur Road, 2010

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4.15 Signboard and statues on display at the sculpture studio of Asim Paul at 488, Rabindra Sarani, 2010

and residences, and even a museum and exhibition gallery to display Kumortuli art throughout the year.22 As the years rolled by, with little headway in the execution of these plans, questions of how effectively the artisans and their work material and processes could be relocated inside a concrete building or what such a refurbished site might entail for the artistic prestige of this image-making trade remained hypothetical. For a long time, no decision could be arrived at concerning an alternative venue for housing the workshops in the neighbouring vicinities of Chitpur or Strand Road—a venue which would not take away the crucial access to the river and its supply of clay, straw and jute, nor remove the trade in other accessories from the retail marts of Barabazar.23 In April 2010, on Bengali New Year’s Day, the process finally began of relocating a section of the Kumortuli idol makers and workshops (in the first phase, 170 families and 98 workshops) into a nearby temporary address of three converted industrial godowns (at 541/1 Rabindra Sarani), demolishing one main block of the old shanties. If hopes of better conditions of living and working, even in these transit godowns, brought together the members of the two unions of Kumortuli, the changes also elicited a fair share of resistance among many older residents, who were sceptical about what they would receive after the renovation and feared that the move during that summer would seriously jeopardize their work for the coming Pujas.

The season of 2010 saw a ‘tale of two Kumortulis’— the split spatial locations taking on the colours of a political divide, with contending stories of hope and displacement furiously pitted against each other.24 There were large hoardings all around the vicinity announcing the new ‘Temporary (Asthayi) Kumatuli’ with the names of all the relocated artisans at the warehouse address, alongside other hoardings which laid out the details of the KMDA’s layout and plan of the renovated existing site. The renovation of Kumortuli was a project of the Left Front regime, one if many unfulfilled promises that the government was pushing through in its last lap in power, with the spokesmen of the main mritshilpi union voicing their support for the relocation. At the same time, opposing Trinamool Congress-led demonstrations and protest meetings blared in the older site, with banners asking the public not to believe in rumours of the shift, announcing that the ‘300-year-old Kumortuli will remain exactly where it was’. These protests importantly brought to the forefront a handful of women mritshilpis, like Kanchi Pal Datta, Bharati Pal and Sandhya Pal, who had been forced by the death of their fathers and husbands to enter this male livelihood and keep the family trade plying. Their vocal presence at the 2010 dharnas at the demolition site underlined the particular anxieties about the loss of home and hearth and the displacements of families of women, who have long remained the invisible, unacknowledged work force within the family workshops at Kumortuli.25

4.16 Sunil Pal with Air India Maharajas and other fibreglass sculpture in his studio at Kumortuli, 2010

4.17 Idols being made inside the relocated warehouse site on 541/1 Rabindra Sarani, 2010

pre-histories of the present Accounts were doing the rounds of both the advantages and disadvantages of the new location— where more space also brought the inconvenience of separating residences on the upper floor from the studios beneath, with workers complaining that they could no longer cook, rest and work in the same place to maximize the pace of production; or where the welcome protection from rain came with the downside of a lack of adequate air and sunlight and the additional electricity costs of running lights and fans. Yet, despite initial fears of customers and adequate orders not reaching the idol makers at their changed address, work flourished in these more spacious warehouse interiors and grounds through the extended Puja season. (See 4.17) Meanwhile, at the older site, much remained unchanged. The reaction of the majority who were still to move ranged between expressions of relief that their work and lives had not been disrupted that season, and apprehensions of the extent of the dislocation that awaited them the following year. With entire families allocated no more than one room homecum-workshops in the proposed construction and the artisans asked to partially pay the cost of their new dwelling and workshop units, Kumortuli seems doomed to be transformed from makeshift shanties into a concrete slum.26 The congestion and squalor may partially recede, but the prospect of this artisanal hub ever taking on the facilities of an artists’ studio and gallery complex remains remote. This is all the more so, as the change in the political regime in the state in 2011 brought a halt to the process of relocation between the older site and the temporary warehouse on Rabindra Sarani, and has left the future of both those who moved and those who are still to move even more uncertain.27

the changing look of the goddess There are divergent opinions about how far back in time we can trace the history of the large clay images of Bengal’s composite iconography of Durga and her family. Did the tradition begin with the performance of the first public Durga Pujas in Bengal by Raja Kangsanarayan of Tahirpur, Raja Bhabananda Majumdar of Krishnanagar, Nadia, and Raja Lakshikanta Majumdar, the founder of the

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Sabarna Chowdhury family of Barisha in Behala, at the turn of the seventeenth century?28 Or is there a later antecedence for the worship of Durga as an anthropomorphic image that comes fully into place in the middle of the eighteenth century, in the fabled ostentations of the Pujas of Raja Krishnachandra Ray at Krishnanagar? It is from this time onwards that the practice of murti-puja, centred around a humanized form of the goddess made out of unfired alluvial clay, began to replace the earlier traditions of the worship of the goddess in the form of a decorated clay pot and a painted patachitra, aspects of which still continue in certain villages and towns of Bengal.29 It is also from broadly this period that the Shakta goddess takes on all the contours of her unique regional iconography in Bengal. Without entering here into this complex early history of the evolving clay iconography of Durga, it is possible to deduce that what today’s authors classify as the ‘aristocratic’, ‘traditional’ image of the sculpted goddess in Bengal (for a typical example, see 2.26) has a lineage that can loosely be stretched from the mid eighteenth to the early twentieth century, from the hey-day of the Banedi Bari Pujas to the emergence of the public communitarian forms of, first, the Barowari Pujas, and later, the Sarbojanin Pujas. This is the large time span that Anita Agnihotri marks out as the ‘early period’ against which she juxtaposes the changing styles of Durgas that would appear in the early and mid twentieth century. In charting a brief schematic history of the transforming appearance of the goddess, I use as a main source her small evocative book, based on her memories of growing up watching the idols being made at the Kalighat Patuapara, and her later interviews with mritshilpis across north and south Calcutta, conducted between 1997 and 2000.30 This entire ‘early period’, Agnihotri writes, remained the stronghold of the tradition of the single frame, closely grouped, stylized image conglomeration of Durga and her family. (See 4.18) Some of the distinct features of this form are marked out, not just in the dramatic elongation of the eyes of the goddess, but also in the bright yellow colouring of her face and body, contrasted by the sap green colouring of the Asura and the white sharp-nosed, horse-like lion, its face often reminiscent of the makara images in temple sculpture.31 An integral part of this style was

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4.18 Stylised ekchala Durga group, with painted background frame and a white horse-lion, Naktala Udyan Sangha Puja, 2006

the elaborate ornamentation of the goddesses and the arching frame in daker or sholar saj—the grandeur of the ornamentation keeping pace with the magnitude of the images and signifying their expense and stature. (See 4.19) Till today, it is this form that has exemplified the archetypal traditional image of the goddess, the one that best caters to the term, sabeki, and most effectively serves the demands of the divine and devotional icon. We are surprised to learn that the first changes in this continuing ‘traditional’ image of the goddess come as late as the 1930s. This is when a new fashion of lifelike figures appeared for the first time, as the period’s novel form of the ‘art’ pratima, patented (as all accounts go) by the clay modeller of Krishnanagar, Gopeshwar Pal (known in the trade as G. Paul). Thereafter, the decades from the 1940s into the 1990s can be presented as a time of the spreading trends of realism, with

both diversification and standardization of various forms of the individually positioned, glamorously humanized and contemporary-look images of Durga, with a few image makers and studios becoming renowned for their particular genres of realistic, action-filled imagery. The entry of ‘realism’ (the use of techniques for reproducing three-dimensional, illusionist appearances in painted and printed pictures) is now widely recognized as the critical force that altered the face of popular mythological and religious iconography in modern India. The new scholarship in the field of popular picture production has offered vital insights into the way select facets of realist representations were appropriated over the late nineteenth and early twentieth century into the ‘bazaar’ and ‘calendar art’ industry, to show how

pre-histories of the present the ‘real’ took on a magical role in bringing gods and goddesses to life and became an inalienable feature of the contemporary worshipped icon.32 Through what routes do techniques of ‘realism’ make their comparatively late intervention in this realm of the clay models of deities? We know of the long-established skills of the Krishnanagar clay modellers in making lifelike figures, which brought many of them to the Calcutta School of Art in the 1870s and 1880s, and made them a vital resource for producing ethnographic models of ‘Indian tribes and castes, costumes and occupations in colonial museums and exhibitions.’33 Yet, there were clearly different representational challenges of introducing such human models into this field of idol making. It is only during the second and third decades of the twentieth century that the mastery over realism in the imaging of the goddess began to carry the claims of modernity and artistic achievement, singling out the work of certain ‘masters’ and the trademark styles they brought into the field. Anita Agnihotri’s account draws us into the many processes that begin to intervene over the middle and later years of the twentieth century in Durga’s transformation from a stylized puppet image into an animated, anthropomorphic figure, reminding us of the different genres of the ‘realist’ image that particular image makers came to be known for. We are told about how, in different phases over the 1940s and ’1950s, Gopeshwar Pal and Ramesh Chandra Pal mixed shades of pink, orange and flesh tones to naturalize the complexions of the deities; about how Durga in Ramesh Pal’s hands took on an elongated, full-bodied, round-faced, limpideyed visage that would become the new epitome of beauty and divinity; (See 4.20) and about how Durga’s lion and Mahishasura, in particular, were given fiercely muscular and realist appearances and highly dramatized poses of combat.34 In an oft-cited analogy, the breaking away from the tightly integrated ekchala image group into (what Gopeshwar Pal first devised as) the panchchala format, with each deity separated out and placed under five individual frames, is presented side by side with the whittling away of the Bengali joint family and the more individuated roles that Bengali middle-class women assumed in the changed social

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4.19 Shobhabazar Rajbati Durga in silver daker saj, mounted on a figure of the horse-lion, 2009

spaces of homes, schools, colleges and offices. (See 4.21) Whether or not such an analogy is relevant, there is no denying that the assumption of lifelike appearances intensified and naturalized the process of both the humanization and domestication of the divinities. At a general impressionistic level, the Durgas, Lakshmis and Saraswatis, from the 1960s onwards, are seen to simulate the look of film heroines, even as they simultaneously take on the poses and appearances of the archetypal Bengali women as depicted in the modern paintings of Nandalal Bose or Jamini Roy. Agnihotri invites us to reflect on various artistries, inflections and shifting styles within this broadly ‘realist’ genre. Ramesh Pal, she writes, brought to the iconography a new mastery over spatial grouping and composition of figures, blending the anatomical forms of Italian neoclassical sculpture with his own patented look of a magisterial and quintessentially Bengali Durga. If three large conical eyes were the central feature of the traditional single-frame Durgas, the much-revered feature of Ramesh Pal’s Durgas too were the depth and magnetism of her eyes in faces that were said to meet the requirements

4.20 The unchanging look of Ramesh Pal’s Durga pratima, Park Circus Puja, 2002. Photograph by Tarapada Banerjee. Courtesy: ABP

4.21 Analogy of the ekchala goddess group with the idea of a joint family, Pratidin, Robbar cover, 17 October 2010

4.22 Contemporary example of a Bharat Mata Durga at a Puja on James Long Sarani, Behala 2012

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4.23 Another contemporary example of a Durga with matted hair and tiger skin attire, Khidirpur Kabitirtha Puja, 2012

of both the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern’.35 While Ramesh Pal fashioned a form for the goddess that would dominate the scene from the 1950s, there would be others, like Gorachand Pal, who in the 1970s gave his Durgas the appearance of a simple, unadorned, open-haired Bengali village woman draped in a red-bordered white sari, reminiscent of the village girl in Ramprasad’s devotional songs for Kali. There was also a continuing trend of imagining Durga as Bharat Mata in certain Pujas, the oldest of these being the one at Beadon Square Park. (See 4.22) Agnihotri tries to unravel the emotional charge of this new rural feminine icon in the late 1960s in a city wracked by Naxalite violence and the trauma of the Bangladesh war. In every phase, the image of the goddess, she argues, can be seen to strike a chord with the broader cultural and political milieu of the time.

Her account also tells us of other experimental ‘art’ styles of Durga imagery that became fashionable with idol makers from the 1950s through to the 1970s. We have already discussed in the previous chapter the period’s particular penchant for ‘Orientalstyle’ Durgas, parallel to the proliferation of realist representations, where idol makers like Shrish Pal of Kalighat came to specialize in transplanting onto his clay models the figural forms of Indian temple sculpture or the paintings of Abanindranath Tagore or Nandalal Bose. It is within the larger rubric of the ‘Oriental style’ that a host of variations in iconographies emerged over these years—there was, for instance, the ‘hill goddess’ or Tantric ascetic look that produced Durgas with matted hair, crescent moon, serpent, and tiger skin attire (See 4.23); or another kind which took on the sculptural postures of dancing Shiva and came to known as ‘Nataraj’

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Durgas; or yet another type which would loosely emulate the body contours, hairstyles, heavy-lidded eyes of the Buddhist ‘Ajanta’ style.36 The distinction of many of these types of images was that their weapons, ornaments and clothing would all be intricately modelled in clay, with no additional draping of cloth, brocade and tinsel decorations. Other writings on this theme narrate the emergence during these years of another resonant stylistic category, that was given the name of ‘Bangal Durga’ because of its association with the mritshilpis who had migrated from East Bengal, which further humanized the demeanour of the goddess and gave her the look of movie heroines, like Nargis in Mother India or Suchitra Sen in films such as Deep Jweley Jaye or Saat Pankey Bandha. By contrast, the traditional ekchala daker saj goddess image, which was still widely in

demand for household Pujas and produced largely by earlier settled residents of Kumortuli from West Bengal, would now be referred to as Ghoti Durga.37 In this unceasing cultural rivalry of Bangals and Ghotis of post-Independence Bengal, the decade of the 1980s would bring into predominance a Bangal mritshilpi family, that of Rakhal and Mohanbanshi Rudra Pal who had migrated to Kumortuli from DhakaBikrampur in 1948, with the former seen as the main architect of the latter-day success of the family trade. The family profession (as we are about to see) would be split, by this period, into different workshops and break-away units—but would together contribute to a generic style of large, heavy-bodied, statuesque figures, with dreamy eyes and full lips, where the emphasis was on resplendent costumes and ornamentation, often entirely modelled in clay and painted in a range of mixed palettes. (See 4.24) These were also the

4.24 Example of a Mohanbanshi Rudra Pal Durga, Singhi Park Sarbojanin Puja, 2006

pre-histories of the present years of an unprecedented scale of ostentation, high spending and involvement of the political mafia in the city’s biggest Sarbojanin Durga Pujas, where, if the goddesses of Ramesh Pal still enjoyed the greatest prices and prestige, those of the Rudra Pals reigned as the main symbols of glitz and grandeur.

‘artists’ among idol makers Taking this broad chronology of changing styles, let us now delve into what led to the shifting identities of ‘art’ and ‘artist’ within this trade—and see what has prevailed as the choices and scope for individual fame and artistic mobility within this idol-making field. The name of Gopeshwar Pal (1894–1944) becomes legendary in this history.38 Coming from a hereditary line of image makers of Krishnanagar, Nadia, the young Gopeshwar Pal had begun to combine his skills in clay modelling with his work in portrait and architecture painting that brought him from Krishnanagar to Calcutta. It was his special flair for creating lifelike clay models that attracted the attention of the colonial art administration in Calcutta and secured for him an invitation to place his craft and his models on display at the 1924 Indian Empire Exhibition at Wembley, in London. At Wembley, he is said to have bowled over his masters, especially a visiting member of the British royalty, by the speed and accuracy of the likenesses he produced on site. Christened the ‘lightning sculptor” in the Daily Telegraph, he is said to have been placed in a room with glass walls so that spectators could see him work the whole day, producing figures in clay at wondrous speed before squashing them and beginning to model again with the same lump of clay. Along with human likenesses, animal images seemed to have been his forte. Taking a handful of clay, he changes it into a horse’s head within forty-five seconds, with a deft touch here and there… With a sweep of the hand, Mr. Pal wipes out the image. A poke here and a twist there, and within thirty seconds the head of a dog appears placidly contemplating the spectators.’ Yet the English reporter still contemplates, ‘if the sculptor is capable of moulding a bust.39

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Even as they accorded him the title of ‘sculptor’, Gopeshwar Pal’s British patrons were clear that the full credentials for such a status would require his mastery of the styles and materials of European statuary. So, from the position of a performing craftsman at an imperial exhibition, he proceeded on a British government scholarship for training in Italy in the art of marble sculpture, before returning home a year later (in 1925) in his new role as a realist sculptor.40 His was a classic instance of the native’s progress under colonial encouragement and patronage. Like his far more celebrated predecessor, the painter Ravi Varma, he also became the conduit through whom the skills of Academic realism entered and dramatically transformed the world of popular devotional iconography, except that he never acquired anything akin to Ravi Varma’s artistic stature or nation-wide fame.41 On his return from Europe, he set up his residence and studio in the vicinities of Kumortuli, a few lanes away from the idol-making workshops, and soon became famous in the trade for his novel style of realistic, dramatized Durga imagery. It is this style that he first experimented with in the Kumortuli Sarbojanin Puja around 1928–29. That it took some time to gain the approval of Puja organizers and publics is suggested by the fact that Gopeshwar Pal’s realist Durgas eventually found acclaim at the Kumortuli Durga Puja only from 1937, when he worked here for eight consecutive years until his untimely death in 1944. During these years, he applied his style to the additional orders he took on for Durgas at the Simla Byayam Samiti Puja and Hatibagan Sarbojanin Puja, and introduced novelties at Hatibagan of a Durga in the form of Mother India against a map of the nation. His son, Siddheswar Pal, remembered how, before the Puja season, his father would sketch lions in the Alipore zoo to be able to recreate their exact likeness in clay, how he excelled in bringing anatomical accuracy to each figure of the divine pantheon, and how he brought to the static forms of the idols the animated gestures, expressions and drama of a real-life battle. (See 3.2) There is also a more general memory of this legendary ‘artist’ and his realistic image-making skills that circulates among the older generation of Kumortuli idol makers— among whom his style is seen to mark the definitive

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in the name of the goddess city’s earliest public statuary of Indian notables— like the one he made of the Bengal industrialist Sir Rajendranath Mookerjee, that was installed in 1938 in front of the Martin Burn building in Dalhousie Square. (See 4.25) During these years, Gopeshwar Pal the idol maker would successfully reinvent himself as G. Paul, the realist sculptor, with a rising career that came to a sudden halt in 1944. What remained was the sculpture workshop of G. Paul & Sons left in the charge of his son and his son’s brother-in-law, that soon steered clear of making idols and continued instead to supply the city’s main stock of public statuary in plaster, marble and bronze. (See 4.26)

4.25 Statue of Sir Rajendranath Mookerjee by Gopeshwar Pal, 1938, relocated at the Victoria Memorial Hall grounds

‘modern’ turn in the art of sculpting the goddess, and his career serves best to separate the time of the past from the time of the present in the trade.42 Yet, even as Gopeshwar Pal’s name comes to signify the new values of ‘art’ and ‘modernity’ in the annals of Kumortuli, in the larger story of this sculptor’s career, the modelling of Durgas soon became secondary to the commissions he gained for public statuary of famous persons. By the late 1930s, this became the main source of his livelihood, allowing him to move from clay to more classy sculpting material like marble and explore the full potential of the simulation of human likeness in chiselled stone. With the Ramakrishna Mission becoming one of his main patrons, he made his name in the making of another kind of Bengali spiritual icon—the figures of the trinity of Ramakrishna Paramhamsa, Sarada Devi and Swami Vivekananda—his most renowned work being the earliest marble statue of Ramakrishna that he made for the newly-built temple at Belur Math at the end of the 1930s. The same years also brought him commissions for making some of the

Let us reflect, at this point, on the way the designation of the ‘sculptor’ comes to be separated out of the inherited skills of the clay modeller, to be associated with Western training and the practices of Academic realism and public statuary. This is where art college training became a new, valued attribute among the group, singling out the few who could gain access to such training in the mid twentieth century. As they branched out into a parallel career in commissioned realist sculpture, they set up a different type of ‘art’ studio on the outer peripheries of Kumortuli, some of which continue to be in practice today.43 Idol making was (and continues to be) grounded in its

4.26 Inside G. Paul & Sons’ statue making workshop, with an oil portrait of G.Paul, 2006

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4.27 Ramesh Pal in his sculpture studio at Nabakrishna Street, Shobhabazar, 2004. Photograph by Tarapada Banerjee, courtesy: ABP

own system of training and apprenticeship within a family workshop, where a young karigar is initiated over the years into the use and mixes of various kinds of clay. He begins by modelling and painting the smaller animal figures, till he gains mastery over the full figure of the deity, and thereafter becomes a ‘master’ who may specialize only in the making of faces, the shaping of fingers and the painting of eyes.44 By contrast, an art college education brought an altogether different exposure to life study, the copying of European classical statuary, and techniques of sculpting in plaster, marble and bronze. Such training, however, also underlines another set of divergences among those who emerged from these art schools as ‘sculptors’. During the 1930s and ’40s, when the rejection of the demands of realism and commissioned public statuary marked the founding narrative of modernism in the history of Indian sculpture, profiling a Ramkinkar Baij vis-à-vis a Debiprasad Roychowdhury,45 a diametrically opposite trend secured the new definitions of a ‘sculptor’ in the field of hereditary image making. Even as ‘sculpture’

as an art form, grounded in formal art school training, enters the world of traditional image makers, and singles out the ‘masters’ in the trade from the average artisans, the ‘sculptor’ in this arena continues to stand sharply differentiated from his counterpart in the contemporary arena of modern art. The career graph of Ramesh Chandra Pal presents an interesting example. The name plate, ‘Ramesh Chandra Paul & Sons, Artists and Sculptors’ marks out his old residence and studio at 2, Raja Naba Krishna Street at Shobhabazar, just off Central Avenue, in the vicinities of Kumortuli but outside its main image-making complex, its middle-class identity setting it apart from the dingy workshops of the hub. (See 4.27). A Government Art College training in the 1940s, under Principal Mukul Dey, and an exposure to the traditions of Greco-Roman and European neoclassical sculpture had provided a strong launching pad for Ramesh Pal’s career as an artist. Thereafter his work moved along two parallel

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4.28 Statue of Deshabandhu Chittaranjan Das by Ramesh Pal, in front of Akashbani Bhavan, Kolkata

lines—one that would establish his fame in creating the period’s best-known Durga images, nurturing a reputation that would prevail from the 1950s to the 1990s; the other that would make him the creator of some of the city’s most familiar public statues of the post-Independence years. In 1944, he is said to have been first drawn into making a Durga image at one of the city’s big Sarbojanin Pujas at Lebutala (what came to be later called Santosh Mitra Square), to complete with two weeks in hand a work that another idol maker had left incomplete. Next came the commission to make the Durgas, over several consecutive years, for the Calcutta Fire Brigade on their main Free School Street premises: a point from which Ramesh Pal never looked back. The specialty of his style of images lay in his ability to adapt the lithe anatomical vocabulary of Italian sculpture to produce a human likeness that remained unmistakably Bengali and, at the same time, to use his skills in realism to give his goddesses a face that was more divine than human.46 Once more, there are significant analogies to be drawn with the career of Ravi Varma. Here again is

a story of an artist who created an order of divine imagery that could both carry the pedigree of European neoclassical art and capture the tastes of the masses. And, just as photographs of Ravi Varma’s mythological paintings in oil (made for the Baroda royal palace) had first sold publicly at Bombay in 1888, paving the way for the mass reproduction of his pictures as colour prints in the subsequent decade,47 we hear of photographs of Ramesh Pal’s Durgas (especially the ones he would make for the prestigious Fire Brigade Puja on Free School Street) selling in the 1960s, first in a few hundreds, soon in several thousands, at the pandal site and later as framed and calendar images. Likewise, indices of mass popularity, in Ramesh Pal’s career, would always be matched by indices of artistic distinction. We know through Anita Agnihotri’s account that, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in the eight to ten Pujas for which he made Durgas, Ramesh Pal would insist that the pandal structure be in keeping with the magnificence of his image and that popular film music be replaced here by the strains of Bismillah Khan’s shehnai—and that, at the Fire Brigade Puja, he even had the officials dressed in crisp white dhotis and panjabis to receive guests.48 Our ‘theme’ Pujas of today clearly had precedents in such innovations of the past, and their striving towards a new culture of refinement. As we draw out these pre-histories of the notions of ‘art’ and ‘artist’ in the city’s Durga Puja, the work of Ramesh Pal offers itself in co-existing frames. It is never very clear whether his is a case of mritshilpi of a Krishnanagar Pal lineage upgrading himself to a sculptor, or a sculptor adding on the making of Durga pratimas to his other lines of work. The octogenarian sculptor is quoted in a newspaper interview of 2007, ‘Don’t forget that I am a student of the Government Art College. Sculpting is my first love.’49 By ‘sculpting’, he meant the statues he was commissioned to make in bronze of the nationalist personalities of Bengal that would replace their colonial counterparts in different public locations in the centre of the city. Each of these government commissions secured his status as the main iconographer of the city’s postcolonial statuary. In each case, the sculptor recalled how he would work, not only with photographs of the person but also with

pre-histories of the present the person’s writings, writings about the person, and the recollections of family members, where available, to recreate as faithfully as he could the dead person within the sculpted image. The bronze statues that he made, for instance, of West Bengal’s Chief Minister, Bidhan Chandra Ray for the compound of Writers’ Building, or of leaders of the freedom struggle, like Chittaranjan Das (in front of Akashbani Bhavan), Kshudiram Bose (in front of the High Court) or the marching Matangini Hazra (at the Esplanade end of the Maidan) are left to bear out the results of this claim. (See 4.28, 4.29) In their prominent locations within the city, these statues made by Ramesh Pal have come to stand in for the personalities themselves. These are pieces where he felt he could best showcase his skills to produce a ‘perfect likeness’.50 Yet, ironically, it is in this sphere that his individual artistic identity stands under constant erasure. The multitudes walking by these statues are seldom aware of or have any desire to know about their creator. If to be ignored and passed by is the routine fate of most such public statuary, to remain unknown is equally the fate of those who make these objects. There is little scope in this sphere of work for bringing into the spotlight the artistic skills and authorship of the sculptor. By contrast, we find, it is in the sphere of his Durga idols (to which he was reluctant to give the same status as his other work in sculpting), that Ramesh Pal’s images carried over several decades the prestige of his name and signature style. Unlike the permanent bronze statuary, from which came his main earnings and national awards, his laboriously crafted Durga images in clay are what the sculptor had to relinquish for immersion year after year, with his dreams of a museum, where some of his images could have been preserved, never realized.51 Nonetheless, one could argue that it is the making of pratimas for the city’s Durga Pujas that most effectively sustained Ramesh Pal’s fame as a ‘master artist’. Within the hereditary profession, many older practitioners, like Nemai Chandra Pal of Krishnanagar, continue to uphold their inherited skills as better suited to the needs of idol making than an art school training in sculpture.52 This senior pratima-shilpi (as he called himself ) stands within a

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250-year-old lineage of clay modelling, the line of work he inherited from his maternal grandfather who, in the middle years of the nineteenth century, made images of deities for the Maharaja of Krishnanagar and the zamindari homes of Jessore, Khulna and Dacca, and his father, who continued the family specialization in sculpting gods and goddesses. He talked of specializations within groups of Krishnanagar clay modellers, with some excelling in making realistic human figures and animals, others in making clay fruits and vegetables, and some, like his family, excelling in the most challenging genre of the making of pratimas. With the category of pratima-murtis, he remembers being trained to work on four broad stylistic types—devi murti, where the emphasis was on high stylization of the eyes and face of the goddess; putul murti where the shift was towards realistic facial expressions, body gestures and movements; ajanta murti, where they would draw on the template of ornaments, head-dress, facial forms and hand gestures of Ajanta paintings, using art-manuals like Nandalal Bose’s Rupavali; and finally, modern murti, where they had the license to introduce all kinds of contemporary looks and fashions. Often, senior practitioners like his father would experiment with a mix of these

4.29 Statue of Khudiram Bose by Ramesh Pal, on the road leading to the Calcutta High Court

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4.30 Nemai Chandra Pal, draped in a namabali chadar, painting the eyes of his Durga at the Honolulu Art Museum, c.1996. Courtesy: Ruby Palchaudhuri

styles to create what he calls do-bhashi images: ones that could cater to multiple artistic tastes and speak to the viewer in a double tongue. We realize how varied were the creative skills and artistic vocabularies that were in circulation within this hereditary traditional trade, even where no formal art school training intervened. And we also understand how the trade offered scope for prestige outside the commissions for public statuary. Cherishing the opportunity to train under realist ‘masters’ like G. Paul and Ramesh Chandra Pal and his ability to work across a range of stylistic idioms, Nemai Chandra Pal’s claim to distinction lies in his travels to all parts of India and abroad, where he created his Durgas on site with a work team. As the first of his family to travel abroad, Nemai Pal graduated from commissions from expatriate Bengali Puja committees in Dhanbad, Bhilai, Bhopal, Bombay and Delhi to becoming, from the mid 1990s, the chosen pratima-shilpi who was taken by the Crafts Council of West Bengal to perform his art of image making in month-long ‘Creating a Durga’ exhibitions in different museum venues in the UK and USA. For these foreign exhibitions, he culled out of all his stylistic options a perfected form of the traditional ‘debi murti’ to present for

The case of Nemai Chandra Pal, alongside those of Gopeshwar and Ramesh Pal, opens up the many directions in which the careers of mritshilpis have moved in the past decades, and the different markers of artistic achievement that have evolved within the trade. By the 1980s, the travels abroad of Durga idols and their makers had become a rising trend, introducing the use of durable, light-weight material like papier mache for the construction of the image, to be replaced by the widespread trend of fibreglass Durgas in the past decade. What Nemai Chandra Pal referred to as modern murtis in the field would be defined in these years, not just by the use of new material, but also by some novel experiments in forms and concepts, pioneered by an artist called Aloke Sen especially for the Puja at Mohammed Ali Park. The closest equivalent to our contemporary creed of Puja artists and designers, this art college trained graduate from a middle-class family was a contemporary at the Government College of Art, Calcutta, in the late 1950s, of artists like Bikash Bhattacharya and Jogen Chowdhury—but was pushed away by family circumstances from his vocation as a painter into the livelihood of sculpting Durga images.53 That he did not come out of the Pal lineage made him all the more of an ‘artist’ among the idol makers, one who soon acquired the label of a ‘non conformist’, specializing in bringing contemporary political themes into his images of Durga and her entourage. A newspaper report of 1990 used the term ‘goddess of the avant-garde’ to refer to Aloke Sen’s creations at Mohammed Ali Park Puja during the 1980s.54 Yet, in sharp distinction from the period’s more acknowledged notations of the ‘avant-garde’ in the ‘artist’s Puja’ at Bakulbagan, Aloke Sen’s popularity revolved around his realist style, and his interpolation of real-life scenarios of train accident sites, jungles with gun-toting guerrilla fighters, cavalcades of armed forces and masked terrorists, or a more symbolic setting of attacking serpents, in which to position the goddess’ own battle with evil. (See 4.31)

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and set up workshops in Kumortuli where there was still space and land for these new settlers. The eldest son of Brajanath, Rakhal Chandra Pal (he dropped the Rudra from his title) was the one who set up the family workshop at Kumortuli under the name of ‘Bikrampur Shilpagar’ after they moved here in 1948. He remembered the stiff resistance they had to face from those long settled at Kumortuli and how hard they had to struggle to gain a foothold in the trade. Accused of under-cutting prices, Rakhal Pal talked of how, for the 15 Durga images he made on his arrival at Kumortuli in 1948, his charge was no less than Rs. 150 to 250 a piece (which was by no means cheap, by the standards of those years). He took special pride in the way the work of the East Bengali mritshilpis began to shape new tastes and markets.55 Through the 1960s and ’70s, Rakhal Pal enjoyed a stature in the field on par with Ramesh Pal, the two sharing between them the commissions for the pratimas for the biggest Sarbojanin Pujas in the city, like those of College Square, Park Circus, Ekdalia Evergreen or Sreebhumi. (See 4.32) And he developed his own signature style of a realist Durga pantheon, reintroducing, for instance, the background painted arch that Ramesh Pal had largely dispensed with, but giving it novel forms of a blossoming lotus or a leafy grove to frame the figure of the goddess.56 4.31 Example of a Durga tableau by Aloke Sen, Mohammad Ali Park Puja, 2003. Photograph by Pabitra Das, courtesy: ABP

Coming to the decade that immediately preceded the coming of age of the ‘theme’ Pujas, we can identify the family of the Rudra Pals, consisting primarily of the father, Mohanbanshi, and his sons, Sanatan and Pradip Rudra Pal, as occupying the standing of the first family of Kumortuli. The narratives of renown, here, are positioned entirely within the parameters of the Kumortuli idol-making profession and the prevalent generic styles of realist Durga images, with a generational shift in identities and aspirations in the 2000s that bring us into the circuits of the present. This family lineage goes back to Bikrampur near Dhaka in erstwhile East Bengal, to the imagemaking profession of the patriarch Brajanath Rudra Pal, following whose untimely death in 1940, his younger brothers and sons carried on the line of work. Their story became one of several of mritshilpis who migrated to West Bengal in the years after Partition

4.32 The aged Rakhal Pal at work on one of his large statuesque Durga images, Kumortuli, 2003

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4.33 Example of a typical Durga image by Sanatan Rudra Pal with all decorations in clay, Adi Ballygunge Puja, 2006

Thereafter, the trade divided among different lines of the family, with one of the main breakaway units formed under Rakhal Pal’s younger brother Mohanbanshi Rudra Pal in the early 1980s, and a second breakaway workshop formed by Mohanbanshi’s eldest son, Sanatan Rudra Pal, in 1997. The period from the late 1980s saw the rising profile of Mohanbanshi Rudra Pal—a success that the image maker feels was hugely bolstered by the Asian Paints awards, and that many others in the field believe largely rested on the work of his eldest son, Sanatan Rudra Pal, until the latter broke away to form his own independent, equally successful workshop at Ultadanga. By the time we arrive at the present, the dominant art of Kumortuli stands best represented by the images produced by the rival units run by Mohanbanshi’s two sons, Sanatan and Pradip Rudra Pal. Through them, we see the Kumortuli profession fast spilling outside its old territorial boundaries to spawn these new large workshops in two adjacent lanes of Telengabagan at Ultadanga, with much of the work on large images being done at the pandal sites. Claiming to have acquired his training more from his uncle Rakhal Pal, rather than from his father, Sanatan Rudra Pal runs a workshop at Telengabagan

that is akin to a mini Kumortuli, dependent for its capital flow on both traditional moneylenders and bank loans. In 2003–04, his workshop was employing a round-the-year workforce of 30–35 people, with extra seasonal labour coming in during the peak months of activity. His specialty became his pure clay images, with all the intricacies of costumes and ornaments modelled in clay and later painted in multiple shades.57 (See 4.33) Known for his monumental, resplendent, multiple-frame images which would be commissioned each year by some of the city’s best-known, big-budget Pujas, Sanatan Rudra Pal’s Durgas became at the same time the choice of many of the first designers of new-wave Pujas at Bosepukur, Babubagan or Bakulbagan. Yet, a continuous funds crunch and the unavailability of any regular commissions outside those of sculpting idols continue to trouble a ‘master’ like him. He talked about how the prices of Durga images have never kept pace with the overall rise in Puja budgets. In 2004, the prices varied between Rs.15,000– 20,000 for his smaller images to a maximum of Rs.80,000 for the largest he was making that year for the Ekdalia Evergreen Puja (a Puja whose overall budget then ranged between 18 to 20 lakhs). The new corporation restrictions that were being imposed on the height of Durga images meant a further curtailment of his earnings, since size is what determined the prices of his idols. By 2007, his costliest production for the Ekdalia Puja fetched him Rs.1.25 lakhs, with the club placing high value on its unbroken repertoire of Durgas by this master idol maker, and honouring this arrangement by increasing the price of his images by 10 per cent each year. Yet, despite the central place of the image in the Puja tableaux, the price that the club set aside for the idol maker fades into insignificance before the 15 lakhs it spent that same year on its pandal and lighting.58

the entry of ‘theme’ productions When I visited the rival studios of Sanatan Rudra Pal and his younger brother Pradip Rudra Pal during 2003 and 2004, there appeared little to distinguish the two—in the congested structures of the work sheds, and even in the general price structures

pre-histories of the present of the images that were being commissioned. However, with a background from the Government Art College, Calcutta and the Fine Arts Faculty of M.S. University, Baroda, the latter represented the new artistic ambitions and demands that were then sweeping through Kumortuli. For some time, the patriarch Mohanbanshi Rudra Pal had restricted himself to sculpting only the face and fingers of the goddess in his small workshop in Kumortuli, leaving the family’s main business to be conducted by this younger son at the Telengabagan site. (See 4.34) Pradip Rudra Pal’s area of professional work is divided along different lines. There is, firstly, the conventional body of large Durga imagery he continues to produce under the banner of his father’s name, as the mainstay of the family business. Then there are the more innovative and experimental Durgas he makes, under his own name, often teaming with a new breed of Puja designers and their ‘theme’ pandals. (See 4.35) The goddesses he made, for instance, for the Puja designed by Dipak Ghosh at Suruchi Sangha, New Alipore in 2004—a Pahari painting style image for a remake of a Rajasthani fort and palace (see 4.36)—became exemplary of his forays into ‘theme’ Puja Durgas, conceived to fit the ambience of the larger pandal tableaux. And, finally, there is the work he executes in wood, metal and fibreglass, for interior décor and for ‘fine art’ exhibitions, to keep his professional livelihood as an artist.59 With Pradip Rudra Pal, we come up with a set of positions that would be shared by several other artists of the time who were making their careers in Puja designing. The Pujas, they say, offer them a unique popular sphere for establishing their artistic reputations, even as they seek entry into the city’s more elite enclaves of gallery art. The rites of passage to this ‘other’ world of art remain highly fraught, with several tensions driving a wedge between the twin spheres of art and Puja designing. Nonetheless, in his own time, Pradip Rudra Pal stands as the archetypal representative of the new persona of the ‘artist’ that Kumortuli has engendered. At one level, the subject of ‘theme’ Pujas—their new styles of productions and producers—has come to sharply polarize the traditional image-making industry. A deep distaste for and non-comprehension of current trends were voiced over time by different

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sections of mritshilpis, from senior figures like Nemai Chandra Pal or Mohanbanshi Rudra Pal to Mintu Pal, the joint secretary of the Kumortuli Mritshilpi Sanskriti Samiti. This disapproval targets two kinds of perceived transgressions in the new forms—the distortion of anatomical accuracy of figures, and deviations from the debi roop (divine look) of the goddess—pitching the realistic against the period’s folk-art incarnations of the deity, the dominant stylistic repertoire of the trade against the innovations brought in by the new entrants in the field. Underlying these reservations are strong feelings of threat and uncertainty of their own prospects within the trade and a sense of unfair competition to their hereditary skills posed by art school-trained professionals, as all media and corporate publicity, they allege, comes to centre on the alternate practices of ‘theme’ Pujas.60 At another level, Kumortuli, in all its unrelieved degradation and squalor, can be seen to continuously keep up with the demands of the present. For some

4.34 Mohanbanshi Rudra Pal at work on sculpting the fingers of the goddess, Kumortuli, 2003

4.35 Older and newer styles of Durga images inside Pradip Rudra Pal’s workshop at Telengabagan, 2009

4.36 Pradip Rudra Pal’s Pahari painting-style Durga ensemble at the Rajasthani fort complex, Suruchi Sangha Puja, New Alipore, 2004

pre-histories of the present

4.37 Naba Kumar Pal’s Durga at the Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja, 2010

time now, there have been provisions for Durga pratimas to be selected and ordered online, with an enterprising studio providing this facility for internet commissions for fibreglass images that are often readied two months in advance, packed and sent to other cities and abroad. The trend of making small fibreglass images for transportation abroad to expatriate Pujas in the UK and USA had taken off from the 1990s, as a lucrative practice where a single image could fetch Rs. 1 lakh or more as against the Rs.10,000–12,000 that local Pujas would pay for clay images of the same size. In 2008, the global economic recession and the sharply curtailed budget of many of the North American Pujas resulted in the cancelled orders for fibreglass images from Kumortuli, and a continuing fall in foreign orders for the next two years.61 However, more than international demand, it is the local contemporary boom of ‘theme’ Pujas which brought about the greater reorientation of the products and production styles of Kumortuli, as many of its kin began to provide the phenomenon with its main infrastructural support of idol-making skills. There are image makers like Naba Kumar Pal who have come to specialize in making Durgas for several

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‘theme’ Puja designers like Gopal Poddar, Amar Sarkar, Sushanta Pal and Shibshankar Das (See 4.37); and others like Parimal Pal who emerged from making only the image to taking on the commission for designing the entire Puja complex at places like Bagbazar, Hatibagan and Khidirpur. (See 4.38) Graduating from the Government College of Art in the mid 1990s, Naba Kumar Pal tried his hand at both film and television set designing, with ambitions of taking on the art direction of films. He was following in the trail of his grandfather, Jiten Pal, who without any formal training had been linked with the work of the Tollygunge film studios in the 1960s and had been the regular idol maker for the cinematic mythological dioramas that were the specialty of the Sanghasree Puja of Bhowanipur. Without much success in the Bengali film circuit, Naba Kumar Pal, by the early 2000s, returned to seek his main livelihood in the family’s idol-making profession, working (as is common practice) under his grandfather’s and father’s names, while designing his ‘theme’ Puja Durgas under his own name. In 2010, while their family workshop was handling a total of 35 orders for large and small Durga idols, with the work carried out in five sheds, he himself was also designing 10 ‘theme’ ensembles in his own studio, where the work was more select and expensive

4.38 Pavilion designed by Kumortuli artist, Parimal Pal, Baghbazar Pally Puja, 2012

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4.39 Tantrik art pandal designed by Debraj Rudra Pal and his artists’ group Tribhuj at the Lake Town Adhibasibrinda Puja, 2006

and the earnings said to be more lucrative. Yet, the highest he was charging for one of his ‘theme’ Durgas that year for the Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja was still only Rs. 75,000, in an overall Puja club budget that had climbed up to Rs. 17 lakhs.62 Where the price and prestige of the Durga idol is concerned, little seems to have changed over the decade, even as newer ‘theme’ varieties of productions have become an integral part of the image-making trade of Kumortuli. This requires practitioners like Naba Kumar Pal to seek round-the-year commissions for television set designing, or orders for sculptures from event-management companies and events like the Kolkata Book Fair, for which he has made plaster of Paris models of the Statue of Liberty and the seated figure of Abraham Lincoln. There are others of the contemporary generation of the same clan who have used their art college training to chart for themselves a more specialized career in art outside their work in ‘theme’ Puja image making and designing. From the family line of Rakhal and Mohanbanshi Rudra Pal are those like Debraj Rudra Pal who banded together with fellow students of the Government Art College, Calcutta in the mid

2000s to form an artist’s group, Tribhuj, and began to actively design ‘folk’ and ‘Tantrik’ art Pujas in various parts of the city stretching from Behala to Lake Town.63 (See 4.39) There is also Sunil Chandra Pal (maternal grandson of Rakhal Pal), who after graduating from the Government College of Art, Calcutta in the early 2000s, slowly carved out a niche for himself as a new-wave Puja designer, while also working towards a full-time career as a gallery artist.64 In 2006 the young Debraj Rudra Pal was still balancing what he calls his own ‘studio’ art of special Durgas with the work he had to put into the regular productions of the family workshop, labouring the distinction between his own ‘studio’ and the family’s ‘dokan’ or shop. In recent years, others like Sunil Pal seem to have moved more fully into the circuit of ‘theme’ Pujas and have entered, in parallel, the more exclusive circles of group exhibitions and gallery art. As these case studies show, the transition from idol maker to designer and artist is never an easy one, but the process is continually finding fresh momentum in the changing worlds of Kumortuli.

fabricating durga’s urban abodes As I turn to the skill and trade of pandal constructions, the disparity in the length of analysis and in the historical and narrative details I can bring to this field of work vis-à-vis the first are telling. The literature on the subject is paltry, compared to the range of writing that exists for the art of idol making, especially for a site like Kumortuli. No historian or ethnographer, journalist or photographer has invested the same order of attention in the material, work processes and styles of pandal making. Nor is there much information to be garnered on the economics and structures of what is locally called the ‘decorator’s’ profession. Existing across metropolitan and district towns, catering to all kinds of outdoor public gatherings (social, cultural, political or religious), these small decorator firms provide the main pool of design repertoires, conception and construction skills that go into the art of pandal making. Like the sculpting of clay images, we could think of pandal making, too, as another kind of ‘urban folk art’—a nagarik lok shilpa in its own right—one that was born and nurtured in the streets of the city, and has the same

pre-histories of the present umbilical connection with the history of the public festival.65 These temporary street-side architectural fabrications that have come to be known as pandals presumably came of age in the same years that the first Sarbojanin Pujas sprouted in the open public places in the north and south of the city. Its rising graph of artistry and intricacy—far less celebrated and documented—can be mapped on to broadly the same chronology as the innovations that the clay modellers bring about in the appearance of the goddess group over the course of the twentieth century. While the making of open-air pavilions for public rituals and ceremonies, using the cheap local construction material of bamboo, plywood strips, rope and cloth had a longer history, the specific forms that the pandal takes on for the festival is clearly propelled by the spectacular genres of public community Pujas of the past five or six decades. The etymology of the word pandal is itself something of a mystery, with its apparent roots not in Bengali, Hindi or English but in the Tamil language, referring to a temporarily constructed marquee or pavilion for housing a deity and hosting ritual events and celebrations. It remains to be researched as to why and when the term begins to circulate in common Bengali parlance,66 and how it comes to supplant another equivalent term, mandap, which comes to us more directly from the architectural space and terminology of the Hindu temple, and translates as a covered, semi-enclosed courtyard site for worship, feasting, and congregation. The chandi-mandap or the tulsi-mandap are common features of rural Bengali temples and homes, both humble and grand. However, the Durga Puja, when it came to be hosted in the mansions of aristocratic and wealthy households of Bengal, was given its place not in a temple-style mandap but in the grand architectural setting of the thakur-dalan: a Western-style arched and colonnaded altar, often with elaborately sculpted facades, overlooking the open courtyard at the centre of the house. Another associated form of temporary construction for festivities is the shamiana, a term in wide usage in other parts of India, connoting a large covered area with a decorative cloth and canvas canopy set up for weddings and other social ceremonies. The Puja pandal form in Bengal emerged as a structure somewhere in between the traditional

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ritual space of the mandap and the modern secular public space of the shamiana, with Bengal’s pandal decorators carrying in recent years the reputation of producing the most intricately decorated and elegantly designed shamiana canopies that are in demand all over the country. If clay constitutes the essence of idol making in Bengal, bamboo forms the core material of the art of pandal construction. Drawing on the traditional techniques of bamboo and mud house construction in rural Bengal, all pandals use as their core skeletal frame an awning of bamboo poles planted in shallow holes in the ground, with vertical, horizontal and perpendicular cross bars tied together for structural stability, and thin wooden battens (the material is locally paraphrased as batam) introduced as reinforcements over the bamboo frame. (See 4.40, 4.41) From the tying together of bamboo poles with jute ropes or cloth strips to the elaborate cladding of this frame with stretched cloth, wooden planks, or synthetic material like plaster, ornamented thermocol or fibre, pandal construction has relied on a well-honed set of local skills in the creation of giant dismountable structures that simulate various forms of architectural edifices. (See 4.42, 4.43) Despite recent attempts by the Ministry of Steel to promote the use of light

4.40 Mohammed Ali Park Puja pandal under construction, 2007

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in the name of the goddess are highly capacious. In this process, venue and landscape are not distinct; one is the entrée to the other. In creating a venue, it enthusiastically projects connections—physical, social, sensorial —to constitute itself as landscape.’ 67

4.41 Ropes replaced by synthetic strips of cloth for tying bamboo poles. Pandal under construction at Park Circus, 2013

steel and aluminium as less cumbersome and more durable material for construction instead of more flammable material like bamboo, pandal makers have refused to part with bamboo. Its value lies in its being not just a cheaper resource, but also a more versatile and reusable building medium. It is this versatility of such bamboo and batam structures which Swati Chattopadhyay shows to be crucial in giving form to the ‘fungible spaces and geographies’ of the festival city. ‘The bamboo structure’, she writes, ‘signifies (the) dual attribute of infinite interchangeability and specific articulation. It is in this sense doubly fungible. Its short life span on a site (and this is where it differs from house construction with bamboo) makes it possible for this duality to be maintained… (T)he construction of Puja venues is a process of creating a fungible infrastructure from materials and space that

The idea of ‘infinite interchangeability’ can be applied not only to the multiple public purposes that these temporary spaces simultaneously serve during the days and nights of the festival: as ritual devotional space, as social communitarian space, or as spaces of touring, viewing and wonderment. It can also be used to think of how the single term, Puja pandal, stands to connote an extraordinary range of fabricated structures, from a standardized segmented covered pavilion to massive replicas of archaeological sites and architectural monuments, recreated villages or conceptual installations. In this sense, all ‘theme’ productions of today’s Pujas, whatever the genre, retain bamboo pandals as their starting structures— and the inner bamboo forms can be seen to ‘have an iterative capacity that maximizes the variety of possible forms.’68 Just as each phase of sculpting and finishing the clay images is laden with ritual and devotional significance, the more mundane labour of assembling material and part by part construction of the physical space of the Puja pandal may also be seen to produce their own structures of feeling and affect, bringing together the producers and viewers. As a unique form of ephemeral, vernacular architecture, Puja pandal making pulls in two important directions. On the one hand, this is the key area of festival work that continually opens the city out into its rural hinterland. Through the supply of large consignments of bamboo, plywood, jute and coir and the main pool of seasonal labour, traditional pandal making remains the most important mode through which rural and suburban Bengal leaves its deep impression on the festival city—with the work in recent years passing largely into the hands of mofussil ‘decorators’. On the other hand, this is also the domain that has seen the greatest shifts in material, medium and design conceptions and brought into the fray new teams of pavilion and set designers—as pandals have moved from being single fabricated structures to elaborate open air tableaux, theme parks and simulated touring complexes. (See 4.44, 4.45) Historically, too,

4.42 Architectural replica pandal of the traditional kind with stretched coloured cloth, Kumortuli, 2008

4.43 Old style pandal architecture with bamboo and thermocol decorations, Behala, 2012

4.44 African art pavilion under construction, Khidirpur 25 Pally Puja, 2004

4.45 Temple structure under construction by pandal makers using fibreglass sculpted panels, Hindusthan Park Puja, 2013

pre-histories of the present it is in this sphere of fabrications that one can trace the first antecedents of the figure of the local Durga Puja ‘designer’, one who would lend his professional skills in interior or film set design to the work of the decorator firm, which had by the mid twentieth century taken over the work of making Puja pandals. Undoubtedly, it is the trade of the pandal makers which has carried the earliest and main charge of the transformation of the Sarbojanin Pujas into an exhibitionary spectacle. As the spending of these Pujas sharply escalated, especially from the 1970s, the prime units of ostentation were the vast pandals, taking on various architectural shapes of temples and palatial mansions, along with their surrounding light-bulb illuminations, with the lion’s share of the Puja budget going into the hands of the decorator firms, then mainly of Kolkata, and the electrical firms of the suburb of Chandannagar (See text box). As the scope of the goddess’ temporary abode came to be dramatically expanded from a functional cloth, plywood and bamboo shelter into ornamental pavilions and giant architectural replicas, these pandal makers, we find, could lay the first claims to ‘theme’

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productions in the field. Among the main contenders clamouring for recognition as the pioneers of ‘theme’ Pujas in Kolkata is the 25 Pally Puja Club of Khidirpur. Its claims to launching a new design trend in pandal structures go back in time by half a century. In the late 1950s, a neighbourhood resident, Golok Karmakar (a goldsmith by hereditary profession and an amateur film-set designer), is said to have created history at this Puja by recreating the Howrah bridge one year and, another year, the ‘Sheesh-Mahal’ (‘Palace of Mirrors’) from the sets of the classic Hindi film, Mughal-e-Azam. These makeshift constructions were created with the simplest of material, with stretched and pleated cotton cloth mounted on a structural scaffolding of batam and bamboo poles— much the same material that another local designer, Ranadhir Dhar, would use several years later in the 1980s to create his wonderful architectural replicas at the Adi Ballygunge Puja. Bolstering Golok Karmarkar’s work was another club member of the Khidirpur 25 Pally Puja, who ran a decorator’s firm and supplied the cloth, wood, bamboo and labour for these installations, free of charge.69 What this seems to have set is a trend of teamwork— a

Not included in this study is this third artisanal skill—that of the light makers concentrated mainly in the district town of Chandannagar in Hooghly—which developed over the twentieth century into a special festival art form. As the Sarbojanin Pujas of Kolkata took on new ostentatious forms in the 1960s, the roadside lighting became the specialty of these Chandannagar light makers, who were able to produce a variety of topical themes as lighted motifs by an elaborate time-consuming process of wiring together tiny coloured electric bulbs on mounted bamboo frames. This cottage industry was pioneered in the middle years of the century by Sridhar Das of Chandannagar, whose firm SD Electrical Company came to employ over 200 light makers. Sridhar Das’ career peaked in 1986 when he was commissioned to create 10 illuminated panels using his technique for the Festival of India in Moscow. [Payal Mohanka, ‘The Light Makers’ in her book, In the Shadows: Unknown Craftsmen of Bengal, New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2007, pp. 26–41] On 1 October 1993, ABP reported that over 10,000 of these poorly paid light makers of Chandannagar were working on Durga Puja lighting in the city for a wage of around Rs. 40 a day. By the mid 2000s, while the period’s new genre of ‘theme’ Pujas largely did away with these populist lighting decorations, these older forms of lights were also rapidly side-lined by a new technology of illuminated fibreglass panels with LED (light-emitting diodes). It was a more expensive option for the light makers but hugely cost saving in electricity consumption. With only a few of the traditional electric firms taking on this new technology, with these made-to-order LED panels of Chandannagar often exported from China, the light industry made famous by Sridhar Das began to fast decline. [‘Theme Burns Lights…’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 29 September 2009].

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in the name of the goddess

4.46 Plaster replica made by Abhay Paria ’s team of the Trevi Fountain of Rome at the Khidirpur 25 Pally Puja, 2003

figure with a local standing as an ‘artist’ working with a decorator’s firm supplying the material and labour—that would become the mainstay of the art of pandal making from the 1950 to the 1990s. And what marked out the more striking innovations from the more standardized repertoire of pandal forms was the architectural design input of figures like Golok Karmakar and Ranadhir Dhar. A break in this pattern of practice appeared from the late 1990s and early 2000s, signalled to a large extent by the replacement of cloth by new construction material like plaster of Paris, thermocol, wood and fibreglass, and the entry into the scene of professional interior and set design personnel with their own small production units, who began to take away the contracts from the decorator firms. When, in 2002, the 25 Pally Club of Khidirpur returned

after several decades to the making of spectacular Puja tableaux, it approached a suburban art school trained set designer, Abhay Paria (with experience in working in Hyderabad’s Ramoji Rao ‘film city’) to create a Mesopotamian ziggurat on its Puja site—following the immense popularity of which it commissioned from the same designer, the next year, a plaster and plywood model of the Fontane de Trevi of Rome.70 (See 4.46) As film and television set designs began to invade the field of Pujas, new kinds of hierarchies also fell into place between different types of professionals and the styles of tableaux they conceived. The difference is evident in the same years in the kind of recreations of old archaeological sites and historical monuments at other Puja sites by another set designer, Sanjit Ghosh, also working for the Hyderabad based ETV productions of the Ramoji Rao group.

pre-histories of the present If the architectural replicas erected by Abhay Paria’s team at Khidirpur never quite fitted the bill of the ‘theme’ Pujas (the Puja committee members retrospectively pushed these to a time ‘just before’ their Puja entered the new style of productions),71 the remake of the ruins of an ancient Chaushatti Yogini shrine from Orissa in the precincts of the Lake Temple Road Shibmandir Puja in 2002 by the Sanjit Ghosh team clearly marked out the changed form. The newness lay in the way in which the avenue leading to the site was lined with gateway structures and pillars modelled on the Orissa temples, (see 4.47) the way the relief sculptures of the Yoginis were made to synchronize with a similar stone sculpture of Durga, and the way the atmosphere of a temple sanctum with a ritual fire was simulated within the ruined temple complex. A composite and tightly integrated tableau is thus set apart from the older form of the stand-alone architectural replica, even as both involved the skills of new film and television set

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professionals. In this changing scenario, the decorator firms and their craft of pandal making are far from phased out. But they have to increasingly contend with the domination of the field by a different breed of set designers, even as the same rural labour pool, with their skills in erecting bamboo and batam scaffoldings, and the same trend of simulating sites and monuments spills from the one work sphere to the other. The few recalling the pasts of pandal making in the city hark back to a time when cloth, batam and bamboo poles prevailed as the primary ingredients of construction. There were decorators who developed from these the fine craft of ornamentation, using pleated cloth and intricate thread-work patterns supported by bamboo armatures on flat or spireroofed structures. The pandals, as a contemporary Puja designer explained, had a tautly stretched and framed two-dimensional look.72 Then, from the

4.47 Sculpted gateway arches leading to the Lake Temple Road Shibmandir Puja, 2002

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1980s, arrived the trend of gigantic architectural replicas, bringing depth, height and threedimensionality to these pavilions, involving new skills of structural elevation alongside those of surface and body decoration. When Ranadhir Dhar launched his particular type of architectural replicas at the Adi Ballygunge Puja in the 1980s, he was still using cloth, batam and bamboo as his main construction materials, his novelties marked in the way he used pure white or specially dyed fabric to create the look of marble, sandstone, gold leaf or terracotta.73 (See 3.26) During the 1980s and 1990s, an ever-expanding range of monumental structures entered the repertoire of pandal makers. Any kind of building—whether it was the Russian Bolshoi Ballet Theatre at Howrah Mandirtala, the new Paris Airport Terminal in the narrow lane of Ray Street off Sarat Bose Road, or the Hooghly Imambara at Khidirpur—could be put on show, using the basic building material of cloth, batam and bamboo scaffolding, accommodating over time the greater use of plywood and plaster.74 While newspaper reports of the time provide such breath-taking lists of the architectural replicas that were erected all over the festival city, there is a disappointing absence of photographs that allow us to reconstruct the look of these curious installations in their congested street settings, and little trade information on the processes of their making. What guided this tantalizing choice of buildings to be used as models for pandals by a particular decorator firm or a specific Puja club is also hard to track, as each tried to outdo its rival in the size and novelty of their productions. That these remakes frequently bore little resemblance to the original structures they sought to simulate becomes the moot point for reflection. The craze for replication could ride slip-shod over the demands of authenticity. The copy existed in its own right, as a simulacrum to be accepted in all its local accretions and glosses. The source of these replicas was a circulating corpus of photographs of buildings from various parts of India and the globe—a corpus that would widely expand in the age of the Internet and keep adding new choices to the catalogues of architectural designs on offer every season to the Puja organizers. From these photographs, the pandal makers, especially the sardar at their helm (who takes

on the standing of a head ‘artist’ and ‘engineer’), could plot out a structural elevation, an enlargement of scale, the internal scaffolding and the outer details of a standing structure. 75 This continues to be the pride of this artisanal trade: the ability of an experienced work-hand in these units to do the work of a structural engineer, to translate a photograph of a building to a scale, elevation and form that could meet the standards of a professional architect. If the building being replicated was from within the country, travel to the site of the original monument in India, sometimes by a Puja club member or the pandal maker, often served as an important authenticating prelude to these productions, as did the preparation of a small model of the building in plywood or thermocol for the approval of the Puja committee. This is still the practice of the old-style pandal making firms, now largely operating out of the mofussil towns, as with Pal Decorators of Shantipur, Mokshada Decorators of Nadia, or Ma Mongola Decorators of Moghalmari near Danton in West Medinipur, who specialize in making large temple replica pandals for the Pujas of College Square, Mohammed Ali Park and Ekdalia Evergreen.76 (See 4.48, 4.49) Even as these firm proprietors refer to ‘artists’ among them who sketch out a scale and elevation plan of the model to be erected, it is hard to define the scopes of artistry and design within this trade, even harder to search out the figure of a new-style ‘designer’ emerging from these ranks. Many of these units have developed a long-term informal working contract with these prominent Kolkata Pujas, who continue with their preference for old-style architectural pavilions. Let us take the case of Amiya Kumar (Bablu) Sahoo, the owner of Ma Mongola Decorators, who has been making the pandal for the Ekdalia Evergreen Puja since the mid 2000s. The seasonal work force he employs keeps changing each year, as with most of these decorator enterprises. In 2011, the entire group was from a single village in the thana of Danton in West Medinipur, where the head mistri said there were over 100 families who were skilled in this work of pandal construction. Combining seasonal farming with round-the-year contracts for wedding pandal-

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4.48 Bablu Sahoo of Ma Mongola Decorators, Medinipur, displaying a model of the temple structure being created at the Ekdalia Evergreen Puja, 2007

4.49 Temple replica pandal under construction at the Ekdalia Evergreen Puja, 2007

making, the demand for their work peaks during the extended Puja season, stretching from Vishwakarma Puja in mid September to Jagaddhatri Puja in early November, when they each earn lump sums of around Rs. 30,000–40,000 for their combined labour team to carry out a specified number of pandal constructions in Kolkata and mofussil towns over these few months. Depending on the scale of these constructions and the time frames for their completion, their team divides into groups of 15–30 workers that work simultaneously at different pandal sites. While the labour team keeps changing, with these workers constantly seeking out proprietors who give them more lucrative contracts each season, the expert figure of the sardar amongst them also keeps moving between different decorator units.77

Puja months. Working largely, he said, from his own designs, Jota has a clear standing in this trade as a shilpi and ‘engineer’, who can with confidence put to scale and form any concept that is required to be made into a pandal.78 In 2011, Jota found himself in the novel enterprise of working for an ‘artist’, that too an international installation artist. That year, his work on pandals ranged from a large ‘Khajurahostyle’ temple that his team was erecting for a Durga Puja at Kharagpur to his most challenging and prestigious venture at the Ekdalia Evergreen Club, where he was in charge of visualizing and erecting the avant-garde concept of a vertically rising street tarmac by the German artist Gregor Schneider.

At the head of Sahoo’s team in 2011 was the sardar Durga Charan Mishra (alias Jota), also from Danton, entitled to the biggest pay in the unit. Working for thirteen years in the pandal-making profession with different Medinipur firms, his affluence in the village, he said, came from the family business of road-construction contracting, which was looked after mainly by his brother. His own passion lay in politics (he had been for some years with the Trinamool Congress) and with designing pandals, work that he takes up with full verve only during the

A crucial aspect of Gregor Schneider’s venture of bringing his ideas of installation art into Kolkata’s biggest public street festival was his wish to have ‘his design completely executed by local artisans using locally available materials so that the collaborative nature of the construction becomes apparent to all visitors.’79 It was towards this end that he came and met the head of this suburban pandal-making team some months before, and that his drawings and designs went back and forth between Germany and Danton, via Max Mueller Bhavan, Kolkata, for various local models to emerge of this curious ‘German Pandal’. (See 4.50, 4.51) In keeping with

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4.50 Gregor Schneider’s model for the Ekdalia Puja, 2011. Courtesy: Goethe Institut, Max Mueller Bhavan, Kolkata

4.51 Gregor Schneider model under construction by Sahoo’s team of pandal makers at the Ekdalia Evergreen Puja, 2011

Schneider’s intentions, it could well be posited that it was the vernacular expertise of a figure like Jota and the skills of the traditional pandal-making labour of Bengal which were the key factors that brought this project to fruition. But the myth of this avowed ‘collaboration’ was rapidly dispelled, with tensions and incomprehension mounting at both ends as the work on site began. And it was hardly surprising that the contributions of Jota and his team (however heavily relied upon by Schneider and the local coordinators of his project) remained side-lined in the final publicity surrounding this novel ‘Germany in India’ venture at the Ekdalia Puja, where the President of the Puja club, Subrata Mukherjee, took centre stage as the prime collaborator.80 Not that this made a huge difference for Jota’s career or aspirations. Relishing while it lasted the new attention that this venture with a German artist brought him, he remained secure in his status and sense of esteem within his own trade. A figure like him seldom gets transformed into the figure of the Puja ‘designer’ in the new festival

setting of the city. Neither the same kind of social mobility, nor the same order of artistic ambitions, that have made ‘artists’ out of the new generations coming out of the idol-making trade, seem to be at work within these groups of pandal makers and their head sardars.

between ‘decorators’ and ‘designers’ Where and on what terms, then, can we begin to search out the new inputs of art and design within the occupations related to pandal making? During the 1980s and 1990s, we could look on a person like Ranadhir Dhar as one who began to gradually lay out the new claims of design in the field. Not belonging to the pandal-making trade but directly feeding into it, his working styles and choices can be seen to indirectly propel us towards the age of the ‘theme’ Pujas. In the history of changing Puja productions, the decline of the skills of pleated cloth decoration, and the unavailability of the kind of cotton cloth that

pre-histories of the present supported this work, is seen to most clearly signpost the end of the old-style pandals. Ranadhir Dhar looks back to the mid 1990s as the time when he switched from cloth to plaster of Paris and wood, one of his biggest experiments in the new medium being a 60foot chariot he made on the model of the Jagannath Rath of Mahesh, to which he added 15–16 feet tall horses in plaster. With the break-up of Modern Decorators due to internal family feuds, he was, by this time, working with material and labour supplied by a small decorator unit in Dhakuria. This is also when he began breaking away from the designing of architectural replicas to conceiving of the Puja site as a ‘totality’ and an integrated tableau.81 Around 1993– 94, he recalls producing his first village complex with straw, hay, bamboo and matting, using rural objects like chala, kulo, lakshmir jhanpi, giving his production the name, Banglar Mukh Ami Dekhiyachhi (‘I have seen the face of Bengal’), an oft-quoted line from the poem by Jibanananda Das. By the end of the decade, he had developed this village form to include thatched mud huts and different rural crafts like lacquer dolls, even bringing in Santhal performers to a village he created at the Adi Ballygunge Puja in 2002. With such productions we arrive, chronologically and conceptually, at the age of the ‘theme’ Pujas: an age whose defining aesthetic would be shaped by this growing urban taste for rural and ethnic arts. It would also be a time when the likes of Ranadhir Dhar would recede from the forefront of the new wave of ‘theme’ Pujas, even as he continued all through to work on his neighbourhood Puja and to do the art work and design for other pandal-making firms in distant parts of the city. In 2007, enquiring into the making of a sensational replica of the Hogwarts castle from the Harry Potter stories at the FD Block Puja of Salt Lake (see 4.52), one encountered again the name of Ranadhir Dhar as the senior ‘consultant artist’ working with the decorator, Sukesh Mondal of EC Block, Salt Lake, who had taken on the commission for this production. There appeared alongside the figure of another ‘artist’, Arabinda Ghosh, operating in close tandem with Mondal Decorators, who was sculpting in fibreglass all the figures of the Harry Potter characters that were to be set up inside the fabricated plywood and plaster castle.82 That season, this same team was also at work on another well-

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publicized Salt Lake Puja production—a replica of the ramparts of the Red Fort of New Delhi, flanked by fibreglass figures of two famed rebel leaders of India’s 1857 uprising, Mangal Pandey and Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi. Neither artistry nor historical authenticity were given a premium in tableaux such as these, which hovered at the borderlines of the period’s growing genre of ‘theme’ Pujas, opening out its edges to popular kitsch and fairground spectacle. Thus, for instance, this production unit could latch on to the theme of the nation-wide celebrations that year of the 150th anniversary of India’s ‘First War of Independence’, and place crude statuary of these two rebel leaders before a Red Fort with which they had no historical connections; and it could juxtapose with equal nonchalance the awkward figures of Harry, Voldemort and Sirius Black inside Hogwarts castle, alongside a standard Durga image that had nothing to do with the rest of the tableau. Matters of synchrony and thematic coordination, that had become the hallmark of the new wave, remained of little import in this genre of pandal productions. In rounding off this chapter, let me dwell a bit more on the case of Mondal Decorators of Salt Lake and their ‘artist’, Arabinda Ghosh. For they best exemplify the survival into the present of many of the older practices of pandal making and Puja designing as an under-layer of the spreading wave of ‘theme’ Pujas. Their examples show how older and newer units of

4.52 Harry Potter castle tableau under construction, FD Block Puja, Salt Lake, 2007

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in the name of the goddess improve his design conceptions and Arabinda Ghosh to sculpt the characters from the Harry Potter films, he laid equal stress on the skills of his head sardar to create an image to architectural scale and elevation as competently as any structural engineer. His unit of construction labourers from Diamond Harbour was entrusted to give shape to these gigantic structures with bamboo, batam, plywood planks and plaster of Paris. The inherited infrastructure of the pandal making trade continued to serve him well, even as he took on novel varieties of monumental structures to replicate.

4.53 Pandal maker, Sukesh Mondal, with internet images of the Harry Potter castle, and a Puja committee member, FD Block Puja, Salt Lake, 2007

production can cohere to make the present never entirely discontinuous with its pasts. Since the late 1990s, the main pride of this local decorator firm of Salt Lake has been its ability to graft international motifs and the most topical themes onto its pandal design repertoire. The gigantic ‘disaster’ tableaux it produced of the upturned and wrecked Titanic in 1998, and of the crashed Columbia Space Shuttle in 2003 (one conceived from a film still, the other from a newspaper photograph) became the buzz of the festival city, overshadowing its work of other Puja seasons, when it recreated, for instance, a replica of the Mahachampa temple complex of Vietnam. The choice of the Harry Potter castle theme in 2007 came as a natural extension of the style of work it is best known for, with idea and the images supplied, as in other years, by the Puja committee members. Lacking the cultural capital of the residents of this affluent township, Sukesh Mondal has always relied on the thematic input of his elite patrons. His achievement lies in his self-initiation into the cultures of a globalized Englishspeaking Indian middle class (he talks of how he saw the Titanic and Harry Potter films only to be able to visualize the replicas he was being commissioned to make), and in getting his artisanal work team to convert images gleaned from the Internet into spectacular three-dimensional structures. (See 4.53) If he depended on artist friends like Ranadir Dhar to

How accurate were these reconstructions of the capsized Titanic or the turreted Hogwarts castle compared to their filmic representations? And what relevance did such remakes have to the image of the Durga pantheon that they housed inside them? These are not questions that have overtly troubled Sukesh Mondal, just as they have seldom weighed on other pandal makers of the past, who nonchalantly fabricated for Puja clubs any national or world monument that caught their imagination. Their task was to erect a spectacular architectural structure and draw in the viewing crowds, with few here to measure the exactitude of the copy vis-à-vis the originals. Unlike the parallel breed of ‘theme’ Puja designers, there is no tag of a signature style that restricts the work of Sukesh Mondal. Working on pandal commissions for Durga Pujas across India and a variety of pavilion constructions in Mumbai and Chennai (where the scale of work and the money on offer is far greater than any Puja in Calcutta), Sukesh Mondal’s team fabricates, on order, thatched hut village tableaux as well as temple and palace replicas to suit different clients’ tastes. In 2004, they also took on the construction of a Republic Day Parade float for the Border Security Force in New Delhi that won them a prize that year. Success and survival in this trade requires such eclecticism in styles and types of production. As with most decorator firms of Kolkata and district towns, Sukesh Mondal’s main earnings, he said, come from the work he undertakes in other Indian cities and from his round-the-year work on fancy wedding pavilions, where he also puts out on demand ornate palace architecture, temple replicas or folk art décor. The Pujas of Kolkata never have the same budgets

pre-histories of the present and never bring in the same earnings; but it is his festival productions here, he admits, which have given him his main reputation and publicity. Thus, in 2007, the FD block Puja of Salt Lake still had the first claim on him for doing their Harry Potter theme, making him give up a more lucrative pandal commission that came later the same year from a Puja in Surat. Our extended interview with Sukesh Mondal gave a good indication of the contemporary face of the pandal-making trade and the ways it still holds its own in the festival sphere, outside the ambit of today’s ‘art’ Puja phenomenon. The ability to do all types of work in the field is what unites the ‘artist’ in this milieu with the pandal decorator who draws on the former’s design and sculpting skills. A curious mix of an idol maker, sculptor, interior designer and aspiring ‘theme’ Puja artist, Arabinda Ghosh is not atypical of the many that pursue such livelihoods in art in Bengal and began to pervade the scene of the city’s Durga Pujas. He referred to himself as a ‘fibreglass specialist’, whose lightweight unbreakable Durga pratimas have been sent over the years to several Pujas abroad. There is a thin line that divides his idol making from his sculptural art for Puja pandals. Thus we saw his figures of the Harry Potter cast, as well as of Mangal Pandey and the equestrian Rani of Jhansi, taking shape in plaster and fibre, side by side with the clay

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images of Durgas in an image modelling workshop run by his friend Pikendu Pal at Baishnabghata Patuli. (See 4.54) The line that marks him out as an ‘artist’ vis-à-vis the pandal decorator is also a nebulous one. Like Sukesh Mondal, he too makes his main earnings from Marwari ‘theme’ weddings and commissions for fibreglass sculptures in hotels in Delhi and Mumbai, some of which have as big an outlay as 6 crores.83 It should not surprise us that Arabinda Ghosh too staked his claims to have begun the trend of ‘theme’ Pujas. He pushed back this beginning to the late 1980s when he began sculpting idols and designing the pandal for his neighbourhood Puja of the Nabapally Sangha at Tollygunge, after which he proceeded to work on the tableau of bigger Pujas, like those of Mudiali and Shibmandir, alongside some of the experimental ‘theme’ Pujas of Behala. He talked of working as a sculptor both with pandal decorator firms, like Mondal Decorators for its Salt Lake productions of 2007, and with set design teams like those of Sanjit Ghosh of ETV Productions, doing the main art work for the remake of the ruined Chausatti Yogini temple site at the Lake Temple Road Shibmandir Puja in 2002. The range of work undertaken by someone like him shows the way the older practices of idol making and pandal designing enter and interpolate the new forms of ‘theme’ productions. Whether or not we take seriously his

4.54 Harry Potter mingling with other clay idols of deities and Rani of Jhansi’s figure outside the Patuli workshop, 2007

4.55 Large temple complex designed by Rono Banerjee, FD Block Puja, Salt Lake, 2010

4.56 Puja tableau with goddess figures made of bamboo poles, trays and baskets, designed by Prabir Haldar, HA Block Puja, Salt Lake, 2010

pre-histories of the present claims of being the key ‘artist’ in so many different types of production units, what strikes us is his capacity to work at these many levels across varied stylistic genres. At the same time, this very looseness and indiscriminate spread of his work is what increasingly compromised his standing as an ‘artist’, as the new wave brought with it a premium on tighter specializations and individual authorial styles. The pandal-making trade today can be seen as constantly diversifying and moving with the times. The work repertoires keep expanding from spectacular architectural and archaeological complexes to elaborate craft displays, and sometimes (as at the Ekdalia Puja of 2011), even international installation art. In 2010, at the FD Block Puja of Salt Lake, the work team of Mondal Decorators was still setting up the main supporting structure for the vast towering complex of five temples that was being erected there that year by the art collegetrained set designer, Rono Banerjee. (See 4.55) We found its kinship network also expanding into another decorator firm operating out of Salt Lake and Ultadanga that was handling several Puja tableaux in surrounding blocks of the township. Related to Sukesh Mondal by marriage, Bhaskar Haldar, proprietor of Lakshmi Decorators, had at the head of his unit a sardar-cum-artist, Prabir Haldar, who did the main construction work in 2009 for a recreated Mayan archaeological site at the HA Block Puja of Salt Lake, which was designed by a suburban artists’ group. The following year, at the same site, this decorator unit emerged from behind the scenes to take charge of designing a

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full cane and bamboo pavilion with an ensemble of gods and goddesses made out of painted cane baskets, hats, trays and bamboo sticks, where Prabir Haldar was in charge of mobilizing materials and overseeing the work of a group of young men who said they specialized in this kind of decorative art and craft work for several pandals.84 (See 4.56) In innumerable such cases, now, the work force of a pandal decorator and its final production becomes indistinguishable from that of a ‘theme maker’, carrying the same pride in the artistry of design and workmanship. As we move in the next chapter into the intricacies of the special ‘art’ and ‘theme’ profiles of the contemporary festival, there will often be no clear answer to what differentiates this dispensation from many of these earlier and continuing trends that this chapter has mapped. If, as I have argued, the entry of a different order of creative personnel, carrying the professional identity of artists and designers, heralds a break, the contours of this group cannot always be neatly sifted out of the existing trades of pratima and pandal makers. There will be questions as to who within this group can most effectively sustain the role of artists or ‘theme makers’ vis-à-vis several others who are coming into or are already in the fray. What differentiates the pedigree of certain types of tableaux from others; and what emerge as the many in-between styles that stretch out the contours of the ‘theme’ Pujas to their furthest limits? To delve into some of these issues, we will now turn to a detailed dissection of the phenomenon of the city’s ‘theme’ Pujas.

Notes 1 This perception is particularly strong among the older generations of mritshilpis of Kumortuli, as will emerge in our discussions with some among this group later in the chapter. It is also the main theme of an article on the changing economy of the Durga Pujas and the decline of several older artisanal crafts of lighting, ornamentation and pandal decoration associated with the festival. Heerak Nandy, ‘Barowari Brittanta’, Special Essay-2, Desh, 15 October 2003, pp. 145–52.

2 Jayanta Das, ‘Kumortulir Charsho Bochhorer Biborton’, Desh, Sharadiya, 19 September 1998, pp. 64–70. The author traces the settlement in this region of the first migrant potters from Adi Saptagram in Hooghly to a time before the arrival at Sutanuti in 1690 of the East India Company’s trader, Job Charnock, and recounts a ‘four hundred year’ history for Kumortuli, which remains however to be fully verified.

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3 The synonymy of this single location with the practices of clay idol making has assured Kumortuli its place in all studies of the city and its Durga Pujas. Kumortuli has also attracted a set of in-depth ethnographies, focusing on its changing demography and workshop practices, on the biographies of idol makers, on the economics of the trade as well as the diversifying styles and scope of productions. In tandem with my own interviews with the mritshilpis of Kumortuli, my information on the past and present history of the place has drawn on three unpublished dissertations: (i) Beth Goldblatt, The Image Makers of Kumortuli: The Transformation of a Caste-based Industry in a Slum Quarter of Calcutta, Ph.D. thesis submitted at the Faculty of Economic and Social Studies, University of Manchester, UK., April 1979 (ii) Geir Heierstad, Images of Kumartuli Kumars – The Image Makers of Kolkata: Changing Notions of Caste and Modernity during the last century, Ph.D. dissertation submitted at the Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, June 2008 (iii) Moumita Sen, Enframing Kumortuli; A Study in Space, Practice and Images, M.Phil. dissertation submitted at Jadavpur University and the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, June 2011. I am grateful to Geir Heierstad for giving me access to Goldblatt’s thesis, and to Moumita Sen, for sharing Heierstad’s thesis with me. An earlier foundational sociology of the art of clay modelling, tracing Kumortuli’s ancestry to the older settlement at Krishnanagar, is Sudhir Chakrabarty, Krishnanagarer Mrtishilpa o Mrtishilpi Samaj, Kolkata: K.P.Bagchi and CSSSC, 1985, a work extensively cited in both Geir Heierstad’s and Moumita Sen’s theses. 4 Jayanta Das, ‘Kumortulir Charsho Bochhorer Biborton’, pp. 66–7, quoting from his interview with one of the oldest idol-makers of Kumortuli, Niranjan Pal, describes the different regional styles of chalchitras and soras that were earlier produced here, some of which lingered into the 1980s. 5 Susan Bean, ‘The Unfired Clay Sculpture of Bengal in the Artscape of Modern South Asia’, in Rebecca Brown and Deborah Hutton, ed., Companion to Asian Art and Architecture, London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010 and ‘Vessel for the Goddess: Unfired Clay Images of Bengal’ in Pratapaditya Pal ed. Goddess Durga: The Power and the Glory. Providing an important history of sculpting in this medium in Krishnanagar and Kumortuli, Susan Bean talks of idol makers’ perception that unfired clay contains life, and of the ritual injunction on the worship of burnt clay figures. To fire an image of the goddess is traditionally seen to be so sacrilegious that the goddess’ wrath could turn the maker to ashes. This injunction stands overturned in multiple recent instances of the use of terracotta, along with other durable material like fibreglass or wood, by artists in designing new styles of ‘art’ Durgas.

6 One explanation of the ritual is that the presumed purity of this threshold soil comes from the belief that a man leaves his good deeds behind when he enters the home of the prostitute —thus ‘sacredness is sourced from the sinner and goes towards the creation of a god who is the ultimate arbitrator of virtue and sin.’ Quoted from Coomertolly: Clayfield of God, Kolkata: Sparsha, 2008, unnumbered pages. However, few among the practicing mrtishilpis today are willing to discuss this ritual and admit to even its notional performance. 7 There have been attempts to ban this degrading practice by an NGO called Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Samiti, which has been fighting against the ostracism of the sex workers of Sonagachhi and their children; ‘Sinful City’, The Bengal Post, Kolkata, 12 October 2010. A more radical social step was taken around this time when the Sonagachhi sex workers broke the social bar and organized their own Durga Puja at the site of this NGO clinic at 143/C Masjidbari Street. This Puja was given a new scale and publicity in 2013, with the sex workers openly performing sindur khela on Dashami as do all married women of a locality. Parijat Bandyopadhyay, ‘Aaj obdhi konodin sindur kheli ni, ebar khelbo’, ABP, 9 October 2013. 8 The information is based on observation in the workshops of Kumortuli during the festival seasons of 2003, 2007, 2008 and 2010. Details of the process of image making are to be found in Coomertolly: Clayfield of God, Anita Agnihotri, Kolkatar Protimashilpira (especially pp. 13– 44), and Moumita Sen, Enframing Kumortuli, Chapter 2, ‘So Sung a Little Clod of Clay: The Story of Practice, Process and Magic’. Jayanta Das,’Kumortulir Charsho Bochhorer Biborton’, pp. 65, 67, provides a particularly useful listing of the different materials, ingredients and tools used in the making of pratimas, alongside a glossary of all the colloquial terms of practice that circulate among the mritshilpis. 9 This early history forms the backdrop of Beth Goldblatt’s thesis, The Image Makers of Kumortuli, Chapter 2: ‘The Demand for Images in Calcutta’, pp. 90–119. 10 The annual cycle runs from autumn to spring, from Ganesh, Vishwakarma, Durga, Lakshmi, Kali, Jagaddhatri, Kartick and Saraswati (which in that order mark the concentrated Puja season from late August into early February) and ends with Annapurna and Shitala at the close of the Bengali year in March and April. 11 For a brief account of the old pilgrim’s route from Chitteshwari to the Kalighat temple, see the essays by Kalyani Datta, on ‘Kalighat’ and Bunny Gupta and Jaya Chaliha on ‘Chitpur’ in Sukanta Chaudhuri ed. Calcutta: The Living City, vol. I, pp. 24–30. 12 Sudeshna Banerjee, ‘Kumortuli Closer Home’, The Telegraph, Friday Salt Lake supplement, 15 September, 2006, surveys, for instance, the thick seasonal proliferation

pre-histories of the present

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of these workshops on the peripheries of Salt Lake, at places like Canal East Road, Beleghata, Mahishbathan and Rajarhat. The title of the piece shows how Kumortuli remains nonetheless the metaphor for all idol-making sites. A resonant lineage of this genre of city photography can be found in coffee-table volumes, from Raghubir Singh’s Calcutta, Hong Kong: Perennial Press, 1975 to Leena Kejriwal’s Calcutta: Repossessing the City, New Delhi: Om Books, 2007. Nowadays, in the build up to the Durga Pujas, the workshop lanes mill with photographers, foreign and local, professional and amateur. The registered union office at Kumortuli has cashed in on the place’s unceasing attraction for photographers during this season, and has begun to charge all photographers a camera fee . Beth Goldblatt, The Image Makers of Kumortuli, p. 38. Heerak Nandy, ‘Barowari Brittanta’, p. 152. Interviews with Nimai Chandra Pal, President, and Mintu Pal, Joint Secretary of the Kumortuli Mritshilpi Sanskriti Samiti, September 9, 2007. The story of the migration of mritshilpis to Kumortuli from East Pakistan and Bangladesh, and the division between the Ghoti (West Bengal) and Bangal (East Bengal) unions is discussed at length in Geir Heierstad, Images of Kumartuli Kumars, Chapter 6, ‘Ancestral Homes, East versus West’, pp. 139– 162. Jayanta Das (in ‘Kumortulir Charsho Bochhorer Biborton’) referred in 1998 to a third union called the Kumortuli Mritshilpi Karigar Samiti, which had only 50 permanent residents in its fold and covered as many 873 temporary seasonal workers who came from the districts of Nadia, Bardhaman, Medinipur and Hooghly. There was no reference to any third union at Kumortuli during the time of my interviews. For a sample of such reports on Kumortuli in the 1980s, see the following cluster of articles: ‘Kumortulitey Bahutal Bari, Uccheder Duschintay Shilpira’, ‘Kumortuli: Respect achhey, Prospect nei’, Sudhir Chakrabarty, ‘Kumortulir ei Shilpira’, ABP, 25, 26 and 29 September 1987. Interview with Mintu Pal, Joint Secretary of the Kumortuli Mritshilpi Unnayan Samiti, 9 September 2007. Ibid. Interviews with Sunil Pal and Naba Kumar Pal at Kumortuli, 21 August 2010. Early in his career, the septuagenarian Sunil Pal moved away from idol making to specialize entirely in commissioned realist statuary and European-style interior décor, with his workshop announcing its specialization in plaster of Paris, fibreglass, stone and bronze. Naba Kumar Pal (whose career will be discussed later) is a younger generation product of Kumortuli, with art college training, combining his family trade in idol making with his work on new kind of ‘art’ Durgas and a career in pavilion and set design.

22 Arindam Sarkar, ‘UK funds to rehabilitate Kumortuli artists’, Hindustan Times, Kolkata, 25 July 2006; Poulomi Banerjee, ‘Makers of Gods brave the odds: Kumortuli artisans’ struggle against red tape’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 31 August 2006.

21 Jayanta Das, ‘Kumortulir Charsho Bochhorer Biborton’, p. 70.

31 Anita Agnihotri, Kolkatar Pratimashilpira, pp. 77–80. Jayanta Das in ‘Kumortulir Charsho Bochhorer Biborton’,

13

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15 16 17

18

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23 Jayanta Basu, ‘Kumortuli Revamp hits wall’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 11 July 2008. 24 Poulomi Banerjee, ‘Idol capital shifts base’, ‘Idol hubs debate the great divide’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 27 April and 3 August 2010. 25 Moumita Sen, Enframing Kumortuli, pp. 39–41, in her interviews with these women, talks of how they used this protest to make themselves visible and try and inscribe their place within the community. 26 Information based on fieldwork and interviews at both the older and the relocated workshop sites at Kumortuli, during August–September 2010. See also, Moumita Sen, Enframing Kumortuli, ‘The Blueprint bursting with Anxiety’, pp. 35–42. 27 Babu Pal, a CPI-M affiliate and the main protagonist of the JNNURM Kumortuli development plan, was replaced in July 2012 by a Trinamool person, Ranjit Sarkar, as the secretary of the Kumortuli Mritshilpi Sanskriti Samiti. He too said that the only way forward was to continue with the relocation of the mritshilpis and rebuilding of the older site, and despaired that the process had been stalled. 28 This view has been recently asserted by Kumkum Chatterjee in ‘Goddess Encounters: Mughals, Monsters and the Goddess in Bengal’, pp. 31–3, where she argues that among the main new feature that characterized the ‘first’ late sixteenth, early seventeenth century public Durga Pujas, hosted by these landed potentates of Bengal, was the worship of large clay images of the goddess group sculpted by the mritshilpis of Krishnanagar and Kumortuli. 29 McDermott, Revelry, Rivalry and Longing for the Goddesses of Bengal, pp. 105–06, places greater stress on the widespread prevalence of this form of ‘ghatey-patey’ Puja across rural Bengal, and locates the transition to the worship of clay images mainly in the eighteenth century, first at the court of Krishnanagar, and then among the many Banedi Bari pujas of early colonial Calcutta. 30 Apart from Anita Agnihotri, Kolkatar Pratimashilpira, I have also used two other important accounts on this theme: (i) Sandip Bandyopadhyay, ‘Kolkatar Durga Pujo’, pp. 26–36, and Durga Pujo: Borobari Thekey Barowari, pp. 18–29; and (ii) Rachel Fell McDermott, Revelry, Rivalry and Longing for the Goddesses of Bengal, Chapter 4, ‘The Artistry of Durga and Jagaddhatri’, pp. 103–29.

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in the name of the goddess pp. 67, 70, provides a list of the traditional pigments and ingredients that went into the colouring of the images, and illustrates the rich repertoire of designs used for the goddess’ crown, weapons and ornaments.

32 Two foundational works on realism in the popular print iconographies of gods and goddesses are Christopher Pinney, Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle and Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Sacred Economies of Indian Calendar Art. 33 Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art, pp. 70–1. 34 Anita Agnihotri, Kolkatar Pratimashilpira, pp. 80–6. 35 Ibid., pp. 81–2, 89–90. 36 Ibid., pp. 82–5. 37 Jayanta Das, ‘Bangal Durga-yi Jitlen’, ABP, 4 October 2000, cited in Rachel McDermott, Revelry, Rivalry and Longing for the Goddesses of Bengal, p.114. 38 My information on Gopeshwar Pal is based largely on an interview with his son, (now deceased) Siddheshwar Pal, at his home on the road adjacent to Kumortuli that is named after his father, on November 4, 2006. I am grateful to Mrinmoyee Pal for taking me along to meet Siddheshwar Pal, who was then ailing and bedridden, but still spoke to me along with his sister for over an hour about his father’s career and accomplishments. I have also drawn on the following other sources: (i) ‘Ekada Sarajagano Gopeshwar Pal-ke amra kotota mone rakhte perechhi’, article in the broadsheet Sutanuti Katha, 1st year, No. 11, Kartick 1411 (October–November 2006), (ii) Jayanta Das, ‘Kumortulir Charsho Bochhorer Biborton’, pp. 65–6, and (iii) Geir Heierstad, Images of Kumortuli Kumars. Chapter 5, ‘Gopeshwar Pal— Innovation and Modernity’, pp. 107–38. There are some discrepancies in the birth and death years ascribed to him in these sources. I have used the years mentioned by his son and used in Geir Heierstad’s thesis. 39 Quoted from The Daily Telegraph of 1924 in Sudhir Chakrabarty, Krishnanagarer Mrtishilpa o Mrtishilpi Samaj, p. 56. 40 Siddheshwar Pal mentioned that Gopeshwar Pal did not enrol for formal training in any academy, but spent seven to eight months touring several marble sculpture workshops in Italy, observing and soaking in the styles and techniques of marble sculpting (and perhaps bronze casting too). 41 Gopeshwar Pal shares with Ravi Varma a similar background of court patronage in his early years, when he worked directly at the Krishnanagar royal household, and had the opportunity there to acquire some training in academic art from an unknown foreign artist. The difference in his case comes with travels and training abroad, which enabled him to deploy his skills in realism

in radically turning around the image of the worshipped clay idol. 42 This point is drawn out particularly by Geir Heierstad in the interviews he conducted with senior mritshilpis about their predecessor (Images of Kumortuli Kumars , pp. 115–120). 43 Two examples, where interviews were conducted on 21 August 2010 with the statue makers working under the main masters, are the studios of Ashim Paul, ‘Sculptor’, his name featured under Ganesh Chandra Paul & Sons, at 488 Rabindra Sarani, and the ‘sculpture studio’ called Atindra Art, run by Mintu Pal at 511 Rabindra Sarani, Kumortuli. 44 Described in the interview with Nimai Chandra Pal, Kumortuli, 9 September 2007. 45 A point elaborated in my article, ‘Locating Gandhi in Indian Art History: Nandalal and Ramkinkar’, in Anjan Ghosh, Janaki Nair and Tapati Guha-Thakurta, ed., Theorising the Present: Essays for Partha Chatterjee. 46 Anita Agnihotri, Kolkatar Pratimashilpira, pp. 87–95. 47 The large body of writing on Raja Ravi Varma’s career as artist and initiator of a new trend of mass pictureproduction all refer to these incidents. See, for example, E.M.J. Veniyoor, Raja Ravi Varma (Trivandrum: Government of Kerala, 1981, pp. 28–9. 48 Anita Agnihotri, Kolkatar Pratimashilpira, p. 88. 49 Interview with Ramesh Chandra Pal, in The Telegraph in Schools (TTIS), Issue on ‘Kumortuli: Of Earth and Heaven’, 15–21 October 2007. 50 Ibid. Also, interview with Ramesh Pal in the feature, ‘Amar Pujo’, ABP, 27 September 1987. 51 Quoted in his conversation with Anita Agnihotri, Kolkatar Pratimashilpira, p. 93. 52 Interview with Nemai Chandra Pal of Krishnanagar, at the home of Ruby Palchaudhuri, head of the Crafts Council of West Bengal, Lake Place, Calcutta, 7 August, 2006. 53 Anita Agnihotri, Kolkatar Pratimashilpira, pp. 111–14. 54 Tapas Chakrabarty, ‘Goddess of the Avant Garde’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 15 September 1990. 55 Cited in Jayanta Das, ‘Kumortulir Charsho Bochhorer Biborton’, p. 68. 56 Anita Agnihotri, Kolkatar Pratimashilpira, pp. 96–100. Interview with Mohanbanshi Rudra Pal, Kumortuli, 31 August 2003. 57 Interviews with Sanatan Rudra Pal at his workshop at Telengabagan, Ultadanga, 20 September 2003 and September 14, 2004. 58 Interview with Puja committee members of Ekdalia Evergreen Club, Gariahat, 12 September 2007.

pre-histories of the present 59 Interview with Pradip Rudra Pal at his workshop at Telengabagan, Ultadanga, 20 September 2003. 60 This sense strongly came through, for instance, in my interviews with senior practitioners like Mohanbanshi Rudra Pal and Nimai Chandra Pal of Kumortuli on 31 August 2003 and 9 September 2007, and with Nemai Chandra Pal of Krishnanagar on 7 August 2006. 61 Poulomi Banerjee, ‘Idol makers in fibreglass fix’, ‘Fewer orders from abroad hit idol hub’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 20 August 2008 and 2 July 2009. ‘Few buyers for idols abroad’, The Bengal Post, Postscript, Kolkata, 5 October 2010. 62 Interview with Naba Kumar Pal at their family workshop of Jiten Pal & Sons, Kumortuli, 21 August 2010. 63 Interview with Debraj Rudra Pal, Kumortuli, 25 August 2006. 64 Interview with Sunil Chandra Pal, Khidirpur 74 Pally Puja, 29 September 2007. 65 The term ‘nagarik lok shilpa’ was specifically used by the Puja designer, Tamal Krishna Goswami, in recounting the history of the art of pandal making and designing, during an interview with him at the Selimpur Puja on 3 September 2007. More generally too, the idea of the ‘urban folk’ is now seen to find its best resonance, expression and promotion in the production economies of Kolkata’s contemporary Durga Puja. See, on this theme, Jawhar Sircar, ‘A festival and more’, The Telegraph, Editorial page, Calcutta, 17 October 2010. 66 The colloquial term is still nowhere to be found in the standard Bengali dictionary, like the Samsad BengaliEnglish dictionary, revised and enlarged second edition, Kolkata: Sahitya Samsad, 1989 which even makes room for English usages in Bengali like ‘paddle’ and ‘packet’. 67 Swati Chattopadhyay, ‘Fungible Unlearning the City, p. 235.

Geographies’

in

68 Ibid., p. 331. 69 Interview with Kali Saha and Asim Datta, members of the Khidirpur 25 Pally Puja committee, Khidirpur, 19 September 2004. 70 Ibid. 71 Interview with Shakuntala Bhattacharya of the 25 Pally Puja Committee of Khidirpur Committee, 21 September 2006. 72 Interview with Tamal Krishna Goswami, Selimpur Puja, 3 September 2007. Heerak Nandy, ‘Barowari Brittanta’, p. 150, talks of the now nearly disappeared art of pandal decoration with pleated cloth. 73 Interview with Ranadhir Dhar at the Adi Ballygunge Puja site, 5 September 2007. 74 Reports on such structures appear in newspaper reports like those by Debashis Bandopadhyay, ‘Pujoy notun ki

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kora jaye tar beporoya proyas’, ABP, 20 October 1985, and in articles in ABP, 10 October 1991, and in The Telegraph, Calcutta, 24 September and 1 October 1990. 75 So, for instance, a newspaper report (The Telegraph, Calcutta, 24 September 1990) mentions a pandal decorator, Subol Chandra Sardar, taking on the construction of a replica of the Hawa Mahal of Jaipur on the basis of a photograph. It is unusual for pandal decorators to be identified by names, and the surname Sardar in this case places the person as the headman of the construction unit. 76 Interview with pandal makers Anjan Pal of Pal Decorators of Shantipur, Nadia, at the College Square Puja, September 13, 2006, and Amiya Kumar Sahoo of Ma Mongola Decorators of Danton, East Medinipur, at the Ekdalia Evergreen Puja site, 25 September 2007. 77 Interview with Kalipada Raut and Dulal Roy who were part of the Danton pandal-making workforce that year at the Ekdalia Evergreen Club’s collaborative Puja venture with the German installation artist, Gregor Schneider, at Ekdalia, Gariahat, 5 September 2011. 78 Interview with Durga Charan Misra (Jota), at the Ekdalia Evergreen Puja, 20 September 2011. 79 ‘Infinite Opportunities—Germany in India, 2011-2012’, press-kit brochure circulated by Max Mueller Bhavan, Kolkata on this ‘collaboration’ venture of 2011 between the German installation artist Gregor Schneider and the pandal makers of Medinipur at the Ekdalia Evergreen Puja. Schneider’s project was called ‘It’s all Rheydt, Kolkata, 2011’, for what he sought to transplant to a Kolkata pandal was a street from his German hometown, Rheydt. 80 No one from this local pandal-making team, not even the sardar, Jota, was anywhere to be seen (nor was their contribution ever mentioned) at the mega launch of the Ekdalia Evergreen Puja on 2 October 2011, where the Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee, inaugurated the Puja and where the podium, filled with German delegates accompanying the artist, Gregor Schneider, was presided over by Subrata Mukherjee. There was an interesting shift also in the stance of Patrick Ghose, who was the main person deputed by Max Mueller Bhavan, Kolkata, to coordinate Schneider’s project with the local workers. In an interview at the Puja site on 5 September 2011, Patrick Ghose talked of how he had taken Schneider to meet the pandal makers at Danton in East Medinipur in May that year, when he had first come down to discuss the project, and of how skilfully the sardar, Jota, had been able to provide a model on the basis of Schneider’s drawings and plans, which he then kept revising, until it got the approval of the German artist. But, at the end of the project, he was cursing Jota for being dishonest with them about what he could or could not do, and for ultimately letting down the ‘collaborative’ venture.

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81 Interview with Ranadhir Dhar at the Adi Ballygunge Puja Club, 5 September 2007. 82 Interview with Sukesh Mondal of Mondal Decorators and the ‘artist’ working with him, Arabinda Ghosh, at the site of FD Block Puja, Salt Lake, 13 September 2007. 83 Continuing interview, only with Arabinda Ghosh, at the site of FD Block Puja, Salt Lake, 13 September 2007. In subsequent years, Aurobindo Ghosh was to be found

providing his concept, design and ‘art direction’ to other Pujas and other decorator firms too. In 2010 he was the chief artist for a model of an Indo-Saracenic white and pink marble palace that was constructed at the Mudiali Puja jointly by Poddar and Kundu Decorators of Kolkata and Classic Decorators of Medinipur town. 84 Interview with Prabir Haldar and his work team at the Puja site of HA Block Residents’ Forum, Salt Lake, 9 October 2010.

FIve

The Age of the ‘Theme’ Puja The notion of an ‘age’ has about it an epochal quality and the implications of a landmark historical period. I will be using the term, though, to suggest a microscopic time span, and a set of trends and dispensations that can lay little claim to be historically momentous. In plucking the term out of the canon of history writing and inserting it into a contemporary festival setting, I wish to think of a specific chronology of the present, identifying a wave of styles, tastes and aspirations that holds together this present and sets its apart from the longer pasts of the city’s Durga Pujas that the earlier chapters have explored. This chapter enters the heart of the burgeoning trend of ‘theme’ Pujas of the past decade to think of how it carries the transformed civic-corporate-artistic profile of the contemporary festival? It will look particularly at the way the new wave of Puja productions emerges out of the complimentary vocations of ‘art’, ‘craft’ and ‘design’. In this festival field, notions of ‘art’ become inseparable from the skills of craftsmanship, and the practical work of making and fabricating. There is a long background history that can be invoked here, of the changing structures of colonial and nationalist art education in Bengal and in other parts of India, where over the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the promotion of the ‘industrial’ and ‘applied arts’ was continually set apart from training in the ‘fine

arts’. Caught in these structures, handicrafts and ornamental design remained relegated to a different social sphere of artisanal practice as against the emergence of a distinctly middle class profession of ‘art’.1 Studies of art and nationalism in early and mid twentieth century Bengal—especially of the alternative ambience of art education at Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan—have looked at the new compulsions of modern art to reintegrate itself with its ‘rural’ other, and enter into a new dialogue with the aesthetics of design and craftsmanship.2 Yet all through these negotiations, right into the present, ‘craft’ and ‘design’ have remained distinctly separated and hierarchized spheres of training and practice that are always appended to ‘art’. What has not been studied adequately is another transition that takes place over the middle years of the twentieth century, with the opening up of new departments of crafts, commercial art and design within art schools, whereby the practice of design moves from the artisanal arts to become a thriving middle class profession. In these specific settings of art pedagogy of early twentieth century Bengal, can we think of an emergent notion of ‘design’ as a distinct new area of practice that falls between the two separated spheres of ‘art’ and ‘craft’, even as it continually seeks to build bridges between them? How may we conceive of this intermediate identity of design as never quite becoming ‘modern art’, while ceasing to

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in the name of the goddess of tribal villages and ethnic rural décor at certain Puja sites that would later emerge to prominence in the new map of ‘theme’ Pujas,3 many of the senior designers also date their first forays in the field of Puja designing to these same years. A more significant early time-graph and characterization of the phenomenon is provided in a 2003 book on the contemporary city Pujas by the architect Anjan Mitra,4 which also marks the juncture from which our field surveys take off to pursue the course of this festival history through the remaining years of the decade.

5.1 Invitation card to Nalin Sarkar Street Puja, 2009

be the preserve of the nineteenth century category of India’s ‘industrial’ and ‘decorative arts’? The city’s Durga Pujas provide an ideal site for thinking about these questions. They show how, on the ground, these social and institutional separations of worlds of ‘art’ from those of ‘crafts’ or ‘commercial design’ are seldom in place, and how frequently blurred are the lines distinguishing the middle-class artistic profession from other lesser livelihoods that feed off the same pool of skills and training. The claims of ‘art’ in this sphere redounds on a new primacy of design: one that spills outwards from the image of the goddess and the multiple forms of the tableaux that grow around her into the promotional banners, brochures, invitation cards and advertisements that are generated around the event. (See 5.1, 5.2) That this design aesthetic rapidly translates into a new ‘brand’ identity of the Durga Pujas serves to most powerfully imprint on the phenomenon the indices of the present, making it a unique product of the contemporary city and the new commercial economy of the festival. The first section of the chapter identifies some of the main features that came to constitute the sense of distinction of this genre of ‘theme’ Pujas. The second section delves closely into three generic tableaux types that came to hold sway across different localities of Kolkata as the predominant face of the new festival phenomenon. In all this, the question of chronology—of marking the beginnings, rise and spread of the wave of ‘theme’ Pujas—becomes important to think through. While newspapers from the end of the 1990s report on the emergent fashion

the sense of distinction To be small and tasteful To set out our own beginnings, let us first note the shift from a premium on scale and opulence to a new

5.2 Brochure for Santoshpur Lake Pally Puja designed by Sushanta Pal, 2009

the age of the ‘theme’ puja

5.3 Amar Sarkar’s Madhubani village under construction, Barisha Shrishti Puja, 2002

pride in smallness, moderation and refinement in the incipient phase of the ‘theme’ Pujas. Smallness became a new point of self-articulation: smallness of budgets, of sizes of productions, of spaces out of which they grew, and of localities which sought a new social and cultural profile through the distinctiveness of their Pujas. Anjan Mitra’s vignettes of several such neighbourhood Pujas are filled with examples of the spurts of artistic creativity that transform the poorest and drabbest of neighbourhoods during this season. In one humble para after another, he shows how local talent and amateur artists set to work with ordinary, inexpensive material, and how remarkable design ideas spring out of objects and spaces where they are least to be anticipated.5 But it also instructive to note the way in which the pride of being small sets itself up in this period as an oppositional value and identity, serving as a ground for a new discourse on taste and creativity. There were different measures of smallness and synchrony that came into play within the period’s

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new genre of ‘designer’ Pujas. A tight integration of space and design became one of the key hallmarks of the genre. Space has never been in abundance in the city, least of all in those older quarters that came to host the growing scale of the city’s Sarbojanin Durga Pujas. In this proverbially congested metropolis, the unique character of the festival always lay in the way pandal decorators made maximum use of the narrowest of alleys and vacant plots to put up grand architectural structures that would tower high above the masses of people and houses. The same tiny mazes of lanes and parks also emerge as the chosen sites of the period’s transformed genre of art and craft tableaux, with a new group of artists now putting to a different use the limited space that a Puja club had at its disposal. The little village complex, with simulated mud walls and thatched roofs, displaying different rural art forms—such as the wooden puppetry of Bardhaman, or Madhubani wall paintings from Bihar that the trend-setting designer Amar Sarkar conceived, with stellar success, on the small grounds of the Barisha Shrishti Club in Behala during 2001– 2002—becomes exemplary of this new genre in its first years.6 Doing away with the elevation of earlier pandal forms, such rural tableaux worked instead with a horizontal ordering of space, covering up the house fronts on either side of the plot with the simulated plaster walls of hutments, converging on the central painted roofed pavilion of the goddess. (See 5.3, 5.4) In lieu of the experience of entering inside an architectural edifice, the viewers here had

5.4 Madhubani painters at work on the recreated walls of painted hutments, Barisha Shrishti Puja, 2002

5.5 Nalin Sarkar Street Lane with the beginnings of pandal construction, 2006

5.6 The lane transformed by Sanatan Dinda’s Puja installation, 2006

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the experience of being transported from the streets into an enclosed, open-air Madhubani village. Other localities and emergent designers offered other models of the virtues of smallness and the creative use of limited space. For instance, Sanatan Dinda (another founding figure in the history of ‘theme’ Pujas) would use the length of a shabby Hatibagan alley to lead viewers though pillared and decorated walkways into resplendent pagoda and temple interiors. (See 5.5, 5.6) He has always had a taste for an awe-inspiring rather than just a small and chic production, with his efforts directed at producing the holistic ambience of a religious sanctum within the available space of the alley. In our tours of the festival city and surveys of different designer styles, what springs to attention are a series of such archetypal tiny ‘theme’ Puja sites in certain concentrated geographic clusters—for example, a handkerchief sized three-cornered park at the foot of a bridge leading into Santoshpur, that is the site of the Santoshpur Trikone Park Puja (see 5.7); an empty plot squeezed behind some apartment blocks that holds each year the Selimpur Pally Puja; or the winding bend of the parallel Maharaja Tagore Lane in the adjacent lanes of Selimpur that hosts the Puja of the Abasarika club. In each of these places, we see the transplantation of specific templates of a streamlined art and craft aesthetic, marked by the individual styles of designers, always carefully adapted to the limits of the spatial setting. A scaling down of the size of the goddess ensemble became another uniting feature of this genre of productions. The largeness, grandeur and elaborate ornamentation of the idols (whether they be of the traditional stylized ekchala form, or of the rival style of individually positioned realist figures) had earlier marked out the stature of a Puja, and they continue to be the point of pride of several older Sarbojanin Pujas like those of Baghbazar Park, College Square, Mohammed Ali Park or ekdalia evergreen, and of idol makers like Mohanbanshi and Sanatan Rudra Pal. It is as a pointed break from this fashion that the ‘new wave’ evolved its alternative experimental type of small folk-style Durgas, which were specially designed to blend with the tableaux built around them. (See 5.8) That some of the most talented new

5.7 Site of Santoshpur Trikone Park Puja, 2009

Puja designers—prime among them, Sanatan Dinda and Bhabatosh Sutar—begin their conception of their Puja productions by sculpting the image of the goddess, before working out the structure that will evolve around it, has also gone a long way in creating a contemporary brand of signature-style Durgas. (See 5.9, 5.10) The trend of remaining small, while it enabled a host of unknown amateur talents to take up Puja designing, also translated into the ‘branded’ style of a prominent circle of Durga Puja artists. Over time, production expenses and designer fees have varied widely across these different registers of smallness. We could take the instance of Puja budgets, where smallness became another critical though contentious criterion of evaluation. During the early 2000s, this criterion was to a large extent propped by commercial award schemes, many of which, following the lead of the Asian Paints ‘Sharad Samman’, set out to discover the lesser-known creative Pujas, and fixed a maximum budget range of 5 or 6 lakhs for Pujas to be eligible for these awards. This automatically disqualified from the scope of these awards all the large Sarbojanin Pujas and heightened their sense of separateness from the ‘new wave’. There is an unmistakably caustic undertone in this self-differentiation—as the organizers of the College Square or ekdalia evergreen Pujas take counter pride in the largeness and transparency of

5.8 Example of a ‘folk art’ Durga desgined by Kamaldeep Dhar, Hatibagan Nabin Pally Puja, 2010

5.9 Sanatan Dinda’s Durga under construction at the Nalin Sarkar Street Puja, 2007

5.10 One of Bhabatosh Sutar’s signature style Durgas, Rajdanga Naba Uday Sangha Puja, 2008

the age of the ‘theme’ puja their own budgets, in their continued adherence to the tradition of spectacular pandals and gigantic Durga images, and in their lack of need to run after prizes and sponsors. Badal Bhattacharyya, chief secretary of the College Square Puja Committee, said it was impossible for Pujas of their kind to fudge and suppress budgets to meet the requirements of awardgiving sponsors.7 In 2006, even on a reduced budget, the Puja was spending around 10 lakhs on their temple replica pandal alone—a massive structure built by Pal Decorators of Shantipur, Nadia, employing 150 labourers over a month and a half. (See 1.5) It was paying out 1 lakh, 10 thousand to the CeSC as advance electricity bill, and keeping aside another lakh and more for generators, to support the elaborate illuminations around the tank which remain the greatest draw of this Puja. For many years, their funds have been generated primarily by advertisements in the annual Puja brochure they publish and in the many commercial stalls and banners that are set up in their precincts. Rather than searching out sponsors, they have to deal with a rush of advertisers wishing to display stalls and banners at the College Square Puja, and felt greatly disadvantaged at that point of time by new strictures and taxes imposed on these by the municipal corporation. Underlining their difference from the organizers of ‘theme’ Pujas, Badal Bhattacharya continued, ‘Our location is such, our history and reputation is such, that whatever our production each year, the crowds will come here, as will the advertisers.’8 Such self-projections of the College Square Puja openly lay out the lines of divide between two markedly separable genres of Pujas. From the perspective of this older genre of big-budget Pujas, smallness is shown to be the property of the obscure and the unknown in the field and, sometimes, no more than a stance to qualify for prizes. Shifting positions to the other side, we see how smallness came to function as a trope of an alternative brand identity—one where Puja designers made an artistic virtue out of the limitation of space and funds, where Puja committees, along with these designers, actively embraced the new demands for civility, restraint and reform in the urban festival, and where they successfully played up their image as disciplined, law-abiding and socially conscious entities. The genre of ‘theme’ Pujas, it could be argued, emerged tailor-

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made to meet the new municipal restrictions on the height of pandals and images or on the loudness of music at play—equally the many regulations against blockage of public roads, illegal electricity connections or use of inflammable construction material. While the new styles of productions largely dispensed with the taste for blaring music, massive road-blocking pandals or high electricity-consuming light displays, the penchant for rural crafts and organic natural resources like straw, hay, bamboo, mud and clay was also in keeping with many of the prescribed fire safety and environmental norms, creating a set of important equations between creativity, restraint, and prize-worthiness in the contemporary festival. To apply and be eligible for the varieties of new award schemes, today’s Durga Pujas must have in place all their clearance certificates from the police and municipal authorities, as well as from the Fire Brigade, the electricity board and the Pollution Control Board.9 Conformity to the many new regulatory guidelines became an indispensable component of the identity of the new order of Pujas. This is where the discourse of ‘smallness’ found its effective translation into one of civility, discipline and self-governance. The ‘Pujo Perfect’ award contest, begun by another paints company, Snowcem, in collaboration first with Ananda Bazaar Patrika and later with another

5.11 Snowcem-Pratidin ‘Pujo Perfect’ award announcement, Dumdum Park Bharat Chakra Puja, 2006

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Bengali newspaper, Pratidin, along with the local shoe and bag manufacturing enterprise, Sreeleathers, (see 5.11) was one of the many that cited ‘tastefulness’ (ruchishilata) and ‘social and environmental awareness’ (samaj o paribesh chetana) as key criteria for its awards, alongside the composite beauty of the image, the pandal and the lighting. It also added another wonderfully unquantifiable criterion, ‘antarikata’ (loosely translatable as ‘sincerity’) in the final round to sift out the best three Pujas from the closely competing shortlist of finalists.10 The Durga Puja is thus rendered into a contest no different from the period’s typical fare of reality television shows, live song and dance competitions and beauty pageant—and there are no qualms here about plotting affective notions of taste, sincerity and civicmindedness on to a grade sheet, with 100 marks for each criterion. What follows is that is only those Pujas that are seen to be moving with the times—that can engage with these modalities of application and competition and offer up its attributes for such finetuned measures and grades—come within the circuit of such awards and the publicities they offer. In an interview of 2006, the organizers of the SnowcemPratidin ‘Pujo Perfect’ contest made clear that their prize was not meant for big Sarbojanin Pujas like those of Baghbazar, Mohammed Ali Park or Park Circus, but for their smaller, lesser known, creative counterparts.11 The dividing line between one and the other type of Pujas, then, is set as sharply by club organizers and designers as by the corporate awardgivers and sponsors. Smallness, as it comes to stand in for a series of such eligibility tests and criteria of prize-worthiness, becomes no more than a notional concept. As the genre of ‘theme’ Pujas began to diversify and proliferate, the scale of productions, budgets or designer fees no longer remained small within this keenly competitive circuit, even in relation to the older creed of Pujas like those of College Square or ekdalia evergreen. This became particularly so, when high-publicity Pujas like those of Jodhpur Park or Suruchi Sangha of New Alipore, with generous spaces and funds at their disposal, entered the league of ‘theme’ productions, and when many large or small Pujas of this league turned out to be blockbuster attractions in their own right, drawing huge crowds.

What may once have been small in scale and spirit also ended up with the kind of profile, publicity and viewing crowds that went against the grain of its initial dispensation. By the end of our period of survey, we found the smallest of club Pujas in nonelite neighbourhoods, in the interiors of Hatibagan, Manicktala or Santoshpur, rustling up Rs. 10–15 lakhs as their Puja budgets, once they had entered the awards and ‘theme’ circuit. Paradoxically, doing a ‘theme’ Puja soon came to be perceived as an expensive and exclusive option in the field, involving a reliance on awards and corporate sponsorship and an advance amassing of funds to rope in a reputed designer that barred many small Pujas from earlier opting for that path.12 The kinds of prize money on offer within the award circuit also served as an index of the transformed economy of ‘theme’ Pujas. As against the Asian Paints ‘Sharad Samman’, which for over two decades pointedly held on to its token award amount of Rs. 10,000, award schemes like the Snowcem-Pratidin ‘Pujo Perfect’ had in 2006 set its amount at Rs. 1,11,111 for the first prize, Rs. 55,555 and 33,333 for second and third prizes, and Rs. 22,222 for the Popular Choice award, playing on number serials and priding itself on being, at that time, the most lucrative of Durga Puja awards. Its main intention was to outdo its rival Ananda Bazaar Patrika’s ‘Sharad Arghya’ award and place its emoluments on par with the Durga Prize awards of cities like New Delhi. All these trends can be seen as part of a rapidly transforming history of the phenomenon, each bringing new twists and layers to its sense of distinction.

Enter the Durga Puja ‘artist’ The arrival on the scene of a new social and professional group of Puja designers became another central factor to reckon with. That they all staked claims to be ‘artists’ and not just makers of idols, pandals and light-bulb illuminations—helped mark them out from other hereditary and artisanal groups in the trade. That the work of Durga Puja productions became the main forum of their artistic reputation and acclaim also held most of them apart from the established modern art worlds of galleries and exhibitions. This intermediary

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location between two socially differentiated spheres of practice—of artists and artisans, designers and crafts-persons—was crucial to the phenomenon of ‘theme’ Pujas. Dissolving some of these boundaries, allowing persons and skills from both ends to redefine the creative scope of this median zone, and offering up a new category of temporary public art, are what this genre of Pujas has best achieved. While a sense of distinction of being an ‘artist’ and creating ‘art’ is a fundamental attribute of those who have propelled this genre, holding on to these distinctions turns out to be immensely difficult, as much for those in the fray as for anyone trying to categorize this work. While an art college degree marks out many of those who have entered the vocation of Durga Puja designing, equally numerous are examples of amateur designers or crafts-persons, who have no such institutional training, but have carved out reputations for themselves in this line of work. In the past, while there were those like Ramesh Pal or Aloke Sen whose art college backgrounds secured their artistic stature in the sphere of idol making, there were also many instances of young men of a neighbourhood using their small para Puja as a platform for showcasing their design talents. To be self-taught, to have learnt these skills by watching the making of images and pandals in one’s neighbourhood, or to have worked one’s way into experimenting with new forms from within the existing Durga Puja trades is no disqualifier in this circuit of festival art. Subodh Ray, Sanatan Dinda and Bhabatosh Sutar—talked of sculpting Durga images in clay for their localities from a young age, long before they gained art college training and launched themselves on the work of Puja designing. None of them come from a hereditary clan of mritshilpis, yet each of them developed this skill and later continued with the making of the Durga images as the starting point of the Puja pavilions they designed. There are several other designers in the field with no art college degrees, who come out of informal backgrounds in interior and graphic design and have gained their main public acclaim through the Durga Puja pandal structures they have created over the years. Many of them too began their forays in the field by designing their neighbourhood club Pujas, well before the age of ‘theme’ Pujas.

5.12 Madhubani woman painter at work at the Abasar Club Puja, 2008

This age, I believe, stands best connoted by the importance that comes to be attached to the figure of the Durga Puja ‘designer/artist’ and their individual authorial roles in shaping the full production.13 From being mainly a hereditary occupation of idol makers and pandal decorators, or the stray passion of local amateurs, Puja designing would emerge as a vocation in its own right. Like the earlier trades, this new vocation too would remain a largely male prerogative, and would nurture its own widening pool and hierarchies of Durga Puja ‘artists’. The sharply gendered nature of the world of Durga Puja productions is a critical theme to reckon with, confronting us with the striking absence of women among these new groups of designers. The workforce in the older hereditary trades of idol and pandal making has remained conventionally and constitutively male—with women now brought into these production sites primarily as folk artists whose art is showcased in recreated village sets. (See 5.12) A more pressing question to ask is why middleclass women—whether as local amateurs, art college students or established artists—have largely chosen to stay away from this work of Puja designing, and the creative and earning opportunities this offers. It could be (as male Puja designers tell us) because of the labour-intensive dimensions of this work, and the requirements of day and night presence at

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pandal sites with the workforce to meet deadlines of completion. That this sphere of work lacks the social and cultural insulation of other enclaves of modern art activity could well be what keeps middle-class women artists largely out of its circuit. It is worth noting that the few women artists, like the sculptor Uma Siddhanta or the painter Dipali Bhattacharya, who have occasionally taken on Puja designing in recent years, have done so from their established niches in the modern art world. Both of them had earlier designed Durga images for the Bakulbagan ‘artists’ Puja’, which had been able to provide women artists with a specialized forum of work. When they later took on the work of designing a full Puja, there would be a clear sharing of labour between them and the artisans or art college students they worked with.14 We can categorize three broad groups that have been drawn in to this new vocation of Durga Puja ‘art’ and have helped to define its brief. There is, firstly, a small coterie of those with a recognized standing as ‘modern artists’ who have taken to designing Durga Pujas as an alternative hobby, as a way of bringing their art to a mass spectatorship. Unlike the Bakulbagan Puja of yesteryears, there is no longer one such demarcated ‘artist’s Puja’ in the city featuring each year the work of a well-known Kolkata artist. ‘Art’ Pujas are now everywhere, but even in this pervasive art topography there are a few small neighbourhood Pujas that have come to be known for the repertoire of a single artist. The Puja of Miloni Sangha, which is designed every year by Samir Aich, who is a resident of this para at vidyasagar, an erstwhile refugee colony in the south of the city, is an example. (See 5.13) There are instances, too, of the Bakulbagan Puja of Bhowanipur returning to its earlier trend of commissioning an ‘art pratima’ in 2004 from the painter Shuvaprasanna, or of a Puja in the interiors of Jadavpur eliciting the participation and design concept of Jogen Chowdhury. With many such established artists, Puja designing is usually a once-in-a-while experimental venture, seldom a sustained engagement. There are exceptions, like the case of Samir Aich, for whom designing his para Puja became an annual seasonal vocation, and who also occasionally took on additional requests for designing other Durga and Kali Pujas of the adjacent Jadavpur and Garia region.15 There are also internal

fine lines running through this art milieu, sifting out ‘designers’ from ‘artists’, where there are those like Hiran Mitra, well known in Bengal for his book covers, illustrations and commercial designs, who briefly experimented with Puja pavilions but came to put his designing skills to far greater use in other chosen forms of pavilion and installation art. To this group could also be added some eminent names from the circuit of art direction in films. Gautam Basu, whom we encountered in the first year of our Puja fieldwork in 2002 as the designer of two much-publicized creations of that season in two South Kolkata localities—a ‘Communal Harmony’ installation at Hindustan Park (see 5.14) and a Bengal rural crafts complex titled ‘Sonar Bangla’ at Bakulbagan—had made his name as a creative designer at Bata and later as the art director of the films of Mrinal Sen and Aparna Sen.16 His name and, more importantly, a work team from his film studios, continued to remain associated, in subsequent years, with the Puja production at Hindustan Park, without inviting, however, the same order of media attention. The year 2009 saw the entry into the field of Puja designing of another eminent personality from the film industry, director Goutam Ghosh, with his launch also of a large filming and documentation project on the Durga Pujas of the city. The creative team that he set up, including his wife Nilanjana Ghosh and the designer Ujjwal Chakrabarty, installed that year at Badamtala, Kalighat, an environmental art pandal in the shape of a vast bird’s nest and a Durga in the guise of a tribal woman, holding not weapons but a cluster of white pigeons in her hands. At the centre of my study is a second broad group, consisting largely of art college graduates, whose names we encounter primarily through their innovative repertoire of Puja creations. There are some here who see themselves as painters and installation artists, others who have careers in commercial art, interior, graphic, textile or pavilion design, or work in television and cinema set productions. While an art college background may not be an essential qualifier, it has come to serve as a loose common denominator for this group, marking out a local circuit of art and commercial design that sustains such a group

5.13 Pavilion designed by Samir Aich at the Miloni Sangha Puja, Vidyasagar colony, 2004

5.14 Gautam Basu’s ‘Communal Harmony’ tableau, combining architectural features of a temple and a mosque, Hindusthan Park Puja, 2002

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through the year and brings them with increasing intensity into the seasonal work of the Durga Pujas. Unlike the first category of ‘artists’, this second group seeks and requires a mounting order of publicity and prizes to secure their place in a field that is as slippery as it is competitive. What best holds them together is a common investment in building up a reputation as Puja designers—a reputation whose graph lies in the annual fare they offer each season, in the commissions they gain from big and small Puja clubs across the city several months ahead of the festival, in the designer fees they can charge, or in the exclusivity of the one or two Pujas they commit themselves to each year. The contemporary festival, they all believe, has offered them a unique opportunity to educate mass tastes and bring a new order of artistry and refinement within a popular phenomenon. This conviction is what places this community of artists close in line to the first group, in self-image and aspiration, and bolsters their sense of difference from the occupational ranks of idol makers and pandal decorators in the trade. The phenomenon of the ‘theme’ Puja must itself be located within a changing history of the present. It is within this micro-history that these many fine lines of gradation and self-differentiation appear over time, to sift out a new generation of Durga Puja ‘theme-makers’ from their older counterparts, or to block out the more established names in this vocation from the later flood of new entrants. This history, in its latest phase, also presents us with a third broad category of Puja designers who have worked their way up from within the work team of ‘theme’ Pujas of the early years, graduating from the position of student assistants or crafts-persons working under a senior designer to becoming Puja ‘artists’ in their own right, producing their own select repertoire of art and craft tableaux. While some here are emerging from art colleges, where working as helpers in Durga Puja productions outside class hours and during holidays has become an annual routine for many students (see 5.15), there are several who come from village-based craft occupations like wood carving, basket weaving, rope and hemp decoration or terracotta modelling, rising out of the seasonal flow of rural skills into the city to carve out a small niche for themselves as ‘theme-makers’. From a career as an artisan or

national award-winning craftsperson to a successful Puja designer has become a short and strategic leap. Their profiles provide us with another story of transmuting hierarchies and social mobility that this sphere of festival art has enabled. The next chapter will offer career profiles of some of the types of creative personnel I have broadly classified under the second and third categories of Puja designers. What I have done here is configure in broad strokes the new entity of the Durga Puja ‘artist’ to underscore the point that the persona of the ‘artist’ in this sphere of practice is one that is seldom neatly separable from that of the ‘artisan’ and the kinds of work practices to which the latter belongs. The artists that we keep meeting in this contemporary ‘theme’ Puja circuit, almost without exception, come from non-affluent social backgrounds, and often have surnames like Dinda or Sutar that places them among artisanal and peasant castes (like Mahishyas or Sutradhars) from which they have risen to stake claim to an alternative identity. What is true of this sphere can be said to be a noticeable feature of the sociology of the art worlds of modern Bengal more generally, where some of the most renowned names are Baij, Pyne, Karmakar or Haloi, all markedly outside the upper-caste (Brahmin-Kayastha-Baidya) groupings of the Bengali elite who have long dominated the literary, intellectual and service professions.17 To raise the sensitive issue of caste becomes especially difficult within these bhadralok artist circles in Bengal. While the rustic, ‘non-bhadralok’ identity of an artist like Ramkinkar Baij has often been discussed and contested, the implications of the caste names of these other artists has seldom been broached and may well be considered as an affront to their creative stature as ‘artists’. In this context, it is important to recall that studying in an art college (even in the once prestigious institution of the Government College of Art, Calcutta) and opting to become an artist was never a major choice for the Bengali upper-caste elite. From the starting years of art schools in colonial Calcutta, it had been a struggle for boys from bhadralok backgrounds to wrest for themselves the respectability of an education in the ‘fine arts’ within a predominantly artisanal student population.18 If, over the course of

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5.15 Art college students at work on Sushanta Pal’s Puja production inside the Selimpur Pally Puja club room, 2004

the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, art schools became a more defined stronghold of the educated middle class, the problems of securing a professional stature in art never went away, nor did the hierarchies in the newly-expanding educational and professional opportunities that always kept art school training as a distinctly lesser option. In the course of our post-Independence history, there grew a sharp dichotomy between the valorised image of the artist in intellectual, middle class circles and the depressed social profiles and class backgrounds of the bulk of students who came to the art colleges of Bengal.19 In recent times, this gulf has taken on a different edge and proportions—as only a select few of the city’s older and younger artists have moved into the cosmopolitan national and international worlds of contemporary art activity and availed of its quotient of glamour, publicity and wealth, leaving the majority unhappily trapped in the provincialism and limited opportunities of the local art scene. It is largely the latter group that can be seen to have most actively taken on the period’s new vocation of Durga

Puja designing and to have found in it an alternative forum of identity and local renown. The transforming visual culture of Durga Puja thus holds up a mirror to this larger social milieu of modern art in Bengal. It becomes our window into an art world that is pointedly local, vernacular and non-elite, and is always struggling to rise above the ordinary and the average. The figure of the artist, here, must continuously seek out new forms of distinction vis-à-vis the artisan and craftsperson that provide the main foil to his stature. The nature of the work process in this sphere of Puja designing becomes particularly pertinent to this problem of self-positioning of the ‘artist’. For, unlike the contemporary practices of painting, sculpting, mixed-media installations or digital art (which also foreground materials, processes and collaborative labour), Puja productions involve a degree of proximity and collaboration with artisanal labour that often threatens to collapse the crucial line separating the artist from this mixed work force. That these productions must pitch themselves into

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an undifferentiated space of mass reception and meet the standards of popular appeal produces another set of ambivalences in their claims to be ‘art’. The designation of ‘art’, and the authority and acclaim that it generates, is never a taken-for-granted index in this creative domain. Rather, it is one that needs to be continually negotiated within a vortex of shifting styles and production processes and given its new markings within a register of popular tastes.

The claims of ‘art’ production As already argued, in this festival field, the sense of distinction of being an ‘artist/designer’ found its strongest manifestations in a set of new stakes on individual style, authorship and creative experiment. Right from the start, this provided the defining parameter for the phenomenon of ‘theme’ Pujas, placing a new value on coordination and synchrony between all parts of the tableau. In the early years, the lack of a unified conception would at times show up in a curious duality between old and new styles of production within the body of a single Puja. In 2001, there are references in the newspapers to such jarring discrepancies between two wings of an Amherst Street Puja in north Kolkata, one which wished to simulate a small village scene, and the other which insisted on repeating a vast pandal and Durga image in the name of not ‘letting go of tradition’, or between a remake of a ruined and deserted zamindari mansion at the Jodhpur Park Puja (designer Dipak Ghosh’s first experimentation with a new style of architectural replica in thermocol) and dazzling light displays along the avenue leading up to the Puja that was seen to be entirely out of tune with the ambience of the ruined house.20 This is the time from when the convention of a tripartite division of commissions—between a suburban pandal-making firm, an idol maker and his workshop, and the small electrical workshops of Chandannagar who specialized in creating lightbulb decorations—becomes the identifier of an older practice of Puja productions and a certain type of Sarbojanin Pujas that have consciously continued with this practice. This is also when the spotlight of the media and the sponsors began to shift to

what could be profiled as the ‘new wave’, and its innovative, composite tableau styles. The changing template of the award categories of the Asian Paints ‘Sharad Samman’ provides, once more, a key index of this makeover in preferences. By 1999–2000, the separate awards for each season’s best pandal, pratima and light display came to be consolidated as ones for three best Pujas, to be judged for their appearance as composite units, with two new ones added for ‘Creative excellence’ (Nobbo Nakshi and for the ‘Best Artisan of the Year’ (which in Bengali was more specifically marked out as Shreshta Pratima Shilpi, or the maker of the best idol).21 Smallness, novelty and innovation were all now flagged as the cherished attributes of the time, even as a set of unresolved contradictions remained embedded in the last award category, which to date has room only for the ‘artisan’ and the ‘idol maker’ and never the ‘artist’. The vocation of the designer and the changed notion of a composite tableau come as a combined package. These two levels of change are integrally linked. An open street site or a small park begins to be looked on as the space for an art installation or a stage set, where the design concept covers the Puja in its entirety: the pandal structure, the image of the goddess, the outer environment and décor, the colours, the lighting and now, often, even the music which is ‘themeproduced’ by the Puja designer in collaboration with a music composer. In keeping with this dispensation, the whole contract and responsibility for a club Puja begins to be handed over to an artist/designer, who in turn mobilizes a work team that could include art students, rural crafts-persons, tribal artists, construction labourers, and usually a hereditary idol maker from Kumartuli or Patuapara from the younger generation, who produces the image of the goddess in keeping with the overall design of the Puja. (See 5.16, 5.17) This is where the new genre of ‘theme’ Pujas can be seen to frequently replicate, under a different order of professional art direction, the demand for the same variety of artisanal skills that have long been associated with Bengal’s Sarbojanin Pujas. But this is also where we encounter a host of highly fraught gradations in stature and expertise between artists and artisans, between those who provide the ideas and concepts and the different levels of the creative and labour force that give shape, over months, to

5.16 ‘Theme ’ Puja designed by Sushanta Pal in the form of a Rajasthani painted haveli, Santoshpur Trikone Park Puja, 2004

5.17 With its synchronized Durga image by Kumartuli artist Naba Kumar Pal, Santoshpur Trikone Park Puja, 2004

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the full structure and their intricate details. Over the 2000s, it became increasingly the sign of the reputation and stature of certain ‘artists’ in this sphere of work when a final production could carry only his name and signature style to the exclusion of the larger work team, when a neighbourhood Puja could brandish that star designer’s name as the main publicity strategy with sponsors, award-givers and the media. The nature of authorial claims, however, can be seen to vary widely across different ranks of designers and their modes of work. Our case studies of ‘theme’ Pujas will offer up multiple types of designers and work practices—ranging from the most ‘hands-on’ artists in this field who sculpt the idols themselves and personally execute a large section of the surrounding structures and décor, to those who provide mainly the concept input and direction, employing various levels of workers to construct different parts of the production, to another group who work from a greater distance as impresarios or ‘event managers’, mobilizing crafts-persons from different parts of India for varieties of ‘folk art’ Pujas, usually handling commissions across several sites in the city. Much of the internal work relationships in a production differ, depending on whether the work force brought in are rural crafts-persons and folk artists, or art school students, or set design workers from film and television studios. And the intensity of artistic self-projections in this workspace also ebb and flow, depending on whether the specialty of the designer lies in producing architectural replicas, simulating craft villages and theme parks, or offering what they call a ‘conceptual theme’. In recent years, Puja hoardings have laid out the different ranks of the production team, much in the line of film credits, with star figures like Goutam Ghosh lending their name only to the overall conception (samagra parikalpana), with others in charge of art direction (shilpa nirdeshana) and practical execution (rupayan), where much of the on-site work is carried out by the third level of the team.22 Over the course of our study, we could see certain broad patterns emerging for the distribution of designing and production credits in these publicity banners. The higher the standing of a designer, the stronger

becomes his authorial monopoly over the entire production, even over the Durga imagery which is made by others under his direction and design.23 Their example is also followed by many young new entrants in the field, like the artist Anirban Das, who sometimes advertise themselves in sole charge of the ‘Concept, Design and execution’ of a Puja, or at other times chart new heights of creativity in collaboration with a talented new generation image maker of Kumartuli.24 At the Lalabagan Nabankur Sangha Puja of Maniktala during 2010 and 2011, in two of his career-best productions—one on Shiva’s Tandava, a modernist art installation in bamboo, wood and terracotta using the different symbols and weapons of Shiva, the other a folk art tableau using a special form of tribal dolls (jou putul) made at Medinipur—the name of the artist appeared under design and execution, with the exquisite ‘art’ Durgas attributed to the Kumartuli ‘theme’ artist, Parimal Pal. (See 5.18, 5.19) As endless numbers of small-time artists have taken over the sphere of Puja designing, there has been a converse trend again of laying out the separate acknowledgements for the conception and execution of the pavilion, for the Durga image, for the lights and for the music. Newer nomenclatures of ‘concept artist’, ‘pandal artist’ and ‘idol artist’ have come into circulation. Through all this, the notion of a tightly directed and coordinated production is never abandoned. But it is opened up to accommodate the multiplicity of units and contributions that go into its making, with separate values given to the work of conception (bhabna) as against that of execution and fabrication (rupayan). As the spreading genre of ‘theme’ Pujas throws open the varieties of skill, labour and creative inputs that a designer needs to mobilize under an integrated direction, there are also older fads and fashions that continually come in the way. Well into our times, we find newspapers wryly commenting on the continued fad for gimmicky material in Puja décor, where everything from cotton towels (gamchhas) to firecrackers, soaps, edible sweets or Horlicks jars were being used for constructing pandals.25 (See 5.20) There is no discounting, either, the thought, intention and painstaking labour that would often go into such productions. In 2003, at the 41 Pally Sarbojanin Puja in the lower middle-class

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most coveted Puja awards.27 (See 5.48) It is this shift from the marvels of material and numbers (20,000 used and discarded stamps or 5,000 spinning tops) to a focus on village arts and crafts, and elaborately researched recreations of national and transnational art and archaeological sites that exemplifies the changed aesthetic dispensations of the age.

5.18 Anirban Das’ production titled, Tandava, Lalabagan Nabankur Sangha Puja, Maniktala, 2010

neighbourhood of Haridebpur in the far south of the city, a local art teacher, Arun Saha, with a team of 25 underprivileged children (to whom he gave art lessons at the para club) designed a pandal with 6,20,000 tiny homeopathy medicine bottles, depicting mythological scenes, with the avowed aim of promoting homeopathy as an alternative form of medicine and winning a place in the Guinness Book of World Records.26 In the years that followed, this Puja allows us to plot a significant transition in the choice of materials and styles, propelled by a different team of art school-trained youth, gathering under the banner of an art group, typically adding on Puja designing to their fledgling professions as interior and landscape designers. One year, the pandal was designed with decorative comb patterns, gathered by an artist, Bivas Mukherjee, from tribal communities from all over eastern India; in 2007, they made their most innovative move of recreating the relief sculpture and textile designs of the ancient Inca civilization on material simulating the look of rock and granite, a work that won them the first place in that year’s

How and when do claims of artistry inflect these experimentations with material and novel objects? In what ways do certain Puja tableaux make the subtle, but critical, jump from ‘gimmick’ to ‘art’ in public perceptions? Most importantly, how does a new discourse of purity and religious sanctity come to be thickly entangled with these ‘art’ productions, to mark their distinction from the crassness and profanities of other styles of décor? These questions will need to be constantly posed in analysing the many forms of ‘theme’ Pujas of the age, in sifting out their internal unities and differences, and in charting their chronological flows across space and time. In his account of the contemporary festival in the city, Anjan Mitra sets out three broad categories for these Puja productions—those centred primarily around rural crafts and artifacts (Crafts, ba, kutirshilpakendrik), those centred around subjects and themes (Bishoykendrik), and those centred around thoughts and ideas (Bhabkendrik). While

5.19 Parimal Pal’s Durga designed for the Tandava theme, Lalabagan Nabankur Sangha Puja, Maniktala, 2010

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5.20 Gimmicky material in Puja decor—pandal decorated with Horlicks jars at a Lake Terrace Puja, 2006

the first category is seen to enjoy the maximum popularity and spread, the latter two, he writes, offer greater scope for complexities and innovations, with the last type supposedly carrying the highest identity of ‘conceptual art’.28 The author is well aware of the difficulties of fitting the myriad tableaux one encounters in the festival under these labels, especially of distinguishing the decorative from the descriptive, the narrative from the conceptual. One may also raise questions about how far these festival productions can sustain the notion of a progression from the specificities of objects to the abstractions of ideas, from the workmanship of crafts to the intellection of art? At the same time, the fact that every designer Puja carries a concept note on its theme, and that terms like shilpa-bhavana o nirdeshana (artistic conception and direction) or abhibyakti (creative expression) thickly inflect these productions demand that these notions be given their place in a field that

is overtly seeking to be ‘art’ even if it can never fully be so. To address the claims of ‘art’, both as a set of insistent projections as well as a mesh of incomplete formations, becomes the main task at hand. My account will introduce a related but different set of generic categories to analyse the new exhibitionary regime of the present-day festival. In what follows, I will look at three broad, overlapping types of tableaux—architectural and archaeological replicas, theme-parks, and craft and folk art villages—that have come to predominate the festival-scape of the city, and will identify a fourth type, that takes on the claims of ‘conceptual’ or ‘installation’ art and evolves out of the object assemblages and design forms of these other types. What holds together this entire pool of productions is a new aesthetics of authenticity and similitude—a common premium on preparatory site visits, field research and scholarship, and faithfulness

the age of the ‘theme’ puja to the original sites, cultures or craft traditions that are being reproduced. equally crucial to this whole conglomerate is a bid for public pedagogy: a mission to educate the masses and reorient their tastes for history, art and anthropology. One predominant compulsion of today’s festival lies in offering these more specialized art, craft and archaeological tours across India and the world. Side by side, another thrust lies in recreating in these simulated spaces an experience of the spiritual and the sacred. The ‘theme’ Pujas can be seen here to fully participate in the period’s reformist drives towards cleansing the character of the festival and bringing back to it a sanctity it had forfeited over the years. Notions of purity and authenticity seek out fresh testing grounds on varieties of historical and vernacular art forms and past traditions of religious imagery. (See 5.21) It will be my central contention that the claims of art production, far from excluding or erasing the religious, reinvents it within new frames of spectatorship and pitches it into a new zone of wonder and reverence. The praxis of touring and worship are made to coexist in an exhibitionary field that remains constitutively grounded in the performance of the ritual event. (See 5.22, 5.23) The result is a conscious re-inscription of devotional affect, surrounding the homecoming of the goddess, within the body of the urban spectacle.

genres and forms As I now turn to a dissection of some of the main forms and styles that make up the spectrum of today’s ‘theme’ Pujas, it may be useful to briefly explain the choice of certain terms and the connotations of their use. A word is first in order here about the term ‘tableau’ that I have constantly used to refer to various units of these Puja displays. The term, whose dictionary meanings range from a ‘picturesque presentation’ to the putting up of ‘structures, objects and still or moving figures to represent a scene’, is taken to suggest the form of a staged set or a coordinated layout of exhibits, where the goddess and her family form the central frozen group of figures around which unfolds the larger setting. It is the animation of this divine entourage, and the flow of spectators in and out of the simulated setting

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5.21 Durga in the form of a south-Indian bronze sculpture inside the Padmanabhapuram palace replica, Tridhara Sammilani Puja, Monoharpukur Road, 2009

which can be seen to give the tableau the sense of a ‘living picture’.(See 5.24) With the Durga Pujas of the city, the term takes on the full-blown elements of a ‘live’ exhibitionary space. The tableau as a form belongs less to the worlds of art exhibitions, more to those of theatre and pageants, floats and parades, fairground shows and pavilions, carrying the in-built in connotation of a temporary and popular display. As a production form, it lends itself particularly well to the vernacular architecture of Puja pandals, to the portable and dismountable nature of these constructions. It speaks directly, as one writer puts it, to the language of craftsmanship, by which is implied ‘a quality of tactility, of “madeness”… the instinct to shape and touch things, to impart intimacy to materials’,29 a vast variety of which are put to use within these fabrications. It speaks equally powerfully to what another writer has termed the principle of ‘fungibility’ of these structures: their ‘infinite interchangeability’ in converting everyday spaces into make-

5.22 Worship of a red Tantrik Durga at the Selimpur Pally Puja, 2006

5.23 Saptami morning Puja being conducted inside a pavilion designed with Baluchari sari motifs, Behala Club Puja, 2008

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to the specific disciplines of art, literature or film, and their critical vocabularies? To what extent can one hold on to the distinctions of genres within these kinds of tableaux that are continuously working with the contingencies of funds, materials and spaces? And what are the challenges in the attribution of individual authorial styles in a sphere where all innovations are open to copying and reproduction? I offer my broad categorizations of some of the main forms of today’s ‘theme’ Puja tableaux, with the full awareness of the mutating status of each form, and the difficulties of marking strict boundaries and gradations among them. Yet, despite these constraints, to seek out the differences in tableau forms becomes critical to our understanding of the diversity and complexities of this field of production and display. In thinking of these distinctions in terms of a differentiation of ‘genres’, I would also like to locate each of these within a new discourse of art production, which they seek for themselves. If we were to regard the work of simulation as forming a constitutive core of today’s Puja productions, then another term, ‘simulacrum’, also suggests itself for 5.24 Spectators moving around the central ensemble of the goddess, Hatibagan Sarbojanin Puja, 2003

believe touring sites and in catapulting viewers from journeys across the globe back to the city streets.30 In the context of the new forms of the ‘art’ Puja, the term ‘tableau’ is also used in conscious contradistinction to the term ‘installation’ that comes out of a very different international history of critical art practice and its distinctly separate milieu of art exhibitions and art viewership. In playing off one term against the other, what is called into question, however, is the separateness of these two areas of contemporary public art, and the mutual exclusivity of their practitioners and publics. What emerge are new spaces of public art production and viewing, but ones where the category of ‘installation art’ remains inappositely lodged and keeps dissolving into the alternative ambience of the popular ‘tableau’. (See 5.25) The same problem of appositeness arises with the notion of ‘genres’. How effectively can this field of ephemeral festival art support a notion that belongs

5.25 Bemused spectators inside Sushanta Pal’s experimental art pavilion at the Vivekananda Athletic Club Puja, Haridedpur, 2010

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5.26 Replica of the Radha Madhav temple of Bishnupur by Tapas Kharati, Beltala Sarbojanin Puja, Vidyasagar colony, 2004

thinking about this entire range of fabrications. We could invoke it in Jean Baudrillard’s radical sense of that which leads to a displacement and erasure of the real, to ‘the liquidation of all referential’, and the creation of a ‘hyper-real’ that is capable of ‘substituting signs of the real for the real itself.’31 We could also think of it in its more physical implications of the labours of making and replicating, of a gathering of materials and objects to create artifices that stand on their own ground and take on promiscuous independent lives. What Baudrillard calls ‘the panic of material production’ and ‘the panic stricken production of the real and the referential’32 translates in our context into a frenzy of architectural and spatial simulations. The term ‘simulacrum’ here signifies not just the final production but all the labour, material and processes that go into its assemblage. It takes us from single edifices into larger architectural and archaeological complexes, landscaped theme parks and recreated

sets of village life and culture. It is with the central notion of the replica as ‘simulacra’ that I will lay out some of the main genres of today’s ‘theme’ Puja displays in the city.

On architectural and archaeological replicas It seems logical to begin with the large architectural replicas of national and world monuments that have long dominated this sphere of production. This genre still constitutes a prime attraction of festival tourism. It also best bridges, as we have seen, the passage from the older to the newer practices of pandal making, both connecting and separating out the work of decorator firms from those of the new ‘designers’ in the trade, allowing room for a range of free-style remakes as well as exact reproductions of architectural structures. If we were to take smallness of size, space and budget as the hallmark of the early form of the

the age of the ‘theme’ puja ‘theme’ Pujas, and add to it the profile of local talent, then an elaborate remake of the eighteenth century Radha-Madhav temple of Bishnupur at the Beltala vidyasagar colony in the interiors of Bagha Jatin in the south of the city can be taken as an exemplary instance of the changed status of the architectural replica. (See 5.26) The pride of this 2004 Puja creation by a para resident and club member, Tapas Kharati, lay in its laborious simulation of the original, the scale of the temple compressed here into a 47 feet high and 30 feet wide structure to fit the available space. An employee in the workshops of the State Transport Department, and skilled in the making of terracotta moulds which he fired in a neighbouring clay kin, Kharati becomes one of the many instances of an artisan turned ‘theme maker’ in the field.33 Most important for the production was the research and labour that went into its making—months of field work in the temple town making detailed sketches of the temple and the carvings; then, the preparation of the moulds of individual panels which were testfired for results, before nearly 3000 such panels were made and fixed onto a bamboo and plywood frame to recreate the outer façade of the temple. A blue enamel board modelled on the Archaeological Survey of India site placards, with information on the date and style of the original Bishnupur temple, added a further play on authenticity—even as it competed for attention with the paraphernalia of sponsorship banners and award trophies of the Puja. A Bishnupur temple replica was in itself no novelty in the seasonal fares of Kolkata’s Durga Pujas. Through the late 1990s and early 2000s, look-alikes of this group of terracotta temples kept appearing in several scattered Puja sites, sometimes as the work of decorator firms, at other times as the concept of new Puja designers. That same year (2004), another intricate Bishnupur temple replica—this time, of the Shyam-Rai temple—was on view, not too far away, in the spacious Bangur Park of the more affluent neighbourhood of Lake Gardens. A similar panelby-panel reproduction of the terracotta carvings, including the arched passageway inside the temple, and the same use of an Archaeological Survey-style signboard also marked this remake. (See 5.27) The difference here lay in the operation of a multi-level production team, with another board announcing

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the credits—to two ‘artists’ for the ‘art-direction’, to individual crafts-persons for the terracotta panels, wood construction and the Durga image, and to an electrical and decorator firm for the overall structure and lighting. What we see here is a close grafting of older practices of image making, pandal construction and lighting onto new conceptions of a ‘theme’ Puja. The intensity of work and the scale of material fabrications become key points of consideration. What propels the need to produce thousands of minutely modelled and baked terracotta panels in structures that will have no life beyond the week of the festival? What calls for the investment in a durable medium in place of the bamboo, ply, cloth and plaster of the average pandals? The answer to these questions lies in the belief that the replica, however brief its existence, can offer itself as a near approximation of the original. And that, like other kinds of Puja productions, it can carry within it the mark of artistry and workmanship of the makers. If we were to invoke the notion of ‘simulacra’ here, it would not be in its dictionary meanings of ‘deceptive substitute’ or ‘mere pretence’, but in the sense of a parallel creation that wishes in no way to ‘deceive’ viewers with the false claim of being the original but seeks rather to simulate in a small way the artistry and labour that went into its making. Hence the new emphasis of these makers not on quick and random

5.27 Replica of the Shyam Rai temple of Bishnupur at Bangur Park, Lake Gardens, 2004 (inset; a copy of an ASI signboard on the temple featured next to the structure)

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in the name of the goddess of distinction of this genre of replicas. The invitation to viewers was to walk around the extended architectural complex, to take in the carvings, and finally arrive at the altar of the worshipped icon.

5.28 Parimal Pal’s idol of Durga, made to match the brick temple complex at the Babubagan Puja, 2004

improvisations but on long-drawn, painstaking assemblage of objects and materials, and on the detailing of form and design. In 2004, we saw another instance of this process in an engraved clay tile temple that came up in the Babubagan park in broadly the same area of south Kolkata, in which over ten thousand carved clay tiles were mounted on a wooden structure to simulate a sculpted stone temple. (See 1.21) The tropes of authenticity here devolved, not on reference to any specific historical temple, but on the deployment of the traditional art of engraving and its transference from wood and stone to clay tiles that were made in a suburban kiln at Basirhat. For the designer Bandhan Raha, whose forte lay in putting cheap everyday items like earthen teacups to innovative use, this marked a shift from a sensational to an art and craft production.34 He talked that year of drawing on the hereditary artisanal skills of Gopal Bhaskar of Bardhaman, to whom he entrusted the work of engraving the tiles, and of Parimal Pal of Kumartuli, who produced the clay image of Durga in the appearance of a medieval black schist stone idol of a temple.35 (See 5.28) To go beyond the mere architectural facade and recreate a sense of the depth and interiority of structures becomes the other point

Giving the Durga image the look of an ancient temple sculpture of stone or metal to match the historic architectural structure built around it becomes common practice. Stripped of external clothing, also of gold and silver ornamentation, these images, in simulating the monochrome forms of ancient rockcut reliefs, sandstone and black schist sculpture or bronze statuary, stand in marked contrast to the predominant type of large, colourful ekchala or panchchala Durgas. We can track its recurrent forms from the ones inside the recreated temples we have just described to the kinds that were made to blend with a Tantrik tree shrine or the Tibetan pagoda that the artist Sanatan Dinda fabricated at Hatibagan during 2002 and 2004 (See 5.29, 5.30). We can also trace a particular penchant for the style of Himalayan metal sculptures and their confluence of Tantrik and Buddhist iconographies in a growing repertoire of copper and bronze tinted ensembles of the goddess group. Carefully synchronizing the appearance of the Durga idol with its architectural setting is, of course, a prime requirement of the entire range of ‘theme’ Pujas. Within this particular order of Indian temple replicas, what turns out to be especially important is the production of a living religious ambience within its interiors. The faithfulness of the copy comes to centrally hinge, in these cases, on simulation of the ambience of the inner sanctum of a temple. Let us return, at this juncture, to the more pervasive lives of these replicas as architectural spectacle. It is with the designer Dipak Ghosh that we are introduced to our widest repertoire of historical architecture from different parts of India (ranging from temples to forts and palaces), and the highest order of workmanship on the interiors and exteriors of these structures. exact scale to scale replicas became this designer’s forte, requiring of him a close perusal of the original monuments through site visits, photographs and books, and nearly year-long work on the conception and panel-by-panel execution of his models, the bulk of which are fabricated off-site in temporary workshops before they are assembled

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on the Puja site a few weeks before the festival.36 Dipak Ghosh’s specialty has been his use of the light packing material, thermocol, to recreate the look of marble and various hues of stones and reproduce the intricacies of architectural decoration. Among the first of his replicas to make festival news was a model of the marble temple of Dilwara in Mount Abu, which he put up at the Jodhpur Park Puja of 2002, and which won 14 awards that year. The fineness of architectural ornamentation is what governs his choice of monuments and nurtures the artistic claims of his reproductions side by side with the originals. Among this designer’s choicest productions have been the original size replicas he produced of a Rajasthani fort and palace complex at Suruchi Sangha Puja, New Alipore, in 2004 (see 3.1), the Mukteshwar temple of Bhuvaneshwar at Mudiali in 2005 (see 1.39), the restored Kinchakeswari temple of Khiching at Pratapaditya Road Trikone Park (see 5.31), a carved wooden palace from Padmanabhapuram, Kerala, and

a Nepalese temple at the Tridhara Sammilani Puja at Monoharpukur Road, during 2008 and 2009. (See 5.32, 5.33)

5.29 Sanatan Dinda’s Durga modelled on a Pala period black schist sculpture, Hatibagan Sarbojanin Puja, 2002

5.30 Sanatan Dinda’s Durga modelled on Eastern Indian bronze statuary, Nalin Sarkar Street Puja, 2004

It is fascinating to travel over time across the different locations of these remakes—for each neighbourhood lends its own quality to the viewing of these monumental structures and the savouring of their decorative workmanship. The designer himself has a strong sense of what kinds of replicas go best with the spaces and tastes of a locality. He has learnt through trial and error about ways of transporting structures initially designed for spacious Jodhpur Park or New Alipore venues to the congested quarters inside Kasba. He knows equally of the imperatives of ensuring the smooth flow of crowds through each of his buildings. Although located in an open park, the Dilwara temple at Jodhpur Park had underlined the severe problems of crowd management and movement within the segmented spaces and levels

5.31 Dipak Ghosh’s replica of the Khiching temple of Orissa, Pratapaditya Road Trikone Park Puja 2007. Photograph by Sraman Mukherjee

5.32 Replica of a section of the wooden Padmanbhapuram palace of Kerala, designed by Dipak Ghosh at the Tridhara Sammilani Puja, 2008

5.33 Nepalese temple in a mix of Newari architecural styles, designed by Dipak Ghosh at the Tridhara Samillani Puja, 2009

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of the structure. An overflow of visitors and a nearstampede around the restricted entrance of the edifice on Ashtami had forced the Puja organizers to close public entry into its interior on the last two nights of the festival. Squeezed among the crowds, one had little opportunity that year to think about the correspondence of this replica with the original or take in the artistry of its carvings. The coming years brought opportunities for more detailed viewing of Dipak Ghosh’s creations, sometimes in the middle of a busy street surrounded by high-rise apartments, at other times in the more enclosed setting of a Rajasthani fortress or an archaeological cluster of Orissa temples. As is always the case in this festival sphere, what brought awards and vast crowds to these structures had more to do with the publicity endeavours of the Puja clubs than with the greater or lesser finesse of the recreation. In contrast to the many who see themselves as ‘artists’ in this field of work, Dipak Ghosh foregrounded his skills primarily in workmanship and looked askance at the pretentious posing of concepts and themes that had become the order of the day. He was also one of the few in this top league of designers who tempered his authorial claims over his production with an open acknowledgement of the collective teamwork that his fabrications involved—stressing the importance of working with traditional idol and pandal makers rather than side-lining their contributions.37 His own pride lay in his ability to put different material to work on the intricacies of structures and carvings. By 2006, the year he reproduced the Chamba temple for the Himachal Pradesh theme park at the Suruchi Sangha Puja, he had switched to plaster, wood and fibreglass as the main medium of construction. (See 5.34) Yet mastery in thermocol remained central to his reputation. So, in 2009, while a vast Nepalese temple in a blend of Newari architectural styles, largely with wood and fibreglass, became the talk of the season at the Tridhara Sammilani Puja, he felt that his career’s finest work in thermocol was being produced elsewhere that year, in a small Puja on the outer edge of Jodhpur Park. Here, his team was recreating, in its minute details of ornamentation, a piece of Indo-Saracenic architecture from nineteenth century Jaipur, designed by the colonial architect, Colonel Swindon Jacob. (See 5.35)

5.34 Dipak Ghosh’s replica of a Chamba temple of Himachal Pradesh at the Suruchi Sangha Puja,New Alipore, 2006

Profiling India’s variety of architectural styles and decorations remains Dipak Ghosh’s strong point, leading him beyond temples to other historic structures, with Rajasthani architecture emerging as one of his clear favourites, allowing him to often reuse material from one Puja in other smaller Pujas the next year. At the same time, the form of the goddess inside these architectural remakes remains an equal point of concern for the designer. He recalls how the Durga images made by Pradip Rudra Pal for his Dilwara temple and his Rajasthani haveli— one in the form of a white marble relief sculpture, the other in the style of a Rajput miniature painting (See 4.36)—while they matched their architectural setting, were not considered appropriate for worship. This lacuna, he feels, was rectified in his recreation of a Chamba temple of Himachal Pradesh, where Pradip Rudra Pal, in adapting the Durga to the sixth century style of sculpted Devi imagery of the region (see 5.36), was able to give her the look of a worshipped goddess in contrast to the plaster copies of specimens of the ancient sculptures of the state on

5.35 A piece of Indo Saracenic architecture of Jaipur, designed by Swindon Jacob, recreated in thermocol by Dipak Ghosh, at the 95 Pally Puja, Jodhpur Park, 2009

5.36 The goddess inside the Chamba temple at the Himachal Pradesh complex, Suruchi Sangha Puja, New Alipore, 2006

5.37 Puja in progress inside the Padmanabhapuram palace replica, Tridhara Sammilani Puja, 2008

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display around the site.38 Archaeological authenticity and museum modes of display must continuously make room for the devotional ambience of a Durga Puja. This is a compulsion that none of these touring sites can easily forego, as they work with varying criteria of aesthetic and historical synchrony of the images with the larger complexes that house them. The performance of the ‘religious’ becomes an integral part of the viewing spectacle of these complexes. The bigger the scale of their conception and publicity, the greater the investment in experimenting with different historical and regional iconographies of the goddess, in coordinating costumes and accessories of worship, often in also bringing in priests and performers from those specific areas. In 2008, we were treated to the full effects of such a spectacle inside Dipak Ghosh’s recreated wooden palace and royal chamber of Padmanabhapuram, where we saw priests in Kerala attire conducting the Puja before a goddess group that was given the appearance and clothing of South Indian metal statuary. (See 5.37) The information leaflet handed out by the Puja club, while it gave us the historical dates and architectural form of the reconstructed palace, also specified the form of the goddess as Thurkadevi, which had been created by the idol maker Bablu Banik in accordance with the guidelines provided by the Arul Migu Thurkadevi Hindu Society of Greater vancouver.39 Here is one of many instances of how the global (here, in the form of a diasporic Keralite Hindu organization) interpolates the national and the regional in this local staging of cultures, architectures and iconographies.

On theme parks and displays of world cultures Let us now turn to some of the ways in which the ‘national’ seamlessly expands into the ‘transnational’ and a vernacular global imaginary fuels the desires of travel in the festival city. In the exhibitionary world of Durga Pujas, the core form of the architectural replica continually leads one, not only from single monuments to larger archaeological complexes and theme parks, but also from different states of India into other exotic countries of the globe. From a ‘miniIndia’ laid out for touring in our own city, we are also invited to mingle with other world civilizations in these same spaces. The ‘theme park’ as a form takes

5.38 Remake of the Bhimbetka caves at the Jatra Shuru Sangha Puja, Garia, 2004

on an elasticity that allows it to lodge itself in the middle of streets and tiny corner parks or unfold over the expanse of enclosed open grounds. It can also accommodate varying orders of authenticity and similitude, and engage viewers in different frames of credibility and artistic appeal. This is evident when we move from remakes like that of the Bhimbetka caves of Madhya Pradesh, (see 5.38) with its interiors filled with prehistoric rock paintings, that came up in 2004 near a bus junction at Garia (where we again saw the playful subterfuge of an Archaeological Survey signboard) into the kinds of elaborate theme parks featuring the art, architecture, crafts and performing arts of different states of India that the Suruchi Sangha Puja of New Alipore presents each year. each of these sites aims at momentarily transporting viewers into a different geographic location. If fake owls and monkeys on boulders were intended to simulate the feel of the Bhimbhetka caves, the Suruchi Sangha grounds have laid out, in different years, elephants and backwaters, camels and sand-dunes, or terraced hills and gurgling hill streams to create the topography of Kerala, Rajasthan or Himachal Pradesh. But there are also other, more finely honed markers of artistry and

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5.39 Remake of the Kamakhya temple of Assam, by Subodh Ray, at the Suruchi Sangha Puja, 2008

authenticity to be sought out at these sites, to sift out the designer productions from the larger mass of loose look-alikes. While the spreading resources of film and television set production enable quick improvisations of archaeological sites in thermocol, plywood and plaster, the more researched and intricate artistic conceptions of designers like Subodh Ray leave their mark on the kinds of architectural remakes we encounter within the Suruchi Sangha theme parks, as with this 2008 remake of the Kamakhya temple of Assam and its striking Durga imagery simulating the look of a metal sculpture (See 5.39, 5.40) It is never easy to make such discerning judgments in this sphere of mass viewing and touring. We may even ask: do spectators make these choices at all or are they only swayed by the thrust of publicity, media reporting and awards? What happens, for instance, when in a single season, as in 2003, one had to choose between three Kerala ‘dance villages’ at three Puja sites in scattered pockets of the city, at Behala, Babubagan and at the Suruchi Sangha Puja at New Alipore? Not surprisingly, we found each Puja club and its team of designers asserting its patent on the original conception of the theme, alleging that their ideas had been pirated by the others. With greater or lesser space in hand, each of these Pujas had on

display a simulated brick and tile Kerala temple (see 5.41, 5.42), leading out to stalls featuring Kerala crafts and food, Kathakali costumes and make-up, and different dance performances from the region. What set them apart was their internal production histories and divergent designer profiles—with two unknown art students at Babubagan pitted against established Puja designers like Amar Sarkar at the Behala Udayan Sangha Puja and Subodh Ray at the Suruchi Sangha Puja in New Alipore, with the latter two introducing new elements, like digital copies of the Padmanabhapuram murals encircling the temple at Behala, or an elaborate display of masks and write-ups on their associated dance forms in the park at New Alipore. The idol maker Sanatan Rudra Pal’s experimentation with a Durga pantheon in Kathakali costume also lost out in artistic rating to Subodh Ray’s rendering of the divine group through carefully visualized distinctions in their dance postures—Ganesh and Kartick in Kathakali, Lashmi and Saraswati in Koodiyattam, and Durga as Bhadrakali in the Teyyam posture.40 (See 5.43)

5.40 Matching Durga imagery, also by Subodh Ray, inside the Kamakhya temple at the Suruchi Sangha Puja, 2008

5.41 Kerala temple complex, designed by Amar Sarkar, at the Behala Udayan Pally Puja, 2003

5.42 Rival Kerala temple complex, designed by Subodh Ray, at the Suruchi Sangha Puja, New Alipore, 2003

5.43 Subodh Ray’s Durga pantheon in different Kathakali dance postures and costume at the Suruchi Sangha Puja, New Alipore, 2003

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5.44 Entrance to the Ghana village complex, designed by Partha Chowdhury, at the Behala Sahajatri Puja, 2004

The following year, the Kerala wave gave way to an obsession with Africa as the exotic flavour of the season, with several Pujas across the city competing with each other in the presentation of African village complexes and African tribal arts. Here, too, there were a range of specialized choices, authenticated reconstructions and the finest quality of artwork on offer. What best fitted the theme park model was a remake of a Ghana village with brightly painted and decorated thatched huts on the grounds of the Sahajatri Club Puja of Behala. (See 1.43) It presented a wonderful example of the way a densely inhabited neighbourhood space—a small empty plot between rows of houses—could be effectively transformed into an imaginary village site from distant Africa, where viewers entered through a striking painted gateway (see 5.44) into a meandering complex of hutments and read about the region of Sirigu in Ghana and its tradition of wall decorations by poor peasant women that had been recreated here. As explained in his concept note, the main intention

of the designer (one of the many art college trained artists coming into this vocation) was to highlight the aesthetic and creativity of womenfolk that alleviated the acute poverty of village life.41 And it was left to a new generation idol maker to produce Durga iconography that blended with the ambience of this African village. The other African tableaux of that year took us away from the ambience of theme parks into that of art installations. A distinctly primitivist aesthetic linked the African production of the Kankurganchhi Youngster Club, with its stylized motifs and figures in black reed and wood, with the amalgamation of different genres of tribal art—wooden masks, carved bamboo totem poles and painted cloth canopies—that the designer Subodh Ray brought together within an enclosed pavilion at the 25 Pally Club at Khidirpur, at the centre of which he created a primitive Durga pantheon with the look of an old bronze sculpture with a greenish patina. (See 5.45,

the age of the ‘theme’ puja 5.46) It becomes crucial for our concerns to see how two alternate registers of cosmopolitan taste set apart the style of plaster cast replicas of world monuments by suburban pandal makers and set designers from this African art display of Subodh Ray. The artistic credentials of the latter is foregrounded in its choice not to replicate any specific site but to explore instead the broader aesthetics, objects and materials of African primitive art, and the family genealogies that connect the imagery produced by different primitive races of the world.42 The taste for African art was one that would keep reverberating across the festival over subsequent seasons, drawing both reputed and lesser-known artists into the fold. The following year (2005) saw another designer, Amar Sarkar, known for his predilection for the tribal and folk arts, moving from his work with Bastar metal art at the Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja in 2004 to an experiment with a South African village installation at the same site.43 (See 5.47)The viewers were treated here to a spread of brightly painted bold geometric patterns on round hutment walls, converging around carved totem poles, clothed and beaded figures and bamboo structures with drums, leading to the Durga icon that was set up within a similar colourful enclosure.

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others like the recreated Inca archaeological site in the interiors of Haridebpur in 2007. That these deep engagements with ancient world art and civilizations often spring out of obscure, non-elite neighbourhoods of the city is fully in keeping with the social trajectory of the city’s ‘theme’ Pujas, their designer profiles and their publics. It underlines the insistently local and vernacular strains of these dialogues with the global. So it was that a group of young local artists decided in 2007 to profile the art of the ancient Inca civilization in a Puja in the small plot of the 41 Pally Puja of Haridebpur, to rival a display at a neighbouring Puja on the Indus valley civilization. (See 5.48, 5.49) As against the museum-like exposition at the United Club Puja of Paschim Putiary of fibreglass models of enlarged seals, animal and human figures from the Indus valley, synchronized with a stylized relief sculpture of Durga,44 the Inca site at 41 Pally Puja at Haridebpur had a more densely integrated archaeological ambience. Using the Internet as their main resource, these artists produced their own relief carvings of Inca motifs on material simulating granite stone slabs and grafted on Peruvian textile designs in fresco panels they painted around the carvings.

The transnational imaginaries of the contemporary festival have come to revolve around such a primitivist aesthetic, with their compelling modernist overtones— one that transports us from such displays of African tribal art in different sites and different seasons to

That neither the designers nor the club members nor the viewing crowds have ever visited these distant sites does not detract from the credibility of these reconstructions. In the age of the Internet, it is a globally accessible pool of information and downloadable images of world art and monuments that comes to the aid of both these new groups of

5.45 Subodh Ray’s African art tableau, titled ‘Wonder of Primitivism’, at Khidirpur 25 Pally Puja, 2004

5.46 Subodh Ray’s Durga pantheon, with a bronze patina colouring, Khidirpur 25 Pally Puja, 2004

5.47 Amar Sarkar’s South African village tableau at the Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja, 2005

5.48 Recreation of an ancient Inca archaeological site by a team of young artists, 41 Pally Puja, Haridebpur, 2007

5.49 Art of the Indus Valley civilization replicated at the United Club Puja, Paschim Putiary, 2007

the age of the ‘theme’ puja Puja artists and designers and of the older variety of decorator firms, in enabling and authenticating their productions. It is through this route that structures ranging from the fictional Harry Potter castle to the famous Opera House of Paris continue to enter the repertoire of local pandal makers, even as another body of local artists seize the opportunity of a public visual education in the ancient artistic heritage of the Incas, in the Mayan civilization of Mexico, or in the egypt of the Pharaohs. A closer survey reveals distinct differences between older forms of pandal structures and newer forms of ‘theme’ productions. The towering plaster facade of the Paris Opera house (with the rear structures left unclad), put together by a suburban decorator firm in a Salt Lake park, fitted the first category. (See 1.36) Of the second type was the more composite recreation, in an adjacent Salt Lake block, of a Mayan archaeological site by a firsttime Puja designer and his team, who drew his ideas from a Mel Gibson film set among ruined Mayan sites, and painstakingly filled the walls and ceilings enclosure with Mayan figural and animal motifs and the relief design of a Mayan calendar.45 Styles and motifs of ancient world cultures come to be easily morphed on to local uses and iconographies. This is particularly true of the many free-floating citations of egyptian art and architecture in this festival setting. From a giant golden Sphinx that is made to serve the functions of a pandal in the middle of a road, we have seen remakes of egyptian temples, the animal-faced egyptian god Anubis converted into Mahishasur, and metallic gilt-coloured Durgas taking on the costume and headgear of egyptian queens. (See 5.50) An important point to underline here is the undiminished local élan and confidence that spill over from the fabrication of Indian temples and craft villages, into tableaux that recreate African villages or the art of the ancient Incas and egyptians. In these make-believe sites, the exotic global can secure for itself the same niche as the nation’s own art, architectural or craft heritage.

On craft and folk art villages A significant contrast unfolds as we turn to our third, most widely prevalent, tableau type that has come to permeate the contemporary wave of ‘theme’ Pujas. The other face of the vernacular cosmopolitan is the

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5.50 Gilded Durga with an Egyptian style costume and headdress, Hatibagan Sarbojanin Puja, 2007

vernacular ethnic, with its deepening engagement with the many rural and tribal art forms of the nation and the region, the eclectically global set off by a complimentary passion for the intensely local. If, in the staging of world cultures, vernacular talent can be made to simulate the skills of the makers of African totem poles or the relief sculptures of the ancient Incas, without in any way diminishing the effectiveness of the copy, the featuring of the nation’s own village crafts and folk arts have always required the authenticating inputs of persons and products from their original locations. So, while craftsmen from Assam and West Dinajpur in North Bengal could be made to work on bamboo panels and wooden carvings with African designs for the Khidirpur installation of 2004, a remake of a tribal village with Bastar metal statuary or another with Bhil and Gond paintings could succeed only through the performing presence of these folk practitioners. This is where the compulsions of copying and improvisation give way to a preoccupation with the salvage of these dying local art forms and disappearing communities of folk artists.

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5.51 Gateway to a Naga village complex, designed by Amar Sarkar, Ajeya Sanghati Puja, Haridebpur, 2004

The figure of the crafts-person or tribal artist becomes the vital marker of authenticity. Hence, the premium placed by Puja designers on transporting from distant zones various craft and folk communities to perform their skills and produce their wares on site, their presence in the preparation stages being crucial for the making of ‘genuine’ Santhal, Masan, Naga or Gond villages in the heart of the city (example, 5.51) and for locating the familiar forms of Madhubani painting or Orissa patachitras in the particular village milieu from which they have emerged. Hence also the frequently voiced concern of Puja organizers and designers to draw out these tribal communities and their art forms from extinction, and to use the festival as the occasion for providing an economic platform for their work.46 The Pujas have long provided seasonal employment to various groups of artisanal labour, ranging from those who load, mix and knead alluvial clay to those who erect the bamboo and plywood framework of pandals or work on its outer plaster, thermocol or fibreglass decorations, those who may paint the panels on the chalchitra, make different kinds of

ornaments and weapons, or toil at transporting the images from workshops to pandals and from there to the immersion banks. The list is extensive and graded between different categories of skilled and unskilled, rural or semiurban labour. To this group came to be added these folk artists from various pockets of the country, who lend a touch of both the exotic and organic to the production. Brought over to the sites either by artists/designers or by middlemen, these groups find themselves in varying hierarchical relations with the rest of the work force and the key person directing the making of the set. The ease and familiarity with which they interact in these productions depends a lot on whether they are, for instance, Medinipur patuas or Madhubani painters, with a fair degree of exposure to urban publics and markets, or women from a Kutch village who travelled to Kolkata for the first time in 2003 to execute mud and mirror wall decorations in a recreated village at Selimpur. (See 5.52) On this also hinges the opportunity these groups or may not get from the Puja organizers to

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of an uncorrupted and authentic ‘folk’, even as its various forms (painting, music, dance forms or food) are continually reinvented for urban middle class consumption. The city’s burgeoning fashion of folkart Durga Pujas rides triumphantly on this wave, as it has done for more than a decade now—during which we have seen the thatched and storied structure of the Bengali mud hut emerging as a favourite form of pandal architecture, and the template of the small mud-hut village cluster repeating itself across the whole city. (See 5.54, 5.55) To take up the hoarding caption again, we could argue that these villages that crop up throughout the city transcend their ‘fakeness’ by grounding themselves on the ‘true’ ethnicity of the folk communities and art-forms they profile, making the ‘folk’ the central trope of a vernacular design aesthetic. These village sites play a critical role, not merely in staging the pristine aura of folk traditions but also in aesthetically transmuting their motifs and styles into a vocabulary of urban design.

5.52 Folk artist from Kutch at the Selimpur Pally Puja, 2003

stay on through the days of the festival and sell their products to the visiting crowds. It becomes essential at this point to locate this genre of Durga Puja tableaux within the escalating visibility of handicrafts and folk arts in the public life of contemporary India.47 The ‘folklorization’ of urban tastes within the city is now best tracked in the year-round circuit of government-sponsored craft fairs held in the many new permanent fairground complexes in the city. (See 5.53) Two of the most prominent of these are located opposite the Science City on the eastern Metropolitan Bypass, and in the large Central Park at Salt Lake, with the first complex (the Milon Mela grounds) marked out by its village hut-style red-roofed pavilion architecture. We can also track its newer face in a rising trend of locally organized ‘folk’ food, dance and music festivals in neighbourhoods like Behala, Santoshpur or Jadavpur, one of which put a hoarding with the catchy title, Fake noy, Folk (‘Not Fake but Folk’). ‘Fakeness’ finds its powerful counter in the notion

Let us consider some of the ways in which the period’s ‘theme’ Pujas have drawn on this thriving commercial and cultural economy of the ‘folk’. The logic of the market blends here with the pedagogy of taste. Unlike the city’s growing spread of handicraft

5.53 A stall with bamboo and wood carvings at one of the many handicrafts fairs at the Milon Mela fair grounds, opposite Science City, 2008

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in the name of the goddess

5.54 Village hut-style pandal structure, Samaj Sebi Puja, Lake Road, 2002

fairs and emporiums, these Puja tableaux take us from the preparatory workshop to the display stage, allowing us to observe the detailed processes of fabrication that are so crucial to the understanding and appreciation of the final product. There is also a transition here from the particularities of a region, a folk community and its showcased art-forms into the larger design conception of the ‘theme maker’, who in almost all cases takes on the authorial prerogative over the entire production and incorporates the folk style into his own artistic ensemble. We see this process at work within each of the different production formats that designers have evolved over time for this generic form of the folk art tableaux, each with its own registers of ethnicity and artistry. A key designer who first incorporated this folk aesthetic into his authorial style of Puja productions is Amar Sarkar. In the early 2000s, he provided us

with some of the most artistic models of such folk art villages, with their first concentrated locus in the neighbourhood of Behala. What Amar Sarkar brought into vogue was a researched exploration of a specific folk tradition, which would evolve through months of prior fieldwork, searching out communities and their art practices in far-away rural zones. It would culminate in the bringing of a small group of practitioners and their products to the city in the month before the Pujas, when the village would be laid out with the help of other pandalmaking labour and the folk artists would produce their main corpus of site-specific work under his close direction. This became the broad format for the making of most of his village tableaux, whether they featured Madhubani paintings, lacquerpainted clay dolls from south Bengal, the painted and sculpted motifs of the Masan tribes of north Bengal or the art of painted chalchitras associated specifically with the traditional Durga idol.48 (See 5.56) A creative utilization of small spaces and a streamlined architectural design became the hallmark of his productions. Over the years, we saw this form travel from the interiors of Behala to Bosepukur, Santoshpur or Bhowanipur in south Kolkata, and far north to Tala Park at the opposite end of the city. Amar Sarkar emphasized his ‘hands-on’ involvement with many of these craft techniques and the innovations he brought about in the scale and form of the traditional products in collaboration with the crafts-persons. Large life-size painted figures that he

5.55 Village complex with clay pot decorations, designed by Rupchand Kundu, Jatra Shuru Sangha Puja, Garia 2006

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5.56 Pandal architecture with painted chalchitra panels, designed by Amar Sarkar, at the Santoshpur Trikone Park Puja, 2007

inserted into a village ensemble on the craft of lacquer dolls was one such experiment, where he encouraged workers to switch to plaster of Paris and spray paint for this purpose, because their methods of clay firing and melted lacquer paint application on the dolls did not allow for such enlargements in scale. With the metal figures of Bastar, he could introduce his innovations in size and design without departing from the existing techniques, while bringing in here for the first time his own innovative Bastar-style Durga image (one he sculpted in his Behala studio with a team of art students, with the traditional material of straw and clay, and embellished with metallic paint; see 5.57). There are dramatic transitions that his work repertoire often offered within a single Puja site, as at Bosepukur, from the monochromatic effects of the iron statuary of Bastar in 2004 to the burst of colours and angular patterns of South African painted huts in 2005. (See 5.58)

There is also a significant cycle that can be traced in Amar Sarkar’s engagement with folk art, when he returned in 2008 to working on a Madhubani village at the site of the Abasar Club Puja at Bhowanipur, presenting the same Dalit artist group, Urmila Devi and her family, and their particular caste style of Godhna painting, that he had highlighted in 2002 in his prize-winning production at the Barisha Shrishti Puja at Behala. The design aesthetic evolved from an open-air hut complex with painted house fronts to a covered installation centred on a fabricated tree, which made dramatic use of the black and white lines and motifs of the Godhna style, and blended these with the coloured Kachni and Bharni styles of Madhubani paintings on the entrance and walls of the enclosure. (See 5.12, 5.59) Urmila Devi, the designer told us, had in these interim years graduated to greater material prosperity in her hometown and a reputation in the art market, thanks to the exposure

5.57 Amar Sarkar’s clay Durga modelled on Bastar metal sculpture, to be given a metallic sheen, Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja, 2004

5.58 Amar Sarkar’s South African village installation, Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja, 2005

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he first gave her to the Kolkata market, and also because of today’s growing popularity of Godhna styles and motifs among folk art aficionados. Her son Shravan Paswan had also become one of the helpers in all of Amar Sarkar’s Puja productions.49 In the same years, another art school trained artist, Gopal Poddar, brings into play a different working formula for the production of craft and folk art villages—one where the designer operates in the role of impresario, mobilizing crafts-persons and overseers from all over India to work on a series of ethnic art tableaux across the city, handling multiple commissions and craft traditions in a single season. Unlike Amar Sarkar, this designer was seldom available on the production site for interviews, and had little investment in telling us about the extent of his own engagement with the work processes and styles of these craft traditions or with the careers of these crafts-persons. It is more as a mega eventmanager that the name of this designer featured every Puja in our tours of craft villages, showcasing designs and products from all over the country. In 2003, for instance, there were three of his eye-catching folk art displays on view in a stretch from Garia through Selimpur to Hindustan Park—one on the art of patachitras of Raghurajpur in Orissa, another on the mud and mirror wall decorations and Pithora paintings of Kutch in Gujarat, and a third on the styles and motifs of Kalighat painting—with matching Durga imagery produced by Naba Kumar Pal. In subsequent years, we have seen this designer operate both in the smallest of spaces, as in a narrow alley at Hatibagan where he set up in 2007 a village decorated with wooden painted toys (rocking horses and elephants on wheels) made by Gouranga Sutradhar (see 5.60), and within vast open parks, as at FD Block Salt Lake in 2009, where he laid out an elaborate terracotta tile-roofed Ayyanar shrine from Tamil Nadu, surrounded by large terracotta votive statuary of horses, elephants and human figures. (See 5.61) Requiring various categories of workers from Tamil Nadu to work in phases at the Puja site, where a large furnace was created for the baking of sculptures, this became one of Gopal Poddar’s most ambitious productions in this line. Our survey of this production also showed the way this designer

5.59 Amar Sarkar’s new design for a Madhubani village complex at the Abasar Puja, Bhowanipur, 2008

deployed local materials and skills along with those of the featured region. Truck loads of soft Ganges clay were brought in, along with a local terracotta worker from Birbhum to guide the Tamil workers on how to make large sculptures with this alluvial clay. A different group of Tamil artisans were brought to build the temple enclosure with coconut palms and barks, while the work on the tiled terracotta roof was implemented by the workforce of Mondal Decorators who are the regular pandal makers for this Puja.50 Over the years, this designer’s craft repertoire has kept expanding, to include, for instance, the miniature painting traditions of the Kangra valley of Himachal Pradesh, which he had the painters transplant on canvas at the Telengabagan Puja in 2009. Or the art of Jaipur’s famous blue-glazed pottery, which he used within a white fort-like structure at Dumdum Park in 2007, where the goddess group was also given a porcelain look and a mix of a Mughal-Rajput attire. (See 5.62, 5.63) Here, we also got a sense of the kinds of sleek boutique décor that mark out many of these craft displays. As the taste for rural, ethnic chic shapes the work of innumerable Puja designers, individual styles

5.60 Gopal Poddar’s village complex, with wooden rocking horses and toys made by Gouranga Sutradhar, Hatibagan Nabin Pally Puja, 2007

5.61 Ayyanar shrine complex of Tamil Nadu, with large terracotta votive statuary, designed by Gopal Poddar, FD Block Puja, Salt Lake, 2009

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5.62 Gopal Poddar’s white fortress pavilion, decorated with Jaipur blue pottery, Dumdum Park Tarun Sangha Puja, 2007

5.63 Porcelain-look goddess in Rajput attire to match the blue pottery pavilion, Dumdum Park Tarun Sangha Puja, 2007

and conceptions become harder to pull out of the standardized spread of village sets. At the same time, the varieties of vernacular art on offer in these sites keep expanding, ranging from the near-extinct local skills of making goyna-bori to the thriving practice of batik leather-work of Santiniketan, whose samples are to be found throughout fairs and stores in the city. And some of the most commonly circulating folk art-forms of the region—like the patachitras of Medinipur or Raghurajpur in Orissa, the painted wooden puppets of Bardhaman, or the carved bamboo masks and figures of West Dinajpur—find their way each Puja season into newer kinds of architectural settings, pavilion design and material (see 5.64) even as they take on innovative styles and motifs for the larger urban market. The contemporary festival also presents us each year with newer formats of promotion of folk and rural arts—some of which even attempt to entirely do away with the intermediary figure of the designer or ‘theme maker’. Thus, in 2010, we had the instance of an NGO running a self-help organization for the rehabilitation of women from the cyclone-affected areas of the Sunderbans, letting these women take full charge of setting up a Durga Puja at Beleghata, of erecting the pandal and decorating it with their patachitra paintings. The Puja was advertised with the catchy phrase, Swanirbhar Durga (‘Self-reliant Durga’), where the face of a rural woman replaced that of the goddess, and where the premium was on the economic self-reliance of these women and their ability to transform the Durga Puja on their own terms.51

The more pervasive festival trend remains that of designer-led productions, which are equally concerned with bringing the rural craftsperson to the forefront, but aim at incorporating their different skills, work processes and objects within new intricacies of architectural design and thematic conception. The Selimpur Pally Puja of 2007, an amalgamation of craft traditions in different materials (bamboo, cane, jute, reed, wood, baked clay and burnished metal) from nine districts of West Bengal, provides an excellent instance of such a ‘folk aesthetic’. The designer, Tamal Krishna Goswami, an art college alumnus who had been working on Puja sites since the late 1990s, dwelt at length on the name, Shilpayan, that he had given this production.52 His intention was to return the notion of shilpa to its primary association with decorative craftsmanship and artistic skills. He wished to bring back to it the nineteenth century english connotation of ‘art industries’, and harked back to the artist Abanindranath Tagore’s usage of the term to mean a regeneration of village crafts and folk arts. To him, the detailed explanation of this ‘concept’ was as important as his bringing together, for the first time, this range of craft products from both West and east Bengal within a single exposition. From the finely woven cane fencing on the outer walls to the richly carved bamboo poles supporting the open air pavilion, from the giant painted wooden figures lining the pathway to the hanging birds in shola pith and metal dhokra figurines in the central enclosure, we were made aware of all these craft traditions of the state. There were also many of the designer’s

5.64 Pavilion designed with motifs of wooden puppets of Bardhaman on painted flex, Ballygunge Cultural Association Puja on Lake View Road, 2005

5.65 Shilpayan tableau designed by Tamal Krishna Goswami, with the painted wooden Durga, Selimpur Pally Puja, 2007

the age of the ‘theme’ puja innovations to be savoured—like the painted wooden figures of angels, the figural symbolism of the leaves of new plantain trees, and not least of all, a carved and painted wooden relief sculpture of Durga, which was based on the motif of an eighteenth century wooden panel from a temple of Faridpur in east Bengal. (See 5.65) Accessed from the Gurusaday Datta museum of folk arts, the Durga image here was made to be preserved and wound its way into the museum of the Bangiya Sahitya Parishat at the end of the Pujas. It is important to see how, in many of these productions, the ethnicity and skills of the of the rural crafts-person comes to be subtly displaced on to the figure of the designer. On the one hand, the designer is often barely separable from the different groups of craftsmen who are brought to work on site to handle particular materials and objects. On the other hand, he emerges in the role of the supercraftsman who seeks out his alternative vocation as artist and designer, without giving up the indigenous

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craft idioms that define his style. It is in this process of metamorphosis of the folk into fine art and design that the city’s phenomenon of ‘theme’ Pujas can be seen to find its prime momentum. What unfold are a series of transferences and manoeuvres that enable many craft and folk practices to enter the vocabularies of contemporary art, even as it propels several modern artists to enact the persona of the primitive image maker. Puja designing becomes thus a prime field for the nurturing of a contemporary urban folk aesthetic. Like the folk forms and artisanal skills they subsume, these Puja tableaux too struggle to secure their identity as ‘art’: an identity that is more easily claimed than sustained, and constantly needs to be boosted by media publicity, corporate sponsorship, and connoisseur tastes. The next chapter takes on more centrally this coveted yet contested designation of Durga Puja ‘art’ to see how it inflects the careers of a selection of contemporary Puja designers of varying artistic and social stature.

Notes 1 A large body of scholarly writing exists on the pedagogic and institutional obsession of victorian england and nineteenth century colonial administrators with Indian industrial arts and design. See, for example, Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977, pp. 221–51; Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New Indian Art, pp. 57–68; Saloni Mathur, India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, pp. 1–79. Two recent key books in this field are Arindam Datta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of its Global Reproducibility, London: Routledge, 2007 and Abigail McGowan, Crafting the Nation in Colonial India, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 2 Tapati Guha-Thakurta, ‘visualising the Nation: The Iconography of a “National Art” in Modern India’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, nos. 27–28, March 1995, pp. 29–37; R. Siva Kumar, Santiniketan: Growth of a Contextual Modernism, New Delhi: NGMA, 2007; Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the AvantGarde, 1922–1947, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 78–99. 3 Ambar Basu, ‘A Guide for Pandal Hoppers’, The Telegraph,

Calcutta, 7 October 1997, refers to a series of these village displays using earthen lamps, Bankura terracotta sculptures or Purulia Chhau masks at a cluster of south Kolkata Pujas, and cites also modern art innovations, blending Rabindranath’s love songs with modern sculptures and paintings, at the Telengabagan Sarbojanin Puja. 4 Anjan Mitra’s Kolkata o Durgapujo, written from the perspective of an architect, looks particularly at the transformed spatial morphology of the city during the festival. It offers a series of small cameos of little neighbourhood Pujas of south, north and east Kolkata, their amateur artists and designers, and the seasonal inflow of rural labour and crafts-persons, helping to lay some of the trails of our field research. It was a sign of its times that transcribed english excerpts of this book, with the photographs in colour, were put to use in a promotional booklet on the Pujas published by the cellphone service provider, Hutch: Kolkatar Pujo, Hutchinson Telecom east Limited, Kolkata, 2004. 5 Ibid., pp. 59–103. 6 The Barisha Shrishti Puja of 2002, with its recreated Madhubani village, became a foundational site of our study, leading our research team to first take into account

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in the name of the goddess the new visual aesthetics and ethnography of such Puja venues. This is where we conducted one of our earliest long interviews of our Durga Puja Project on 19 September 2002, with the Puja committee members, with Amar Sarkar, foremost of the period’s new Puja designers, and with Urmila Devi and her family of Madhubani painters from the Jitawarpur village, Darbhanga district, Bihar, who told us about the ‘Godhna’ style of paintings of their lower caste group. This Puja forms the first case study of my article, ‘From Spectacle to Art’, pp. 62–4.

7 Interview with Badal Bhattacharyya, Chief Organizing Secretary, College Square Puja, 13 September 2006. 8 Ibid. 9 In our interviews with Puja committee members, 2006– 2007 onwards, there was repeated talk of the importance sponsors were placing on the adherence of Pujas to the various municipal and environmental regulations to establish their eligibility for awards. In October 2008, the Behala Club Puja organizers showed me an example of one such organized portfolio, with all the municipal certificates of permission clearances placed in transparent folders and enclosed with its applications for different awards. 10 Interview with Surojit Ghosh of Base Services, organizers of the Snowcem (Pratidin and Sreeleathers) ‘Pujo Perfect’ awards contest, 18 September 2006. He said that it was usually his job to conduct interviews with various people involved in a Puja, and that it was the first time he was serving as a respondent. Then a decade old, these Pratidin awards had largely modelled themselves on the Asian Paints ‘Sharad Samman’, placing the same emphasis on the ‘fairness’ and intricacies of the strategies it used for arriving at the final shortlist of 10 Pujas across different zones of the city. Aligned with a reputed company like Snowcem, this spokesman also took pride in the high quality and unbiased ‘scientificity’ of its selection process, which he said was carried out exclusively by artists and art college students. 11 Ibid. 12 This point frequently came through in our interviews between 2007 and 2009 with the organizers of Pujas in localities which came into the ‘theme’ circuit only in these later years. For example, the Santoshpur Lake Pally Puja in 2008, which rued its earlier lack of success with ‘theme’ Pujas and made a new launch that year with a child-art installation by designer Sushanta Pal; or the Rajdanga Naba Uday Sangha in Kasba, which in 2008 had built up adequate resources to commission the artist Bhabatosh Sutar to design their Pujas for the next three years. 13 While I freely move between the designations of ‘artists’ and ‘designers’, the latter is the one that lends itself best to this vocation. It can accommodate both those with established careers as ‘artists’ who take on this seasonal

work and a host of others coming out of other livelihoods in interior design, commercial art and crafts. 14 So it was with the Chakraberia Sarbojanin Puja of 2003, where artist Uma Siddhanta featured the craft of Bengal’s village boatmen with her own sculpted Durga image. After designing several Durgas for the Bakulbagan Puja (in 1999, 2001 and 2005), when Dipali Bhattacharya in 2011 undertook a different order of a modernist art installation on environmental pollution, using vast masses of discarded metal junk at a neighbouring Puja site of the Abasar Club (see 6.70), the laborious work of assembling the industrial junk and executing the installation was left entirely to a group of her art college male students. 15 Samir Aich is said to combine his Puja designing with ‘avant-garde art works for advertising and futuristic sets for theatre productions’. Susmita Saha, ‘Designs on You…Idol Worship’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 20 October 2007. See also Anjan Mitra, Kolkata o Durgapujo, pp. 81–3. 16 Interview with Gautam Basu at his studio in Tollygunge, 18 December 2002. 17 The artists being referred to here are Ramkinkar Baij, Ganesh Pyne and his lesser-known elder brother Kartick Pyne, father and son Prahlad and Prakash Karmakar, and Ganesh Haloi. Questions of caste identities and hierarchies have long remained an elided issue in the sociology and politics of Bengal. For a brief statement and debate on this, see Anjan Ghosh, ‘Cast(e) out in West Bengal’, Seminar, A symposium on caste, race and the dalit question, 508, December 2001;‘Rethinking West Bengal’s caste-free status’, Media Perspectives, A blog for discussions on media, political and cultural issues of South Asian and international significance, Tuesday, 20 March 2007. 18 Discussed in Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art, pp. 42–43. 19 It is hard to come by any historical or contemporary survey of the changing social backgrounds of art college students in Bengal, or in other parts of India. It is telling that a recent important introspection among artists and art teachers on the afterlife of colonial art education and the problems facing different art colleges in India (Varta, Discussing Art, vol.3, No.1, 2011, published by Akar Prakar, Kolkata; Art education Special, guestedited by Indrapramit Roy) raises several critical concerns about curriculum, thrusts of classroom practice and the moulding of future artistic careers. But it carries few references to the underprivileged caste and class backgrounds of the majority who have been coming into art colleges in the country. The social question of who are opting for livelihoods in art and who are able to most successfully climb the rungs of the profession is seldom discussed. My sociology of art college students in Kolkata

the age of the ‘theme’ puja is impressionistic, and based on conversations with artists and art teachers, especially with Dipali Bhattacharyya, a long-time teacher and then Officer-in-Charge of the Government School of Arts and Crafts, Kolkata, during July and September 2011.

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display using gourd shells painted with patachitras. What they undertook in 2007 was seen by them as their most ambitious and successful ‘art’ venture—one that brought a slew of awards and made the 41 Pally Puja the ‘Model Puja’ of the year atThe Telegraph ‘True Spirit’ awards.

20 Report in The Telegraph, Calcutta, 25 October 2001.

28 Anjan Mitra, Kolkata o Durgapujo, pp. 106–07.

21 A full list of awards, awardees and judges, from 1985– 2005, is circulated by the Asian Paints ‘Sharad Samman’ campaign.

29 Amit Chaudhuri, Calcutta: Two Years in the City (New Delhi: Penguin, 2013), p. 243.

22 This Goutam Ghosh production of 2009, titled ‘Prakriti’, at the Badamtala Ashar Sangha Puja, Kalighat, advertised the names of Ujjwal Chakrabarty as ‘art director’, Tarun Purakait and Suraj Bhattacharyya in ‘visualization and execution’ (rupayan) and Gorachand Pal and sons for the pratima. Given the importance of the film director here, what was not discussed at the time was the extent to which this idea of a pandal in the shape of a vast bird’s nest was pirated from a similar experiment with a bird’s nest that was put up the previous year (2008) by a lesserknown Puja designer, Nirmal Malik, at the adjacent Puja site of 66 Pally, Kalighat.

31 Jean Baudrillard, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’, Selected Writings, edited and Introduced by Mark Poster Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988, p. 167.

23 This is the case, for instance, with the designer Sushanta Pal, whose Durga Puja installations never carry the name of Srinath Banerjee, who has made the carefully synchronized Durga Puja images for many of his productions in recent years. The relationship between the designer and the idol maker here is not too different from that which existed between the artists at the Bakulbagan Puja during the 1980s and the idol maker Prafulla Pal of Patuapara. Srinath Banerjee does not fit the same bill of a traditional mritshilpi, but he functions in much the same capacity of producing an image to the exact design of Sushanta Pal, upto the final layering of clay, leaving the painting and detailing to be done by Sushanta Pal and his team of art college students. 24 A low-profile graphic designer, who keeps himself in the background, Anirban Das came into this work towards the end of the 2000s. From the hoarding of 2009, which advertised his solo production at Survey Park at Santoshpur, he moved during 2010–2011 to the north Kolkata Pujas of Hatibagan and Manicktala. 25 ‘An ode to oddity this autumn’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, Mahasaptami Guide, 2 October 2003; ‘Towels to Soaps, all adorn Ma’, Hindustan Times, Kolkata, Puja Special, 30 September 2003. 26 The Telegraph, Calcutta, 7 October 2003. 27 Interview with Chanchal Dey and Debnath Ray, the two young local designers of the Inca art pavilion at 41 Pally Club Puja, Haridebpur, 17 October 2007. Graduates of the Government Art College, Kolkata, these artists had formed a design agency to do commissioned work for interior design and outdoor landscaping. They had first worked at this neighbourhood Puja in 2004, presenting a folk art

30 Swati Chattopadhyay, Unlearning the City, pp. 228–229.

32 Ibid., p. 171. 33 Interview with Tapas Kharati and members of the Beltala Sarbojanin Durgotsab Committee at the Puja site at the vidyasagar colony, Beltala, 23 October 2004. 34 Interview with designer Bandhan Raha and a member of the Puja committee, Soumitra Bose, at the Babubagan Puja site, 13 October 2004. 35 Both members of this artisanal team, Parimal Pal and Gopal Bhaskar, would move on in the next years to becoming independent Puja designers. In the latter half of the 2000s, Parimal Pal was both designing entire Pujas at his studio in Baghbazar, and making his name at some of the most innovatively conceived ‘art’ Durgas on the scene. (example. 4.38, 5.19) In 2012, Gopal Bhaskar (whose title means ‘sculptor’, and who comes from a hereditary practice of carving and modelling) was working out of both Bardhaman and a workshop on the fringes of the city at Garia, and had ‘authored’ a wooden sculpture of the goddess for the Labony housing block Puja of Salt Lake, that was sold off after the Pujas to a film and television studio at Joka. 36 Dipak Ghosh’s work is tracked through several interviews taken with him over successive seasons at different Puja sites—at the Jodhpur Park Puja on 25 September 2003; at the Suruchi Sangha Puja, New Alipore, on 4 October 2004 and on 21 September 2006; and at the 95 Pally Puja, Jodhpur Park and the Tridhara Sammillani Puja, Monoharpukur Road, on 8 September 2009. 37 He scoffed at the way many Puja designers ‘now think themselves to be Satyajit Ray, trying to take full command over lights, idols, pandals’. ‘It is not possible’, he believed, ‘for any one person to do all this. Besides it creates resentment amongst the traditional workers, who feel they have been doing their work since ages… Why should “designers”, even if they are art college graduates, lord over them?’ Interview with Dipak Ghosh, Jodhpur Park Puja, 25 September 2003. 38 Interview with Dipak Ghosh, Suruchi Sangha Puja, 21 September 2006. 39 Leaflet handed out by the Puja committee, ‘Tridhara

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in the name of the goddess Sammilanir Ebarer Nibedan: Daru Shilpey Dravid Sthapatya (Padmanabhapuram Palace)’, September 2008. Interviews with Sanatan Rudra Pal at his Ultadanga Studio, during August–September 2003, where we saw his Durga group in Kathakali costume in different stages of completion; and with Subodh Ray at the Suruchi Sangha Puja, New Alipore, 23 September 2003. Interview with the designer of this Ghana village complex, Partha Chowdhury, at the Behala Sahajtri Puja, 6 October 2005. The indebtedness of modern man to this legacy of his primitive ancestors was presented as the key concept of this production, with the Bengali title Adimata Ajo Bismay best translated as ‘The Wonder of Ancient Primitivism’. Puja Brochure of 2004 presented by Subodh Ray’s art studio, Sharad Anganey—Banglar Mati-Prayas 2004. Interview with Amar Sarkar at his own art studio in Behala, 19 September 2004, and at the site of his South African village tableau at the Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja, 10 October 2005. Leaflet of the United Club Durga Puja, 5/46 Paschim Putiary, Kolkata 700041, ‘Return of Indus valley Civilization—Durga Puja 2007’. The Puja pandal was said to resemble the remains of the Great Bath of Mohenjodaro, with the pavilion filled with enlarged fibreglass replicas of excavated sculptures, seals and figurines from Indus valley sites. It was planned and executed by an amateur artist, Mohit Kumar Pal. Interview with Debashis Ray, member of the United Club Paschim Putiary Puja committee, 17 October 2007. Interview with a Puja committee member of the HA Block Puja, Salt Lake, and the designer Chandan Das, a self-taught artist from Kanchrapara, 18 September 2009. This has been a persistent concern of Puja designers throughout the period of our study. The compelling urge to salvage various tribal and folk art forms, by profiling both the practitioners and their arts, holds together the work of an entire gamut of older and younger Puja designers, such as Amar Sarkar, Subodh Ray, Gopal

Poddar, Kamaldeep Dhar, Nirmal Malik, Tamal Krishna Goswami or Anirban Das. To pick out here those who have developed out of this pervasive trend a distinctive craft ideology and a special folk aesthetic for the designs of goddesses and pavilions has not been easy. 47 Among recent writings that lay out the historical antecedents of this trend in colonial India, and the shifting nationalist discourses on handicrafts, folk and tribal arts over the early and mid twentieth century, see, Abigail McGowan, Crafting the Nation in Colonial India; and Rituparna Basu, The Rediscovery of Folk Art and Crafts in Bengal: Reappraisal of a Twentieth Century Endeavour, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History, Calcutta University, 2008. An important essay that highlights the configuration of this trend in post-Independence India is Paul Greenough, ‘Nation, economy and Tradition Displayed: The Indian Crafts Museum, New Delhi’, in Carol A. Breckenridge, ed., Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in Contemporary India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996. 48 Interviews with Amar Sarkar, along with different groups of folk artists and student helpers working under his directions, at the Barisha Shrishti Puja, 19 September 2002; at the Santoshpur Trikone Park Puja, 2 October 2003 and 15 September 2006; at his own art studio at Behala, 14 September 2004; at the Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja, 10 October 2005; and at the Abasar Club Puja, Bhowanipur, 13 September 2008. 49 Interview with Amar Sarkar and Urmila Devi at the Abasar Club Puja, Bhowanipur, 13 September 2008. 50 Interview with the Puja committee members of FD Block Puja, Salt Lake, 29 September 2009. 51 The hoarding read Swanirbhar Durga—Gram Banglar Meyera Miley Durga Pujo Paltey Dilo! (‘Self-Reliant Durga—Women of rural Bengal transform the Durga Pujas!’). What the venture paradoxically underscored was the general absence of women, both rural and urban, within the existing trades of idol and pandal making and in the new professions of Puja designing. 52 Interview with Tamal Krishna Goswami at the Selimpur Pally Puja site, 23 September 2007.

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Demands and Dilemmas of Durga Puja ‘Art’ In no other sphere do we find the category of ‘art’ so widely stretched. The nomenclature, and the aspirations that go with it, spill across a wide spectrum of activities, productions and careers that have emerged out of Kolkata’s seasonal graph of festival displays, particularly its spreading repertoire of ‘theme’ Pujas. We find citations of the works of Bengal’s modern ‘masters’—Nandalal Bose, Rabindranath Tagore, Jamini Roy, Ramkinkar Baij, or Ganesh Pyne (see 6.1, 6.2)—in free-floating circulation, alongside the vocabularies of tribal arts and ethnic design. (See 6.3) In the build up to the festival, a variety of Durga-themed exhibitions are also routinely put out each year by museums and art galleries in the city, by the Indian Museum as well as by older and newer art galleries like the Chitrakoot Art Gallery or the Harrington Street Arts Centre, where the art on display ranges from traditional genres of medieval sculpture and painting, folk and ritual art forms to works of contemporary artists.1 This creates a particular synergy between the museum and gallery art that draws on its more initiated public (see 6.4) and the kinds of festival art that spread through the streets of the city for mass-viewing—where the tastes, dispensations and stylistic repertoire of one sphere frequently flow into the other. It is against this canvas of the many overlapping circuits of art production and reception that

permeates the public spheres of the festival that this chapter takes up the thread from the previous one to closely investigate the categories of Durga Puja ‘art’ and ‘artists’. It presents a series of individual designer profiles, picking its selection both from a core group that defined the ‘new wave’ in the early 2000s and remained central to its evolution over the decade, and from a group of later entrants who followed in the path of their predecessors, while often redefining the thrust of their practice.2 In choosing my lineup of Puja artists, I have focused on those who have shown the greatest staying power in the field, with a continuing creative energy that has allowed them to ride the crest over successive seasons. To plot a changing chronology of ‘theme’ Pujas, I have also pushed outwards the boundaries of this social group to bring in another type of designer whose rise to eminence tests the lines of division between art and craftsmanship. If the established worlds of modern art have added prestige to this domain of festival productions, what has more substantively propped it up are a set of other livelihoods in craft making, pandal and pavilion construction, interior decoration, and cinema and television set design, where art school training frequently feeds into these changing occupations. In the first years of the ‘theme’ Pujas, there was a novelty to this figure of the ‘artist’ and distinctiveness to his presence. Over time, the artistic qualification of those taking up commissions for Puja designing becomes as loose

6.1 Panels reproducing Jamini Roy’s paintings, Behala Tapoban Puja, 2006

6.2 Rupchand Kundu’s take on Ramkinkar’s Santhal Family and Mill Call in a Santhal village setting, Dumdum Park Bharat Chakra Puja, 2007

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6.3 Painted clay pot and patachitra décor in a village complex designed by Rupchand Kundu, Jatra Shuru Sangha Puja, Garia, 2006

6.4 Durga sculpture designed with found metal objects by Narayan Sinha, on display at the Harrington Street Arts Centre, October 2011

as the genre of productions themselves, opening the field to new hierarchies and contestations.

Kolkata, in conjunction with Salt Lake and New Town Rajarhat, were offering ‘theme’ or ‘art’ productions. These statistics point to a clear link between the flows of corporate capital and professional artistic enterprise into the festival, suggesting, as I have been arguing, that the new aesthetic ‘zeitgeist’ of the city’s Durga Pujas is inextricably tied to the commercial logistics of the contemporary event.

In October 2010, a lavishly illustrated magazine cover story on Kolkata’s Durga Pujas talked of around 200 established artists and art college graduates ‘infusing a carefully crafted artistic energy’ into that year’s event. The main intention of the feature was to profile on a national forum what it called ‘The Durga Puja Zeitgeist’, a new spirit of the festival that was leaving its spectacular artistic imprint in novel Puja installations across different spaces of the city.3 There were other important statistics that the article provided — that this annual festival in the city was now a Rs. 40 crore industry;4 that there were around 45 different kinds of companies (ranging from multinationals to local electrical manufacturers, including a growing number of print and television media houses) which were pouring their investments into festival coverage, advertising and awards; and that over 1,000 of the 4,500 odd Durga Pujas held in

The same year, we find other newspaper reports pushing against the grain of this equation. Talking of their ‘drift away’ from Puja productions, a group of artists, who had all worked on festival tableaux during the early and mid 2000s, complained about how the obsession of Puja committees with awards and the ‘heat of competition’ (even where they had not enlisted for any of the contests) had soured their work experience. What specially irked them was the presumed right of persons with no ‘appreciation of art’ to dictate terms or offer suggestions on how to design their Pujas, creating situations where

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in the name of the goddess creative practice within this sphere. To whom then, does the field belong? What marks out the ‘greater’ from the ‘lesser’ artists in today’s booming vocation of Puja designing, and what kinds of criteria of discernment are being proposed here that ride above the winning of awards? How are new markers of artistic eligibility and ineligibility being sought out in a sphere that can barely sustain these fine divisions? It is within this shifting temporal grid of new forms of Puja productions, where the categories of ‘theme’ and ‘art’ Pujas will both merge and unmerge, that I wish to place the selected career cameos that follow.

an ‘art’ puja in the wilderness

6.5 Sonajhuri forests, Santiniketan, the site of the Shanibarer Haat and the entrance to the house where the Santhal Durga Puja is held each year.

a sponsor or organizer becomes ‘more adept at talking about art than a professional artist’.5 Such consternation shores up the perennial concern of art worlds about protecting the boundaries of their sphere of professional practice from such unqualified interference. More important, for our context, is the surfacing of another register of contrasts between the period’s indiscriminate spread of ‘theme’ Pujas and the exclusivity of a select repertoire of ‘art’ productions, pitching the notions of ‘theme’ and ‘art’ Pujas on contrary lines. The more it was commented that ‘themes’ rule the market and Puja contests keep multiplying, the less becomes the draw into the field of a different kind of artist. If the one phenomenon (‘theme’ Pujas) is seen as constitutively grounded in sponsorships and awards, the other (the ‘art’ Puja) is held up as a different order of researched creative endeavour, with its makers looking askance at the perfunctory mass production of ‘themes’ by persons without either the professional training or the groundwork that is required. What emerges is an internal splitting of the art profession as it throws itself, with varying intensity, into this unbounded domain of festivity and finds itself struggling to hold on to a notion of ‘true’

Let me begin with a Puja that has consciously distanced itself from the metropolitan setting of Kolkata, and set itself up as a ‘refuge’ from the crowds, clamour and competitions of the city event. The Sonajhuri reserve forest lies 3 kilometres away from the ashram and university precincts of Santiniketan, beyond the Mayurakshi canal, flanking a bird sanctuary, expanses of water, and a cluster of Santhal villages at Ballavpur Danga. While Rabindranath Tagore’s famed ‘Abode of Peace’ still offers an ideal getaway from the bustle of the city (Santiniketan is a three-and-a-half hours car or train ride away), the Sonajhuri forest stands as a further retreat from the built environs, activities, and tourists that now pervade Santiniketan the whole year round. (See 6.5) With holiday resorts, commercial hubs and housing enclaves fast eating into the open countryside around Santiniketan, the Sonajhuri forest range and its tribal village belt still remains relatively unspoilt, even as this area too is fast being inducted into the eco-tourism circuit.6 This forest range now draws its own stream of visitors for the weekly village haat that is held every Saturday evening, with a choice spread of fabric, pottery, jewellery, trinkets, crafts and home-made food, and for a special ‘tribal’ Durga Puja that is conducted every autumn in an artist’s residence on the canal bank. (See 6.6) From the 1990s, these forested outskirts of Santiniketan had begun to attract a few Kolkata

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artistic experimentation and for its metamorphosis into a tribal deity. (See 6.7) In Santiniketan, where no Durga Pujas have been held to date within the campus precincts, in keeping with the ideological aversion to image worship of its Brahmo founders Debendranath and Rabindranath Tagore, the Sonajhuri Durga Puja was particularly well-poised to loosen its Hindu ritual mould and take on the form of a Santhal festival, held during the same season. In the process, it could also establish its distinction from the Durga Pujas of the surrounding areas—the ones held in the main Bolpur town, in the courtyard of the Rajbari at Surul, or in the neighbouring villages of Goalpara or Bhubandanga—and develop its special artistic identity.9 6.6 Inauguration of the Santhal Durga Puja at the Sonajhuri house, with the procession led by Asis Ghosh’s wife, Chitra, 2007. Courtesy: Asis Ghosh

artists who acquired plots of land, built homes and studios, and began to work here in close unison with the Adivasi communities. Among them was Asis Ghosh, a 1983 graduate of the Government Art College, Calcutta, who invested his earnings from the sale of his paintings and trade fair pavilion designing in New Delhi, to reorient his lifestyle and art pursuits in these remote settings.7 It was his brother-in-law Badhan Das, a bohemian artist as deeply invested as him in living and working in this tribal zone, who first mooted the idea of organizing a Durga Puja with the Santhal community at Sonajhuri. This Puja venture comes out of a distinct modernist trajectory of alternative art and rural activism: one with many counterparts in the history of modern Indian art, with some of its best-known precedents coming out of Santiniketan itself and its premier art institution, Kala Bhavan.8 A charismatic art teacher at the Government College of Art, Calcutta (where he himself was a student in the politically turbulent 1960s), Badhan Das had evolved a special profile for the support he extended to folk artists of Bengal, whether they be the patuas of Medinipur or the Santhal woodcarvers of Birbhum. That he chose to channel his commitments into launching a Durga Puja in a location where it could be recast as an Adivasi festival becomes a special point for reflection. Clearly, the iconography of Durga offered great potential for

As is to be expected, a powerful primitivist aesthetic governs each Durga image made at Sonajhuri, just as it defines the look of innumerable other folk-art goddesses that have become the staple of Kolkata’s ‘art’ Pujas. But there are significant differences here that need to be put in place. There is no requirement,

6.7 Goddess group made out of painted cast iron and metal utensils, Sonajhuri Durga Puja 2005. Courtesy: Asis Ghosh

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in the name of the goddess Debipujo’, a name given to it by Badhan Das in the memory of his deceased elder sister. The memorial to his sister is today transformed into a memorial to the artist himself. 10

6.8 The Sonajhuri house and its permanent Durga Puja altar

to begin with, of fabricating a village tableau around the goddess. The Sonajhuri forest and canal makes up the ultimate authentic location, with a permanent Puja altar built into the open verandah of the house on the canal bank. An ornamental terracotta roof plaque and two puppet lions on a platform, where the goddess is set up every year, now marks out the house as primarily a Durga Puja site, (see 6.8) with no-one in full time residence, and the upper floors and a large shed used to store the large dismantled images made over many seasons. Badhan Das never ended up living here for any length of time. Two years after beginning this venture, he died an untimely death in Kolkata in December 2002. His sister and brother-in-law, Chitra and Asis Ghosh, keep the place running from their own home in a nearby village, specially keeping the Durga Puja going on these premises as a poignant memorial to ‘Badhanda’. Every year, during the days of the festival, a large photograph of Badhanda (god-like with his flowing white hair and beard) is placed in a tree grove and decorated with garlands, festoons and lamps to make up a parallel shrine. The image of the dead artist becomes part of the devotional ambience of this forest Puja, as Santhal drumbeats, songs and dances fill the grounds in front of both altars. (See 6.9, 6.10) The Puja is locally called the ‘Hiralini

The first year (2001), Badhan Das sculpted a terracotta goddess with the help of two of his exstudents, Partha Dasgupta and Pallab Das, and had the piece transported from Kolkata to Sonajhuri, with priests brought in from the village of Goalpara to consecrate the image. The following year, with Badhanda already unwell, Asis Ghosh converted his drawing into a wooden sculpture, working on site with locally supplied wood and tribal carvers, leaving the final painting to be done by his brother-in-law. From 2003, it fell to Asis Ghosh and a team of Badhan Das’s students to keep making the Durga images at Sonajhuri—assembling the figures, one year, out of iron utensils and beaten iron sheets with relief patterning and painting; another year, when funds were running low, with woven bamboo and cane. Asis Ghosh developed, in parallel, his own artistic oeuvre of painted wooden and bronze sculptures, resembling Santhal and African tribal art, his work for the art galleries standing in close concordance with the work he offers for this alternative forum of the Santhal festival.11 The involvement of the local Adivasi community with gathering the material and constructing the idol has been central to the hosting of this event. This is one of the ways in which the community has come to regard this as their own Durga Puja, where Santhal groups from several surrounding Birbhum villages congregate to participate in the rituals, perform their songs, dances and sports, sell their wares, partake of a community meal served to them on the main days of the Puja, and even clean up the forest grounds on the last day before they depart. (See 6.11) The Sonajhuri Durgas made from various durable materials are not immersed but recycled over different seasons. This stands out as another feature of the self-styled difference of this Puja. The reasons for the rotation and reuse of images are largely financial. There have never been the kinds of funds at their disposal that would allow them to make fresh sculptures each year with expensive material like polished wood or burnished metal. Asis Ghosh also

6.9 Festooned photograph of Badhan Das at a tree grove at the Sonajhuri Durga Puja, 2005. Courtesy: Asis Ghosh

6.10 Santhal dancers at the Sonajhuri Puja, 2007. Courtesy: Asis Ghosh

6.11 Cleaning up of the forest precincts after the Pujas, Sonajhuri, 2007. Courtesy: Asis Ghosh

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in the name of the goddess the Santhals and Bauls of the region, making up a select public for an event that has today become one of Santiniketan’s special attractions — not unlike the winter art fair (Nandan Mela) at the Kala Bhavan grounds that presage the institution’s biggest mass cultural and commercial event of the Poush Mela. This selectivity of its producers and publics, drawn from a tendentious mix of tribal and modern art worlds, is what makes for the exclusive image of this Sonajhuri Puja.12

6.12 Goddess group made with woven cane and bamboo, reembellished for the Durga Pujas of 2008

believes that the best way to revitalize the preserved images, stored around the house, is to keep altering and adding new elements to them each season, and rendering them fresh for a new festival. So, in 2008, they were embellishing the Durga group made from woven cane baskets with freshly painted bamboo panels and new decorations on the body of the images. (See 6.12) In sharp contrast to the Kolkata Pujas, the Sonajhuri event stands shorn of all commercial trappings and publicity. There are no sponsors, advertisers or award givers here, nor a Puja committee with an annual budget of several lakhs. Nor is there any wish for these. To bring in corporate funds and sponsors, Asis Ghosh feels, would sully the character of this venture and take away from it the ethos of a pure communitarian tribal festival. With depleting individual donations from friends and family, finances are nonetheless a constant source of worry for the artists working here — with Asis Ghosh depending mainly on his own artists’ community to pitch in every year with money and help in making the goddess or the pandal where the community meal is served and jatra and Baul performances are held in the evenings. Over the years, groups of metropolitan visitors and art-lovers have come to converge on this forest Puja, alongside

We have here a utopian model of a pure ‘art’ Puja, steeped in an idiom of primitivism that flows from the image of the goddess into the rituals that are performed around her and the surrounding environment. It seems to fit perfectly into the groove of a creative and communitarian event, its location providing it with its main resources and sealing it off from all that it wishes to keep away. Ventures such as these, in their chosen position on the ‘edge’, allow us to think of why their form and intent cannot be played out within the main body of the city’s festival. It can only stand as a one-off venture, repeatable in similar settings where modern and tribal art worlds can come together, but with little potential for becoming a workable template for Kolkata’s growing stock of ‘art’ Pujas. My purpose in beginning with this example is to position it in its separateness from the main resonance of the city’s ‘art’ Puja phenomenon— where the very notion of a ‘phenomenon’ requires that more and more artists, designs and endeavours must keep growing within it, that forms of individuality and newness must emerge out of stiff competition, and that creativity must actively seek out, rather then reject, its commercial supports.

the artist as puja designer Sanatan Dinda We could not think of a setting more radically different from the reserve forests of Sonajhuri than the dingy alleys of Hatibagan from where Sanatan Dinda emerged to fame for his Durga Puja productions. Equally pointed are the contrasts in the modes of positioning and publicity of his Pujas. Sanatan Dinda offers us our best example of the new-age ‘star’ in this field of festival art, with

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6.13 Puja banner advertising Sanatan Dinda, his Durga image of 2006 and the Nalin Sarkar Street Puja, Hatibagan, 2007

a Durga Puja career that stretches from the end of the 1990s into the present, and a parallel career as a gallery artist that began to take off in the 2000s. There is a palpable excess in his self-projections — whether in his pontifications about his art, creative practice and cosmic conceptions of the goddesses; in his mouthful of references to Dadaism, Surrealism or Pop Art, all of which he claims to draw on; or in the flashy sartorial styles he revels in. A carefully cultivated image has been all-important for Sanatan Dinda, as he has moved from being known mainly as a Puja designer in this north Kolkata locality to becoming an artist at large with a growing success with art galleries and sales of his paintings.13 In 2007, the year he completed a decade of his career in Puja designing, the artist’s face was prominently on display, side by side with the image of his award-winning Durga of the previous season,

on the publicity banner of the Nalin Sarkar Street Puja of Hatibagan.14 (See 6.13) Until then, in the thickening topography of the city’s Puja hoardings, never before had the face of the designer been featured alongside his name and work, and seldom had we seen a promotional caption that played a clever pun around the name of the designer. The term sanatan, which refers to the very ancient and pure in a religious tradition, was used by the advertisers to mark out a particular legacy of Durga Puja creations as well as this artist as the special pride of the Nalin Sarkar Street Puja. This was also possibly the only Puja in the city where private art galleries from New Delhi and Kolkata had avowedly come on to the scene as sponsors. The artist told us that a few individual buyers of his paintings had also contributed funds that year for his Puja, and parts of his season’s installation would be given to these galleries and collectors. Sanatan Dinda was

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in the name of the goddess for the 25th anniversary celebrations of the award. That year, around the Nalin Sarkar Street Puja site that had, for two years running, been conspicuously devoid of his seasonal art, hung another banner with Sanatan Dinda’s name and face, announcing this time the forthcoming solo exhibition of his paintings in Kolkata, Mumbai and London.17 By the next year, however, he was back with aplomb on the hoardings of the Nalin Sarkar Street Puja, which made a special point of marking his absence from the scene in 2008 and 2009 and his grand return in 2010. (See 6.14)

6.14 Banner announcing Sanatan Dinda’s return to the Nalin Sarkar Street Puja, Hatibagan, 2010

out to drive home his hard-won identity as an ‘artist’, strewing his Puja neighbourhood with its imprints.15 That same year, he announced that he would stop designing Pujas for a variety of reasons. Committed since 2003 to this single Puja on Nalin Sarkar Street at Hatibagan, and to the narrow alley that it has for its grounds, he felt unfairly hemmed in by the many police and court restrictions on the blocking of roads that were curtailing the already little space that he had at his disposal to put up his architectural pavilions. Feeling these pressures from 2005, he said he refused to relocate his productions elsewhere even if it meant giving up his Puja endeavour. Sanatan Dinda’s ties to this one location and Puja singled him out among all his peers in this field of work, and provided a unique site-specific dimension to his artistic profile in the city.16 A major factor behind his announced withdrawal from his Puja work was also the pride and security of his growing status as an artist — a position from where he felt he could turn to his art as a lucrative livelihood, and think of his Puja productions as work he did out of pure passion, for the sake of the masses whose tastes have been transformed by the kinds of creativity they encounter within the festival. In 2009, he emerged in a new role in the festival city as a judge in the final rounds of the Asian Paints ‘Sharad Samman’,

Sanatan Dinda’s recounting of his own past has subtly shifted over the different years we have interviewed him, each retelling inflected by his changing stature as an artist. But the one constant point of reference has been his humble social background and his years of growing up in the slums of Kumartuli, where his father ran a local ration store. Here, he learnt to make his own idols by watching the work of senior mritshilpis and found in their image-making process the main inspiration for his own dabbling with sculpture. His parental home has remained at Kumartuli, while he came to live and work out of Hatibagan, bought his own apartment and set up his studio at neighbouring Goabagan, and more recently acquired a large studio-cum-residence at one of the most exclusive high-rise apartment enclaves on the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass. Sanatan kept dwelling on his proverbial ‘rags to riches’ story. He bristled at the memory of being labelled a ‘patua’ (folk painter) who had turned to idol making because he could not become a modern artist, by the same people who later jumped on to the bandwagon of Puja designing. That he could not afford to enroll in the sculpture department at the Government Art College and had to specialize instead in painting is another frequent theme of recall. And he also constantly stresses the fact that it is because he has risen from the ‘grassroots’ that he has been specially committed to offering his art to the common public through the forum of the Durga Pujas. Graduating from the Government Art College in 1992, venturing into solo and group exhibitions of his paintings and sculptures, Sanatan Dinda began

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installations becomes the distinguishing mark of Sanatan Dinda’s Pujas, providing us with a powerful instance of the way the ‘religious’ becomes an integral part of an ‘art’ production.

6.15 Sanatan Dinda (right) working on the figure of the goddess inside the pandal site, Nalin Sarkar Street Puja, 2005

designing the Hatibagan Sarbojanin Puja of his neighbourhood in 1998. He took his cue from an innovative pavilion that one of his seniors from the Art College had created for that Puja the previous year, bringing to it the coveted Asian Paints ‘Sharad Samman’ award. It is significant to note the early ‘craft’ orientations of his pavilion designs, featuring Madhubani painting, the appliqué cloth work of Pipli, or the painted wooden dolls of Bardhaman. The foregrounding of the ‘conceptual’ comes about, in his case, with his deepening engagement with Tantrik art and philosophy, and with the historical iconography of the Devi—concentrating his attention on the form of the goddess which he has always sculpted himself and maintained as the centre piece of each of his Puja installations. (See 6.15) Prior research on the sculptural forms of the goddess in Indian art and field visits to different shrines in India became the prime markers of authenticity of his work. Sanatan Dinda’s goddesses became his speciality, each one emerging out of a closely studied corpus of the Hindu and Tibetan Buddhist pantheon of eastern India. (See 6.16) His forte also came to lie in the fabrication of shrine-like structures in the narrow lane of the Puja site and in the creation of the ambience of an inner temple sanctum leading up to an image of the goddess that often simulated the look of a worshipped stone or metal icon. (See 5.29, 5.30) The infusion of a heavy dose of the ‘spiritual’ into his images and

The smallness of the spaces and budgets he worked with made each of Sanatan Dinda’s productions archetypal of the ‘art’ Pujas of the period. In 2003, with his relations with the Hatibagan Sarbojanin Puja Committee embittered by unpaid dues, Sanatan shifted his allegiance to a neighbouring puja on Nalin Sarkar Street on a similar narrow alley — which remained thereafter his sole chosen turf, where he carried over the same aesthetics and ambience of his Devi worship. (See 6.17) Over successive Puja seasons, thereafter, we see this single Puja site hosting the now branded art productions of Sanatan Dinda. Each year, the narrow length of the alley has been put to use to conceive of temple or pagoda-like structures, with an open corridor of decorated walls leading to a towered spire above the goddess, with fabricated motifs in plaster, thermocol and fibre

6.16 Sanatan Dinda’s Durga conceived in clay in the form of a Tibetan bronze sculpture, Nalin Sarkar Street Puja, 2006

6.17 The first Puja pavilion designed by Sanatan Dinda at the Nalin Sarkar Street Puja, 2003

6.18 Our touring team posing at the open corridor pavilion at the Nalin Sarkar Street Puja, 2006

6.19 Awards and banners, Nalin Sarkar Street Puja venue on Ashtami night, 2011

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covering the bamboo and plywood scaffolding. (See 5.6) Over the years, geometric Tantra motifs, and swirling coils of stems have become typical features within this scheme of architectural décor. (See 6.18) A special investment in ‘themed’ remixes of chants and devotional music to heighten the spiritual atmosphere inside the pavilion is also a repeated feature of his works. And a steady flow of awards brought a dense cluster of designer banners and commercial signage that became an integral feature of the visual topography of this Puja site. (See 6.19) Sanatan’s Durgas have been stand-alone figures, with the goddess’ accompanying children (the deities of Ganesh, Lakshmi, Saraswati and Kartick) reduced to small figures on the framing arch or on the lower pedestal. His Durga of 2010 was bigger, more vibrant and youthful than all his earlier creations. With a dramatically enlarged face and eyes and a spread of ten outsized hands, she rose like an animated figure out of her base. (See 6.20) Unwavering in his emphasis on the deep religiosity of every one of his Durga images, on the morning of Mahalaya, Sanatan was perched high on a ladder, bringing his goddess to life by painting on her eyes to the sound of specially recorded scriptural chants in a choreographed spiritual ambience. The much awaited and photographed event of the chakkshudan (painting of eyes) of the deity had moved out of the idol-making hubs of Kumartuli to the artist’s open studio on Nalin Sarkar Street. The goddess’ abode he designed that year was also striking. Instead of a closed architectural structure, he introduced a crescendo of swirling silver-painted lotus stems and buds, converging in a central petal-shaped cupola, bringing an elegant flavour of Art Nouveau design amidst the drab house fronts of the alley. (See 6.21) In 2011, Sanatan undertook one of his most extravagant Puja productions to date, transforming the alley into a massive boat covered with blue and silver fishing nets and hanging window frames, leading to a large vertical monolith with laser lighting effects. The theme music playing here was the song Moner Manush by Lalan Fakir, the mystic bard of rural East Bengal, to match the symbolic setting of a boat on a river. We also now find him inserting his gallery art into his Puja installations, in the form

6.20 Sanatan Dinda’s Durga , still to be completed, Nalin Sarkar Street Puja, 2010

of fibreglass sculptures with intricately embossed surfaces—a large gesturing hand, a standing male nude, and in the final sequence, a hanging bronzetinted fibreglass figure of the goddess breaking out of a wall, suspended above a prostrate demon conceived again as a male nude. (See 6.22) The artist was taking all the liberties he wished with the iconography of the goddess, now that he had achieved its metamorphosis into an artwork and secured it with his signature and date. But how effectively, we may ask, does such an artwork tag apply in this sphere of reception? Its main significance lay in the large numbers of awards that rolled in and the even larger crowds that clogged the Nalin Sarkar Street Puja. Inside that claustrophobic space, viewers were instructed not to photograph the goddess but to avail of different sized picture

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in the name of the goddess been working more and more with non-immersible material like fibreglass, with each of his signaturestyle Durgas taking on the aspirations of a signed, collectible artwork intended for buyers and gallery owners. With each season have come newer social venues and greater artistic self-projection. In 2012, as he carried his work into the posh neighbourhood of Jodhpur Park, he performed his line drawings on the pavilion walls in the style of M.F. Husain in a production he dedicated to the deceased veteran, and embellished with another of his signed Durga sculptures. (See 6.23, 6.24) Looking back on his career, Sanatan Dinda would like to see himself as sailing out of art college in 1992 into the full flow of success as a painter. His reluctance to acknowledge that this long repertoire of Durga Puja designing is what has created his renown in the city becomes crucial to his artistic self-positioning—it is what boosts his sense of his singularity vis-à-vis his many other art-college trained colleagues in this sphere of practice.

6.21 Sanatan Dinda’s Art Nouveau pavilion, Nalin Sarkar Strret Puja, 2010

prints of the image being sold outside for Rs. 10– 30. The artwork here was being absorbed within a long-standing practice, that goes back to the sale of photographed images of Ramesh Pal’s Durgas during the 1960s and 1970s, which this Puja committee revived in the mid 2000s with pictures of Sanatan Dinda’s award-winning creations. In this milieu, it was impossible to discern whether these pictures were selling as works of art, as icons, as festival touring souvenirs, or as a jumble of all these. None of this, however, compromises Sanatan Dinda’s standing as the artist in the city’s Durga Pujas. Especially important is the emphasis he places on the non-commercial and purely artistic nature of his Puja productions. From the time in 2002, when he complained about the Hatibagan Sarbojanin Puja committee snatching away his prize money while still owing him Rs. 25,000 for his previous year’s work, he soon arrived at a position where he could support the entire 18–19 lakhs budget of the Nalin Sarkar Street Puja from the sale of his paintings. In recent years, as he has moved far out of his home turf to the new high-budget Pujas of south Kolkata, he has

Bhabatosh Sutar Our next designer, younger by some years to Sanatan, emerges as a sharply contrasted personality. Reticent, shy, only gradually drawn into conversation about himself and his artistic conceptions for the Pujas, Bhabatosh Sutar’s long-sustained profile as one of the city’s most talented Durga Puja artists has clear parallels to that of Sanatan Dinda.18 As does the story of the acute poverty and struggle that lie behind his carefully wrought success in this profession. For the past few years, Bhabatosh Sutar has been an active member of an environmental art collective that has now set itself up as an artists’ residential community over a sprawling expanse of land at Khudirampally, on the rural margins of Sarsuna in Behala. (See 6.25) Including residences alongside large painting and sculpture studios, the space has grown to be a thriving hub of art classes, exhibitions, workshops and collective art activity in this inner suburb.19 In his aspiration to pursue a full-time artistic career, he looks on his Durga Puja commissions not only as an integral part of his creative practice but also as a key source of his livelihood. His earnings from the three Puja commissions he takes on each year provides the main support for his other experimental art,

6.22 Fibreglass sculpture at the entrance of Sanatan Dinda’s boat pavilion, Nalin Sarkar Street Puja, 2011

6.23 Sanatan Dinda’s signed fibreglass Durga, 95 Pally Puja, Jodhpur Park, 2012

6.24 Pavilion designed by Sanatan Dinda as his tribute to M.F. Husain, 95 Pally Puja, Jodhpur, 2012

6.25 Bhabatosh Sutar (left) at work on a public sculpture at their artists’ colony at Khudirampally, Behala, 2013. Courtesy: Bhabatosh Sutar

6.26 Bhabatosh Sutar’s Madhubani Durga, Barisha Shrishti Puja, Behala, 2002

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from which, he admits, there is never much money flowing in.20 Bhabatosh Sutar has come a very long way from the time we first encountered his work at the Barisha Shrishti Puja at Behala at 2002, where he had sculpted the Durga image for the Madhubani village complex that had been created there by the designer Amar Sarkar. (See 6.26) He remembers how hard he had to bargain for Rs. 25,000 for his images with the Puja committee, which said that it could get a much cheaper idol from a traditional idol maker. To claim a separate ‘artwork’ price for his images seemed impossible then for this fresh art college graduate, who had developed the skill of making clay sculptures in his teens. Looking backwards and forward from this stage, Bhabatosh’s emergence as an artist unfolds in close conjunction with worlds of craftsmanship and artisan skills. The chance to get admitted to the Government Art College was itself fortuitous. Losing control over the agricultural lands they owned in Barisal, Bangladesh, his family was among the late refugee peasant migrants who came across the border in 1981–2 (when Bhabatosh was eight years old) and moved to Behala, to cheap rented rooms in these rural outskirts of Khudirampally. Bhabatosh somehow made it through school, driving a rickshaw outside school hours. He considers as his greatest saviour a local artist, Tarun Dey, who was himself a struggling art teacher in a government school in the vicinity, who bought him his first art materials and helped him gain admission in 1995 to the Government Art College, Calcutta. Through his art college years, Bhabatosh shared a rented room in Khudirampally with a friend, Nirmal Malik (who would later also take on Puja designing), the two supporting themselves by taking on orders from city clients for various kinds of decorative craft objects in clay, plaster, wood or bamboo.21 As with innumerable such cases of those who come to be trained as artists in today’s art schools, the social lines of division between ‘art’ and ‘craft’ practices get easily blurred. It seemed natural that Bhabatosh would turn to various craft and folk art traditions as his main resources as he took on for three years (2003–05) the

6.27 Bhabatosh Sutar’s terracotta Durga ensemble, Barisha Shrishti Puja, 2003

sole charge of designing the award-winning Puja of Barisha Shrishti Club of Behala, beginning in each case with sculpting the Durga image. In keeping with the spreading trend of such folk art tableaux, he too talked about using the Pujas as a forum for promoting these dying rural art forms and emphasized how much he learnt about different materials and techniques from these craft traditions. But he also believed that it was because he had a more trained and creative eye than these crafts-persons that he could draw from their work processes the confidence for his own experimental leaps with form and design. This is how he subsumed these craft idioms to evolve his own modernist folk style. In 2003, in an enclosure filled with terracotta décor, his Durga pantheon rose as a large stylized ensemble in an open-air pillared canopy, (see 6.27) which used the Bankura horse motifs as pillars to support the full structure, where the entire ensemble grew out of a series of decorated terracotta funnels and pipes that were designed to fit

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6.28 Bhabatosh Sutar’s wooden boat pavilion, at the hull of which was placed the painted wooden sculpture of the goddess, Barisha Shrishti Puja, 2004

into each other. The next year, he switched from the monochrome of terracotta to more colourful painted wood and bamboo carvings, where the small Puja site was transformed into the large hull of a wooden boat leading through simulated river waters into an inner open structure housing puppet-like figures of Durga and her family. (See 6.28) We see here a pointed endeavour to transform the Durga image from an ephemeral worshipped icon to a collectible artwork, with the artist negotiating the twin demands of the ‘religious’ and ‘artistic’ lives of his images. While he described ‘the divine vibrations’ he experienced every time he worked on his Durga images, he was also consciously working with durable material with an eye to the post-Puja preservation of his works. His terracotta Durga of 2003, its many parts detachable to allow its transportation and reassembling in another space, made festival news that year by finding a place in the outer lawns of one of the city’s five-star hotels, the ITC Sonar Bangla. It was a matter of immense pride for the artist and

for the Barisha Shrishti club that their Durga images came to be acquired for the next two years as well— the wooden image of 2004 was bought by a Puja enthusiast and collector; another lacquer-work image of 2005 was commissioned by the state archaeology and craft museum at Behala. However, such pride and confidence about the artistic future of his Durga Puja creations would not endure. None of these collected works, Bhabatosh Sutar later rued, got the kind of care, attention or display they deserved—underlining the difficulty of Puja creations ever securing a postfestival identity as ‘art’.22 From 2006 onwards, Bhabatosh stuck to the more practical option of making immersible clay images, each of which became part of his distinctive oeuvre. These were the years when he moved far out of Behala to take on multiple commissions for designing Pujas in places all over the city, spreading his work across the distances of Ahiritola and Lake Town (in the north and north-east), Khidirpur (in the west), and Bhowanipur, Naktala and Rajdanga (in the south

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6.29 Bhabatosh Sutar’s production titled Shabda-Kalpa (‘The Realm of Sound’), Natun Pally Pradip Sangha Puja, Lake Town, 2006

and south-east). Such movement across far-flung parts of the city became characteristic of the vocation of Puja designers, enabling them to negotiate higher fees with every new hosting committee and inscribe different locations with the markings of their art. Bhabatosh’s first move was from Barisha Shrishti Club to an obscure Puja of Natun Pally Pradip Sangha in the depressed inner quarters of Lake Town, where he took on the challenge of bringing to this unknown location crowds, connoisseurs and awards. It is also here that he experimented with what he felt to be his first ‘conceptual’ production, combining rural craft resources with digitized sound technology to play out the effects of different sounds on visual objects. Erecting a conglomerate of white cave-like structures (similar in style to the Husain-Doshi Gupha in Ahmedabad), with their outer covering in plaster and the inner walls layered with mud, he placed several ventilation holes in the caves to allow air to whistle through and bounce off water-filled clay pitchers, hanging bells and wooden cart wheels. As with all his productions, the Durga image that he had worked on for months in his studio was later installed in the Puja site and given its finishing touches and colour to blend with its surroundings. (See 6.29. 6.30) For the artist, the claims of art production are transferred from the investment in a collectible

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Durga sculpture to an entire display which he conceives and executes from scratch to finish, with the full knowledge that it will be dismantled and sold off piece-meal by the clubs after the Pujas. It appears strangely anomalous that the artist, in this sphere of production, retains no authorial rights over his installation, which becomes the property of the club that paid for its making. The economics of this festival art is such that Bhabatosh (and many other designers like him) prefer working for a contracted fee, out of which he pays only his own team of helpers, leaving the organizing committees to supply all the raw material, labour and infrastructural support against a fixed budget, and to dispense with the production at the end of the Pujas. It is on these transient and infirm grounds—where his ‘art’ is continuously returned to recyclable and dispensable material and his quotient as an ‘artist’ rises and falls with the ebb and flow of awards—that Bhabatosh decided to take his Puja productions into new levels of ‘conceptual’ art. Working the next year, 2007, at the Khidirpur 25 Pally Puja, by now a well-marked ‘theme’ Puja site, Bhabatosh created what I consider one of the finest installations in this field of festival art. The

6.30 The Durga imagery made to match the outer and interior colours of the pavilion, Natun Pally Pradip Sangha Puja, Lake Town, 2006

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6.31 Bhabatosh Sutar’s installation using the metaphors of ploughing and cultivation, Khidirpur 25 Pally Puja, 2007

work grew out of the metaphors of agriculture and cultivation, inspired by lines from an eighteenth century Ramprasad Shyama-sangeet, which talked of how the human mind, like the soil, would yield its bounty of gold only if properly ploughed.23 What is worth noting, though, is the striking disjunction between the deeply rural devotional affect of this song that the artist drew on and the recognizable modernist idioms of pavilion art that he opted for. Within a bamboo-lined enclosure and an gateway with an ornate awning, he constructed as a dramatic centrepiece a vast radial sun with bamboo poles, standing above a decorated mound of vegetation and foliage, encircled by half-blooming buds, plants and stems that took on the form of the trishul. Beyond this stood a large angled wooden plough, through the frames of which viewers glimpsed the figure of the goddess which was also given a circular radial frame. (See 6.31, 6.32, 6.33) In

choosing to use expensive materials like cement, concrete, metal and wood, the artist was once again pushing against the ephemerality of these festival tableaux. He had hoped, in vain, that his radial sun and cemented earth installation would be collected and preserved, and had even offered to remake it for a potential art collector for about 8 lakhs. That such hopes continually circulate is as important as the fact that they are seldom fulfilled. This emerges as a perennial condition of this sphere of festival production and consumption, where such laboriously created installations struggle for an identity as ‘art’ amidst spaces and publics that can barely sustain them. A small children’s park in a neighbourhood like Khidirpur (that demands to be returned to its everyday use immediately after the festival) and the mixed crowds that throng this Puja hardly make for an appropriate milieu for this kind of public artwork. Yet, it is with a different

6.32 Plough structure within the Bhabatosh Sutar installation, Khidirpur 25 Pally Puja, 2007

6.33 Bhabatosh Sutar’s Durga, Khidirpur 25 Pally Puja, 2007

6.34 Bhabatosh Sutar, Installation with enlarged forms of handloom weaving shuttles and looms, Rajdanga Naba Uday Sangha Puja at night, 2009

6.35 Bhabatosh Sutar, Calligraphy installation with stenciled motifs on back-lit panels, Abasar Puja, Bhowanipur, 2009

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sense of gains and returns that artists like Bhabatosh continue to pitch their artistic energies into a Puja installation and look on the festival as providing them with an opportunity for creating public art, albeit temporary, that is not forthcoming from the state or any other corporate sponsor. His productions of 2009 gave a good sense of the spreading range of his themes, installation designs and work materials, as well as his choice of the most special and innovative among these. With each of his themes, Bhabatosh worked without any fixed models, continuously improvising with materials and designs, giving his artisanal team instructions for work for only a few days at a time. Tight coordination and control, however, became essential as his work came to be regularly spread out across three Puja sites each year, among which one was typically set out by him as his primary creative work. At Rajdanga Naba Uday Sangha, beyond Kasba off the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass, where he had been working then for two years, he returned to a traditional craft theme—handloom weaving in Bengal—but radically broke out of the template of the simulated village complex. Instead, he used dramatic enlargements of forms of weaving looms and rows of yarn, and especially of the weaving shuttle, to create rocket-like structures, wrapping the entire installation in pastel blue and pink woven cloth. (See 6.34) At the Abasar Puja of Bhowanipur, where he worked for the first time that year, he chose to profile the art of calligraphy in a more minimalist, streamlined installation. Drawing centrally on a Japanese design aesthetic, he used backlit coloured stencilled patterns of various script forms, with the effects of stained glass, to cover the entire arched enclosure. (See 6.35) His artistic imagination and labours peaked, that season, in the work he produced at the Naktala Udayan Sangha Puja, where we saw him working again with cement and concrete, along with dried wood, to create a maze of cave-like structures decorated with abstract relief motifs. Inside he created the impression of a deep clay oven out of which emerged a semianthropomorphic image of Durga as a giant crimson flame—a vast head with ten arms and multiple eyes bursting out like small fire sparks around her treetrunk torso. (See 6.36)

6.36 Bhabatosh Sutar, Durga in the shape of a giant flame, Naktala Udayan Sangha Puja, 2009

The suitability of such experimental iconography for a Durga Puja, and its public acceptability as a new order of festival art, could be continuously debated. His ratings on the awards circuit were fluctuating but, undeterred, Bhabatosh worked every year at transforming his Puja productions into his chosen forms of installation art at a few select locations. An open rotunda, dramatically enclosing a vast buffalo head with the ten spear-wielding hands of the goddess serving as gilded and embossed fibreglass pillars was one of his season’s best of 2010, at the Rajdanga Naba Uday Sangha Puja. (See Chapter head image, p. 247) With the change in ruling regime in 2011 would come a new order of political backing for this artist in tandem with the two main Puja

6.37 Bhabatosh Sutar, Self-portrait as a winged Asura, seated on a mound with motifs from Picasso’s Guernica, Chetla Agrani Puja, 2012

6.38 Bhabatosh Sutar’s mahogany sculpture of Durga, Naktala Udayan Sangha Puja, 2011

6.39 Bhabatosh Sutar, Winged boat-shaped pavilion, Naktala Udayan Sangha Puja, 2011

demands and dilemmas of durga puja ‘art’ clubs where he works, the Naktala Udayan Sangha and the Chetla Agrani Sangha, propelling him towards further experiments and artistic licences. In the sculpted tableaux of 2012 at the Chetla Agrani Sangha Puja, the artist presented himself as a nude and winged Asura, surrendering to the goddess who sat suspended above him on a crescent moon, the connoisseur’s attention drawn to the motifs from Picasso’s Guernica painting on the mound on which the artist sat. (See 6.37) By this time, Bhabatosh Sutar was also once again conceiving of many of his Durgas as preservable works of sculpture— such as his work of 2011 in polished mahogany, within a large triangulated boat-shaped wood and bamboo pavilion at the Naktala Udayan Sangha Puja (see 6.38, 6.39), or the much–publicized sandstone Durga image of 2013 at this same Puja site, with the government’s promise of acquisition of these images for reinstallation at its cultural complexes at New Town Rajarhat.24

Sushanta Pal Of the same generation and art college background as Sanatan and Bhabatosh, Sushanta Pal’s credentials are more those of a professional designer, leading us to think of how the two identities of ‘artist’ and ‘designer’ both overlap but also subtly stand apart in this festival sphere.25 Graduating with a Master’s degree from the Government College of Art in 2002, he used his specialization in textile designing to set up a fabric boutique in Kasba and began working with costumes and interior designs for the new genre of Bengali films by director Rituparno Ghosh. There are distant family connections here with the Kumartuli Pals, with the famous idol maker Jitendranath Pal, who in the 1960s and 1970s had also worked on the sets of the Tollygunge film studios. But Sushanta Pal hardly dwells on this lineage. Unlike Sanatan and Bhabatosh, he has never sculpted his own Durga idols, although he insists that each Durga image that is made by mritshilpis for his tightly authored productions are done under his design specifications, with him doing the final detailing and colouring of the image from the basic structure that is produced for him. Sushanta Pal here represents a wide-spread trend of the times, where designers take charge of the conception, design and execution of the full

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6.40 Art school students working on the Durga pratima for a Sushanta Pal production, Naktala Udayan Sangha Puja, 2007

production, working in collaboration with a younger generation idol maker of Kumartuli, like Naba Kumar Pal, who has come to specialize in the making of synchronized ‘theme’ Durgas. In our many interviews, he has also made it a point to distance himself from the field’s obsession with the revival of dying rural crafts and folk arts, and was skeptical about the extent to which poor crafts-persons actually benefit from this format of production. Sushanta Pal has over the years evolved his alternative preference of working with found objects and industrial materials like tin and scrap metal. While deeply invested in processes of object making, he has tended to push outwards from organic craft material to experimenting with synthetic fibres and fabrics and digital printing, blending vernacular forms with a modern design aesthetic. He has consciously worked every year, not with teams of crafts-persons, but with batches of art students from different art colleges in the city, and strongly believes that this seasonal work of helping with Durga Puja installations should now be actively encouraged as part of the art college curricula. (See 6.40) It is out of his two areas of professional work in designing textiles and film sets that Sushanta Pal conceived of the best of his early Puja productions of

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6.41 Sushanta Pal’s pavilion with large painted parasols, Selimpur Pally Puja, 2004

2002 and 2003 at the Barisha Sahajtri Club at Behala. In 2002, he designed here a pavilion with murals using old wooden textile printing blocks that he had amassed from a printing godown, highlighting the intricacy of carvings that made each of these blocks an ‘art work’. The measure of success of this production lay not in awards but the new interest that was shown in preserving these blocks in places like the Gurusaday Dutt Museum and the Weaver’s Service Centre. In 2003, at the same Puja site, he simulated a full film studio set, complete with lights and camera, ready to shoot a traditional ekchala Durga image in a zamindari thakurdalan, which has been a favourite sequence in innumerable Bengali films. Using the technical hands of the film studios to create the set and even play the background musical score, he surrounded the site with old Bengali cinema posters and a screen running old film clippings to suffuse it with the theme of the Pujas in film history.26 From these first years, Sushanta Pal’s Puja career is marked by continuous shifts both in club locations and in forms, as he moves his work over the decade across all parts of the city, to Hatibagan, Selimpur, Santoshpur, Naktala, Kalighat or Khidirpur. In the dizzying pace of his movements, it is hard to identify any unified stylistic repertoire. Nor, it seems, was there a need for such unity to build his reputation in the field. In 2004, at two not-too-distant sites at Selimpur Pally and Santoshpur Trikone Park, he was working,

in one space, with colourfully painted parachute fabric to set up conically shaped pavilions (See 6.41), and in the other, with the form of a Rajasthani haveli with painted walls, sculpted relief and mirror reflections, with matching Durga images sculpted by Naba Kumar Pal. (See 5.16, 5.17) In the coming seasons, we saw him turning to the traditional forms of pandal and idol making, trying out the old format of the bamboo, plywood and cloth shamiana, and recreating, in another instance, a typical Kumartuli workshop shanty, strewn with straw-stuffed moulds, half-painted figures and clay face masks that took us through different stages of the making of these idols. (See 6.42) Between 2005 and 2008, Sushanta Pal’s work took on the more serial form of site-specific installations on the small grounds of the Naktala Udayan Sangha Puja, where he evolved a close relationship with the Puja committee to make this his chosen location of work for four years. In 2006, using his skills in textile designing, he carried out a remarkable experiment with the art of woven tapestries, where he dissected digital prints of miniature paintings of the Devi into ribbons, which he then had woven in the mode of pictorial tapestries and laid out against the structures of weaving looms in a matted enclosure. (See 6.43, 6.44) The novelty in his work came to rest less on an overarching idea and more on innovation with materials and forms.27

6.43 Sushanta Pal’s recreation of an idol making workshop, Baishnabghata Patuli Upanaguri Puja, 2006

6.43 Sushanta Pal, Pavilion designed with woven tapestries of paintings, Naktala Udayan Sangha Puja, 2006

6.44 Panel of woven tapestry of a Pahari miniature painting on Durga, Naktala Udayan Sangha Puja, 2006

6.45 Entrance to a ‘child art’ pavilion designed by Sushanta Pal, Santoshpur Lake Pally Puja, 2008

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in the name of the goddess sleek modernist slant. While at Bosepukur in 2009, he set off large lotus-shaped Tantrik motifs on wood and metal sheets with overhead clusters of threepronged spears, he produced at Khidirpur in 2010 a more geometrically angled blue and silver pavilion, with pyramidal roofs, and inverted triangular panels, covering all the wall objects in silver foil against a midnight blue taffeta covering. (See 6.47, 6.48) If some of these Puja-themed installations of Sushanta Pal come closest to a ‘modernist’ style, it is also important to note how much of this modernism stands mediated with Tantrik motifs and with the repeating forms of trishuls, lotus petals, or the three eyes of the goddess that permeate all the ‘modern art’ of the Durga Pujas.

6.46 Winged Durga, at a production titled Dugga Utsab, Santoshpur Lake Pally, 2008

As at Naktala, we see this designer’s oeuvre taking on a greater stylistic density in certain locations over successive seasons. We could take, for instance, his work for the Santoshpur Lake Pally Puja in 2008 which focused on the theme of child art, and recreated a fantasy landscape with a sun, houses, plants and flowers, using painted taffeta cloth and objects like bathroom pipes, buckets, watering cans and sprays around the goddess. (See 6.45) And we could track its carry-over, the following year, in a pavilion in the same site dedicated to the ‘festival of Durga’ (Dugga Utsab), which was filled with fluttering banners, colourful cloth-draped poles, and featured a largeheaded folk-doll Durga, whose arms, weapons and drapes were spread out like the wings of an angel. (See 6.46) By the end of the 2000s, Sushanta Pal was beginning to work more and more with tin and metal sheets, aluminum foil and metallic objects, embossing their surfaces, creating stencilled forms out of them, making creative use of items ranging from round steel scrubbers to conical loudspeaker phones. While he keeps closely to the theme of Devi worship and inevitably gives his productions names like Yogini or Mahamaya (elaborating these through concept notes that he puts up at their entrances), his work with tin and metal increasingly takes on a

What I would pick out as the choicest work of Sushanta Pal’s Puja designing career had a different colourful and festive flavour, taking its lead from the child art pavilion that he had created at Santoshpur in 2008. Over different years, a narrow Kalighat lane, lined with old houses from the 1920s—the site of the Badamtala Ashar Sangha Puja—had emerged as another serial site for his seasonal productions. In 2008, he visualized here in striking three-dimensional form the imagery of the nineteenth century handcoloured wood-cut prints of Battala, recreating a

6.47 Sushanta Pal’s pavilion titled, Yogini, Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja, 2010

6.48 Sushanta Pal’s blue and silver-hued installation titled, Mahamaya, Khidirpur Pally Sharadiya Puja, 2010

6.49 Sushanta Pal, Battala themed pavilion, Badamtala Ashar Sangha Puja, 2008

6.50 Details of figures modelled on Battala wood-cut prints atop the architectural structure, Badamtala Ashar Sangha Puja, 2008

6.51 Sushanta Pal’s transformation of the neighbourhood into a painted installation, titled Parar Pujo, Badamtala Ashar Sangha Puja, 2010

6.52 Sushanta Pal (right) with a Puja committee member at the Badamtala Ashar Sangha Puja, 2010

6.53 Sushanta Pal’s installation in white, covering the house fronts of the entire alley leading into the Ultadanga Pallysree Puja, 2014

demands and dilemmas of durga puja ‘art’ columned architectural structure inhabited by gods, winged angels and costumed figures, which seemed to almost blend with the surrounding houses.28 (See 6.49, 6.50) From here grew the idea in 2010 of transforming the full neighbourhood of Badamtala into a brilliant painted installation, where brightly coloured designs and motifs of suns, stars, trees and foliage spread from the open air Puja pavilion to cover the walls of four surrounding houses of the locality. Called Parar Pujo, it used for the first time an entire section of the para—the houses, the trees, the pavements, the railings and the lamp-posts—as the decorated and synchronized site of the Puja. (See 6.51, 6.52) The small para with its old houses lent itself ideally to such a design scheme. It did take a lot of persuasion to get permission from the residents to have their dilapidated houses repaired and painted free of cost, to get them to agree to the bold patterns that would come in tow. The end result turned out to be a unique sample of public art: one that encompassed the extended space of a para and had the added advantage of remaining in place even after the Pujas were over.29 In a rare move, Puja art had come to stay and enliven the para the full year round. Four years later, Sushanta Pal carried over the same production and design template with a very different effect to another small neighbourhood Puja in the north of the city, of the Pallysree Club of Ultadanga. Here, he chose the colour white to transform all the houses of the alley and converted the full corridor path into an installation in swirling white motifs and delicate lace-like décor in keeping with the theme of ‘Eternal Peace’. (See 6.53) What Sushanta Pal shares with Santatan Dinda and Bhabatosh Sutar is a commitment to his Puja productions as an integral part of his professional career and a crucial public forum for his creativity. Each year, he sets aside two and a half months from his regular work in textile and film set designing to devote exclusively to the three Pujas that he usually takes on each year. His commissions for the next Puja season are booked as one year’s festival ends, and many Puja clubs have to wait in queue for two years before they can hire him (as is the case with many of these prime designers). He may not have the same stake as the other two in becoming a ‘pure’ artist, nor in sculpting his own repertoire of Durgas

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in durable material like wood or fibreglass for postfestival preservation. But he too harbours the desire to hold exhibitions, for a different public, of his owncurated selection of parts of his pavilion installations that he keeps stored in his studio and remixes and uses in different Puja seasons.

a larger cast Looking back from this point on the past decade, we could keep adding more and more Puja designing careers and production histories to fill out the larger canvas against which the oeuvre of Sanatan Dinda, Bhabatosh Sutar and Sushanta Pal stand sharply etched. There are several instances of art college alumni and veteran professionals working in this field from the late 1990s, many senior to these three by several years, some of whom could also be placed in these ranks of forerunners and ‘star designers’. Many of these careers have also kept pace with the changing times, exploring newer and newer resources for the city’s ‘theme’ Pujas. Let us take the case of a stalwart like Amar Sarkar, whose folk art repertoire has already featured in the previous chapter. It is significant that he too held high his primary identity as a painter, and talked of the way he inadvertently came into designing Pujas through his obsession with travelling to various parts of the country to explore indigenous art traditions.30 By the end of the 2000s, Amar Sarkar was diversifying from his trademark folk art villages to work on other kinds of thematic concepts and with a broader array of materials. From tableaux designed to showcase the art of conch shells (See 6.54), to an installation with clusters of hanging bird motifs and another using studded mirrors, broken glass shards and bottles (See 6.55, 7.37) Amar Sarkar has kept steady his reputation in innovative Puja designs. In 2011, in one of his most experimental works to date, he created an industrial trade fair style pavilion, delving into a rich archive of contemporary newspaper and hoarding advertisements which he laid out as walls of digital collages, into which he inserted as parasol banners the full history of his own Durga Puja productions in different locations. (See 6.56) In a new self-reflexive trend, the designer Puja was now beginning to dissect its own pasts and its own commercial histories.31

6.54 Amar Sarkar, Pavilion shaped like giant conch shells, Khidirpur 25 Pally Puja, 2006

6.55 Amar Sarkar, Installation with broken glass shards and bottles, Hindusthan Park Puja, 2011

6.56 Amar Sarkar’s elaborate installation on the theme of advertising, with the banners marking his own earlier Puja productions, Tala Barowari Puja, 2011

demands and dilemmas of durga puja ‘art’ From the same senior generation of Government Art College graduates are other figures like Rono Banerjee, who brought his expertise in film and television set production into the sphere of Puja designing from the early 2000s and has come to be known for his crowd-pulling recreations of old ruined mansions, fortresses, palaces and temples in simulated landscape settings. There is also the designer Rupchand Kundu, a 1982 graduate of the Government Art College, Calcutta, who straddled twin careers in painting and art direction in films, working for well-known Bengali directors like Chidananda Dasgupta and Tapan Sinha, while building up from the 2000s a third thriving vocation in constructing Puja tableaux. Rupchand Kundu tried his hand at craft tableaux even as his main predilection is for film-set-like remakes of ancient caves with waterfalls and relief stone carvings, or of an old north Kolkata alley with crumbling architectural facades, (see 7.44) inside which he recreated a scene of ghosts and witches from the popular Bengali fables Thakurmar Jhuli. While he places a high premium on elements of wonder and mystery in productions that are made to cater to mass tastes, Rupchand Kundu would also like to see his work as qualifying as a kind of ‘installation art’ with ‘conceptual’ moorings.32 He thus has a periodic compulsion to inject a strong dose of modern art citations into his creations— as with the look-alike of Ramkinkar Baij’s cement sculpture of Santhal women that he introduced within a Birbhum Santhal village at a Dumdum Park Puja in 2007 (see 6.2), or with the structure of a modern art museum and gallery that he fabricated, complete with a fountain and a Louvrestyle glass pyramid in 2011 at the Babubagan Puja in Dhakuria. Each of these designers can be seen to lay out, through their repeating and changing choices of location, a spreading topography of ‘theme’ Pujas, often marking a specific Puja as the chosen site of work over several seasons. It is within this crowded milieu of ‘theme’ Pujas that I presented three detailed profiles of designers as my choice of the finest in the field. These select careers can be seen as most effectively testing the claims of ‘art’ in a domain where it is in continuous risk of evaporating. They allow us to extend ideas, however

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debatable, of ‘experimental’ and ‘conceptual’ art into this circuit of ephemeral festival display and explore spaces of connoisseurship that are not reducible only to the winning of awards and media publicity. The more the cast grows and the more thickly ‘theme’ Pujas proliferate across all parts of the city, the more difficult it becomes to hold on to such markers of artistic pedigree. Distinctions prove hard to unearth, even harder to hold on to. Once established as an ‘artist’ in this line of work, how easy is it to keep that identity going? What are the expanding boundaries of opportunity and eligibility that enable the rise in the field of many with none of the same training or credentials as artists?

networks and mobilities: the craftsman as puja designer In this final section, the spreading phenomenon of ‘theme’ Pujas is viewed through an evolving network of production processes, division of labour and distribution of creative skills that generate their own patterns of social mobility and career aspirations. A number of figures move up the rungs of this production and designing ladder to become seasonal ‘stars’ in their own right. The prolific field of Durga Puja ‘art’ can be seen to thrive, more than ever before, on a continuously dissolving hierarchy between artist, artisan and craftsman. We have seen how designers like Bhabatosh Sutar pulled themselves over the thin arc that took them from craft skills into a professional career in art. We could also look back to the struggles and dilemmas of another senior founding figure of the city’s ‘art’ and ‘craft’ Pujas, Subodh Ray, who would like to share with Amar Sarkar the credentials of pioneering the ‘theme’ Pujas of Behala and of discovering the talents of the young Bhabatosh Sutar. He himself did not come out of any standard art college training, rather out of a background of making traditional Durga idols and financially supporting his family from his teens by selling these to local clubs in Behala. While he later acquired a degree from the Indian Art College, he has earned his living as an employee of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation, while taking on every year several large and small commissions

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6.57 Subodh Ray’s Durga pantheon given the form of the folk metal sculpture of the Jharkhand region, Suruchi Sangha Puja, 2009

for Pujas, for each of which he sculpted his own Durga images in a range of ethnic folk styles.33 Running a studio called Banglar Mati, in the inner quarters connecting Tollygunge and Behala, that catered to various orders for craft, tribal arts, traditional sculpture and decorative objects, Subodh Ray came to specialize in the vernacular art forms of Bengal. At the same time, he also came to excel in designing theme parks of different states of India for the city’s mega-Puja at Suruchi Sangha, New Alipore, where each year he painstakingly researched and recreated temples, villages, craft work and Durga images based on the traditional iconographies of Kerala, Gujarat, Assam or Jharkhand. (Example, 6.57 ) It is here, though, that his prestige and selfesteem as an ‘artist’ suffered the most. This biggest, most high-publicity Puja, which unashamedly

brandishes only the name of its political bigwig organizer, Arup Biswas, gave Subodh Ray neither the artistic credits nor the financial returns that were his due. In 2010, with over 6 lakhs still to be recovered from the Suruchi Sangha Puja organizers, Subodh Ray was searching for other political Puja patrons but also bitterly contemplating fully giving up his work in this field. The many years that he had devoted to designing Pujas had failed, he felt, to take him where he wanted to reach. 34 If artistic aspirations in this sphere get easily trampled, they also find ways of recycling their energies into the resources of rural arts and the pride of craftsmanship. A powerful example can be found in a Puja display at Santoshpur Trikone Park in 2009, to which the designer Nirmal Malik gave the title Karigarer Karigari, with a marked emphasis on the figure

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in collaborating teams of rural craftsmen to work on these designs under his close instructions. And in each case, the signature style of the designer left its main imprint in the figure of the goddess that he himself designed and sculpted in harmony with the surrounding décor. (See 6.58. 6.59) Today, his work in the Puja sphere has graduated from craft forms to a new genre of environmental art, as he functions as an integral part of the art community at Khudirampally.

6.58 Nirmal Malik’s pavilion with coloured hemp and ropes, BE East Puja, Salt Lake, 2007

of the workman (karigar) and his workmanship (karigari). The production became a direct allegory of the persona of its maker who hovered at the social boundaries between the artisan and artist, for whom vernacular craft processes formed the constitutive grounds for the honing of his skills as an artist.35 Nirmal Malik appears on the scene of the city’s ‘theme’ Pujas through close associations with two other Puja designers. With Bhabatosh Sutar, he shared a rented room in the interiors of Khudirampally at Behala in the 1990s and the same struggles to become a painter. Picked out by Tarun Dey from the canteen of the government school where he was an art teacher, this boy from Mograhat in South 24 Parganas could not avail of art college training like his friend Bhabatosh, but began to work with him on his prize-winning creations at the Barisha Shrishti Pujas of 2002 and 2003. With Subodh Ray and his Banglar Mati studio, where he began working on orders for terracotta and fibreglass sculptures, he got his first break in the mid 2000s when he authored his own Puja creations, as the senior designer began to hand him some of his commissions. Thereafter, we find Nirmal Malik developing his own repertoire of craft and folk art pavilions at a series of Puja sites, using material ranging from terracotta, bamboo and wood carvings to coloured rope and hemp. In each case, he brought

To have been part of the work team of a senior designer opens up a route by which many in recent years began to chart out individual careers in Durga Puja ‘art’. The group here includes young art college students as well as amateurs without any institutional training and some who emerge from entirely rural and suburban circuits of craft practice. While still a student at the Government College of Art, Shibshankar Das began working under Amar Sarkar in 2004 on his many tribal art tableaux: the Naga village at Haridebpur, and the Bastar and the South African villages at Bosepukur. Sushanta Pal, who also regularly employs art college students to assist in his Puja productions, pointed to the different modes of delegation of work by different designers. While he himself closely monitors and directs his student

6.59 Sychronised and colour-coordinated Durga by Nirmal Malik, BE East Puja, Salt Lake, 2007

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6.60 Shibshankar Das, Pavilion designed in the form of terracotta step-well architecture, Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja, 2006

6.61 Shibshankar Das, Giant wheel with human figure spikes at the entrance of the pavilion on zodiac symbols, Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja, 2010

team, Amar Sarkar, he says, leaves much of the work of designing and making to be handled by students.36 It is this experience that enabled Shibshankar Das to graduate to an independent commission in 2006 at the Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja.

Puja in the ‘theme’ Puja circuit. (See 6.60) Bringing in terracotta crafts-persons from Bankura to work on this tableau, Shibshankar also laid open a critical acknowledgement that in most cases, it was not the designer but the student or artisanal team (who performed the laborious task of implementation) with whom lay the real credit for a production.37 In his identification with his work force, Shibshankar provides us another crucial instance of the dual identities of artist and artisan that frequently remain embedded in the figure of a Puja designer.

Excessively high fees or a perceived lack of adequate commitment to their individual Puja are what often alienates organizing committees from reputed designers, leading them to recruit newer, lesserknown talents. The Bosepukur Puja organizers spoke of the ‘risk’ they took in 2006 in handing over the full charge of their Puja to Shibshankar, and of the great opportunity they thereby provided to this young art college graduate, who was then earning his livelihood as a set design assistant in the Tollygunge film studios. Creating a giant terracotta step-well pandal, filled with various-sized terracotta motifs, figures and columns, Shibshankar’s production adequately kept up the long-standing profile of the Bosepukur

As he rose in the profession with growing numbers of commissions and awards, he continued to place the same importance on mobilizing large groups of rural artisans to work with him as a collective creative team. His focus has been less on the revival of a single dying folk art form, more on providing a platform for earning and learning new craft skills to village youth from politically disturbed regions

demands and dilemmas of durga puja ‘art’ like Nandigram in Medinipur. It is with such a team that Shibshankar came to create an awardwinning design at the Chakraberia Sarbojanin Puja in 2010, where the highlight was on the decorative patterning and assemblage of diverse material such as perforated tin sheets, cloth appliqués, paper pulp, carved wooden blocks and painted bamboo poles.38 While this was his most labour and cost intensive production that season, the two others Pujas he designed that year, teaming up in each case with the Kumartuli artist Naba Kumar Pal for the Durga image, were equally eye-catching. At Bosepukur, he worked on the theme of astrology and zodiac symbols, giving a copper sheen to the entire pavilion and its décor, introducing at the entrance a vast wheel with human figure spikes. (See 6.61) And, at the 41 Pally Puja at Haridebpur, he turned ‘green’, visually and metaphorically, in the current fashion for ecological themes, in a production he titled Gachch Parban Pala (‘The Worship of Trees’), creating a beehive-like structure decorated with stem-like coiling water pipes, green traffic lights, and clay birds and dolls that took on the appearance of blooming flower buds. (See 6.62) The definition of ‘art’ in this sphere seems to inevitably grow out of such a cornucopia of objects, materials and designs. Those staking a higher artistic dispensation for their creations strive hard, as we have seen, to mark a distinction between works that are ‘conceptual’ and those that remain grounded primarily in the ingenious use of objects and material. In the latter category would feature a designer like Prashanta Pal, who has been working in the field since 1998 but emerged to prominence only in the mid and late 2000s. His success has rested on the way he can work wonders with everyday objects, like cheap plastic dolls, plastic bottles and cans, out of which he creates puppets, or mosaic chips or shredded coloured towels with which he creates wall murals (See 6.63, 6.64)—and the way he can also recreate full village settings, as he did with a fishermen’s village where he used painted clay pots and lamps and items like brooms as decoration.39(See 6.65) How is all this different from the gimmick of outlandish material that was once the rage of Puja pandals and was shunned in art circles as cheap and tasteless? Is there a pronounced

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6.62 Shibshankar Das, ‘Green Puja’ installation titled Gachh Parban Pala, 41 Pally Puja, Haridebpur, 2010

design aesthetic that redeems these productions and gives them the stamp of artistry? We are left groping for an answer. What is easier to identify is a new well-honed professionalism with which a figure like Prashanta Pal has made Puja designing his main livelihood. It took a long time for this commerce graduate, who apprenticed under the Santiniketan-based artist Kamaldeep Dhar, and worked initially only for his parar pujo at Darparnarayan Tagore Street in north Kolkata, to gain entry into the established ‘theme’ Puja’ circuits of the south and win some ‘grudging respect’ as a Puja designer from his peers in this profession. There is neither any delusion nor selfprojection here about his general standing as an ‘artist’. In a matter-of-fact manner, what Prashanta Pal claimed as his credentials were the over 230 Puja awards (including 9 coveted Asian Paints awards) that he had won so far, and an assured income from 4–5 big-budget Puja commissions every year, for which he maintains a round-the-year work team of 55–60 rural artisans. To maximize his gains, (in contrast to artists like Bhabatosh Sutar or Sushanta Pal) he ensures that he brings in his own labour and material and retains full ownership over his productions for selling and recycling in other mofussil Pujas.40

6.63 Prashanta Pal, Puppets made out of plastic water cans, Talbagan Sarbojanin Puja, 2010

6.64 Prashanta Pal, Pandal decor made with shredded towels, Dumdum Park Tarun Sangha Puja, 2010

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6.65 Prashanta Pal, Durga decorated with brooms at a recreated fishing village, Dumdum Park Tarun Sangha Puja, 2009

The same modes of functioning also mark out the career of Gouranga Kuinla that I present as my final case study. The social transitions here are the most remarkable. Starting off by painting hoardings and wall graffiti in the district town of Tamluk in east Medinipur, he first came to Kolkata in 2001 as a worker of the Sree Durga Decorators firm of Tamluk that was then putting up the pandals each year at the Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja, according to the design concepts of Bandhan Raha. From this time onwards, he began combining his year-round pandal-making orders (that took him to cities like Jamshedpur or Nagpur) with working on the pavilions of prominent Kolkata Pujas. What differentiated him from others in this trade was a parallel reputation he built up for decorative craftwork in material ranging from jute and hemp to wood and bamboo, which he submitted for national awards and began supplying to emporiums. And

it is with credentials as a national award-winning craftsman that Gouranga Kuinla entered the city’s Durga Puja circuits around 2008 in an independent capacity as Puja designer.41 Over the next two years, this late entrant staged his prodigal success by functioning with a tightly organized cottage industry team out of his district hometown, Tamluk, which begins to work months in advance on the four Kolkata Puja commissions he now takes on. In 2008, we found him working with organic natural material, like wood shavings, bamboo strips, stone chips, dried leaves, gravel and shells, with which he produced minutely patterned panels and architectural structures at a Bosepukur (See 7.34) and a Salt Lake Puja, and jute fibres with which he created a set of spectacular horses at a Lake Town Puja. In subsequent years, in different Puja sites that become his stronghold, we see him

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6.66 Gouranga Kuinla, Pavilion with figures and wall panels made out of painted bamboo baskets and trays, Dumdum Park Bharat Chakra Puja, 2009

moving towards a greater pragmatism of materials, with the investment in elaborate workmanship matched by a close attention to the portability and reuse of his productions. So he began to simulate the look of rows and rows of Dhokra metal sculptures in painted thermocol, the look of painted wooden puppets with folded and collapsible paper cartons, and the appearance of underground water with discarded plastic bags in a pavilion he decorated with seaweed and shells. At the same time, he also inventively filled his tableaux with stylized figures made out of converted bamboo baskets or inverted clay pots which he clothed like puppets and placed in a festive Rathayatra-style pavilion, (See 6.66, 6.67) and got his team to laboriously recreate the painted motifs of Bengali patachitras as exquisite silk embroidered panels.42 (See 6.68) Each of these Gouranga Kuinla productions could be seen to carry a touch of his authorial design. But it is also in the nature of the trade that many of these forms (like figures made with bamboo trays and baskets, or rows of clay pot puppets with bobbing heads) come to freely proliferate across multiple Puja sites and quickly lose all marks of any singular creator. (See 6.69) More than issues

of patent and authorship, designers like him are concerned with maximizing the life and travels of each season’s work. Thus each of these tableaux are fabricated in a way that allow for their careful dismantling and repacking by his team at the end of the Durga Pujas in order to be reused, in part or in whole, in the Kali Pujas and Jagaddhatri Pujas of suburban towns. For entire pandals to be sold off at drastically lowered prices to district Kali Puja and Jagaddhatri Puja committees is the fate of most ‘theme’ productions, even the ones most deserving of preservation as public art. What is notable here is the way Gouranga Kuinla retains full control over this process of movement and recycling of his works across the season’s many festivals, with the key intention of recovery of the cost of his production, and even profit. If he too harbours desires to be a painter, he is equally aware that there is no career to be secured in that line of work and sticks closely to the crafts and commissions that bring him his earnings. By 2011, he could brandish his newfound affluence and mark his new place in the city by opening a small boutique for crafts and curios at Bosepukur, on the main avenue connecting to the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass.

6.67 Gouranga Kuinla, Chariot-shaped pavilion flanked by costumed clay pot figures with bobbing heads, Dumdum Park Bharat Chakra Puja, 2010

6.68 Gouranga Kuinla, Detail of an embroidered patachitra-style panel on the episode of Ramchandra’s invocation of Durga, Kankurgachhi Mitali Sangha Puja, 2010

6.69 Saree-clad clay pot puppets, similar to Kuinla’s clothed clay pot figures, featuring in another designer’s work at the Lalabagan Nabankur Sangha Puja, Maniktala, 2012

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‘art’, but not quite In beginning with the examples of the Sonajhuri Santhal Puja and ending with that of Gouranga Kuinla, this chapter has laid out the two ends of the spectrum of Durga Puja ‘art’ —one that moves from the ‘artist’ to the ‘craftsman’, while continuously transmuting both identities, and swings between the discourses of creativity and the practices of thriving commerce, with both feeding into the cultural economy of the event. It could well be asked —did it need so many case studies to present this story? It has been my deliberate intention to generate in this account the same sense of excess and saturation that the festival leaves us with every year. I have tried, thereby, to show why even die-hard enthusiasts of Puja touring find it hard to discern which works may qualify as forms of ‘public art’ as against the bulk that repeat the templates of craft villages or present only the novelties of materials and designs. There are many in art circles who are loathe granting any of these productions the name of ‘installation’ or ‘conceptual’ art: designations which they rightly say come out of a different history of avant-garde practice. One of the key paradoxes I explore here is the aspiration of some Puja designers to take on the idioms and materials of installation art in an arena where none of the other institutional parameters of curating, criticism and reception are ever in place. This is what makes the terminology of contemporary installation art a constant impropriety in this field of an ephemeral mass spectacle. It is also worth reflecting that when a different order of avant-garde installation art does intervene from the outside— as it did in the much-publicized venture of the German installation artist Gregor Schneider at the Ekdalia Evergreen Puja in 2011—it becomes no less of an impropriety and an anomaly. As a transplantation of a model of an empty tarmac road from his German hometown into the vertical form of a towering structure put up by a local pandalmaking team, Schneider’s work was completely out of sync with the surrounding illuminations and ambience of the Puja, not least of all with the conventional Durga image by Sanatan Rudra Pal that was housed inside. As a form of pandal, it was stark, colourless, lacking in intricacy—a cause of

curiosity and incomprehension both among the special invitees at the inauguration and among the crowds that flock this Puja.43 Modernist experiments with pavilion design or industrial art, even by the city’s own artists, seldom succeed in this sphere— as, for instance, with a production using discarded car parts and metal junk on the theme of industrial pollution by Dipali Bhattacharya and a team of her art college students.44 (See 6.70) The field remains ensconced in the safer sway of a vernacular design and craft aesthetic, with the festival nurturing and endorsing its own specific repertoire of ‘modern art’. All transitions in this sphere remain incomplete. Each Puja production, however ambitious, is left with no other local name but a pandal—in the same way that each designer Durga image is left grappling to transcend its status as an idol and become a ‘work of art’. These unresolved contradictions are at the heart of my study, as it explores the grounds on which the names and claims of ‘art’ circulate among changing groups of producers and spectators. If one goes out looking here for cutting-edge installation art, one is bound to be disappointed. So it was with a journalist writing a column in the magazine Mint, reporting on the eve of the Durga Pujas of 2011.45 Why, she asked, could the Ekdalia Evergreen Club’s model of collaboration with a contemporary German artist not be taken further? Why were contemporary artists like Paresh Maity or Sreyashi Chatterjee, fashion designers like Sabyasachi Mukherjee or Anamika Khanna, or film directors like Rituparno Ghosh not taking over the designing of pandals throughout the city? I think getting big name artists to design the pandals would transform the artistic landscape of the city. It would be a game changer and show artisans what can be done…It would need a visionary director of pandals, if such an office exists, to make it happen, but it would—and I know I sound impossibly arrogant here—lift the city’s creative sensibilities from the realm of tradition and connect it what is happening on the global art scene...46 My answer would be to push the argument in a reverse direction. To show that in this sphere it is frequently the ‘artisan’ who is showing the ‘artist’

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6.70 Installation (under construction) on industrial pollution with discarded car parts, by Dipali Bhatacharya and a student team of Government Art College, Calcutta, Abasar Puja, Bhowanipur, 2011

what can be conceived of as popular public art. To make a counter case that it is the saving grace of the festival that the ‘big names’ among the city’s artists, film directors and fashion designers have not invaded this field of creativity and displaced the opportunities of a host of others who have made this their chosen space of work. And to emphasize that the nature of production here is such that there cannot prevail any single curatorial vision that will set the terms of the artistic makeover of the city. The distinction of the city’s Durga Puja ‘art’ lies in its very resistance to such overarching structures of

control, and in its ability to thrive amidst all the chaos, crowds, incongruities and overproduction that we encounter on the streets. Like everything in Bengal, it can never be fully or adequately global— and remains inextricably embedded (as I show all through this book) in the localness of its producers, organizers and viewing publics. That it can never be equal to the exclusive circles of ‘high art’ is what makes for the specific social and cultural profile of the phenomenon. That it forces us to abandon many of the arrogances of ‘art’ and push outwards its normative boundaries has been the moot point of interest of this study.

Notes 1 In September 2011, for instance, the Indian Museum mounted a large show from its collections titled, ‘Shaktirupena: An Exposition on Mother Goddesses in Indian Art’, where the exhibits ranged from earliest Harappa terracotta and medieval stone sculptures and bronzes to nineteenth century ivory and porcelain objects, Kalighat paintings, Bastar metal figurines, as well as few paintings by Abanindranath Tagore and Nandalal

Bose. The Chitrakoot Art Gallery put out at the same time a small selection of specifically Durga imagery by nineteenth century anonymous oil painters of Bengal and other twentieth century Bengali artists. And the Harrington Street Arts Centre had on view an exhibition curated by Ina Puri of a special genre of contemporary Durga sculptures made with found metal objects (like pipes, chains, locks, keys and other utensils) by a self-

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in the name of the goddess trained Birbhum artist, Narayan Sinha, who chose to place his work in a gallery for private and corporate buyers rather than in a Durga Puja. (See 6.4) These careers are tracked mainly over the period from 2002 to 2010, with a few leads into 2011–2012. ‘The Durga Puja Zeitgeist’, Cover Feature on Art by Shamik Bag, Mint Lounge, The Weekend Magazine, 9 October 2010. This calculation of collective spending in the season of 2010 is made on the basis of a rough count of 4,000 Puja units in the Kolkata Greater Urban Area, with an average annual budget of around Rs. 10 lakhs. Arka Das, ‘Artists drift away from Puja’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 21 September 2010. Among the artists quoted in this article are Robin Roy, whose 2004 work at a Behala Puja won an award; Srikanta Pal, who designed Pujas right through his undergraduate days at Rabindra Bharati University in the mid 1990s till he moved to MS University of Baroda; and Partha Dasgupta whose Puja pavilions at Behala, done from 2002 to 2006, were all said to be ‘one-of-a-kind site specific installations’ and described as ‘works that were way ahead of their times.’ The Sonajhuri area and the Ballavpur bird sanctuary have come more and more into Santiniketan’s circuits of ecotourism, with the Kopai Country Cottage Homes as one of the newer kinds of holiday resorts and homes that are on offer here. With a job as graphic designer in Calcutta Doordarshan (the state-owned television centre), he would commute between Kolkata and his home in Bonerpukur Danga in Sonajhuri, till he found a post in the newly opened Doordarshan studios at Santiniketan in 2000. Interview with artist Asis Ghosh at the venue of the Sonajhuri Durga Puja, Santiniketan, 2 October 2008. Much of Santinketan’s art has been defined by such an ideology of tribal activism and an environmental, primitivist aesthetic. This is well articulated in R. Siva Kumar in Santiniketan: Growth of a Contextual Modernism, and elaborated in the publications brought out by the NGMA, New Delhi, around its major retrospective exhibitions on the three founding artists of Santiniketan—Nandalal Bose 1882–1966, Centenary Exhibition volume, with essays by Jaya Appasamy, Sankho Chaudhuri. Laxmi P. Sihare and K.G. Subramanyan (New Delhi: NGMA, 1982), Benode Behari Mukherjee, 1904–1980, Centenary Retrospective Exhibition, curated by Gulam Mohammed Sheikh and R. Siva Kumar (New Delhi: NGMA, 2006) and Ramkinkar Baij: A Retrospective, curated by K.S. Radhakrishnan and R. Siva Kumar (New Delhi: NGMA, 2012). ‘Durga Puja celebrated among Santhals’, The Times of India, Kolkata, 30 September 2003; ‘A different

ambience’, an article on the Sonajhuri Durga Puja, The Statesman, Kolkata, 4 October 2008. 10 The images of the Sonajhuri Durga Puja event, the on-site Santhal performances, and the different Durga images made and stored over the years, are drawn from a video recording of the ‘Hiralini Debipujo’ of 2005, and a large set of still photographs from 2007, which were generously shared with me by Asis Ghosh. 11 Sculptures of Asis Ghosh, catalogue of exhibition held at the Academy of Fine Arts, Calcutta, 2008. 12 This exclusivist ambience of the Sonajhuri Durga Puja is fast getting eroded, as these forest grounds and the special weekly event of the Shanibarer Haat have become general tourist attractions. In a visit to the Sonajhuri forests in January 2012, I found there had come up on the weekly market grounds a village hut-restaurant (one of the many of its kind coming up in and around Santiniketan), with walls painted in the style of Nandalal Bose’s Sahaj Path linocuts, serving Bengali lunch and snacks round the year—and the house with the Durga Puja altar being let out to select guests and friends of Asis and Chitra Ghosh. In April 2014, I found here newer guest houses with tribal art décor, and saw that the Shanibarer Haat had expanded from the canal bank into the main forest grounds and become a round-the-week event. 13 Sanatan Dinda (like the other two designers who follow—Bhabatosh Sutar and Sushanta Pal) has been interviewed every year, from 2002 to 2011, and his work closely studied every season. I have drawn here mainly on the interviews with him taken on 23 September 2002, 12 October 2004, 30 September 2005, 19 September 2007, and 7 October 2010—all at the site of the Nalin Sarkar Street Puja. 14 With Sanatan Dinda setting the trend in this style of publicity and pushing it to new heights, Puja hoardings featuring the faces of other ‘star’ artists like Amar Sarkar or Bhabatosh Sutar became a new vogue from 20112012. 15 Interview with Sanatan Dinda, Nalin Sarkar Street Puja, 19 September 2007. 16 It was only in 2011 that Sanatan Dinda first took on a Puja designing venture in south Kolkata, at the Chakraberia Sarbojanin Puja, in addition to his Puja at Nalin Sarkar Street. Thereafter, in 2012, he entirely moved away from this location and carried his now familiar trail of publicities to two Puja productions of south Kolkata, at the Barisha Club Puja of Behala and the 95 Pally Puja of Jodhpur Park. 17 The same advertisement for his art exhibitions, with one of his mixed painting-cum-sculpture installations of a nude female figure breaking out of a wall, also simultaneously appeared in glossy art magazines, like Art India or Take on Art.

demands and dilemmas of durga puja ‘art’ 18 Several interviews were conducted with Bhabatosh Sutar over different seasons at the different sites of his Durga Puja productions—at the Barisha Shrishti Puja sites on 14 September 2003 and 17 October 2005; at the Natun Pally Pradip Sangha Puja in the interiors of Lake Town, on 20 September 2006; at the 25 Pally Puja, Khidirpur, on 6 September 2008; and at the Naktala Udayan Sangha Puja on 16 September 2011. 19 The idea of such a venture is said to go back 22 years, when the senior-most artist in the group, Tarun Dey, began acquiring land in this area, and put together with the group a consolidated expanse of thirty five cottahs, on which came up the residences and studios of the Environmental Art Collective. Much of the credit for designing the grounds and the main building with studios and residences goes to Bhabatosh Sutar. The name Chander Haat (literally meaning a fairground on the moon) implies a place given over to wishes and dreams. In the making from the late 2000s, the Chander Haat Prangan formally launched itself on 8 February 2013 through an opening exhibition, a three-day art festival, and a lavish foldout brochure. 20 Along with Bhabatosh Sutar, several other artists of the Environmental Art group, like Tarun Dey and Nirmal Malik, have been working on Puja installations, individually and as group productions, and look on these experiments in ‘public art’ as a vital source of income that has made possible their Chander Haat venture. 21 Reluctant to discuss this past personal history, wishing only to discuss with me his artistic conceptions for each of his designed Pujas, Bhabatosh finally gave me this candid account of his life in my interview with him at the Naktala Udayan Sangha Puja on 16 September 2011. 22 Bhabatosh’s 2002 terracotta Durga ensemble lay largely neglected and hidden in an outer corner behind wedding pavilions on the ITC Sonar Bangla lawns. Now, it is nowhere to be found, with that portion of the hotel grounds sold off to another estate. And Derek O’Brien, who acquired the painted wood and bamboo Durga group of 2003, still had not placed it on display in his office grounds in 2006, and could not remember the name of the artist who made the work. 23 These particular lines from this song of Ramprasad were cited—Emon manab jamin roilo patit, abad korley pholto sona, mon re krishi kaaj janey na and the title for this production was given as Esho Sobai Langol Dhori, Manab Jamin Abaad Kori (‘Come let us all plough the earth, and make the human mind reap its crops’). From the Concept Note of the 25 Pally Sarbojanin Durgotsav Samiti, in its 63rd year, October 2007. 24 The Trinamool ministers Partha Chatterjee and Firhaud Hakim, the main political patrons of the Naktala and Chetla Pujas, have emerged as the main promoters of

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Bhabatosh Sutar. This scenario of direct Trinamool backing of Durga Puja art and artists would now be played out in several other locations and prop up many other Puja designers. Sanatan Dinda also rode on the same wave of political backing of the two south Kolkata Pujas he designed over 2012–13, with the Chief Minister rubbing shoulders with the artist at her inaugurations of these Pujas. By now, Bhabatosh Sutar and Sanatan Dinda were also being touted as the busiest, most marketable ‘brands’ of the city of ‘theme’ Pujas; Rwiju Basu, Painter Thekey Adman, Themenagarir Byastatama Brand, ABP, Kolkata, 9 October 2013. 25 While his works were tracked from 2002 to 2011, the main interviews with Sushanta Pal were conducted at the Barisha Sahajatri Puja on 20 September 2003, at the Naktala Udayan Sangha Puja on 12 October 2005 and 21 September 2006; at the Badamtala Ashar Sangha Puja, Kalighat on 15 September 2007, 6 September 2008, and 14 September 2010; and at the adjacent Sanghasree Puja at Kalighat on 15 September 2011. 26 Titled Rupali Parday Sonali Durga (‘The Golden Durga of the Silver Screen’), this Puja theme broke new grounds in 2003. A decade later, in 2013, the theme would repeat itself in a very different kind of exhibition on ‘100 Years of Indian Cinema’, curated and sponsored by the Alliance Francaise, Kolkata, at the Pally Mangal Samiti Puja on Anwar Shah Road. 27 The rhyming couplets publicizing his Pujas (a typical feature of these popular productions) also highlighted the play with material—the pull and stretch of woven ropes (Tanaporener notun khela, debir anganey dorir mela) or the traditional feel of bamboo, straw, clay and colour (Bansh, khor, mati or rong, ebar Pujor sabeki dhong). 28 Many of these design themes of Sushanta Pal—whether drawn from child art, or the art of Battala wood engravings—are not new in themselves. Pavilions with rag dolls or puppets, interspersed with paintings by children from local sit-and-draw contests, have come up in different seasons in Pujas at Hindustan Park or Khidirpur. In 2004, for instance, two local designers had put up a large display on the woodcut prints of Battala, with enlarged panels of these black and white prints filling the enclosure, and the goddess modelled on the appearance of the figures on these prints. Sushanta Pal’s novelty lay in converting the architectural backdrops and figures from these engravings into a three-dimensional tableau. What was remarkable was the sheer labour involved in making straw-stuffed moulds of these figures and their conversion in hollowed plaster casts that were then given the handdaubed painted look of the Battala images. 29 ‘United Colours of Badamtala till next Puja’, The Bengal Post, Kolkata, 24 October 2010. 30 Interview with Amar Sarkar at his studio at Behala, 14 September 2004.

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31 This mixed media installation was put up in the far north of the city, at the Tala Barowari Puja, its 91st year in 2011. It centred around a history of advertising from its early beginnings in almanac pages to its current life as digital flex hoardings, which Amar Sarkar sourced from a large Facebook archive on old and new advertisements. This was compiled by a group of advertising professionals at Bates 141, inviting new postings with the title, Ekhane Bigyapon Mariben (‘Please paste advertisements here’). The display also had many other components thrown in— like figures of folk performers dressed as gods, piled boxes with calligraphic patterns, and a well-like structure lined with clay moulds of Durga heads—which left viewers grappling to find connections and meanings. Stunning in its use of advertising imagery, this installation by Amar Sarkar became an instance, however, of a confusing and cluttered overdose of the ‘conceptual’ that has become the bane of many of today’s ‘art’ Pujas. 32 Interview with Rupchand Kundu at the Jatra Shuru Sangha Puja, Garia, 21 September 2006. 33 Interviews with Subodh Ray at the Suruchi Sangha Puja, Alipore (where he had designed the best of that year’s several ‘Kerala dance villages’, 23 September 2003; at the 25 Pally Puja, Khidirpur, 6 October 2005; and at the Behala Agradoot Club Puja, 20 September 2006. 34 Conversation with Subodh Ray on 9 October 2010, at the CJ Block Puja, Salt Lake. He had found, however, an alternative patron that year in Firhaud Hakim, and was being promoted by Hakim’s Chetla Agrani Club Puja where he sculpted a Durga image in a mixture of permanent material (wood, bronze and stone), hoping it would be acquired by a collector. With this new political backing, Subodh Ray continued to work on Pujas during the subsequent seasons of 2011 and 2012—paying his overt if oblique tribute to the new Chief Minister as ‘Bengal’s Durga’ in a Puja he designed at Bhowanipur Golmath in 2011. (See 3.37) 35 Interview with Nirmal Malik at the Santoshpur Trikone Puja, 10 September2009. 36 Interview with Sushanta Pal, Badamtala Ashar Sangha Puja, 14 September 2010. 37 Interview with Shibshankar Das, then working for the first time on his independent Puja commission at Bosepukur, and Subir Ghosh of the Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja committee, 10 October 2006. Interview with Kajal Sarkar, President of the Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja, 23 September 2007.

38 Interview with Shibshankar Das on his production that year for the Chakraberia Sarbojanin Puja, Bhowanipur, 25 September 2010. 39 Between 2008 and 2010, the Talbagan Sarbojanin Puja, Bosepukur, and the Dumdum Park Tarun Sangha Puja have been the two prime locations for these productions of Prashanta Pal. 40 Interview with Prashanta Pal at the Talbagan Sarbojanin Puja site, Bosepukur, Kasba, 1 September 2010. 41 Interview with Gouranga Kuinla, at a private Marwari residence in Salt Lake, where he had been commissioned to do an elaborate interior tableau for their Janmashtami Puja, 1 September 2010. 42 ‘Artist’s theme for a dream’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 30 October 2010. 43 This point about incommensurability and noncognition at both ends of this ‘collaborative’ venture is candidly brought home in Nilanjan Bhattacharya’s film, Ninety Degrees. In this high-profile international art intervention within the public sphere of the festival, it was the German artist who clearly carried away more from Kolkata’s Durga Pujas to take back to Germany (not least all, portions of the dismantled pandal and immersion refuse that he recovered from the riverside, for reuse in installations there) than the festival could take from him. We could argue that his Durga Puja venture had far greater affective impact within his own art than within the local field out of which it emerged. 44 This pavilion at the Abasar Puja, Bhowanipur titled Dushan-Binashini (‘The Destroyer of Pollution’) had about it the full appearance of a modernist industrial art installation, with a specially hanging mushroom cloud and a large buffalo head made of steel junk (see 8.7), but won no appreciation or awards on the festival circuit. 45 Shobha Narayan, ‘When Kolkata turns into a museum’, in her column, The Good Life, LiveMint.Com, The Wall Street Journal, Thursday, 13 October 2011. 46 The columnist goes on to surmise that the reason this is not happening is because of the huge premium placed by Bengalis on the continuity of artistic and artisanal traditions in the Pujas. ‘It is this passion that Durga Puja evokes that is the biggest obstacle to any wholesale redesign of pandals. I might want a Paresh Maity pandal or a Rituparno Ghosh designed pandal, but for that, I have to get past how much every Bengali is invested in this.’

SEVEN

Durga Puja Tours and Travels The south of the city fast caught on to the period’s new wave of ‘theme’ Pujas. In 2003, the newspapers were reporting on south Kolkata leaving the north behind in the novelty of its Pujas, in their styles of publicity and tally of awards, while also commenting on the gradual makeover of some of the older north Kolkata Pujas in a strategic bid for corporate sponsorship and prize money.1 Distinctions between the ‘north’ and ‘south’ in the city are as territorial as they are social and cultural. There are very different histories that unfold for these areas from the late eighteenth century into the mid twentieth century, with a sharply divergent tenor of metropolitan development, middle class lifestyles, and new institutional, commercial and residential complexes separating the south from the north.2 The north-south elongation of Kolkata along the curvature of the river Hooghly continues to give the city its core cartographic anatomy. At the same time, the expansion of the city in other directions, especially its providential eastwards growth off the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass, have opened up other geographic and cultural axes of urban life and complicated the earlier spatial definitions of ‘north’ and ‘south’. The ‘north’ can be shown to have developed innumerable internal layers and segments, and spilled eastwards into vast new expanses of the city—first, with the satellite township of Salt Lake developing on its eastern flanks from the late 1970s and rapidly transforming itself from the 1990s; more lately, with

the global-look corporate and technological sector growing further inwards to the east in Sector V, Salt Lake and New Town, Rajarhat. The gigantic apartments, malls and offices, and dazzling glass and steel architecture of these ‘techno-cities’ stand in sharp contrast to the overgrown quarters and narrow lanes of the proverbial traditional city of the ‘north’. The idea of a ‘south’ also becomes more and more difficult to plot on the spreading spatial map of the city. The post-Independence and post-Partition years had created a series of remote peripheries, stretching the city deep into its rural hinterland, as one refugee colony after another sprouted in the east of Ballygunge and south to southwest of Dhakuria, Jadavpur, and Tollygunge. This created a wide social gulf between the gracious ‘south’ that thrived around the vicinities of Gariahat Road, Rashbehari Avenue, Southern Avenue and the Lakes, and the congested lower middle-class colonies that mushroomed in these interiors.3 From the end of the 1990s, a newer ‘south’ opened up eastwards along the southern stretch of the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass leading to Garia, cutting into the disappearing open greens, agricultural plots and wetlands of these rural fringes of the city, bringing up a series of new elite, middle-class and lower middleclass housing enclaves, drawing areas running from Mukundapur, Kalikapur to Baishnabghata Patuli and New Garia into the current metropolitan map.4 (See 7.1, 7.2)

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7.1 Map showing the areas of older elite south Kolkata, stretching from Ballygunge and Gariahat to Rabindra Sarovar and Jodhpur Park

7.2 Map showing the new eastward extensions of south Kolkata towards the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass and the areas of Baishnabghata Patuli and Garia

This is not the place to enter into this largely untold story of the transforming demography, sociology and territorial graph of the contemporary city.5 My main purpose here is only to lay out, in its broadest contours, the extended spatial parameters in which my micro-account of the changing character of the city’s Durga Puja is grounded. What kinds of new maps emerge for the city of the festival? How do designers, forms and styles travel across space and time? And how do certain, often otherwise nondescript localities gain a new visibility on this map and remain ingrained in public memory as Puja sites long after the event is over?

transforming the known city into an illusory zone of spectatorship.

The first section of the chapter takes up the case of three neighbourhoods from different parts of the city (among the many which jostle for a place in the expanding festival map of Kolkata) to show how each of these emerge as prime sites of art production and festival touring. While locational histories are crucial to the aesthetics of ‘theme’ Pujas, it is also important to see how the city as a whole is configured by the trajectory of the festival. Each season, the Durga Puja offers a new city to be discovered and traversed—where the concentrated intensity of these travels in space and time ends up

The second section of the chapter hones in on the experience of ‘walking in the city’, to show how in the process of walking one both unlearns and re-engages with the ‘everyday city’, weaving new maps through the existing cartography of roads and neighbourhoods. While I take my cue here from Michel de Certeau’s celebrated essay of this title, I wish to rethink the contrast that he conjures between the panoptic vision of the city seen from above as a ‘theoretical (that is, visual) simulacrum’ (like Manhattan viewed from the 110th floor of the World Trade Centre), and everyday spatial practices enacted by those who walk the streets below. Kolkata has seldom lent itself to a panoramic view from above that lays out the city as a ‘planned and readable’ space. On the contrary, the experience of the city is always, as de Certeau terms it, ‘lived “down below”, below the threshold at which visibility begins’, where urban walkers are said to work their way through ‘the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without being able to read.’6 I will show, on the contrary, that the city ‘from below’ becomes ‘readable’ in a new way by festival walkers who experience it during these

durga puja tours and travels 295 days as a unified visual simulacrum. As I track the spread of the wave of ‘theme’ Pujas across the entire metropolis, festival touring, I argue, creates a specific tempo of walking and gives the city a particular legibility for those who walk and view. It also offers up a temporary experience of an integrated city, as the phenomenon throws a seasonal veil of unity over disparate spatial zones, allowing for a collapse of their social differences within a new festival topography.

neighbourhood histories Behala Let us begin our tour in the far southwest of the city, in a zone that I have been referring to as a founding site of the period’s ‘art’ Pujas. Previously part of a separate municipality by the name of South Suburban, Behala was to be incorporated only in 1985 within the jurisdiction of the Kolkata Corporation. And it is only in 2011, under the new government’s move to bring greater Kolkata under a unified administrative rubric, that zones like Behala came under the jurisdiction of the Kolkata Police force. The vicinities of Barisha and Sarsuna in Behala, with their vestiges of old temples, aristocratic homes and place names referring to medieval forts are, however, among the earliest settlements of the city, with a history that dates far beyond the time of the founding of colonial trading establishments in the three acquired villages of Sutanuti, Govindapur and Kalikata at the end of the seventeenth century. This history can be tracked back to the turbulent times of Pathan and Mughal rule in these fringe territories of Bengal, to the rise and fall of the local Barobhuinyas (cohort of twelve landed warlords). One line of these warlords—that of Raja Basanta Ray and Raja Pratapaditya—set up a fortress called Raygarh in the region of Sarsuna and laid out temples and tanks whose traces still survive in the names of several little areas and bazaars.7 The history moves thereafter to the time of the settlement in these regions of Brahmin and trading families from other parts of Bengal and the grant of Mughal jagirs over these lands, with which we come to the story of the Sabarna Ray Choudhurys of Barisha, among the oldest zamindars of Bengal, who held the jagir rights over the three villages that would become the

colonial city and are reputed as ‘the family that once owned Calcutta’.8 These same regions of Behala also offer us the oldest and newest of Kolkata’s Durga Puja histories. Lakshmikanta Majumdar, who migrated here from Halishahar after the grant of the Mughal jagir to found the Sabarna Ray Choudhury family of Barisha, is said to have hosted the first Durga Puja in this locality in 1610 in an atchala mandap (eight-roofed temple pavilion) in the oldest of their residential mansions. (See 7.3) It is from this historic precinct that eight decades later the villages of Sutanuti, Govindapur and Kalikata would be sold to the East India Company by his descendants. The Sabarna Ray Choudhury Puja contends with those begun by Maharaja Kangsanarayan of Tahirpur in northern Bengal (now in Bangladesh) around 1580, and by Maharaja Bhabananda Majumdar of Krishnanagar, Nadia, in 1606, all in the heyday of Mughal rule, to be considered the first of the Banedi Barir Pujas of Bengal.9 Behala was again where some of the longest-running household Pujas began in the early and mid-colonial era, as with the Puja begun around 1770 by the family of Jagatram Mukhopadhyay, or the ones begun in the mid-nineteenth century by two other affluent Behala families, one by Hemchandra Haldar, and the other by Raibahadur Chandi Charan Ray of the Supreme Court of Calcutta.10 Although

7.3 Remains of the old atchala mandap at the main Sabarna Ray Choudhury family Puja at Barisha, Behala

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rickshaw pullers or a sick child of the locality, or arranging local ‘sit and draw’ contests and song and theatre events) were what grounded the reputation of these clubs in the para. And the taste and artistry of their Puja productions, each carrying the creative stamp of a new creed of art school trained designers, were what catapulted them on to the larger stage of the urban festival, drawing the attention of corporate sponsors and award-givers, pulling viewing crowds from all over the city to these distant venues.11

7.4 Village-hut style structure under construction at the small empty plot hosting the Barisha Shrishti Puja, 2005

the elite family Pujas of this area could never compare in their show of wealth and extravagance with their counterparts in the bania palaces of north Calcutta, they establish the long lineage of Durga worship in this region. Jumping forward by two hundred years and more, we find that the contemporary genre of ‘art’ Pujas would also find one of its earliest concentrated clusters in the same locality of Barisha in Behala. At the lead of this wave was one of the newest Puja clubs of the area, Barisha Srishti, which we have already come upon in our discussions in the previous two chapters. It came into being in 1999, as a breakaway unit from an older club called Sahajatri, whose Puja site was located just a stone’s throw away down the same road. The Pujas of Barisha Srishti and Sahajatri stand as exemplary models of the period’s new virtues of smallness and artistic refinement. Each had at their disposal no more than a small vacant plot of land, wedged between rows of houses. (See 7.4, 7.5) Each presented the image also of an organic parar pujo, where the worship was conducted by a local priest, where elderly residents and women of the surrounding houses closely participated in all the rituals and the younger generation, though hardly involved with organizing the Pujas, spent the five days of the festival enjoying adda in its precincts. Social work and cultural activities (blood donation camps, ambulance services, raising money for

When our research team first arrived at these club Pujas during the seasons of 2002 and 2003, there was a full-blown rivalry between these two small back-to-back units, especially in their claims to have augured the trend of ‘theme’ Pujas. When in 1998, the Puja of Barisha Sahajatri brought home the coveted Asian Paints ‘Sharad Samman’—for the recreation of the rural hermitage of an ancient mythical sage by Sushanta Pal, then still a student of the Government Art College—it fully fitted the bill of the small, unknown, artistic Puja that this award campaign was seeking out. The following year, 1999, the Asian Paints award sought out another small Barisha Puja—that of Tapoban club, situated a small distance away from the Sahajatri site, on a tiny bylane off Diamond Harbour Road—which featured for the first time the Behala-based artist Amar Sarkar, who designed the grounds with Rajasthani crafts and a Durga in the style of a Rajasthani costumed puppet. One of the Barisha’s first Sarbojanin Pujas,

7.5 Pandal site at the alley leading into the neighbouring Barisha Sahajatri Puja, 2005

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7.6 Tiny site of the Tapoban Club Puja with a Gambhira tribal art pavilion, 2004

7.7 Durga image of the Gambhira tribal art pavilion designed by the artists’ group, Tribhuj, Tapoban Club Puja, 2004

dating from the 1940s, the Tapoban club’s funds remained as limited as its grounds. Its total budget in 2003 could not be stretched beyond Rs. 75,000, as it went about each year profiling one rural craft form after another in tightly-knit miniaturized tableaux.12 (See 7.6) Over 2001 and 2002 it was, however, the newly formed Barisha Srishti Puja, which emerged as the biggest ‘star’ on the art production and award circuit, where the perfect model of the little folk art village evolved, as we have seen, under the research and design supervision of Amar Sarkar.

Tapoban, we also first encounter the teamwork of artist groups like Tribhuj, formed by some young art college graduates, among them Debraj Rudra Pal and Sunil Pal from the lineage of the Kumartuli image makers.14 (See 7.7) As its most important point of distinction, Behala can also be seen to have pioneered a particular genre of ‘art’ Pujas—the rural craft and folk art tableaux—and retained it through this period as its home-grown speciality.

Behala, we were told, had become the centre of a local art revival, of a concerted effort by artists and art students of the area to use the small parar pujo as a forum for their design experiments with different folk arts and crafts.13 It would bring on to the scene several of the most successful of the city’s senior and younger Puja designers—Amar Sarkar, Subodh Ray, Bhabatosh Sutar and Sushanta Pal—many of them are residents of Behala, all of whose careers in this line of work were nurtured in the little Pujas of this area, before their call came to design Pujas in other parts of the city. This is where they were able to first cultivate a new layer of spectators and public tastes for art; and, while they took on lucrative Puja commissions in several parts of the city, designers like Amar Sarkar or Bhabatosh Sutar continued, until 2006–07, to commit their time to at least one of the Behala Pujas. In Pujas like those of Barisha

For a region that is said to have once been jungle and riverine lands, the home of low-caste, forest communities (shabar, dhibar, nishad or bagdi peoples) and their competing religious cults of Dharmathakur and Buro Panchanan, before it was settled and urbanized under the zamindari regimes of the Mughal and colonial era,15 this modernday obsession with village and folk arts in its Pujas becomes an interesting point for reflection. Is it a way this locality marks its own indigenous, primordial pasts against the tide of the humdrum and unwieldy urban growth of the present? Or does it only ride on the wave of a growing middle-class urban taste for ethnic rural arts that can be seen to sweep across Pujas in old and new, elite and non-elite neighbourhoods? Whatever may be the case, the list of such craft and folk art displays at Behala was a long and growing one. Alongside, the art of goyna bori, galar putul or Gambhira dance masks and musical instruments of the Santhal tribes of North Bengal that were seen

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Young Men’s Association had emerged to special notice for having its Pujas designed by Bhabatosh Sutar, and had become by 2007 the only of one of this prime designer’s Behala Pujas, featuring that year a Varanasi ghat with steps and umbrellas, and the goddess placed within the hull of an old-world zamindari barge.16 (See 7.10) By this time, another Puja site further south—that of Behala Natun Dal—was drawing record queues of spectators for its simulations, in different years, of mountainous caves with icicles, a fishermen’s village, or a deserted ruined temple in a jungle. These productions of art college-trained set designer Rono Banerjee had announcement banners put up all over the city to pull festival crowds in their direction.17 The Behala Natun Dal stands representative of a different tenor of the popular, sensational genre of production that would also find a place within the period’s nomenclature of ‘theme’ Pujas. 7.8 Line of old Shiva temples at Barisha, Behala

at successive Barisha Tapoban Pujas during 2002, 2003, 2004, we saw during the same years, in the neighbouring site of the Barisha Yubak Brinda Puja, the art of clay soras, along with the oldest surviving sora painter of Tahirpur in Nadia, palm-leaf manuscript painting, and palm leaf hand-fans. There were also more striking cosmopolitan waves, such as a taste for African primitive art, taking over the imagination of local Puja designers in Behala, even as African motifs sprung out of Puja sites in the same years in other pockets of the city. And it was again these Behala ‘art’ Pujas (especially that of Barisha Srishti), which augured the trend of collectible Durga images, ones that artists chose to sculpt with material like wood, lacquer or terracotta, seeking for these a place in the city’s hotels, parks or art collections. (See 6.27, 6.28) To continue our survey of Behala, let us also consider the kinds of temporal flows and spatial spreads of this genre of ‘art’ Pujas within this zone. As we kept returning to Behala during each season of our fieldwork, we would find the entire stretch along James Long Sarani thickly lined with village tableaux, clay and terracotta installations, often also replicas of old Bengal temples, barely distinguishable from the dilapidated real ones in the locality. (See 7.8, 7.9) At the northern end of this stretch, a club like the Behala

At the same time, across Diamond Harbour Road and the many roads leading into the interiors of Behala, the quintessential folk art Puja continued

7.9 A pandal in the shape of an old ekchala temple, Barisha Ekata Sangha Puja, 2008

durga puja tours and travels 299 to hold sway, each calling on a more cultivated layer of spectators. During 2006, one of its newer incarnations was to be found in the Behala Agradoot Club Puja, sprouting out of a winding alley of a small para far off the main road, to which we were led to by its banner on the main junction, advertising the recreation of a tribal village of Chhattisgarh under the design supervision of Subodh Ray. As explained by a club member, it was only during the previous year that their little Puja had succeeded in mobilizing the kind of budget and designer that allowed them to make the transition from their earlier standardized fare to new-style ‘art’ productions, and enter the league of corporate awards and publicity. In 2005, a craft village designed by Subodh Ray with two typical Bengali ritual objects, matir pradip and dhunuchi, had brought the Puja its much coveted honours and viewers. A committee member spoke as proudly of the CESC- Telegraph ‘True Spirit’ award that had come their way that year as well as of the special kinds of viewers who had searched out their Puja, citing the instance of two Swiss tourists who arrived in these remote parts to see their production the day after Dashami, just as the entire unit was being dismantled. Such success had enabled their Puja to access new advertisers and sponsors and push up their budget to 6.5 lakhs in 2006.18 This enabled Subodh Ray to conceive of the more ambitious project of bringing the aged, national award-winning folk painter of Chhattisgarh, Sonabai, and her team of painters to create on site a replica of their tribal village, which he embellished with his folk-art goddess. (See 7.11) That these painters could be seen at work on site in the weeks before the Pujas and that they were made to dance in the simulated village courtyard on the evenings of the festival made the Behala Agradoot Puja one of the period’s typical live folk performance sites. (See 7.12) What was also a great pride of the Puja was the way it had engaged local children to participate with the folk painters in painting wall motifs and to later act as guides for those Puja visitors who wished to know about this particular art form. The practice of involving child volunteers of the para, often in uniform sponsorship tee-shirts, to explain the ‘concept’ of the Pujas continued here in the following years, and caught on in several other Pujas of the locality. (Figure 7.13)

7.10 Bhabatosh Sutar’s pavilion designed like a barge on the ghats of Varanasi, Behala Youngmen’s Association Puja, 2007

Bringing in a different order of smartness, a facility with spoken English, and an ability to engage new classes of viewers and tourists at these pandal sites, these children become the face of the new social aspirations of these neighbourhoods and their newstyles of ‘theme’ Pujas. That same season of 2006, a short distance away on the connecting Banamali Naskar Road, there was a bigger, more resplendent tribal art village from central India on view on the grounds of the Behala Club Puja, featuring the paintings of the Bhil and Gond communities. (See 7.14) While similar in style to its counterpart at the Behala Agradoot Club, it carried little of latter’s intimate feel of neighbourhood involvement. Dating back to 1944, the Behala Club is among the oldest of this area’s Sarbojanin Pujas, its site bordering an old Harisabha temple of this vicinity. But its Puja had come by now to bear the new signs of a fully corporatized and outsourced designer event. The club that year had handed over the entire charge of Puja designing to an event-management company, ‘The Sixth Sense’ which had brought in an artist’s group, exotically titled ‘Reflections of Another Day’, which in turn involved 40–50 painters of the Bhil and Gond tribes to work on site on this Puja installation. The making of a synchronized Durga image was left to Subodh Ray, who also happened to be a member of their art group. (See 7.15) The

7.11 Subodh Ray’s folk art Durga to match the tribal art of Chattisgarh, Behala Agradoot Club Puja, 2006

7.12 Tribal dancers from Chattisgarh at the Behala Agradoot Club Puja, 2006

7.13 Local child guides posing at the Behala Agradoot Club Puja, 2008

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7.14 Gond art installation with painted huts, Behala Club Puja, 2006

7.15 Subodh Ray’s matching Durga pantheon at the Behala Club Puja, 2006

Puja here stands fully integrated within a larger corpus of public design initiatives undertaken by this group of professional artists, led by Partha Ray, all involving the promotion of ‘environmental art’ and endangered tribal art forms. From setting up an exhibition at a local shopping mall to designing hotel lobbies and galleries in other cities, and pavilions for international trade fairs and floats for the Republic Day Parade in the capital, this artists’ team decided to carry their work with the tribal artists of central India on to a Puja site, their first venture in Puja designing.19

on a transparent fibre roof and using over 15,000 cemented-together clay pots with their mouths facing the sky to capture the impression of awaited rain and fertile earth.20 (See 2.10) And in 2011, Barisha Club featured again a tribal art village, with the folk art impresario, Gopal Poddar, deploying the form of wooden musical instruments of the local Banam tribe of north Bengal, to design African-style vertical figural sculptures and architectural structures. (See 7.17) Once again, the pride of this Puja was expressed in its ability to host such installations in expensive material and give these over for postfestival use in a ‘theme park’ cum ‘film city’ coming up at in the southern suburbs of Maheshtala. By the end of the 2000s, the Barisha Club had also emerged in a lead role in the newly-formed organizational consortium, Forum for Durgotsav, whose main role was to evolve a common platform for mediation with the commercial sponsors and the municipal authorities.21 By 2012, it had purportedly become one of the largest budget Pujas of the city, and was featuring as its prize draw the ‘art’ of Sanatan Dinda.

In other Pujas of Behala, around the same time, we came across signs of a similar order of slick hotel décor-style art, produced by modern artists. In 2008, the merged unit of the Srishti and Sahajatri Pujas of the renamed Barisha Club sought to recover its slipping place in the awards circuit by a new order of ‘conceptual’ art by Purnendu Dey. Titled ‘Time’ and structured around the forms of different astronomical instruments for measuring sunlight and shadow, much of the prestige of this installation lay in its use of expensive material like polished wood and gleaming metal, with the clay goddess too given a wood and metal finish. (See 7.16) In its relocated larger grounds on the other side of the road, this Puja, which now maintains one of the best websites, has kept attracting new orders of artists and ‘designer’ Pujas. In 2010, the Environmental Art Collective working under Tarun Dey created here a circular air gallery, simulating tufts of cumulous clouds

The case of Behala allows us to chart a specific timeline in the spread and shifting tenor of ‘art’ Pujas in what would remain its most dense cluster on the new festival map of Calcutta. In traversing its history from the late 1990s in small Puja sites to these newest displays at the Barisha Club, we have moved back and forth between repeating templates of village tableaux and folk art displays and newer genres of ‘conceptual’ and ‘ecological’ art. In the

7.16 Polished wood and steel installation titled, ‘Time’, by Purnendu Dey, Barisha Club Puja, 2008

7.17 Banam tribal art of north Bengal in a complex designed by Gopal Poddar, Barisha Club Puja, 2011

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7.18 Kolkata Police-Indian Oil Puja Guide Map showing the big Pujas of north and central Kolkata, with the Puja zone of Hatibagan coloured in red

course of the past decade, we have also witnessed the escalations in the scale, corporate profile, professional and organizational ambitions of this genre of ‘art’ Pujas within this select zone. We will now travel to two much smaller neighbourhood units in the north and southeast of the city, to show how, over the same period, these emerge as parallel key sites in the expanding topography of ‘theme’ Pujas.

Hatibagan Right up to 2005, the twin ‘art’ Pujas of this locality—the Hatibagan Sarbojanin and its rival, the Nalin Sarkar Street Sarbojanin—had not found

a place in the Kolkata Police-Indian Oil road maps, even as these maps block out this area of north and central Kolkata as a prime Puja touring zone, with its concentration of the older variety of big-budget crowd-pulling Pujas. (See 7.18) Some of Kolkata’s oldest and most prominent Sarbojanin Pujas, with nationalist histories going back to the 1930s, are in the immediate vicinities of Hatibagan—the Baghbazar Sarbojanin is to its north, the Simla Byayam Samiti and the Vivekananda Sporting Club Pujas to its south, the Kumartuli and Ahiritola Sarbojanin Pujas to its west. A few blocks away to the north are also the most reputed and publicized

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extensions into the public domain of the older form of the Barowari Puja of a temple trust or an affluent family. Located near the intersection of the old Cornwallis and Grey Streets (later renamed Bidhan and Arabinda Sarani), the Hatibagan Sarbojanin Puja, which began around 1934–35, is among this early league of community Pujas of the area, with an important claim to have pioneered the first nationalist tableaux in the early 1940s, where Durga appeared in the guise of Bharat Mata against the backdrop of a map of undivided India (in a novel creation by Gopeshwar Pal). Those were the days when the para itself was spread over a larger area and its Puja had much larger grounds in a park at adjacent Goabagan, before that was taken over by a large transformer of the CESC, and the Puja had to move into a narrow street, first on Nalin Sarkar Street across the road, then to its present venue on Hatibagan Lane on the other side of Arabinda Sarani.23

7.19 Close-up view of the goddess at the pavilion designed by Sushanta Pal, Hatibagan Sarbojanin Puja, 2003

of the city’s Banedi Barir Pujas—the Pujas of the two eighteenth century mansions of Raja Nabakrishna Deb, known respectively as the Shobhabazar ‘Rajbati’ and ‘Rajbari’, the older house dating back to before 1757 that came to his adopted son Gopimohun and famous grandson Radhakanta Deb, and the later house from the 1780s that remained with the family of his biological son, Rajkrishna Deb. This whole area stands within what may be called Kolkata’s ‘Heritage Puja’ zone, one that has never ceased to be at the centre of media attention and which has found in recent times a growing visibility in the state-sponsored festival tourism. Lesser known and publicized, one of the first small Sarbojanin Pujas of the north also came up in this region, at Sikdarbagan around 1913, in the close trail of the Sanatan Dharmotsahini Sabha Pujas that began in 1910 on the banks of the Adi Ganga at Bhowanipur.22 Each of these came up as the first

Until the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the locality is said to have stretched into what is now Maniktala as an unbroken tract of forested land.24 The term bagan (gardens) attached to the names of several localities of this vicinity have survived from the time when the gardens and orchards of wealthy bania merchants like Oomichand and Govindaram Mitra grew out of this forested expanse in the eighteenth century. Goabagan was so named for its gua or betel nut trees; Chaltabagan for its enclosure of chalda trees; Narkelbagan, Panbagan and Phoolbagan for their coconut, betel-nut and flower groves; Settbagan and Sikdarbagan after the family that owned these gardens. Hatibagan got its name for being the place where the elephants of Nawab Siraj-ud-daulah were kept during his siege of the British Fort in Calcutta in 1756.25 Little remains of that aristocratic past in these parts of north Kolkata, least of all any traces of spaciousness or greenery in this congested maze of narrow alleys typical of these old northern quarters. And only a few remnants survive of the many Sanskrit tols (traditional places of education) for which Hatibagan was once known, which had been set up by the pandits who had settled in this vicinity in the early colonial era. Despite its location within the ‘Heritage Puja’ zone, the Hatibagan Puja lost its distinction over the later twentieth century, even as the locality became a lower middle-class hub, largely

durga puja tours and travels 305 of small traders and shopkeepers, and its pavements were taken over hawkers and stalls of cheap consumer goods. The hawkers continue to thickly inhabit both sides of the pavement on Arabinda Sarani, and the neighbourhood remains as dingy and congested as ever, even as a clutter of commercial signage invade the alleys each Puja season. Hatibagan offers itself as the archetypal non-elite social space in the city, which would engender the new genre of ‘art’ Pujas. The Hatibagan Sarbojanin Puja is at the forefront of all those contending to have pioneered a new wave of creative productions. Once again, it is the award of the Asian Paints ‘Sharad Samman’ which signposts the beginnings here in 1997, the year their judges sought out at Hatibagan an experiment with an exposed bamboo and rope work pandal by local artist Sukhendu Mukherjee, who would later become a successful advertising professional.26 Thereafter, as we have seen in the previous chapter, it was a young art college graduate of the para, Sanatan Dinda, who would take this trend forward to new paths of renown, even as he himself would evolve into one of Kolkata’s most talented Durga Puja designers. Let us recall the way Sanatan stuck closely to his home turf at Hatibagan until 2010, shifting his allegiances in 2003 from the one parar pujo at Hatibagan Sarbojanin to a neighbouring one on Nalin Sarkar Street with an equally old history. Nalin Sarkar Street provides an exemplary instance of the way a shabby nondescript alley undergoes a dramatic seasonal metamorphosis and secures for itself a special niche in the urbanscape of the festival season through the serial, cumulative effects of the art productions of Sanatan Dinda. Along with the ambience of ‘art’ arrive corporate sponsors, clusters of designer hoardings, the glamour brigade of judges and a new social class of spectators that become over time the greatest cultural capital of this humble neighbourhood, and sustaining pride of the Puja club. (See 6.18, 6.19) As in most localities, here too the phenomenon of ‘theme’ Pujas had its ripples across a series of clubs in this small locality, each taking shape side by side in the alleys of Hatibagan. Unlike their equivalents in Behala, prizes and increased budgets long eluded the Pujas of this region. An interesting contrast to the

Nalin Sarkar Street Puja unfolds in the site evacuated by Sanatan Dinda at the Hatibagan Sarbojanin Puja, which never relinquished its place in the ‘art’ Puja circuit but is found to be continuously drawing on new designers and an eclectic mix of styles and themes. In 2003, the club invited the young designer, Sushanta Pal, then working primarily in Behala, who conceived of a tableau on the theme of Devi and Bengali motherhood. Lining the narrow alley with rows of fibreglass maquettes draped in redbordered white sarees, he created at the end an open rotunda shrine with a stylized folk-art ensemble of the deity (See 7.19). The following year, it was the team of a resident graphic artist and researcher, Apu Bandopadhyay and Padmanabha Dasgupta, who took charge of their parar pujo, and created here a researched display on the history of Bat-tala woodcut printing and book illustrations, emphasizing the proximity of Hatibagan to this historic zone of the early Bengali book industry. There were, however, retrospective musings by these designers on why many of these themes did not succeed in the festival circuit—the measure of success always being the winning of awards and the praise of the media—and also on their inability to attract the masses.27 This lack of ‘success’ is what disallowed the Puja budget from climbing above 3.5–4 lakhs (at a time when other ‘theme’ Puja budgets were easily

7.20 Pavilion with corrugated paintings spread across large cardboard pylons, designed by Sunil Pal, Nalin Sarkar Street Puja, 2008

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7.21 Village complex designed by Gopal Poddar in the narrow alley of Hatibagan Nabin Pally Puja, 2007

double that amount) and kept the Puja grounded in the continuous input of design and marketing initiatives of local residents. Even at the rival Nalin Sarkar Street Puja, which had graduated to a different trajectory of awards and publicity, Sanatan Dinda had as his core work team a group of local young men who helped assemble various units of the pandal structure and decorations. In 2008, following Sanatan Dinda’s withdrawal, a young art college graduate of Kumartuli lineage, Sunil Pal, was brought in, late into the season, to work on the Nalin Sarkar Street Puja. With hardly three weeks in hand and a budget that barely covered the cost of his material and paint, Sunil Pal put together an innovative installation using long cardboard pylons (on which vast flex sheets come rolled), with images of painted panels from Ajanta and Ellora converging on a central panel with the large face of Durga.28 (See 7.20) That this experimental venture failed to win any kudos that season underlines the vagaries of the scopes of ‘art’ production in this sphere. That the next year saw only a team of young local residents taking recourse to designing the Nalin Sarkar Street Puja also points to the sharp rises and falls in the career graphs of many such ‘theme’ Pujas.

In 2007, we found another old parar pujo down an adjacent alley—the Hatibagan Nabin Pally Puja, with claims to be as old as the Hatibagan Sarbojanin— coming to the limelight with a neat little craft village designed by Gopal Poddar, featuring painted wooden rocking horses and elephants on wheels by a craftsman from Nadia who continues to make these for a living. (See 7.21, 5.60) The drive of a new group of para residents brought sponsors for the first time, as well as an increased budget and a reputed designer to this humble venue, and enabled its passage into the coveted ‘theme’ Puja circuit. Theirs becomes another case of the intense local investment of a socially depressed neighbourhood in the cultural prestige of a ‘theme’ Puja. For the Hatibagan Nabin Pally Puja, the dividends were immediate. Roping in the Santiniketan-based designer Kamaldeep Dhar, and winning two of the most coveted awards (the Asian Paints and the Snowcem ‘Pujo Perfect’ awards), it became in 2008 the newest star of Hatibagan, with a noticeable roll back that year in the profiles of both the Hatibagan Sarbojanin and Nalin Sarkar Street Pujas. By 2010, with the announced comeback of Sanatan Dinda, the Nalin Sarkar Street Puja was once again riding new waves of publicity and success. And the full neighbourhood was also offering that year a rich bounty of ‘art’ Pujas. After viewing Sanatan’s youthfully vibrant Durga in her lotus-shaped abode, if we continued walking through the winding back alley of Nalin Sarkar Street, we arrived at the next intersection at another exquisite grey and ochre mud hut complex, with a museum-like display of some 900 wooden Santhal puppets at the Hatibaban Nabin Pally Puja.29 With Kamaldeep Dhar providing again the design conception, a Santhal wood carver of Birbhum and his team had created these puppets of varying shapes, sizes and colours, which were meant to move after the Pujas to a private folk art museum in Santiniketan. (See 7.22) Hurried along the tiny space by local child volunteers, who exhorted spectators to keep moving, we returned to the main Arabinda Sarani and walked across the road to the Hatibagan Sarbojanin Puja. Here, we saw a modernist installation with shuttle-like structures draped with blue, white and silver banners, a central waterway, panels with falling water, (see 7.23) and a colour-synchronized

7.22 Puja production titled Chadar-Badar, designed by Kamaldeep Dhar with Santhal wooden puppetry, Hatibagan Nabin Pally Puja, 2010

7.23 Water-themed pavilion designed by Sukhendu Mukherjee, with Durga holding water pots in her ten hands, Hatibagan Sarbojanin Puja, 2010

7.24 Sanatan Dinda’s temple-complex at the Barisha Club Puja, 2012

7.25 Contrasted by Bhabatosh Sutar’s modernist black wood and steel pavilion at Sikdarbagan Puja, 2012

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7.26 Interiors of Bosepukur Road, Kasba, with another local club building, 2009

7.27 Site of the Bosepukur Shitala Mandir, now covered with commercial hoardings, 2009

Durga image whose ten arms held water pots in the place of weapons. We found out that the resident designer, Sukhendu Mukherjee, who had given this Puja its first taste of an experimental pandal in 1997, had returned to work here after 13 years on this waterthemed ecological display.

Gardens, Kasba and Haltu, through which run the two major avenues (the Park Circus and Rashbehari Avenue Connectors) linking this part of Kolkata with its arterial lifeline of the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass. The building of the railway flyover bridge, Bijon Setu, at the beginning of the 1970s, and the coming into use of the Rashbehari Connector in the 1980s have been crucial to the social metamorphosis of the cluster of paras of the area, bringing their parks, shops, offices, municipal structures, police stations, apartment blocks and, not least, their many club Pujas on to the open vista of the Connector. Of these, our focus will be on Bosepukur—a para demarcated by the Bosepukur Road that runs on both sides of the Connector and takes one into the interior roads of Rajdanga and Kasba—and on its Shitala Mandir Puja that became from the early 2000s one of the most visible new entrants on the festival map of the city. (See 7.26, 7.27)

The ‘art’ Pujas of Hatibagan, we could say, had turned a full circle. There was also now a sense of pride among the Puja organizers of this entire neighbourhood in the way all of Hatibagan had turned into an ‘art Puja zone’ comparable to Behala. In 2012, there also occurred a dramatic spatial exchange between Behala and Hatibagan of the works of the city’s two star designers, Sanatan Dinda and Bhabatosh Sutar, with the former showcasing his biggest productions at Barisha Club, Behala, and the latter beginning to produce his ‘art’ Durgas and their accompanying elaborate pavilions at the Sikdarbagan Sarbojanin, on the occasion of the centenary of this Puja. (See 7.24, 7.25)

Bosepukur, Kasba Like Behala in the southwest, this zone in the southeast of the city would be fully integrated within the city’s metropolitan jurisdiction only in 2011. Till then, the map of south Kolkata in the Puja Guides trailed off in the east, with Park Circus, Bondel Road, the Bondel Gate and Ballygunge rail stations. Beyond these exist the dense stretch of working and lower middle class residential neighbourhoods of Topsia, Tangra, Tiljala, Picnic

The railway line and bridge that we must cross to come to Bosepukur from the south are what once sharply set apart these peripheries from the affluent bhadralok neighbourhoods of Ballygunge, Gariahat and the areas between Rashbehari and Southern Avenues. These eastern suburbs had received a major chunk of their residents from across the borders in the aftermath of Partition, and evolved like all the refugee colonies that sprouted further south in the stretches beyond Jadavpur and Tollygunge. The social composition here was more noticeably working class, spilling over from the leather and allied factories of

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always on these ignored and volatile margins of south Kolkata, always on the wrong side of Bijon Setu.30

7.28 Earthen tea cup pandal, designed by Bandhan Raha, Bosepukur Shital Mandir Puja, 2001. Photograph by Rajib Basu. Courtesy: ABP

Tiljala and Tangra, and serving as the main pool of domestic labour for the richer homes of Ballygunge and Gariahat. During the tumultuous 1960s and ’70s, Kasba became particularly notorious for its political vendettas and anti-social gang violence, one of its worst faces exposed in 1982 in the murder of a carload of religious activists of the Ananda Margi sect on the Bijon Setu, allegedly by CPI(M) gangs. The name of the bridge itself is testimony to another ghastly history of crime and homicide. In 1978, the Calcutta Improvement Trust dedicated the newly constructed bridge to the memory of one of its young engineers, Bijon Kumar Basu, who (as the commemoration plaque records) was ‘brutally murdered and thrown off a moving train’ on the Ballygunge railway tracks in August 1974, near where the bridge stands today. The dark memories of those times still hang heavy among the older residents of this region, and need most urgently to be effaced. The members of the Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja remember a past where they were

This Kasba zone was drawn within the ambit of the city’s Municipal Corporation in the mid 1980s, when several new areas like Behala were also added to its charge. Even as the buildings, lifestyles, and socioeconomic character of the area were significantly transformed, and signs of that typically unplanned growth of the city manifested itself all along the route of the Connector, there remained a distinct cultural gulf between these developing parts and the other elite quarters of the south. The Durga Pujas, we are told, began to gradually change this. A new genre of spectacular pandal constructions at the Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja, in its prominent location in an open plot on the Connector, made festival history by breaching this long-standing social gulf, bringing a new class of spectators and sponsors, along with the crowds, to the ‘other’ side of Bijon Setu. (See 2.30, 2.31) The history of this Puja, which marked its 53rd year in 2002, signposts the kind of social transitions that are involved in the passages from the past to the present in this Kasba region. That the Puja grew on the precincts of a Shitala Mandir is a clear sign of the very different class composition of the residents who earlier inhabited this suburban belt. The worship of Shitala, the goddess who gives protection against diseases like smallpox, has always been a practice of the rural and urban poor of Bengal. That the name of the club has retained this link with the past, even as the para and the Puja has taken on more distinctly bhadralok guises, suggests an interesting layering of identities in its changing profile. With the creation of the Rashbehari Avenue Connector, the Puja site of the club found a new visibility, along with its tiled and renovated Shitala Mandir (now covered with commercial hoardings) which continued to lend its name to the new ‘star’ Puja that brought unprecedented renown to this para. How seriously do we take the claims of the Bosepukur Puja organizers to have dramatically altered the cultural face of the locality? Granted the self-indulgence of such views, the Bosepukur Puja nonetheless offers us a powerful instance of the way the transforming aesthetic of a Puja is inalienably

durga puja tours and travels 311 linked to the aspiring socio-cultural mobility of a para, and the way a single Puja production leads to a cluster of new-style Pujas and produces the cumulative Durga Puja identity of a larger spatial unit. The case of the Shitala Mandir Puja also brings to the fore one more founding narrative of ‘theme’ Pujas, along with another first-wave designer whose status would remain contentious in the period’s growing ranks of Puja ‘artists’.31 This Bosepukur Puja first caught my attention on a festival evening in 2000 with a pandal designed with playing card motifs, intricately painted on plywood planks and mounted on a bamboo and plaster scaffolding. In those days, ‘themes’ and ‘concept notes’ were still a novelty, but one noticed here the title Tasher Desh (Land of Cards) taken from Rabindranath Tagore’s dance drama. The next year, there was an even more eye-catching structure on this Puja site—a pandal constructed with thousands of little earthen cups (matir bhanr)—that became the talk of the season and brought to the limelight its designer, Bandhan Raha. (See 7.28) What was so special about this earthen tea cup structure, still talked about today as the bhanrer pandal ? Bandhan Raha talked about how it radically overhauled the notion of pandal design and served as a major architectural feat. It required considerable architectural imagination to conceive of the form of a spiralling temple exterior, using as its walls rows of closely stacked earthen cups that from a distance took on the appearance of ribbed terracotta decoration. This is how he had seen these earthen cups stored in tea shacks, or transported in vans and tempos, from where he developed the idea of converting this disposable object into the material for a wondrous artwork. His aim was to bring the matir bhanr from the street teashop to the middleclass drawing room.32 With this bhanrer pandal, he also recounts how Puja budgets moved confidently into the denomination of lakhs and began to depend crucially on sponsorships and awards. Like many others in this line of work, Bandhan Raha’s home-grown talent for putting up architectural structures with a variety of organic or throwaway material had first been nurtured by his own parar pujo at Sunilnagar in the interiors of Picnic Gardens, where he began working in 1991. Here is one more instance of an obscure neighbourhood

7.29 Pandal decor being made with used sugarcane fibre inside the Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja, 2002

Puja, sustaining a spurt of local creativity with no publicity and outside funds, until it brought in two Asian Paints awards in 1992 and 1995.33 In 1998, Bandhan Raha shifted the centre of his work to the Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja, with stories (as are often heard in this milieu) of acquaintance networks that drew him from his own to this other Puja in his vicinity. As designers change locations, commercial gain or professional prospects tend to be always clothed in the affective discourse of kinship and emotional ties. By this time, Bandhan Raha had also begun designing Puja pavilions in places north and south, from Lake Town to Dhakuria, with the Bosepukur Puja becoming, however, the centre-stage of his productions. With his genre of work, we see how the phenomenon of ‘theme’ Pujas could ride on the novelties of construction material, and negotiate the fine lines of distinction between ‘gimmick’ and ‘art’, between popular and more discerning tastes. His earthen cup temple structure of 2001 is seen to have made that subtle leap from mere sensationalism to artistry of conception and execution. In 2002 at Bosepukur, Bandhan Raha chose to work with an even more unconventional material, of the kind that the new reformist lobbies decried as strange and vulgar. That year, used sugarcane fibres were amassed in massive quantities (see 7.29)

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7.30 Mosaic tile pavilion designed by Prashanta Pal at the Talbagan Puja, 2008

as the material for constructing the pandal (once again in a form of Bengal temple architecture), the straw-like fibres woven into a thick matting around a plywood, bamboo and canvas scaffolding, and pandal constructing labour deployed to make interior wall decorations and figural motifs with the same material. This is also when the neighbouring Puja of the Talbagan Sarbojanin Club came up with a rival pandal creation, using the abandoned black discs of defunct gramophone records—as a tribute, we were told, to the dead record industry. The Bosepukur and Talbagan Pujas became the ‘traffic stopper twins’ of 2002 on the Bypass connector, bringing (as recounted in Chapter 2) the axe of police restrictions and regulations on these Puja sites the next year. Bandhan Raha was forced to experiment with a wholly new kind of ‘theme’ Puja in 2003, the year the Bosepukur Puja was hemmed in by various police injunctions and uncertainties about its site. He had to take recourse to a late improvisation of a tableau of an old age home, featuring the plight of neglected parents in such homes, choosing as his theme the popular contemporary song by

Nachiketa called Briddhashram. This largely failed experiment with a sentimental ‘social theme’, while it terminated the designer’s six-year-long stint at the Bosepukur Puja, also propelled the Puja into a new rising and fluctuating career on the ‘theme’ Puja circuit. In 2004, the Puja committee reached out to the Behala-based designer Amar Sarkar, working by then in several south Kolkata Puja sites, who created at Bosepukur over the next two years resplendent tribal art installations using Bastar metal statuary and South African painted huts. (See 5.47, 5.57, 5.58) The full wave of the new folk-art aesthetic with the master touch of Amar Sarkar had arrived at Bosepukur—but with a degree of reservation among Puja organizers about its receptivity and appeal to the masses. The Bosepukur Puja organizers, unlike the ones of Behala or Hatibagan, voiced this need to cater to the standard mass of spectators who flocked to their Puja, even as they took pride in their ability to attract new classes of viewers and sponsors. Once again, we are made to think here about a layering of newer over older

durga puja tours and travels 313 styles of Pujas, rather than a complete make-over of forms and publics. At the same time, we see the spread and shifting cycle of the genre of ‘theme’ Pujas across the broader zone. All along the stretch from Bijon Setu to Bosepukur, there would be innovative pandal structures and Puja ‘theme’ banners vying for attention each season. The thickest cluster began growing in the more immediate vicinities of the Bosepukur Puja, some of which, we were told, loosely added Bosepukur to their club names to extend its Puja fame across a larger spatial belt. The neighbouring Talbagan Sarbojanin Puja became the venue where the designer Prashanta Pal worked each year with different materials, ranging from bamboo rice huskers painted with Jamini Roy motifs to mural decorations with multi-coloured mosaic chips, or

dolls made out of plastic jars and cans. (See 7.30, 6.63) Across the Connector, in the neighbourhood of Rajdanga that had come up on the other side of the road, the Puja of Naba Uday Sangha began, from 2007, to host the elegant productions of the designer Bhabatosh Sutar. (See 7.31) Not to be left behind, the Tribarna Sangha Puja, that same season, displayed a striking folk-art pavilion, with halved clay pitchers painted by Medinipur patuas, with the Durga appearing as a painted image on a concave clay mound—the work of a local unnamed designer collaborating with the folk artists on hire. (See 7.32, 7.33) It becomes important to note, at this point, the movements of designers and their changing design forms across the spatial belts we have surveyed. While designers like Amar Sarkar, Bhabatosh Sutar

7.31 Bhabatosh Sutar Pavilion with painted clay pots and bamboo poles, Rajdanga Naba Uday Sangha Puja, 2008

7.32 Pandal designed with painted halved clay pichers, Rajdanga Tribarna Sangha Puja, 2008

7.33 Durga and her family as painted relief sculpture on pitchers, Rajdanga Tribarna Sangha Puja, 2008

7.34 Gouranga Kuinla, Tableau titled, Ashray (‘Shelter’), Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja, 2008

durga puja tours and travels 315 or Sushanta Pal can be seen to spread out from Behala to Puja sites in and around Hatibagan and Bosepukur, Bandhan Raha in turn came to take on commissions in Behala. For one who could offer multiple types of productions—from pandal structures built with novel materials to architectural replicas or rural craft-based tableaux—to suit different Puja clubs and their desired publics, it is significant that Bandhan Raha chose to work largely with the last type for the Pujas of Behala, using, for instance, the patachitras of Orissa at Behala Udayan Palli Puja in 2004 and the textile art of Baluchari sarees at the Behala Club Puja in 2008. Clearly, choices of particular forms for particular sites within this broad rubric of ‘theme’ Pujas would be determined not just by the travels of designers but also by the specific artistic profile that had been established for a Puja zone like Behala. To end this account of Bosepukur and Kasba, let us also take stock of a changing cycle in the career of its central protagonist, the Shitala Mandir Puja, which from 2006 to 2008 recedes relatively into the background and starts working with a set of junior personnel who would work their way up from the work team of established designers to gradually take charge of designing a Puja in their own capacity. As we saw in the previous chapter, it was here that Shibshankar Das and Gouranga Kuinla graduated from their apprenticeship under senior designers like Amar Sarkar and Bandhan Raha to author their own Puja productions. In 2008, in one of his first independent commissions, Gouranga Kuinla created at the Bosepukur Puja a set of cottages and a figure resting under a tree, which he fabricated and decorated entirely with organic natural material and gave the title Ashray (‘Refuge’) (See 7.34) From 2001, when a self-taught designer who had worked for his own parar pujo created the sensation of the bhanrer pandal to 2008, when an artisanal assistant who had been part of that pandal-making team took over charge here as designer to create a topical tableau on environmental art, the Bosepukur Puja can be seen to have charted the full spectrum of the city’s contemporary festival history. By the end of the 2000s, the entire neighbourhood came to be strewn with the imprints of the city’s prime Puja designers— Sushanta Pal at Bosepukur, Prashanta Pal at Talbagan

or Bhabatosh Sutar at Rajdanga. The pandal designs of the Shitala Mandir Puja increasingly took on the look of wood and metal modern art decor— as with Sushanta Pal’s pavillion titled Yogini of 2009, using metal mesh and a flurry of stencilled tinplate spearheads (see 6.47), or Shibshankar Das’s Chakradhara of 2010, with its copper sheen panels and pillars, and a giant wheel with zodiac symbols and human figure spikes at the entrance. (See 6.62) And the para could pride itself on the place it claimed in the present sociocultural map of the city because of this special Puja history. 34

an engulfing wave Breaking out of these detailed micro-histories of neighbourhoods, our tours will now rapidly move across far-flung parts of the metropolis to track the spread of the new genres of Pujas across the map of south Kolkata. In keeping with the spirit of ‘pandalhopping’, our imperative will be to keep moving, to cover large stretches, to constantly seek out more Pujas to see, and never have time to linger long in a single place. Walking the city takes on here, in Michel de Certeau’s words, a particular ‘qualitative character: a style of tactile apprehension and kinaesthetic appropriation.’ Pedestrian movements become ‘one of those real systems whose existence in fact makes up the city’.35 The intertwined paths of the swarming mass of ‘pandal-hoppers’ can be seen to give their shape to spaces, weave places together, and chart out a series of new routes that connect and make up the festival city. Let me unfurl one such new tour map as it stretched southwards from the Gariahat Road-Rashbehari Avenue junction. (See 7.35, for a Puja guide map of several section of south Kolkata that will come within our tour) The most prominent commercial hub of south Kolkata, this is also the location of the south’s two biggest older-style Sarbojanin Pujas, those of Ekdalia Evergreen and Singhi Park, which in their continued premium on ostentation, scale, and unchanging forms of pandals and images, serve as the perfect foil to ‘theme’ and ‘art’ productions. The trail could pick up from the Hindustan Park Sarbojanin Puja which, in 2002, entered the new

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SOUTH SOUTHKOLKATA KOLKATA

TILAK ROAD

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26 SANGHATI PUJA SAMITI

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PRINCE ANWAR SHAH ROAD GOLF GREEN

JADAVPUR POLICE STATION

SOURCE : KOLKATA POLICE STATION MAP

7.35 Kolkata Police-Indian Oil Puja Guide Map showing sections of South Kolkata, 2005

circuit with a ‘Communal Harmony’ tableau, designed by the film art director Gautam Basu. Mingling the architectural forms and decorations of a temple and a mosque, Islamic calligraphic motifs with those from Pahari Rasa-leela paintings, it featured Durga in the style of a Mughal miniature and displayed media photographs at the entrance of the Gujarat carnage of that year.36 (See 5.14) If the main spotlight was on topicality and media publicity in this concocted pastiche of 2002 on the ‘rich cross fertilization of Islamic and Hindu cultures’, later Durga Puja productions at this site would turn our attention more on the virtues of artistry and synchrony in ‘art’ pandals featuring Kalighat paintings, Tantrik geometric designs or varied shapes of wooden owls, many of these still put together by Gautam Basu and his team. (See 7.36) In 2011, in its slightly altered location beside the famous address of 55B Hindustan Park (once the residence of West Bengal’s iconic chief minister Jyoti Basu, now converted to a guest house), this Puja came under the awards limelight, with a mixed media installation using mirror chips, broken glass shards, bottles and icicle formations created by Amar Sarkar. (See 7.37)

The ‘theme’ Puja trail moved into a dense thicket as we travelled over the Dhakuria bridge into the narrow lanes of Selimpur and crossed over into the visibly more posh neighbourhood of Jodhpur Park.37 In the narrow inner lanes of Dhakuria were a number of closely clustered Puja sites of the Babubagan Club, Bandhab Sammilani, and Abasarika clubs, which laid out changing production styles, from architectural replicas to new materialbased constructions to elegant folk art installations that took shape in the smallest of alleys. (Example 7.38) The older Babubagan Club presented over time some of the sharpest swings in tableau forms in its sharp disavowal in the later 2000s of excessive ‘theme’ hyperbole. Winding our way through the maze of quiet inner lanes of this neighbourhood, we came upon the Puja of Selimpur Pally, on a small open plot behind an apartment block, which has been one of the chosen locations of our research. Sites like Selimpur have allowed us to delve into the social profile of the neighbourhood, the yearlong activities of the Puja club and its heightening investment in corporate sponsorships, bigger Puja budgets and new designers.38 It has allowed us to track the successive development of different

7.36 Gautam Basu, Pavilion with giant owl motifs (under construction), Hindusthan Park Puja, 2009

7.37 Durga image seen through a crystalline glass shards installation, designed by Amar Sarkar, at the Hindusthan Park Puja, 2011

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7.38 Abasarika Puja on the narrow Maharaja Tagore Lane, Dhakuria, with a pavilion designed by Ramkumar Manna using motifs from Ganesh Pyne’s paintings, 2006

designers and forms of ‘theme’ productions in the core years of the new wave—Gopal Poddar’s small Kutch village with its mud mirror decorations and Pithora wall paintings in 2003; Sushanta Pal’s ‘modern art’ installation with painted cloth parasols in 2004 (see 6.41); a Nepalese-style pagoda draped in red, with fluttering prayer banners and bells and a red Tantrik deity in 2006 (see 7.39. 7.40); or a blend of different wood, bamboo and cane craft forms of Bengal in one of the most elaborately designed tableaux of this genre, in 2007.(See 5.65) Across the road, the Jodhpur Park Puja, in its more elite residential precincts and spacious grounds, offered a more fluctuating ‘theme’ profile with its continuously shifting line-up of designers and tableaux. Following my interest in individual designers, we can plot here the decade-long career of the architectural replica expert Dipak Ghosh—from his first remake of a crumbling zamindari mansion that he put up in this park in 2001 to his recreation of the Great Stupa of Sanchi in the Pujas of 2011. (See 7.41) From the main park Puja, a new connoisseur’s attention would now shift in this neighbourhood to the lesser-known 95 Pally Puja behind the market, which became during 2012–13 the new locus of Sanatan Dinda’s festival art. (See 6.23, 6.24)

Moving out of Jodhpur Park, as we pushed further southwards past the crowded Jadavpur crossing with its chaotic bus and auto-rickshaw traffic and explosion of commercial hoardings, down the congested stretch of Raja Subodh Mullick Road, the trend of ‘theme’ Pujas began gravitating towards the more non-affluent, refugee-settlement social zones of Santoshpur, Bagha Jatin, Ramgarh and Gangulybagan, before moving on to the edges of Garia and Patuli. As signs of contemporary urban growth have transformed the face of these erstwhile refugee colonies, dispensations for the new genre of ‘art’ Pujas have also visibly inflected their cultural locus in the metropolis. As at Kasba, in these parts too, the building of a multi-lane bridge over the Jadavpur railway lines (named Sukanta Setu, after the Bengali poet who died very young) has played a vital role in opening up Santoshpur to the flow of people and traffic from other parts of the city, connecting its interiors to the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass on the other end. The altered sociology of Santoshpur is best borne out by the rise to prominence of the Trikone Park Puja, which began in 1950 and found its new location in a tiny triangular park at the curving foot of Sukanta Setu, (see 5.7) from where it began, from 2002, to place on view a series of village tableaux on various rural and tribal art forms, many of them the creations of the veteran Amar Sarkar or later entrants like Nirmal Malik. By 2006–2007, spectators were also being lured by promotional banners into the inner areas of Santoshpur and Survey Park, with the Puja of Santoshpur Lake Pally (with its large grounds next to a lake) becoming a keen aspirant for a new ‘designer’ status and its attendant publicities. In the next two years, we saw these aspirations being fulfilled by the successive productions of Sushanta Pal, using colourful child and folk-art forms that enveloped the site in a common design aesthetic. (See 7.42, 6.45, 6.46) Returning and moving southwards along our selected route on Raja Subodh Mullick Road, there are other topographies of ‘theme’ productions that unfold in the transforming social spaces of the colonies that lie on either side of this avenue. In 2004, it was in the interiors of one such neighbourhood—the Beltala Vidyasagar colony—

7.39 Nepalese temple structure with hanging bells, Selimpur Pally Puja, 2006

7.40 Accompanying red Tantrik Durga image, Selimpur Pally Puja, 2006

7.41 Dipak Ghosh’s replica of the Sanchi Stupa, Jodhpur Park Puja, 2011

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7.42 Sushanta Pal, Dugga Utsab pavilion, Santoshpur Lake Pally, 2009

that we encountered an exquisite replica of a Bishnupur temple by an unknown local figure (that I discuss in Chapter 5) and found it competing for attention with a diametrically opposite style of ‘modern art’ installation that the established city artist, Samir Aich, had begun to put up each year at his parar pujo at the neighbouring site of the Miloni Sangha. (See 5.13, 5.26) Further down, on the other side of the road at Gangulybagan, in 2006 we came across the Puja of Ashok Trust, Baishakhi Club, which had decided that year to feature as its ‘theme’ the paintings and sculptures of Ramkinkar Baij to mark the birth centenary of the artist.39 From the very amateurish simulations of Ramkinkar’s art, the Puja featured, the following year, a more elegantly designed village complex, with elaborately crafted panels of Santiniketan’s leather batik work placed on display by Shibshankar Das. (See 7.43)

Continuity in the field of ‘theme’ productions has helped to mark out some Puja sites more prominently than others in our surveys. One such Puja is that of the Jatra Shuru Sangha in Garia, lying at the extreme southern end of Raja Subodh Mullick Road, off a major bus junction, where Baishnabghata bifurcates to the east, and Garia spreads further south. Begun in 1957 and earlier organized by the GariaBaishnabghata Durgotsab Committee, this Puja was once known for its Pancha Durga iconography, where the goddess was shown as five different incarnations of the Debi. Later, a local trekking and adventure club took charge of the Puja, lending the dramatic tenor of its name to the event, the term ‘jatra’ invoking both a journey and a theatrical show that would bring the inveterate ‘pandal-hoppers’ to this venue. Club members here have the distinct sense of a break from the past and of entering, from 2001, into the wave of ‘theme’ Pujas, when they

durga puja tours and travels 321 new discerning layer of spectators who come here with particular expectations of art viewing.42 Such select artistic layers, as I have shown, coexist in the field with a series of other contending criteria of novelty, topicality and popular appeal, and need to be continuously sifted out from this larger gamut of viewing attractions. We therefore have to keep returning to thinking about the aggregate effects of these multiple forms of tableaux that converge within the spectrum of a single Puja tour, within a concentrated territorial stretch or across different zones of the city—or produce their serial effects over time, drawing us back to a single Puja or a zonal cluster every season.

7.43 Village complex with Santiniketan batik work, designed by Shibshankar Das, Baishakhi Club Puja, Gangulybagan, 2007

commissioned different professional designers to lay out in their park a wide variety of displays—scenes from Satyajit Ray’s children’s film Hirak Rajar Deshey, the caves of Bhimbhetka, a village setting with panels of patachitras of Raghurajpur in Orissa, another with a variety of painted clay pot decorations and columns, and in 2007, the set of an old north Kolkata street and house-front created by Rupchand Kundu, (see 7.44) leading into a tent where one encountered the ghosts and witches from Thakurmar Jhuli.40 There is often an alternative serial order of styles and designers that becomes the draw of certain Pujas. During 2006–2007, it was the work of a single Puja designer, Sushanta Pal, with banners and rhymes advertising the variety of his productions, which drew us left from the Garia junction to the new Patuli township and to the grounds of its BaishnabghataPatuli Upanagari Puja. It also led us to turn right towards Tollygunge and search out, inside Naktala, one of the older residential neighbourhoods of this locality, for the Naktala Udayan Sangha, which entered the fray of ‘theme’ Pujas in the mid 2000s.41 (See 7.45) As we have seen in the previous chapter, the special artistic reputation of the Naktala Udayan Sangha Puja came to revolve from this period around an unbroken association with prime Puja designers like Sushanta Pal and Bhabatosh Sutar, and on a

Travelling westwards from the regions of Naktala towards Tollygunge Circular Road, another deep interior opened itself to Puja spectatorship in the neighbourhoods of Haridebpur and Putiary that lie beyond the Tolly’s Nullah, in a maze of lanes that connect Tollygunge to Behala. Designers like Amar Sarkar and Subodh Ray played a signal role in drawing out the ‘art’ Puja trends of Behala into these areas. The former, in particular, brought into limelight the Ajeya Sanghati Puja of Haridevpur, where each year he would design tribal and folk art villages from different parts of India, to the forefront.43 In 2007, the media was abuzz with the

7.44 Rupchand Kundu’s remake of an old north Kolkata street, as a setting for the fables of Thakurmar Jhuli, Jatra Shuru Sangha Puja, 2007

322 in the name of the goddess

7.45 Seriality in styles of pavilion design at the same Puja site - Sushanta Pal’s bamboo and tapestry art pavilion, 2006, (left) and pavilion designed with painted conical bamboo structures, 2007, (right) at the Naktala Udayan Sangha Puja

news of the neck-to neck ‘clash’ of two ancient world civilizations—the art of the ancient Incas alongside that of ancient Mohenjodaro and Harappa—in this distant zone of the city.44 (See 5.48, 5.49) By the end of the decade, the Pujas of Haridebpur were rapidly upgrading their profiles in their ability to attract renowned designers and host new orders of ‘ecological’ and ‘installation’ art by Shibshankar Das and Sushanta Pal and most recently, Kamaldeep Dhar and Partha Dasgupta. One of the most experimental productions came up on the small plot of the Vivekananda Athletic Club at Haridebpur in 2014 on the theme of Kolkata’s streets, statuary and popular visual culture. Conceptualised by Partha Dasgupta, it involved a Californian ‘street artist,’ Tracy Lee Stum who collaborated for over a month with his art team to paint a three-dimensional scene rising from the floor of the Tollugunge metro station crossing, surrounded by walls pasted with old photographs and wood cut posters. Using the line from Rabindranath Tagore’s poem, Kolikata choliyachhey noritey noritey, the production played on the metaphor of an animated, perambulating city. (See 7.46. 7.47) If the ‘new wave’ found its way into these distant and remote parts of the south (in the same way that it spread into a similar peripheral belt in the city’s north, west and east), it also marked out its prominent locations across several older Puja paras in the heart of elite south Kolkata. We could take

the instance of the Ballygunge Cultural Association and Samaj Sebi Sangha on Lake View Road off Rashbehari Avenue, that date back to the 1950s, and of the Mudiali Club at the other end of this zone, that came up in 1935 as one of the oldest Sarbojanin Pujas of the neighbourhood that grew around the then newly-laid out Lakes. These Pujas had carved out a special niche for themselves in the decades before ‘theme’ Pujas, for the artistry of their pandals and pratimas and a style that was distinctly different from the loud extravaganza of the Pujas of Ekdalia Evergreen and Singhi Park.45 Coming into the 2000s, we can see the new genre of ‘theme’ Pujas partly growing out of these earlier styles, but also forming a larger circle of distinction around them. Around the Mudiali Puja, which was continuing to attract crowds with its genre of architectural replica pandals made by the decorator Mahfuz Khan and large Durga pratimas commissioned from Bonobehari Pal of Chandannagar, the Shibmandir Sarbojanin Puja of Lake Temple Road emerged, in these years, in the forefront of awards and publicity with a different brand of designer productions, specializing in recent times in ‘conceptual’ themes and ecological art displays by the artist Subrata Banerjee. (See 7.48) A similar order of glamour and corporate sponsorship has converged around the twin Pujas of Ballygunge Cultural Association and Samaj Sebi Sangha, their prestige resting as much on the continued artistry

7.46 Three-dimensional floor painting by Tracy Lee Stum, with the statue of Uttam Kumar, recreating the Tollygunge Metro station junction of the city, Vivekananda Athletic Club Puja, Haridebpur, 2014

7.47 Pavilion wall plastered with old woodcut prints and postcard size images of the city’s public statuary, in a city-themed installation by Partha Dasgupta and his team, Vivekanada Athletic Club Puja, Haridebpur, 2014

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of the Times of India, had also begun to invade the festival topography of this location, side-lining even the pavilions of these two Pujas.

7.48 Subrata Banerjee’s nature-themed installation with large coiled vegetal motifs, Shibmandir Puja, Lake Temple Road, 2010

of their pandals and pratimas (although seldom commissioned from ‘star’ designers in the field) as on the social standing and affluence of the organizers and the locality. As two of the three Pujas in the city that were being entirely sponsored that year by the Times of India, the Ballygunge Cultural Association celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2011 with a recreation of the Jor-Bangla temple of Bishnupur, created by the film set design team of Gautam Basu. In close competition, the Samaj Sebi Puja had on display a novel pandal made with organic jute fibre in the shape of an enlarged and decorated sindur container.46 (See 7.49, 7.50) In 2012, this Puja location on Lake View Road would come into new cinematic fame as the high-suspense, brilliantly visualized scene of climax of the thriller film Kahani, which unfolds in the background of Kolkata’s Pujas—where the supposedly pregnant heroine, Bidya Bagchi, draped in a traditional red bordered while silk saree on Bijoya Dashami, disappears into a sea of similarly attired look-alikes flooding the street, all converging on the ritual of sindur-khela to bid farewell to goddess Durga. By this time, an overpowering cluster of commercial publicity hoardings and kiosks, dominated by those

Standing on the other side of Rashbehari Avenue on Monoharpukur Road, well known for the medical dispensary that the club runs in a circular alcove in the middle of the road, the Tridhara Sammilani Puja has had a more recent career of fame and big-budget productions. It is from 2008 that it rose to new heights of renown with a series of spectacular remakes of historical architecture created by Dipak Ghosh—the carved wooden palace of Padmanabhapuram, Kerala in 2008, the Newari architecture of Nepal in 2009, and of a Rajasthani haveli and temple in 2011— each of which brought unprecedented crowds and awards to this Puja site. (See 7.51) For every such large Puja, there are many smaller ones in the vicinity that have their own imaginative repertoire. Dwarfed by the publicities of the Tridhara Samillani Puja, the Monoharpukur Sarbojanin Puja, in a turn down the same road, has chosen its themes in different years from Nandalal Bose’s linocut images for Rabindranath’s Sahaj Path, or from Rabindranath’s song on the dark-skinned Santhal girl, Krishnakali, where the divine pantheon took on the form of a Santhal family in a Santiniketan-style pavilion. Our tours of South Kolkata Pujas also got drawn to certain locations by the excessive hyperbole of their promotional strategies. The Badamtala Ashar Sangha Puja, in the old pujo para of Kalighat, which we have had occasion to visit in earlier chapters, is one such location. Begun in 1939 (around the time of other community Pujas of this neighbourhood), it launched a new order of architectural and environmental simulations from 1999 and made special festival history in 2003, the year the site was transformed into a ruined forest fortress by the set designer Rono Banerjee. With a shiuli tree in its midst, the production carried the title, Janglagarey Shiuli Porey (‘The fall of shiuli flowers in a forest fortress’).47 Reminiscent of similar forts in the Jhargram and Jamboni forest belts, so popular was this imaginary forest fortress in this narrow lane at Badamtala that the local bus stop came to be temporarily known as the ‘Janglagarh stoppage’. In 2007, the Puja underwent a makeover from this type of scenic spectacle to a

7.49 Jor Bangla temple replica designed by Gautam Basu’s team, at the Ballygunge Cultural Association Puja, 2011

7.51 Crowds of spectators at Dipak Ghosh’s Rajasthan palace complex at the Tridhara Sammilani Puja, 2011

7.50 Samaj Sebi Puja with pandal shaped like an enlarged decorated sindur container, 2011

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crowd congregation.50 But mega crowds also act as a deterrent to a different order of spectatorship. So, each season, even as Suruchi Sangha’s theme-park displays become more and more spectacular, the serpentine queues outside and the sheer crush of people inside make these simulated sites less and less accessible for viewing.

new kind of art installation, substituting the works of Rono Banerjee with those of Sushanta Pal. It was from this time that the Puja came to be supported by an NGO called the International Foundation for Sustainable Development (IFSD), as a part of its Kalighat development project, and the charge of its publicity was given over to an event management company. (See 7.52) The intricacies of Sushanta Pal’s conceptions had to seek out a discerning public against the tide of the Puja’s publicity gimmicks.48

a cohesive urban topography

A similar vein of showmanship and flashy advertising also became the selling point of the Suruchi Sangha Puja in New Alipore, backed by the Trinamool Congress politician Arup Biswas, who brought mega crowds, sponsors, and funds into what was once a little-known Puja of New Alipore, and mobilized the best Puja designers—Subodh Ray, Dipak Ghosh or Amar Sarkar—to lay out, as we have seen, elaborate theme parks displaying the architecture, arts and crafts of different Indian states.49 (Example, 7.53) The Suruchi Sangha Puja was among the first to adopt the mode of putting up publicity banners in all parts of the city, and also the first to deploy the overt metaphor of Puja travels, offering the masses a holiday to the backwaters of Kerala or the palaces and fortresses of Rajasthan for five rupees a head (which was the standard price of a bus or auto-rickshaw ride in 2003–2004). In 2009, the Suruchi Sangha Puja proudly announced its place at the head of the Pujas with the highest

It is time to step out of these frenetic travels and reflect a while on what makes for an integrated experience of the festival city. What serves to unite this landscape of ‘theme’ Pujas across these diverse urban spaces, even as the tableaux themselves are of the many styles and varieties we have described? How do the marked differences in the social and physical appearance of paras get temporarily blurred in these festival trappings? Following the trail of these ‘art’ Pujas can take us from the narrow old north Kolkata alleys of Ahirtola, Beniatola or Pathuriaghata, drive us eastwards through the inner lanes of Maniktala, Kankurgachhi and Beleghata, and bring us into the open expanses of the newer township of Salt Lake, allowing us weave through these routes a common aesthetic thread and tenor. Travelling from the south to the north, or from the north to the eastern flanks of the city, we can also track the changing chronologies in the spreading spatial and stylistic graph of ‘theme’ Pujas.

7.52 Painted house fronts and the office of IFSD at the Badamtala Ashar Sangha Puja site, 2010

7.53 Karnataka theme park, designed by Amar Sarkar, Suruchi Sangha Puja, 2010

durga puja tours and travels 327 name in the ‘art’ Puja circuit—such as BE Block (East) or AG or AH Blocks—which were drawing on corporate sponsors and upcoming designers, and presenting striking ‘theme’ pavilions in the same way as the Selimpur Pally or Naktala Udayan Sangha Pujas. (Example, 7.55. 7.56) Travelling out of Salt Lake northeast towards Dumdum, a new festival touring map opened up from the mid-2000s along the parallel arteries of the old Jessore Road and the new V.I.P Road, with an exponential spread of ‘theme’ Pujas into the interiors of Patipukur and Lake Town, or through a zone like Dumdum Park, where the Pujas of Tarun Sangha and Bharat Chakra have made the biggest and continuing marks, sporting each year new designers and design concepts.

7.54 Pavilion designed with plastic toys by Prashanta Pal, Lalabagan Nabankur Sangha Puja, Maniktala, 2009

The new wave took its own time to arrive in Puja sites like the Lalabagan Nabankur Sangha or Kankurgachhi Mitali Sangha, which came into the new art touring map only at the end of the 2000s through the productions of Prashanta Pal, Anirban Das or Gouranga Kuinla. (See 7.54, 5.18, 5.19) It was also only from 2007 that the Salt Lake Pujas began to purposefully ‘shed their nondescript look’51—with designer productions sweeping through most of the block Pujas of this township from 2009 as they began to mark their 25th or 30th year. That year, the FD Block Puja of the Titanic and Harry Potter production fame sought out in the place of the older pandal decorator firm the reputed designer Gopal Poddar, to launch what they termed their first ‘proper theme venture’ featuring the terracotta votive sculpture of the regions of Trichinopoly, Salem and Puddukottah, in a recreated shrine for the deities of Ayyanar and Mariamma. (See 5.61) By this time, there were also a number of Salt Lake Pujas, with an established

We have already discussed the important role of Puja announcement banners that emerge on the city’s landscape months ahead of the festival. Transcending all sense of locality, these banners crop up all over the cityscape, producing an imaginary spatial cohesion for the Kolkata of the Durga Pujas. To move from this pre-Puja ambience of banners into the thick of the unfolding event is to encounter another kind of homogenized commercial signage of award and sponsorship hoardings, advertisement kiosks and cut-out figures, and a common stock of logos, images and captions that keep recurring at the entrance of each ‘theme’ Puja, whether they sprout out of a little vacant plot in Naktala, or have a large park all to themselves, as with the FD Block Puja in Salt Lake. What is at work here is a logic common to the uniform design of all of today’s service-chain shop-fronts (for example, of Airtel or Vodafone mobile phone stores, Café Coffee Day outlets or Big Bazar shopping malls) as they come up in every nook and corner of the expanding metropolis. Like these shops, the visual topography of ‘theme’ Pujas carries the same thick markings of the new social mobility and consumer lifestyles that enter a locality. And they produce a unitary aura of commercial gloss that will bring together the ‘theme’ Pujas of older and newer, affluent and non-affluent neighbourhoods, temporarily effacing the drudgery and drabness of a location in the eyes of both Puja organizers and visiting crowds. (See 7.57, 7.58)

7.55 Recreation of a Buddhist pagoda with an intricate woven-jute facade, BG Block Puja, Salt Lake, 2009

7.56 Tibetan style Durga iconography inside the pagoda structure, BG Block Puja, Salt Lake, 2009

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7.57 Pavilion with blue lotus motifs at the Kankurgachhi Sapnar Bagan Puja, 2012

7.58 Awards stage and banners on the opposite side of the road at the Kankurgachhi Sapnar Bagan Puja, 2012

As we move along these festival routes through this maze of localities, the distinctions of each para dissolve and the eye gets accustomed to this unifying culture of signage and posters. The Snowcem ‘Pujo Perfect’ banners earmark the bestknown and admired Pujas on its award circuit, using the phrase, Purono Bochhorer Monjurono Pujo (‘The Most Memorable Pujas of Yester-Years’) to refer to a distinctly contemporary festival history, where the past that is being invoked is no more than a decade old. The tousle-haired urchin, Gattu, stands with a beating dhak to commemorate 25 years of the Asian Paints ‘Sharad Samman’ in a new wave of publicity of this oldest and most coveted of Puja awards. (See 7.59) And a growing number of other Puja awards from media groups like the Times of India or Ananda Bazaar Patrika, of Bengali TV channels, of the Kolkata Corporation, or of new ‘green’ lobbies (that have introduced, for instance, the Rotaract Green Puja Award) add their colourful hoardings to this dense conglomeration. Building on these are various other stock displays at each of these sites—most prominently, a lineup of all the previous years’ trophies on a stage or in a specially named ‘Achievements and Awards gallery’, now accompanied frequently by a collage of photographs portraying the other ‘Social and Cultural Activities’ of a club, or of award-winning moments from earlier seasons. And to the ‘Do Not Touch’ signs that we keep encountering inside the interiors of pandals are added new ones that also ask

us to ‘Observe Carefully’ (that is, if the crowds and volunteers ever allow you to stand still), and tell you that ‘this Puja can win the Green Puja award if you Do Not Smoke’. For the initiated spectator, there are also other kinds of continuities and connections to be searched out in these Puja tours across the city. Old designers are continually stumbled upon in new locations; craft forms and pandal designs keep travelling across seasons into different productions and Puja sites, with no one to assert patents or copyrights. So, for instance, old-time designers like Bandhan Raha never leave the scene, just as the art of local patachitras never stales as a resource for pandal decor. In one more patachitra ensemble that we came upon in 2009 at the Brindaban Matri Mandir Puja on Sukeas Street, we found Bandhan Raha’s team transferring the painted motifs onto embroidered cloth panels, anticipating the similar work of his newer counterpart, Gouranga Kuinla, at the Kankurgachhi Mitali Sangha Puja the following season. (See 7.60) And in the same Badamtala Puja location, with some of the houses still retaining the painted facades from Sushanta Pal’s 2010 project, the famous earthen teacup pandal from 2001 returned in 2011 as a gateway structure to an arched temple-like pavilion that Bandhan Raha put up here. (See 7.61) The ‘theme’ Puja circuit emerges over the decade as a palimpsest of citations and transpositions.

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Within its template of repetitions and reuses, there are individual designer styles to be studied over the years, newer ones to be evaluated, and the finest and most creative works to be distilled out of the proliferating output of ‘theme’ productions. The trail in recent years could lead to a far-off new residential area at Madurdaha, Kalikapur (off the southern stretch of the Bypass), where a young commercial artist, Soubhik Payra, launched his debut Puja designing venture in 2011 with large painted trucks. And it could then lead the following year to a known Puja site at Northern Park, Bhowanipur, where he worked on a simulated seaside installation with large vertically-upturned fishing boats, nets and eroded sculpted panels. (See 7.62 ) We could also trace the stylistic oeuvre of an artist like Bhabatosh Sutar across disparate spatial locations in different seasons—to see how they introduce a common design aesthetic to pavilions that grow out of the inner quarters of Behala, Kasba, Khidirpur, Naktala or Sikdarbagan, taking us from the far south to the far north of the city. With every passing season, though, art productions have to struggle to find their place within the

mounting clutter of advertisements and publicities. The festival city today is given over more and more to flexes and hoardings than to artistic pavilions and Durga images. Their competitive juxtapositions were best seen at the Chakraberia Sarbojanin Puja of 2012, where enormous flex banners of Century Plywood imprinted with the face of the goddess enveloped an awkward modernist pavilion designed by Shibshankar Das with steel rods, hanging glass balls and the orange and yellow cut-out globules of the Tata Docomo advertisements. (See 0.28) From being external sponsors and funders, advertisements had invaded the internal form and format of Puja pavilion designs.

new touring prospects The Durga Pujas of the city have for years been known for the inimitable practice of ‘pandal-hopping’: a practice premised on the central experience of walking with vast crowds through large parts of the city. The phenomenon of ‘theme’ Pujas can be seen to have brought a whole new thrust to this experience of

7.59 Asian Paints awards signage on a stage with awards, Lalabagan Nabankur Sangha Puja, Maniktala, 2009

7.60 Bandhan Raha’s production with embroidered patachitra panels on oval frames, Brindaban Matri Mandir Puja, Sukea Street, 2009

7.61 Gateway structure with stacked earthen tea cups, Badamtala Ashar Sangha Puja, 2011

7.62 Night illumination of Soubhik Payra’s installation with fishing boats shaped like a large thousand-petalled lotus, titled Shatadalatari, Northern Park Puja, 2012. Courtesy: Soubhik Payra

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7.63 Advertisement for ABP ‘Puja Parikrama’ tours, 2009 – courtesy, ABP

collective walking, as it distributed spectators across new festival spaces and routes and added new layers of tastes to these viewing tours. In ending this chapter, let us also consider how festival tourism in the city has in recent times taken on a more organized and advertised profile. The term ‘tours and travels’ in this chapter title is intended to suggest a new twist to this concept of touring—whereby from offering up the whole city as an open place of free, whimsical travels in space and time, the Pujas themselves are coming under the purview of paid and conducted package tours. Like our tours, these ones on offer also parcel out the city into discrete and separable geographic zones, while recreating the image of a culturally composite whole. Newspaper reports from 1995 refer to the first ventures of the West Bengal Tourism Development

Corporation (WBTDC) towards a tie-up with private hotels, lodges and travel agents in the state to promote Puja tourism and organize bus tours in the city. The most successful were the evening river cruises it began to organize along the Hooghly, especially on the evening of Bijoya Dashami, to watch the immersion of the deities at different ghats along the river, opening up the much-neglected river front of the city during this festival season.52 Later, in the early 2000s, its national counterpart, the Indian Tourism Development Corporation (ITDC), also announced a similar package of Puja bus tours in the city.53 This is also the time when a private event management company called Happenings worked actively at bringing international tourists to Kolkata during the Durga Pujas, setting up workshops to train young guides to take these visitors around, negotiating hospitality packages with the city’s luxury hotels, restaurants and clubs, and trying to integrate into the programme other eastern India tours of the hill resorts of Darjeeling and Kalimpong or the seaside resorts of Puri and Konarak.54 That such initiatives brought little reward was attributed 7.66 largely to the lack of adequate infrastructural support from the inert tourism industry of the state. Neither private nor government ventures in this sphere are seen to have effectively tapped or maximized the international, national or even local tourism potential of Bengal’s Durga Pujas. The years 2008–2009, saw a concerted upswing in the state’s organization of Puja tour packages, with the Ananda Bazaar Patrika group pitching in as key collaborators as part of its ‘Sharadotsav’ programme, which it subtitled in English ‘A Carnival of Celebration’. Such promotional ventures and the publicity that accompany them are typical of today’s many varieties of brand marketing of the Pujas. ‘If you want to see God [in this case, the Goddess], book your seats today’, their advertisements announced.55 (See 7.63) One had a choice of air-conditioned or non air-conditioned buses, whole or half-day, early morning or late evening tours for different budgets, or better still, of the experience of ‘Puja on River Ganges’, where a pontoon was set up on the river with a Durga image and visitors could watch cultural programmes and fireworks sitting aboard

durga puja tours and travels 333 boats that would float around the pontoon. And like any other cultural show tickets, you could buy these tickets too in advance from special counters set up across the city, or online using a credit card. In keeping with the social and communitarian spirit of the Pujas, the tourism department, taking its cue from NGOs, was also organizing free bus tours for senior citizens from old-age homes and children from orphanages. (See 7.64) In the past few years, the WBTDC has stepped in and publicized its many Puja touring packages and itineraries, trying to keep pace with the changing forms of Puja displays in the city. As in the past, the unchanging Pujas of the old aristocratic homes of north Kolkata are still the main fare on offer and the most ready selling point of the festival. The terms ‘Banedi’ and ‘Barowari’, along with their ‘traditional’ label, are the ones most widely in circulation, with these ‘Traditional Houses Tours’ offered in two phases as ‘Sanatani I and II’. At the same time, another type of pandal tour is offered for different north, south and east zones of the city. We return again to the profiling of north Kolkata Pujas as ‘Puratani’ (or ‘old-style’), with ‘old’ referring here to the older styles of Sarbojanin Pujas of Baghbazar, Kumartuli, Simla Byayam Samiti or College Street, which are marked out for viewing along with the newer style Pujas of Darpanarayan Tagore Lane or Kankurganchhi. The nomenclature of the ‘art’ Pujas remains curiously absent in these tour lexicons—even as their geographic coverage has expanded to new areas and varieties of Pujas of south Kolkata (featured under ‘Dakshini I and II’) and also entered the new zone of the east (termed ‘Purba’), taking viewers from Beleghata to Lake Town and Dumdum Park and also on a special evening tour of the Salt Lake Pujas.56 The WBTDC has recently added newer tour packages to its festival fare. Using a Bishnupur terracotta temple panel and Jibanananda’s ‘Rupasi Bangla’ as its logo, it now offers district tours to the old temples of Antpur and Guptipara in Hooghly, the latter famous as the home of the first Barowari Puja, and has initiated a larger ‘Bengal Renaissance’ heritage tour that will take visitors from the houses of Rammohun Roy or Vivekananda in north Kolkata to Dakshineshwar and Belur Math.

The coming of age of such Durga Puja tours is part of a larger civic and corporate drive to upgrade the festival and regulate its forms of viewing. While using the jargon of a popular ‘carnival’, such ventures make a clear bid to draw in a new social class of spectators and a different national and cosmopolitan interest in the local festival. Today’s festival in the city, I argue, both invites such promotional initiatives but also strongly resists being made into a centrally coordinated, ticketed touring event. The local dimensions of the Pujas and the intimate depths of its proliferation across Kolkata’s neighbourhoods defy, in the end, such larger moves to impose order from above. The essential ‘pandal-hopping’ experience is still one of walking the streets rather than of travelling in luxury buses, of moving with friends and families, rather than with an anonymous tour group, and of planning one’s own random routes of viewing instead of opting for such tour packages. (See 7.65) Like the modes of production and execution of its tableaux, the logic of spectatorship in this event remains fundamentally local. It is largely to the city’s own crowds (and those of Kolkata’s outskirts and smaller towns) that Puja organizers and designers address their pedagogic and artistic messages, and lay out the attractions of recreated global and national sites or craft and folk art displays.

7.64 Senior Citizen’s Puja tour bus, outside the Mudiali Puja, 2011

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7.65 The crowded alley of the Nalin Sarkar Street Puja, Dashami afternoon, 2013

Nothing drives home this intractably local character of the event better than the listing of ‘must-see’ Pujas of Kolkata and Howrah that the Ananda Bazaar Patrika put out in its Puja Parikrama of 2011—a selection of some 500 Pujas, grouped like the road guides into different zonal belts.57 Unlike the tours I have laid out, there are no designer names given here to mark out the best from the rest. What are put out are only names of Puja clubs and a cryptic array of their ‘themes’. For the non-local and the uninitiated, the jumble of themes would be as bewildering as the classifications of animals in the old Chinese encyclopaedia in the passage from Borges with which Michel Foucault begins his book The Order of Things.58 They may well provoke the same burst of laughter, unsettling all that one would expect of a contemporary setting of urban public art, leaving one to grapple instead with this strange panorama of local

simulacra—the Amarnath Yatra, the Bayon temple of Cambodia, the Nalanda ruins, a Nagaland village, a mandap made of jeans, a collage of Rabindranath’s dance-dramas, Feluda’s adventure in the hills. Who but the region’s own—a public bombarded for weeks in advance with news of upcoming Puja attractions in Bengali newspapers and television—would ever make sense of this outlandish fare and take compulsively to the streets in search of it? So it is that, despite having all the potential to become a world-class tourist spectacle, on par (many will say) with the Rio Carnival, Kolkata’s Durga Pujas cannot take on the global ‘brand value’ that would truly put it on an international map. This is the lament of many in the city’s small circle of advertising professionals and ‘brand consultants’, who see in this festival a unique cultural product of exemplary quality, which

durga puja tours and travels 335 they feel is not being given the right kind of national or global ‘branding’. To do so would need a certain programmatic containment and downscaling of the local dimensions of the event that would be hard to bring about. One of the greatest deterrents to bringing large groups of national or international tourists into the city during these festival days is, of course, the fearsome crush of crowds on the streets. It would be next to impossible to clear the city of local masses to allow the unhindered, privileged touring access of these special groups. And it would also go against the grain of what is constantly upheld as a people’s festival and a free-for-all mass event. It is this very attribute—the frenzy of mass spectatorship—that can also be seen as now pushing the event over the brink and destroying it from within. Like everything else about the festival, there is an excess and overkill to the publicities, awards and rush of people, especially in Puja sites whose festival ratings stand inseparable from the record footfalls that they count on. Notwithstanding the efficiencies with which the city’s traffic police and local volunteers manage the stupendous task of crowd control throughout the Puja days and nights, the experience of ‘pandal-hopping’ has

today become increasingly self-defeating, even for die-hard local enthusiasts. This is especially so for those, like myself, who go searching the city each year for new orders of artistry and innovation, and the latest art productions of older and newer Puja designers. As one is now continuously jostled and herded inside and outside these crowded complexes (in which lies the essence of successful crowd management), there is precious little scope for viewing and appreciation of the displays, leave alone worship or devotion. Paradoxically, the more the Durga Pujas have turned into a mega art exhibition, the less can they be viewed with any leisure or discernment.59 The festival has produced the ultimate paradox of an enormous spectacle of public art from which the public itself is being excised—a citywide exhibition for which there can only be crowds but no community of committed spectators. Do I go looking now for VIP entrance passes, tours with celebrity judges and sponsors, or begin my own select conducted expeditions before the madness of crowds take over the main five days? Or do I settle now only for the Puja Parikramas on my computer or television screens? Or, having toured the festival city for years, do I say: I have seen enough; I have seen it all?

Notes 1 ‘Sera howar dourey egiye’, ABP, 2 October 2003, ‘Shreshthatwer loraiye sobaikey tekka dilo dakshin’, ABP, 5 October 2003. A few years later, another newspaper report talked of the narrowing of the gap in the styles and forms of the ‘theme’ Pujas of the north and the south, notwithstanding some marked continuing distinctions—like, for instance, the constrictions of space in the narrow alleys of the north as against the spread-out spaces of the bulk of the big Sarbojanin Pujas of the south; or the mixed nature of Bengali and nonBengali residential communities and viewing crowds in north and central Kolkata, as against the preponderance of more homogenized Bengali middle class communities in bulk of the para and housing block Pujas of south Kolkata. Doyel Datta, ‘Kolkatar Pujo: Milemishey Uttar Bonam Dakshin’, Robibarer Sokalbela, 3 October 2010. 2 Harisadhan Mukhopdhyay’s Kolikata Sekaler o Ekaler, first published in 1915, 3rd reprint and enlarged edition, edited

by Nishit Ranjan Ray, Kolkata: P.M. Bagchi & Co., 1985, remains a classic account of the historical evolution of the city from its earliest origins into the early twentieth century, with a detailed laying of the buildings and spaces of colonial and indigenous habitations over the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For a recent analysis of the porous boundaries between the ‘White and the ‘Black’ towns of the nineteenth century, the changing patterns of architecture and the shaping of the spatial topography of Bengali elite and middle class neighbourhoods in north Calcutta, see Swati Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta. On the road building activities of the Calcutta Improvement Trust in the inter-war years (especially the laying of the Central Avenue), and the way it produced a new Bengali ‘south’ Calcutta in the areas stretching from Bhowanipore to Alipore, Ballygunge to Tollygunge, in sharp social and spatial contrast with the ‘north’, see Partho Datta, Planning the City: Urbanization and Reform in Calcutta, c.1800– 1940, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2012, pp. 264–278.

336 in the name of the goddess 3 The early formation of these squatter colonies, spreading across the regions south of Dhakuria and Tollygunge, is discussed in Prafulla K. Chakrabarti, The Marginal Men, Chapter 3. 4 Ananya Roy’s book, City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003, provides a critical insight into this process of the outward spill of the city into these rural fringes. Studying the intersection of rural migration (through the lives and livelihood of migrant rural women) and urban liberalization at the edges of the city, the book offers a model of ‘informal’ urban planning for understanding the flurry of middle class housing developments on agricultural land and the rise of a new bhadralok Kolkata in areas like Patuli, Kalikapur and Mukundapur. 5 For a compilation of important municipal documents on aspects of this territorial and demographic transformation of the city, see Metropolitan Kolkata: An Anthology of Some Socio-Economic Studies and Surveys of the KMDA, 1970–2004, Volumes 1–5, Introduced by Alapan Bandyopadhyay, CEO, KMDA (published by the SocioEconomic Planning Unit, Directorate of Planning and Development, KMDA, Kolkata: 2004). 6 Michel de Certeau, ‘Walking in the City’, in The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, pp. 91–93. 7 This history is briefly recounted in the chapter on ‘BehalaBarisha’, in Abdul Kashem Rahimuddin’s book on Kolkata, Hey Nagar, Hey Mahanagar, Kolkata: Shilpakala, 1989, pp. 241–249. 8 A history of the central branch and house of the Sabarna Ray Choudhury family has been recently compiled by two younger family members, Probal and Devarshi Ray Choudhury, Bara Bari: The Abode of the Sabarna Ray Choudhury Family at Barisha, Kolkata: Saborno Sangrahalay, 2003. 9 Kumkum Chatterjee in ‘Goddess Encounters: Mughals, Monsters and the Goddess in Bengal’, pp. 29-31. 10 Bimal Chandra Datta, Durga Pujo: Sekal thekey Ekal, p. 135. From the 1860s, the descendents of Jagatram Mukhopadhyay’s family moved from their seasonal worship of Durga to having a permanent ashtadhatu (mixture of eight metals) image of the goddess installed in their household altar, which they continue to worship till the present. The other two Pujas of the Haldars and the Rays of Behala were also still in practice in the 1980s. 11 Interviews with members of the Barisha Shrishti Puja committee, on 19 September 2002, and with Ashim Chakrabarty, Secretary of the Barisha Sahajatri Club on 20 September 2003. 12 Interview with Sushanta Mitra and Barishan Ghosh, members of the Tapoban Club, 20 September 2003.

13 A point emphasized by Amar Sarkar, in our first interview with him at the Barisha Shrishti Puja, 19 September 2002, and reiterated in our conversations with the other Behala Shilpara-based veteran Puja designer, Subodh Ray, on 3 November 2002. 14 This artists’ group was working in 2003 at the Tapoban Club Puja on a small, neatly designed display of the lacquer dolls of Medinipur and rope and thread-work panels made by artisans of Madhya Pradesh. 15 Abdul Kashem Rahimuddin, ‘Behala-Barisha’, pp. 244, 247–249. 16 The previous year (2006), Bhabatosh Sutar had worked here on what would become a common template of a ‘child art’ pandal, creating his Durga to match the paintings of children of the locality. During our visit to this Behala Young Men’s Association Puja on Dashami, 2007, we found a palpable mood of disappointment among members of the Puja committee for failing to win any awards, and some of them also privately voiced their resentment against Bhabatosh Sutar. This ‘star’ designer, they felt, had given this production very little time and attention, compared to his big project that year at the Khidirpur 25 Pally Puja, where he was working on an ambitious installation on the theme of cultivation and ploughing. 17 The work of this art college alumnus, Rono Banerjee, and his fabrication of the jungle and deserted temple set at the Behala Natun Dal Puja during the season of 2007 is featured in the documentary film made on the Durga Puja that year by the USA based art-historian, Sunanda K. Sanyal, A Homecoming Spectacle (Kolkata, 2008). 18 Interview with designer Subodh Ray and President of the Puja committee, Samir Ganguly, at the Behala Agradoot Club Puja, 20 September 2006. 19 Interview with artist Partha Ray, at the Behala Club Puja, 27 September 2006. 20 In fact, the earnings from this one Puja commission allowed this Environmental Art Collective to complete the building of their studio in their artist’s residential complex, Chander Haat Prangan at Khudirampally in the rural fringes of Behala. 21 Interview with Kajal Sarkar of the Bosepukur Puja Committee, who has been a main figure in the Forum for Durgotsav, November 2012. 22 Bimal Chandra Datta, Durga Puja: Sekal thekey Ekal, pp. 142–143. 23 My information on the Hatibagan Sarbojanin Puja and the neighbourhood is largely sourced from two interviews with a resident artist, photographer and graphic designer, Apu Bandyopadhyay, and his friend Padmanabha Dasgupta, both of whom had taken charge of designing their parar pujo in 2004, using the art of Battala wood

durga puja tours and travels 337 engravings. The interviews were conducted in the old rented residence (an archetypal north Kolkata home) of Apu Bandyopadhyay, on 7 October 2004, and on 23 September 2006. 24 P. Thankappan Nair, A History of Calcutta Streets, Kolkata: Firma KLM, 1987, p. 402. 25 Harisadhan Mukhopdhyay’s Kolikata Sekaler o Ekaler (1985 edition), pp. 362–363; A.K. Ray, A Short History of Calcutta, first published 1902; reprint, Calcutta: Riddhi, 1982, pp. 200–201. 26 Anjan Mitra, ‘Hatibagan’ in Kolkata o Durgapujo, pp. 89–91. 27 Interview with Apu Bandyopadhyay and Padmanabha Dasgupta, 23 September 2006. 28 Interview with Sunil Pal at the site of the Nalin Sarkar Street Puja, 2 October 2008. 29 These Santhal wooden puppets, called Chadar Badar, comprise a dying art form still practiced by a few Adivasi families of the Birbhum region. Concept note leaflet, ‘Bishay Bhabna, 2010’, handed out by the Hatibagan Nabin Pally Puja. 30 With little information on this locality of Bosepukur or the larger zone of Kasba in the histories of old Calcutta or in the new compilation of demographic surveys and reports of the KMDA, my account has drawn heavily on several interviews with Kajal Sarkar and Subir Ghosh, old-time residents of Bosepukur and senior members of the Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja committee-–on 15 September 2002, 27 September 2003, 3 October 2006, 11 October 2008 and 5 September 2009. 31 Here is another instance of the self-trained designer who throws in his claims along with several others to have ‘pioneered’ a new wave of Pujas in his innovatively conceptualized structures—but who would never quite graduate to the standing of an ‘artist’ in the field on par with figures like Sanatan Dinda, Bhabatosh Sutar, Amar Sarkar or other art college graduates. 32 Interview with Bandhan Raha at the Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja, 27 September 2003. Bandhan Raha’s career in Puja designing, and the construction of this ‘bhanrer pandal’ in particular, is described in Anjan Mitra, Kolkata o Durgapujo, pp. 142–7. 33 Anjan Mitra, Kolkata o Durgapujo, pp. 99–103. 34 Unlike the continuing rising ‘art’ profile of the Puja of Barisha Club, Behala or those at Hatibagan, in the post-2010 years, the Bosepukur Shitala Mandir and the Talbagan Pujas fell out of the prominent designer circuit. But in keeping with the trend of mass spectatorship, once established on the touring map of the city, they continue to draw massive crowds regardless of the quality of their productions. 35 Michel de Certeau, ‘Walking in the City’, p. 97.

36 This installation is analysed as one of my four case studies in Tapati Guha-Thakurta, “From Spectacle to Art”, pp. 67–68. 37 These areas stretching south from Dhakuria and Jodhpur Park towards Santoshpur, Bagha Jatin, Gartia, Naktala or Patuli are not shown in the Police Puja Guide Map of south Kolkata shown here (see 7.37) but can be tracked in the larger map of older and newer parts of south Kolkata featured at the beginning of the chapter. (See 7.1, 7.2) 38 Interview with Partha Ray and Siddhartha Ray, Selimpur Pally Puja committee members, 23 September 2007. 39 Interview with artist, Pradip Goswami, who conceived of this Puja theme and worked on the copies of the Ramkinkar paintings and sculptures, and club member Arijit Guha, Ashok Trust, Baisakhi Club, Gangulybagan, 19 September 2006. 40 Interview with Mahadeb Guha, Secretary, Jatru Shuru Sangha Puja, 30 September, 2003, and with designer Rupchand Kundu at this Puja site, 21 September 2006. 41 Naktala’s existence as a semi-rural residential zone on the eastern fringes of Tollygunge, next to the Tolly’s Nullah and western fringes of Garia predates the setting up of the refugee squatter colonies in this belt of the South 24 Parganas. The neighbourhood came to acquire a slightly more affluent middle-class identity in the post-Partition years, compared to flanking refugee colonies like Netaji Nagar or Azadgarh. The Nakatala Udayan Sangha Puja has a much newer history beginning in the 1980s, as a breakaway unit of an older para club, with the big leap in its Puja budgets, corporate ambitions and designer profile coming about from 2005. Interview with Debananda Chakrabarty, Vice President, Naktala Udayan Sangha Puja, 21 September 2006. 42 Since 2011, the most powerful spurt to its ‘art’ Puja and awards profile has been provided by the patronage of the Trinamool Congress MLA and State Industries Minister (and currently Minister of Higher Education), Partha Chatterjee. 43 Interview with Binod Kumar Sahu, Puja committee member, Ajeya Sanghati Puja, Haridebpur, 17 October 2007. He gave a larger picture of this lower middle-class neighbourhood and the way the Puja secured its pride of place within its locality and put Haridebpur on the festival map of the city, by drawing on the designer talents of Amar Sarkar from 2002. 44 Sudeshna Banerjee, ‘Pandals put back the clock—Clash of civilizations at community Pujas’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 10 October 2007. These rival neighbouring productions are discussed in Chapter 5. 45 When we began our project in 2002, these Puja clubs were picked out as the obvious first choices for sampling the new tastes and styles of Puja pavilions. Some of the first interviews were conducted by our research assistants with

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47 48 49

50

51

52

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set designer Dilip Chowdhury, working at the Ballygunge Cultural Association Puja, and Nitai Mukherjee, Secretary of the Mudiali Club Puja, on 15 September 2002. This pandal motif of the Samaj Sebi Puja was used to maximum media publicity that year through the organized spectacle of sindur-khela on Bijoya Dashami by married women deputed by the Puja club to perform this ritual for television channels. ‘Janglagarey Shiuli Porey—A Reflection from History’, The Statesman, Calcutta, 18 September 2003. Interview with Sushanta Pal at the Badamtala Ashar Sangha Puja, 6 September 2008. The names of these designers are however routinely downplayed, often entirely effaced, to advertise this Puja as the sole initiative of Arup Biswas. In their appeal to mass spectators, the ‘theme’ Pujas of Badamtala Ashar Sangha and Suruchi Sangha began to outdo the older Pujas of Ekdalia Evergreen, College Square or Mohammed Ali Park. It is on this count that these two Pujas of Kalighat and New Alipore were the only new ones that came to be incorporated from 2004 within the South Kolkata area map of the Kolkata PoliceIndian Oil Puja road guides. The Telegraph, Calcutta, Friday Salt Lake Supplement ‘Festive Roster’, 19 October 2007 and ‘Crowd Crown’, 26 October 2007. Announcement of WBTDC of Puja tours through the city and a river cruise along the Hooghly on all days of the Pujas, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 11 September 1995. Announcement of the ITDC ‘Fest on Wheels’, Times of India, Kolkata, 7 October 2003. In the build up to the Pujas of 2003, Anjan Ghosh

and I discussed with Vikram and Shivani Iyengar (who ran Happenings), their plans for bringing national and international tourists to the city for the Durga Pujas. We also conducted lecture sessions on the Pujas for a group of college students they were training to be guides. 55 The advertisement announced, Bhagabaner dekha petey aaj-ey apnar seat book korun, Ananda Bazaar Patrika and Rupasi Bangla Pujo Parikrama, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 2 September 2009. If there was a tone of light irreverence in the slogan, it was more than compensated for by the artistic and devotional affect of the image of half the face and large eye of the goddess that dominated the advertisement. 56 All these tours are advertised in this print announcement of the WBTDC—Sharadotsaber anandey metey uthun, Kolkatay Durga Pujor romancha upabhog korun, Sharadotsav 2011, ABP, 11 September 2011. In 2013, more extended tours on largely the same routes were on offer, with dates of touring beginning with Mahalaya and river cruises being arranged every day through that week upto Dashami. The day or evening bus tours cost Rs. 800 and 550 per person on AC and non-AC coaches respectively and were fully booked by Mahalaya. ‘A Bus with a View’, Hindustan Times, Metro, 2 October 2013. 57 ‘Shantirupena Sangsthita—Puja Parikrama 2011’, ABP,, 1 October 2011. 58 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Vintage Books, 1973, Preface, pp xv–xvi. 59 This point is strongly expressed in a newspaper column by Rupali Gangopdhyay, ‘Theme-Sankat’, Ei Samay, Kolkata, 7 November 2013.

EIGHT

Destruction, Dispersals, Afterlives Nothing in this grand spectacle is made to last. The vast simulacra of tableaux that engulfs the city begins to disassemble within a few days of Bijoya Dashami, the last day of the Durga Puja, as all urban spaces slowly return to their everyday uses. The immense time, labour and creativity that are invested in the making of images and pavilions stand in contrast to the routine-ness of their unmaking. The goddess and her family are the first to go; the greatest fanfare surrounds the rituals of their departure and consignment to the river. The intensity of public involvement in the festival reaches its crescendo— its emotional and physical climax—in the ecstatic celebrations that unfold around the journey of the images from the pandals to the riverbank. Like everything around today’s festival, the scale and publicity of these farewell rituals have taken on new proportions. Whether it is the mutual smearing of sindur by the married ladies of the para, with the sindur khela becoming like the abir khela of Holi and a highly posed and photographed event (see 8.1); the heady mix of the dhak and dhunuchi nach that precede the lifting of the images out of the pandal altars into the waiting open trucks; the gusto of street dances that accompany the immersion processions (see 8.2)—the newest element being the teenaged and middle-aged women who take centre-stage, throwing all inhibition to the winds; the spectators that line the main avenues to see the goddesses go by or join the river cruises to watch the

immersions on both banks of the Hooghly; or the increasingly elaborate regulations and municipal arrangements that today surround the process of immersion and river cleaning. After this final high pitch of festivity, a sudden lull descends on the city—during which the dismantling of the pandal structures occurs at different paces, depending on the destination and reuse potential of the constituent parts. The process of dispersal here is slower, more mundane, emptied of attention, in keeping with the pall of the post-festival days. The dense commercial signage of gateways and flex hoardings disappear most rapidly, their material designed for quick mounting and dismounting, filling the streets once again with bamboo armatures that are in turn carted away for other purposes. Unlike the earlier form of lighting with tiny electrical bulbs wired on to bamboo frames, the current LED light panels set up by electrical decorators, which in daytime appear as large white or black opaque slabs with inner perforated designs, also move easily. What remain standing for the next few days (often weeks, if they are in grounds that need not be immediately cleared) are the art pavilions, village complexes and architectural remakes—abandoned full structures or assemblages of terracotta, cane, wood, metal, fibreglass, thermocol or plastic foam décor—waiting, in most cases, to be sold to organizers of suburban Kali and Jagadhhatri Pujas

8.1 Sindur-khela by married women of the para, Tridhara Sammilani Puja, Monoharpukur Road, 2011. Photograph by Jeet Chowdhury

8.2 Immersion procession dance as the goddess departs on a truck from the Mallick Bari Puja, Bhowanipur, Bijoya Dashami, 2008

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a leisurely recall and layering of memories across the seasons; the continuum lies in the structured cyclical nature of the Pujas, whereby the end of one year’s Puja brings the awaiting, planning and preparations for the next.2 Whereas the older practices of idol and pandal making have had the logic of destruction and recycling of materials built into the nature of these trades, the new genres of Durga Puja ‘art’ struggle to come to terms with their ephemeral public lives and their postfestival redundancy as preservable art works.

8.3 Dismantling of a Chattisgarh village complex at the Hindusthan Park Puja site, 2008

or taken back by decorator workshops for piecemeal recycling. (See 8.3, 8.4) Sadly, their lives as public art are as short-lived as the festival. Their hopes of finding metropolitan collectors and new spaces of display are left hanging, as the city nonchalantly turns its back on creations that had everyone enamoured just the week before. As the book winds down to these ending scenes of destruction and dispersal, this chapter addresses the moot issue of impermanence that is germane to this field of production. A century and a half ago, Charles Baudelaire had invited us to think of the ‘ephemeral’, along with ‘the fugitive and the contingent’, as a constitutive feature of modernity, suggesting ‘the half of art, whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.’1 While we could think of the yearly homecoming of Durga as belonging to that immutable, unchanging ‘other half ’, the material culture of the festival belongs entirely to the realm of the transient and ephemeral. If the ‘work of art’ in modernity has been continually pitted against the mutability of products, processes and materials, the ‘art’ of the festival has, on the contrary, always factored in the elements of perishability, redundancy and disuse. The effect of the ‘aesthetic’ in this public sphere lies in the briefness of its interventions, in the fleetingness of the marks it leaves on objects, spaces and the sensorium. Everything must be savoured and absorbed in the short time-span of the event; thereafter comes the time, now increasingly rare, for

Processes of discarding here involve different notions of waste, different economies of return and reuse. In the one case—as with the clay images of the deities— the process is about the physical disintegration of objects that have finite life-spans and easily revert to becoming raw material and refuse. The decaying remains of idols that lie strewn across the city through the year carry signs of the hierarchies between different gods and goddesses and their calendars of worship—separating out the figures of subaltern goddesses like Manasa or Shitala, which are never immersed in water but left standing on pavements and watersides for their heads and bodies to slowly fall apart (see 8.5), from those of major goddesses like Durga, Kali or Jagaddhatri, which are given ceremonial send-offs before they are cast into the river. The river ghat is where we mortals too meet our end, where the living part with the non-living, where we surrender to the water the last earthly vestiges of our loved ones. Imbued with the symbolism of the cycle of nature and life, the bodies of the gods, like human ashes, are returned to the

8.4 Elaborate temple structure awaiting sale, three days after the Durga Pujas, Ballygunge Cultural Association Puja, 2013

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8.5 Shitala idols left by the waterside to be gradually returned to nature, Eastern Metropolitan Bypass, 2014

elements, most auspiciously to the river, from whose bed will come the clay to sculpt them anew. Hence, the emphasis on the use of biodegradable material —a straw-stuffed mould layered with alluvial clay— in the making of these images; on the removal from the immersed deities of all that is non-dissolvable and recyclable, like the wooden frame, the clothes, weapons or ornaments; and, most recently, on a preimmersion stripping away of all polluting substances and toxic colours on the body of the idol to protect the river waters. Hence, also, the dilemma of today’s new genre of ‘art’ Durgas, made of durable material like fibreglass, wood or stone, that are in search of a continued existence as works of sculpture and cannot be reduced to idol refuse. In the other case—as with the dispersals of the pavilions and their embellishments—the process of falling to waste is multi-layered. It involves varying ways in which objects, while remaining whole, become redundant, outlive the prime function for which they were made, or become saleable and usable in other contexts. Afterlives here may entail the reduction of pandal architectures to reusable bamboo and plywood parts, their transportation in part and in whole as portable tableaux, or their many decorative components trickling into the local market for ethnic art and craft wares. The post-festival destinies of

Durga Puja productions then take them into different categories of waste—that which may be called ‘ritual garbage’ and has been the subject of the cultural archaeology and anthropology of religious practices across the world;3 or that which comes under the rubric of industrial and consumer junk, around which has grown a large repertoire of contemporary art practices and another kind of anthropology of modern trash.4 In recent times, contemporary Indian artists across the local and national spectrum have turned to varieties of urban and consumer waste to create bricolage sculptures, (example, 8.6) mini cityscapes, and junky fashion wear.5 Like their peers in the worlds of contemporary art, Puja designers too have long made artistic capital out of cheap, throwaway objects and materials (be it earthen tea cups, sugarcane fibres, broken records, plastic bottles and toys, or heavier industrial waste; example, 8.7). The main difference lies in that these festival creations thereafter frequently forfeit the rights of authorship and themselves return to the state of disposable trash. In ending this book, let me offer a few vignettes of the destruction and afterlives of the objects of the festival, each premised on the same kinds of movement of labour and materials that go into the fabrication of the spectacle. I will move between contrasting scenarios, from the speedy laying to

8.6 Banana Tree, sculpture made with discarded rubber by Debanjan Roy, Indian Museum courtyard, 2013. Photograph, courtesy: Akar Prakar, Kolkata

8.7 Mashishasur’s buffalo head made with discarded car parts, Abasar Club Puja, 2011. Photograph by Sourav Kar Gupta

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8.8 Bamboo scaffolding left standing, months after the Pujas, in a Salt Lake park, 2010

waste and the piling of idol garbage on the riverbanks to the careful dismantling, packaging and travels of Puja installations; from the spill-over of the artwork and design aesthetic of the Pujas into new spaces of collecting and display to fresh spectres of apathy and abandon. Through these scenarios, I would like to think of the vast residue of objects, skills and aspirations that the festival disgorges every year, and the lingering of these remains (like the serial memories of each season’s Pujas) within the inhabited fabric of the city. The line-up of festivals leaves behind a year-round landscape of leftovers—abandoned idol corpses on water-banks, stacked-up bamboo poles in parks, still-to-be-removed hoardings of Pujas in street corners, remnants of pandal décor on streets and club rooms, and the occasional preservable Durga image in a museum or a hotel lobby. (See 8.8, 8.9) And as the year proceeds, these residues give way to a new material topography of publicities, constructions and preparations for the Pujas to come.

Ghat adjoining Babughat and Judges Ghat, on the main stretch of the city’s river front along the Strand. With nearly 50 per cent of the Durga images of the main urban zone of Kolkata brought here, these ghats on the Hooghly witness as many as 1,500 immersions over two to three nights, often one every five minutes during the peak hours of the evening. The largest and grandest of the Durga ensembles arrive here, and it is here that we also see the greatest speed and spectacle of their destruction. Offloaded from the trucks, stripped off the flowers and other Puja accessories on their bodies that are to be deposited in vast garbage vats, these vast images on their wooden frames are circled around a few times by the coolies to hoarse cries of victory to the goddess and invocation of her return the next year, before they are lowered onto the muddy banks, and pushed to the edge of the waters. The images are given a token submersion in the river, but they are no longer allowed to float away into the deep. Contained within a roped enclosure, the job of the cranes is to immediately scoop up the bodies and give them a ritual dip in the waters before dumping these idol corpses on the barges.6 In this latest concerted municipal measure to curb river pollution and minimize the contact of the

idols that are ripped apart Let me begin with the new scenarios of immersion. From 2011, the Kolkata Port Trust began to deploy two giant cranes and barges at the central idolimmersion site within the city, at the Baje Kadamtala

8.9 A giant eye remnant from a Bhabatosh Sutar pavilion, Abasar Club Puja, Bhowanipur, 2010

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8.10 The traditional bisarjan: family members lowering a small pratima of a household Puja into the river, Nimala Ghat, 2010. Photograph by Jeet Chowdhury

idol with the river, the entire ritual of immersion is turned inside out. Overhauled are the very notions of bisarjan and bhasan—the first term filled with the solemnity of renouncement and sacrifice that is associated with the act of immersion, the second colloquial term carrying the more vivid invocation of the act of floating in water. (See 8.10) The epitomic image of the occasion remains that of the goddess’ upturned face and clenched fists gently bobbing above water, surrounded by fragments of her ornaments and weapons. (See 8.11) But in stark contrast stands today’s surreal scene of the mauling of the images by cranes, as flaying limbs and torsos drop from above, and detached heads pop out of the mangled bodies of straw and clay. (See 8.12) All feelings are numbed by the intensity of labour and exhaustion. Within minutes of moving into water, the goddess’ brutalization and beheading is complete. Her remains are thrown into a mass of disintegrated idol parts that are heaped on the water banks of all immersions sites, from where, in the

coming days, various items like wooden frames, face masks or sections of clothes and ornaments will be scavenged and recycled. (See 8.13) What allows for this sharp volte-face of the worshipped idol from a living entity to discarded matter? At which point of time, after the end of the Dashami rituals, is life believed to leave the sculpted body of the deities, rendering them into inanimate objects to be abandoned or immersed? Is it when the priest chants his last incantations, often even shaking the background frame, allowing the gods to depart from the temporary bodies they had occupied for a few days? Or is it following the beautiful darpan ritual still observed in all traditional household Pujas where a mirror is placed at the foot of Durga and pot of Ganga water poured over her reflected image in a symbolic immersion? The affective engagement with the living goddess lingers and deepens, through the intimate moments of the sindur-khela, when married women collectively bid farewell to ‘Ma’ with sindur,

8.11 Archetypal image of the goddess floating on the Hooghly. Photograph by Suprotik Chatterjee, reproduced from The Hooghly: Living with the River, New Delhi: Roli books, 2009)

8.12 Giant crane in operation removing idol refuse from the river, Baje Kadamtala Ghat, 2013. Photograph by Moumita Sen

8.13 Immersion refuse piled on the banks of the waterside at Baishnabghata Patuli, 2012

destruction, dispersals, afterlives pan and sandesh, (see 8.14) often climbing precarious ladders to reach the height of Durga’s face. And it reaches its pitch during the boisterous beats of the dhak and dhunuchi naach, when the images, their faces doused with red, mouths stuffed with sweets, and their decorations coming undone, are carried out of the altars and placed on illuminated trucks, to make their round of the para before they head for the river banks. (See 8.15) The attachment is finally severed in the impersonal milieu of the ghat, when the new managerial regime of immersions takes over, and the goddess is given over to the idol-bearers and civic workers to be seen through to the end. The pathos of this last day is infectious. As the evening proceeds, the eyes of the deity seem to brim with tears, as do ours, and a quiet melancholy sinks in with her leaving. The more animated the image, the deeper the devotional bonding with it, the stronger the pangs of parting and the ritual imperatives of a timely, traditional departure.7 It is paradoxical that it is this last phase of the most intense humanization

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of the goddess that is followed by the routine and rampant destruction of her image. At the heart of the paradox is the cyclical passage of the deity between dead matter and living form, and the free coexistence of ritual belief and sentiments with the contemporary imperatives of civic management. Thus, side by side with the poetics of immersion and a collective selfindulgence in grief have emerged new environmental narratives on saving the Ganga and the city’s waterbodies from the pollution of idol waste.8 So it is that we are left to gently ache for the departing goddess while the municipal authorities gear themselves to the gruelling task of clearing the river of post-immersion refuse and handling the solid waste management of the remains of over 4,000 images. Older forms of immersion, of course, continue, as do the older practices of scavenging and recycling. Every year, on the river Ichhamati, that functions as a border between the two Bengals, goddesses from both sides still travel on boats to the middle of the water and are dropped through a traditional

8.14 Dashami thakurbaran at a household Puja, 2009. Photograph by Jeet Chowdhury

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in the name of the goddess idol immersions and are able to sell these faces to the idol-making workshops for Rs. 50 a piece or more.11 Among the stock photographs of the scenes of immersion are images of these children wading to the banks carrying idol heads and headdresses.

8.15 Durga, her face smeared with sindur and mouth stuffed with sandesh, on the immersion truck, CD Block Puja, Salt Lake, 2008

parting of the hulls of two vessels. The day of bisarjan becomes an occasion for the relaxing of the border patrol and free movement of people across the banks.9 At other sites like the Belur Math of the Ramakrishna Mission, Durga’s immersion is still performed through a beautiful procession with dhunuchi nach and fireworks down the steps of the banks into the river, (see 8.16) the slow floating away of the image best watched from a barge in the middle of the waters. Across most ghats and ponds within and beyond the city, household and community idols continue to be floated in water. And what follows is an immediate rifling of the floating images by groups of urchins and rag pickers, who scramble waist and neck deep into the waters to retrieve portions of wooden frames, tinsel crowns and weapons, stretches of cloth, and the most prized item of all, the face masks of goddesses, all of which can be sold for small prices at Kumartuli.10 While wooden structures and straw stuffing are best retrieved later from the dried idol refuse that is heaped on the banks, pulling out the intact faces of the deities from the water requires a different swiftness and cunning. This is a job that has been mastered over the years by destitute boys who live by scavenging the river and riverbanks, who make their biggest haul during the Durga

These informal recycling practices are now increasingly regulated and contained within an organized municipal drive of clearing the river of immersion refuse. The Calcutta High Court order of 2000 of employing civic agencies for removing idol refuse from the Hooghly within 24 hours of bhasan and the West Bengal Pollution Control Board (PCB)’s statutory guidelines for immersion, framed in 2001, began to have effect only towards the end of the decade. In 2009, the West Bengal government for the first time allocated Rs 6 lakhs to 127 municipalities in the state for this massive undertaking, with the Kolkata and Howrah municipalities getting 50,000 and 30,000 each. This small monetary incentive served to mobilize a larger civic initiative involving paid workers, NGO and Puja club volunteers. By 2013, the KMC had at their service 500 paid contract labourers who began cleaning the river of idol refuse at 17 ghats of the city from dawn, after every night of immersion. Stopping immersion in the river has never been an acceptable option. Suggestions that some of the larger images of deities be dissolved on

8.16 Dhunuchi nach on Bijoya Dashami, on the river bank, Belur Math, 2013. Courtesy: Susan Schraeger

destruction, dispersals, afterlives site using jet sprays of water, in what is termed a wash-melt procedure (as is done with some of the large Kali images in suburban towns of Naihati and Bhatpara) has met with outrage and opposition. The strictures on using lead-free paint on the idols or on scraping all paint off their bodies prior to casting them into water have also proved impossible to implement. Instead, what has come into place more effectively over past few years is a close monitoring and streamlining of immersions and idol clearance across different riverbanks and water-bodies throughout the city.12 While the massive cranes in operation at Baje Kadamtala Ghat have offered one kind of speedy if horrific solution to river pollution, the opening of new water-bodies for immersion in 2013 (one of which, off the Lake Town-VIP Road, has been specially named ‘Debighat’) is intended to divide the city’s Pujas into different immersion zones, and divert the burden of idol waste from the main Hooghly river.13 In keeping with other aspects of the festival, an ‘environment-friendly’ system of immersion and river clearance has emerged as a new area of urban governance—a special initiative of the PCB along with the Mayors in Council of the KMC, and a self-professed area of success of Mamata Banerjee’s government.14 pandals

that sell and travel

None of this kind of institutional coordination is at hand for the clearing of the city’s equally vast output of temporary pavilions. The process here is locally and informally driven, unfolding in piecemeal phases, engaging a network of Puja organizers, pandal decorators, designers and artists, with the occasional entry of government or corporate bodies in acquiring a few samples of festival art. The futures or lack of futures of these elaborately crafted structures become far more difficult to determine. Pandals, as we have seen, have been turned into ambitious varieties of art and craft installations, without any parallel infrastructure emerging for their preservation or reuse, without any systematic planning by clubs, designers or civic authorities on what will happen to these productions, following their brief festival life. In tandem with the enormous input of materials and layers of skill and labour that go into their making,

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8.17 Dismantling of illuminations and pavilion structures at the Badamtala Ashar Sangha Puja, 2010. Photograph by Jeet Chowdhury

their dissembling occurs through as complex a mobilization of labour and movement of objects (See 8.17)—as they travel from one festival site to another, from Kolkata into different district towns and their Kali or Jagadhhatri Pujas, from open streets into artist’s studios, decorator’s workshops, club backyards, private homes and lawns, or an odd boutique or public ground tucked away in a corner of the city. The time frame for these dispersals can stretch from a few days at the original pandal location to weeks and months across these other sites of use, disuse, display or storage. With no strict demarcation of their ritual lives, the afterlives of these structures are premised on these loose spills and spreads, on their propensity to disaggregate and reappear in different times and spaces. The lingering of pandal structures on street sites in the days after Durga Puja is partly enabled by the ritual calendar itself. In all community Pujas, the main platform on which Durga was worshipped must be retained to conduct the Lakshmi Puja on the same premises on the full-moon night that follows four days after Bijoya Dashami. With the larger surrounding gateways and displays often dismantled to clear the street, the central core of the pandal outfit is retained for this low-key, subdued event, the post-

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in the name of the goddess the idea of a ‘theme’ Puja travels indiscriminately and in fragments, as a transplantable form emptied of authorship and original conception. (See 8.20)

8.18 Lakshmi Puja inside the retained pavilion of the Badamtala Ashar Sangha Puja, 2010

festival mood evident in the small forlorn figures of Lakshmi standing alone in these empty public sites.15 (See 8.18) In many cases, the full pavilion structures with all their décor are left standing intact by the clubs till the performance of Lakshmi Puja, awaiting buyers or waiting to be dismantled and transported in an already contracted sale to a suburban Puja committee. During 2012–13, in some of the parks in Salt Lake, the Durga Puja pavilions were retained to house the Kali Puja that follows two and a half weeks later (see 8.19), marking a new economy of reuse and a coming together in these neighbourhoods of the Durga Puja and Kali Puja committees that were once more clearly socially segregated. But the more widespread trend is for pandals to switch locations and towns as even they switch Pujas, for such portability brings the best maximization of use for decorators and designers and the quickest cash returns for Puja clubs. The fate of the majority of today’s ‘theme’ Puja pavilions is to be shuttled from the metropolitan ambience of Kolkata’s Durga Pujas to the suburban ambience of Kali Pujas and Jagaddhatri Pujas, where they are freely shorn down, readapted to new spaces, and placed around sizes and styles of locally-made images with which they have no aesthetic concordance. Like the pavilions,

If these sales of pandal art underscore the status of the city’s Durga Pujas as the master event, as the region’s trendsetter in tastes and aesthetics, they also point to the different cultural economies that govern Bengal’s larger provincial landscape of Pujas. They outline a distinct festival geography and its hierarchies of Pujas across the state. In this map, different towns are marked by the primacy of different Pujas that come in the wake of the Durga Pujas, each of which have taken on the template of the metropolitan festivals: in its pandal ‘themes’, awards, competitions and publicities.16 So, for instance, Kali Pujas are the biggest attractions in a trail of towns from Tamluk at the southern tip, through Barasat and Madhyamgram on the outskirts of Kolkata, Naihati or Durgapur in central Bengal, to Siliguri in the north, and the sale destination for many of Kolkata’s big Durga Puja pandals. The thickest and most lucrative outflow of Kolkata’s productions is to the celebrated Jagaddhatri Puja of the old French colonial town of Chandannagar on the upper banks of the Hooghly, where the scale

8.19 Durga Puja pandal, a replica of a colonial period mansion, retained for Kali Puja, FE Block Puja, Salt Lake, 2013

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8.20 Parts of Shibmandir Puja’s nature-themed pavilion, designed by Subrata Banerjee, reused at a Chandannagar Jagaddhatri Puja, 2010

and grandeur of this festival, held exactly a month after Durga Puja, is integral to the identity of its township.17 If we were to think of how all the raw material, labour and organization of the pandalmaking trade comes from the suburban hinterland into the city, the travels of these built structures back into the suburbs opens up a cycle of flows. The Jagaddhatri Puja organizers of Chandannagar talk of other exchanges too. The light decorations that are the proud monopoly of this town, with new designs produced every season, move the following year to Kolkata’s Durga Pujas, also to Kali Pujas in other towns, in exchange for a carry-over of Kolkata’s ‘theme’ pavilions. There is neither time nor money for these suburban Puja committees to commission fresh work from Kolkata’s prized designers in the few weeks between Durga and the Kali and Jagaddhatri Pujas. Buying Kolkata’s readymade ‘art’

pavilions becomes the easier and more affordable option and enhances the scope for awards; given that the publics or judges hardly overlap in these different festival towns, there is little chance of anyone noticing these duplications.18 Therefore, the practice continues unabated of members of these district Puja committees descending on Kolkata’s Durga Pujas, searching out pandals, from Mahalaya right up to Lakshmi Puja, to purchase, package and take away. The resale prices of these pandals range from anything between one-sixth to half of the original costs of their making—from Rs 50,000 to Rs 2 lakhs—with the costs of dismantling and transportation usually passed on to the purchaser. The fixing of deals and prices open up the different structures of proprietorship that exist over these pavilions and their artworks.

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8.21 Gouranga Kuinla’s team packing cardboard puppet figures for transportation, Lake Town Adhibasibrinda Puja, 2010

With ownership of pandals passing in most cases to the Puja committees who paid for them or the professional decorators who constructed them, they are the ones who actively broker these transfers. For the clubs a pressing concern is a quick, one-time clearance of these structures from their premises and immediate cash returns that can be used to clear off dues or be channelled back into their funds pool. The decorators, on the other hand, are adept at handling multiple pandal sales and their transportation out of Kolkata—often distributing sections of structures to different district Pujas, occasionally managing a second recycling of pavilions from a Kali Puja to a Jagaddhatri Puja or a Kartick Puja that follows in late November. Most frequently side-lined in all this are the artists who designed these pavilions, who surrender not only their authorship over their works but also any share in the sales or say in the manner of reuse. In a stark custodial division between conception and construction, the designer Sutanu Maity lamented in 2009 that he earned his commission only once for the pavilions he designed for the Maniktala Chaltabagan Puja, which became the property thereafter of the decorator, Jagadish Chandra Das, who then sold the pandals of this Puja to the same Siligiri Kali Puja for five years in a row.19

In this recycling economy, designers have over time begun to exercise new kinds of rights on their productions, depending on their stature in the field or the financial arrangements they arrive at with Puja organizers. There are instances of the Lake Temple Road Shibmandir Puja directly handling the sale of their 2009 organic art pandal, made with banana tree bark and leaves, to a Chandannagar Puja and asking their artist, Subrata Banerjee, to oversee its reinstallation at the new site. There are also cases of designers like Prashanta Pal or Gouranga Kuinla, who (as we saw in Chapter 6) bring in their own material and workforce, retain full ownership over their Durga Puja productions, and themselves organize their packing, transportation, and setting up in other town festivals through fresh commissions they acquire from these Puja clubs. (See 8.21) My field tour of the Jagaddhatri Pujas of Chandannagar in November 2010 showed up a large number of transported remakes of Gouranga Kuinla’s Durga Puja productions of Kolkata, with his work team in charge of each reinstallation and the designer present at the festival venues, in conversation with judges and sponsors. (See 8.22, 8.23) Of growing importance in these new locations are the draw of prizes and the prestige of an art display. It was on the basis of the 18 prizes that his remade Durga Puja production won at the Boro Champatala Jagaddhatri Puja at Chandannagar in 2009 that the designer Shibshankar Das was commissioned by the same Puja in 2010 to bring across another of his awardwinning Kolkata pavilions from the Chakraberia Sarbojanin Puja. He was asked to set this up as a ‘pure art exhibition intended for prizes’, for which the organizers also made concession for a special ‘art’ goddess that broke with the local convention of large realistic deities.20 (See 8.24) Side by side with such travels of entire tableaux, the dismantling of pandals leave in their wake large bodies of homeless art objects—terracotta statuary, Madhubani, Pithora or Gond paintings, embroidered patachitra panels, ceramic pottery, African masks and totem poles, painted wooden puppets or Bastar metal sculptures. Thrown up by the period’s booming crop of craft and folk art complexes, these objects seek out new kinds of ethnic tastes within the city. Gathering in pandal

8.22 Gouranga Kuinla’s pavilion with clothed clay puppets, taken from the Dumdum Park Bharat Chakra Puja of Kolkata to the Gondolpara Natun Tilighat Jagaddhatri Puja of Chandannagar, 2010

8.23 Kuinla (far right) in conversation with judges at this Jagadhhatri Puja, Gondolpara, Chandannagar, 2010

8.24 Shibshankar Das’ Chakraberia production remade at the Boro Champatala Jagaddhatri Puja, Chandannagar, 2010

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8.25 Terracotta sculptures from the Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja of 2006, installed at the CSSSC campus, 2013

grounds, club rooms and artist’s studios, these are given away at bargain prices to a mixed clientele of individual collectors, hoteliers, boutique owners or theme park and film set units. During the 2000s, it became common for Puja clubs to talk of holding auctions to clear off these accumulations of decorative objects and pandal décor, sometimes even full installations.21 It is through such throwaway sales at these auctions that a small collection of festival art has gathered in my home and office compound over different seasons—a sculpted terracotta column from the Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja of 2006 (see 8.25); a painted wooden angel that a Selimpur Puja committee member saved for me even as the full folk-art complex of 2007 was given over to a Kali Puja organizer for want of any corporate buyer; or a Durga made of painted cane baskets and trays that made its way two days after Dashami from a Salt Lake Puja to my home staircase lobby. (See 8.26, 8.27) The term ‘auction’ serves as a euphemism for a quick disposal of this material to whoever is ready to take away a large bulk for a down payment. But it also signals a bid for alternative classes of consumers and other markets outside the district festival circuit. But connoisseurs and collectors are hard to come by. All the investment of media and corporate sponsors

in the event seems to begin and end with the festival. And few Puja artists and organizers have either the right network of contacts or the resources to find a prominent home for their productions in hotels and office grounds or open-air galleries. What emerge instead are smaller inner circles of transaction and circulation. A wooden Durga in a Salt Lake Puja of 2012, commissioned from a suburban craftsmanturned- designer, Gopal Bhaskar, ended up in a film and television studio in Joka, on the southern peripheries of Kolkata. A large body of wooden tribal art of the Banam community of north Bengal that was assembled at the Barisha Club Puja of 2011 (see 7.17), along with the Durga image made by traditional south Indian wood-carvers, was picked up by a local impresario and collector, Ajitangshu Chakraborty, who had a long-time connection with this Puja and the new Forum for Durgotsav. Acquiring art round the year, and most avidly during the Durga Pujas, he runs a gift boutique down the road from the Barisha Club Puja, where the Durga image lay stored (see 8.28), and intends placing the larger Banam sculptures in a ‘theme park’ he is planning on the model of Ramoji Rao film city of Hyderabad in the city’s south-western fringes at Maheshtala, Budge-Budge. He also runs a new competition for ‘theme’ Kali Pujas at Siligiri, to promote the artists and design aesthetics of Kolkata’s Durga Puja. Persons like Ajitangshu Chakraborty best represent the momentum of local initiative and entrepreneurship that generate the after-lives of the festival.22 With recent years have come small shifts in thrust from pandal sales to pandal collecting and preservation. Sometimes, the moves come from artists—as with Kamaldeep Dhar, a faculty member of Santinketan Kala Bhavan, whose beautiful installation with nearly a thousand wooden puppets made by Santhal puppeteers at the Hatibagan Nabin Pally Puja of 2010 was made to be taken back to Santiniketan, and each item conserved as a sample of this dying tribal art. At other times, the push has come from affluent, politically-powerful Puja committees like Suruchi Sangha of New Alipore, which arranged to hand over its entire Karnataka theme park pavilion of 2010 not to a Kali Puja but to an artists’ group at Naihati who were to set it up in their grounds.23 On rare occasions, an offer

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8.26 Dismantled goddess figures at the HA Block Puja, Salt Lake, 2010

may even come from a state art institution like the regional Lalit Kala Akademi, which in 2013 acquired several structures from an exquisitely carved Thakurpukur Durga Puja pavilion, made out of the wood of mango and kadam trees, in which the Puja had invested over 20 lakhs. First moved to their own premises at Keyatala Road, Kolkata, these structures, along with other items of Durga Puja ‘art’ that were collected that season, were then to move to the main New Delhi unit of the Lalit Kala Akademi.24 It is never clear, though, how far these schemes of preservation ever materialize and lead to new spaces of display. Seldom have I found these collected structures and objects resurfacing in the public domain and engaging new interests. While the desire for collection and preservation has led more and more Puja committees and designers to turn to expensive materials for their pavilions and Durga images, such investments are far from backed by a parallel spurt of post-festival demands for this art. Even prime artists in this field, like Sanatan Dinda or Bhabatosh Sutar, who have the best links with the metropolitan art world and currently the strongest political backing, find no sustained futures for their season’s work. They often have no option but to bring back their ‘art’ pratimas and sections of pavilions to the large studio spaces they now have at their disposal, with plans of opening their own gallery of Durga sculptures.

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For the Kumartuli idol maker Mintu Pal, there were neither storage space nor retention rights over the gigantic fibreglass Durga image that he made for the FD Block Puja of Salt Lake in 2011. Constructed over two months by thirty workers at his studio in the vicinity of Kumartuli, and then assembled part by part on site on wooden frames, this 60feet tall monumental piece became the property of the funding sponsor, Fever 104 channel of Radio FM, who touted it as Kolkata’s biggest-ever Durga pratima and gained from it the optimum publicity of the season.25 (See 8.29) Mintu Pal’s hopes that this work of stupendous labour and expense would be preserved, if not in the same grounds, then in some other public park in the city, was dashed with the same unconcern with which this vast production was taken apart, packed into cartons, and transported to the godown at the head office of Radio FM in New Delhi, with no proposal for remaking it. The extended ten days of display following the Durga Pujas on the FD Block park was the best that that could be conceded to the creator and his creation.

8.27 Durga’s travel from the HA Block, Salt Lake, Puja site to to the staircase landing of my house, 2010

8.28 The Barisha Club wooden Durga image of 2011, stored in the neighbourhood boutique run by Ajitangshu Chakraborty, June 2013

8.29 Mintu Pal’s gigantic fibreglass Durga at the FD Block Puja, Salt Lake, 2011

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a gallery of goddesses That same year, 2011, the state urban development minister, Firhaud Hakim (a major Durga Puja patron) announced his plans of allocating KMDA land for a long-standing government project of setting up a gallery for Durga Puja art, to which the tourism minister, Rachpal Singh, added his promise to have such a facility ready by the following year. When such a museum did come about in 2012, it could boast of an enviable space—a converted warehouse inside the picturesque precincts of Rabindra Sarovar (the city’s largest cluster of lakes at Dhakuria), that made available 3000 square feet of gallery space with huge ceiling height, along with 7000 square feet of open grounds in front, with great potentials for landscaping, curating and displaying new kinds of public art. (See 8.30) It had as its helm the dynamic CEO of KMDA and its sister organization, the Kolkata Improvement Trust (KIT), Vivek Bharadwaj, whose special agenda was the beautification of the city’s parks and waterbodies and the transformation, in particular, of the degenerated social and physical environs of the Lakes. Like the renewed fountains, the introduction of nature-photography walks, and Sunday evening live music by the Lakes, the opening of this Warehouse Gallery was intended to attract new social groups to these grounds. The gallery was meant to have been given over to the city’s avant-garde art organization, Experimenter, to become a venue for large, open-air installations. Instead, in a sudden turn-around, there came in nine ‘art’ Durga images of the season from across the city’s Pujas, turning it into what the locals of the area called a ‘thakur-der gallery’.26 This appellation said it all—it spoke to the curious status of these images as not-quite worshipped idols, and not-quite modern art. It drove home the ambivalence of such a venture of turning goddesses into art objects, of transferring them from a festival venue with its established spectatorship into an isolated gallery venue with no defined public nor any professional team of curators and designers to conceive of a new framework for their viewing. The award-winning renown and ‘art’ status of these objects within the festival was clearly no guarantee of their new life as works of sculpture in a gallery for contemporary art. Compounding this problem was the complete lack of prior planning,

8.30 Durga Puja pavilion art on display, Warehouse Gallery, Rabindra Sarovar, November 2012

professional expertise and the involvement of the art community in the forming of the city’s first museum of collectible Durga Puja art. I was told that the idea of bringing a selection of the best Durga images and pandal installations into this lakeside gallery came up spontaneously in the middle of the festival, as Vivek Bharadwaj toured the Pujas with artist (and a prime cultural figure of the current government), Shuvaprasanna. Clearly, the choices were driven by the heads of the organization, Forum for Durgotsav, and dictated by the political backing and publicity networks of Puja clubs and artists. On the afternoon of Ekadashi, the Bosepukur Durga ensemble, made by Naba Kumar Pal, was the first to arrive at this lakeside destination, with all the festival feel of an immersion procession. Over the next few nights, eight other ‘art’ Durgas (including some of the most experimental images of Sanatan Dinda and Bhabatosh Sutar) came into this refurbished warehouse from Puja sites all over the city, many of these images travelling via the riverbanks where the ritual was maintained of the immersion of a smaller clay vessel or image that had been worshipped. (See 8.31, 8.32) Once gathered here, it was left largely to a group of Puja committee members to work out the logistics of their display. As they busily chalked out their shares of space on the warehouse floor with the same avid territoriality with which each parar Puja competes with the other, they

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8.31 Bhabatosh Sutar’s Durga from the Sikdarbagan Sarbojanin Puja at the Warehouse Gallery, November 2012

8.32 Sanatan Dinda’s Jodhpur Park Durga at the Warehouse Gallery, November 2012

also hotly debated which portion of the accompanying pandal structures were to be brought over and where they were to be set up in the outside grounds.

associate, the environmentalist, and corporate activist Mudar Patherya, were also brimming with plans— about introducing audio-tracks that would recreate the everyday sounds of the Puja city, and others that would tell the neighbourhood stories gathered for these Puja clubs; about training students to be guides for this Puja-themed display; about holding children’s workshops in clay idol making and art and photography exhibitions on the Durga Pujas in parallel in the open grounds. There were proposals too for developing a variety of Puja-themed merchandising for sale at the site, with products ranging from key rings and magnets to lampshades and sarees. This would be a small beginning, they felt, of tapping the immense potential that exists for the national and international marketing of this city festival.27

Conspicuous by their absence in this gathering were not only professional curators but also the Puja artists. It spoke volumes about the ‘art’ status of these images that, barring one, none of their makers were present to guide the decisions about how and where their works were to be set up. It said a lot too about the haphazard way such ventures of collecting and conserving festival art would begin, only to fall flat. That November evening in 2012, though, there was no dearth of curatorial ideas among this motley group of Puja organizers and KIT officials, as the enthusiasm of the just-finished Pujas spilled over into the planning of this gallery. There was animated talk of the need for individual spotlighting for each image within the plywood enclosures to be made for them, and about replaying the special theme music by percussionist Tanmoy Bose for the two Sanatan Dinda productions at the Barisha and Jodhpur Park Pujas. Vivek Bharadwaj and his close

In the end, none of these larger plans materialized around the gallery that was inaugurated in December 2012. The removal of Vivek Bharadwaj from his stewardship of the KMDA soon afterwards took the steam out of the project. The gallery itself proved to be a stillborn venture, sliding into obscurity even as it

destruction, dispersals, afterlives came into being. Neither the high-sounding English title of this exhibition, ‘The Masters Collection’, nor its Bengali television serial-style title, Ma Phirey Elo (‘The Mother has returned’) gave it much public mileage. (See 8.33) Few in the city’s art circuits know or have cared to find about the existence in the heart of the Lakes of such a museum of Durga Puja art; even fewer have ever visited it. ‘We need to outgrow the goddess,’ Vivek Bharadwaj had said in our interview, referring to his long-term plans for the Warehouse Gallery.28 The idea had been to keep the Durga Puja exhibits on view for no more than a month or two, and then replace them with other kinds of modern art. The problem, we could say, came from the way the gallery could never ‘outgrow the goddess’, nor the sculptures ever outgrow their identity as goddesses and become works of art. The images are now available for close artistic scrutiny and leisurely viewing, with barely anyone to do so. A cloud of uncertainty and redundancy continues to hang over the exhibits, as a number of questions are left unresolved. When the gallery space and its grounds are given over to other exhibitions, what will happen to these objects, most of which have nowhere to return to? Where will they be dumped to make room for a fresh inflow of Durgas and pandal displays from the next season? What will be the cycle of disposals and new acquisitions if this scheme of a year-round space of display of select samples of festival art is to be implemented? How feasible in the long run is the idea of such a permanent museum, given how little from each season’s festival can be collected and the limited time for which they can be preserved? A year later, with no maintenance and no visitors, the museum lay in shambles, its open-air displays broken and the grounds covered in slush and stagnant water. The post-Puja months of 2013 saw some renewed activity around the place. A few more Durga images have been accommodated inside to add to the line-up of lonely goddesses, and a large steel tower made by Bhabatosh Sutar at Firhaud Hakim’s Chetla Agrani Puja has been installed outside on a permanent cemented base. But all around prevails a spectre of ruin and destruction. The ceramic tile gateway arches from the Nalin Sarkar Street Puja have gone. The steel figure of the blood-sucking demon, Raktabeej, from the Lake Temple Road Shibmandir Puja tableaux, stands twisted by storms. The giant Buddha head from the Tridhara

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Samillani Puja pavilion, that Gouranga Kuinla’s team meticulously crafted out of hundreds of little brass utensils fixed on to a wired frame, now lies on the ground. (Figure 8.34) A large fibreglass human foot that came from Sanatan Dinda’s installation at Barisha Club has become part of the garbage on the banks of the lakes. (See 8.35) There is no escaping, it seems, from the falling to waste of festival objects, even in a location where they were assembled for preservation. Ephemerality remains the quintessence of the phenomenon that swivels around the give and take between spectacle and ruin, between the ‘interchangeable and (the) specific, profit and waste, sacred and profane, the whole and the fragment’.29 What is it that then lasts from the huge spurt of enterprise and creativity that the Puja releases every year? What is best taken away from each season’s festivities? As he helped bring about the lakeside gallery of festival art, Vivek Bharadwaj believed that, the importance of this project lay less in the objects on display, and more in the intangible gains of sustaining the citizens’ pride and enthusiasm that are generated around the gala event of the Durga Pujas. Why does all the intensity of spectatorship have to begin and end with the festival? Why, after their fabulous metamorphosis, do so many streets return to their drab, ugly appearance? Can the festival aesthetic not be stretched out to envelop other spaces and times in the city? Even if all its grand productions must

8.33 Hoarding on ‘The Masters Collection’, the exhibition of the best Durgas of the season, at the entrance of Rabindra Sarovar, December 2012

8.34 (Left) Kuinla’s giant Buddha head from the Tridhara Sammilani Puja freshly installed at the Warehouse Gallery grounds, December 2012; (right) the Buddha head lying on the same grounds, May 2014

8.35 (Left) Two giant feet from Sanatan Dinda’s Barisha Club pavilion transferred to the grounds of the Lakes, December 2012; (right) one of the fibreglass feet now a part of the lakeside garbage, May 2014

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8.36 Pakistani truck art pavilion, Hatibagan Nabin Pally Puja, 2013

disassemble, can the ideas, skills and materials not find new patrons and uses? Over the years, I have grappled to find answers to these questions. Each season, I have imagined futures for Durga Puja pavilions that were never to be. Bhabatosh Sutar’s spectacular wood and bamboo radial sun standing above a mound of foliated earth, or his rotunda pavilion with the ten arms of the goddess could have found a new life as public art in the open grounds of New Town Rajarhat. The Pakistani truck-art installation at the Hatibagan Nabin Pally Puja of 2013 (see 8.36)—that came out of a novel Indo-Pakistan cultural cooperation scheme of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), brought in three Pakistani painters to work on site, and involved a budget of 20 lakhs—could have been picked up by an enterprising hotelier and converted into a setting for a dhaba-style eating outlet as part of the city’s booming new restaurant culture. Or, the pavilion designed with vast book spines with a boutique bookstore interior at the Samaj Sebi Puja

on Lake Road the same year could well have been the model for a novel bookstore in the city. (See 8.37) The possibilities are endless; the wishes keep growing wings even if they seldom take off. Could the best of Durga Puja art not banish for good the unceasing ghastly output of public statuary and architecture to carve out a permanent niche for itself in the visual aesthetics of the city? Can this ebullient cultural event and its creative energies not be wrested by artists and publics from the narrow grips of the Puja committees and the hegemonic hold of their new political patrons, and reclaimed for other promises and futures? Can we think of a book like this as providing a small push in that direction? The excitement of a contemporary history lies in the stakes it can place on the making and unmaking of the present. It is with these stakes that I have put together this archive of the contemporary city festival, locating myself—as researcher, Puja enthusiast and analyst, viewer and citizen—in the thick of the history that I have constructed.

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in the name of the goddess

8.37 Book pavilion designed with large wooden spines of Bengali books, Samaj Sebi Puja, 2013

Notes 1 Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, first published in French in 1863, trans. Jonathan Mayne, London: Phaidon, 1964), p. 13. 2 This sense is vociferously conveyed in the standard collective cry, Ashchhey bochhor abar hobe (‘It will happen again next year’) that rends the air during the farewell rituals and last journey of the goddess to the water front. 3 Ronald Grimes is one of the key writers on this theme of ritual material waste; an introduction to his ideas and some of the main literature on this theme may be had from his article, ‘Ritual’ in Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief, Special Issue on Key Words in Material Religion, vol.7, no.1, 2011. 4 See, for instance, John Scanlan, On Garbage, London: Reaktion Books, 2004; Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash, New York: Henry Holy and Co., 1999 and Chaitanya Sambrani, ‘Tracking Trash:

Vivan Sundaram and the Turbulent Core of Modernity’ in Vivan Sundaram, Trash, Mumbai: Chemould Prescott Road and Project 88; New Delhi: Photoink; New York: Sepia International; Chicago: Walsh Gallery, 2008. Two influential formulations on garbage in the context of Kolkata are Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘On Garbage, Modernity and the Citizen’s Gaze’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol.27, nos.10–11. March 7–14, 1992, reprinted in his Habitations of Modernity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, and Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘Filth and the Public Sphere: Concepts and Practices of Space in Calcutta’, Public Culture, vol.10, no.1, Fall 1997. 5 On one end of the national and international spectrum are two Vivan Sundaram exhibitions, Trash, 2008–09, which recreated full city spaces with urban waste, moving from these studio structures to video and digital installations, and Gagawaka (2011–12), which used medical waste to

destruction, dispersals, afterlives create haute couture fashions and had models walk the ramp in this whacky junk-wear. And at another end, there is the example of the exhibition Waste Side Story (2013) by local artist Debanjan Roy, who worked on drawings, prints, sculptures, costumes and full room installations with varieties of consumer discards, and has plans of creating site-specific displays at garbage dumps in the city, involving families of rag pickers who live around these dumps. Under a novel initiative taken by the art gallery, Akar Prakar, Debanjan Roy and his artists’ team have also been creating large temporary sculptures with throwaway material in the central courtyard of the Indian Museum, Kolkata. (See 8.6) 6 ‘Cranes: KoPT’s (Kolkata Port Trust’s) answer to immersion woes’, The Times of India, Kolkata, October 2011; Jayanta Basu, ‘Salute a goddess, spare a river’, The Telegraph, Metro, Calcutta, 27 October 2012. 7 It is important to note here that the notion of animation and embodied presence rests most easily within the conventional stylized and realistic forms of the goddess, and it is with these that the devotional attachment of the community is most intense as are the sentiments associated with immersion. By contrast, the experimental ‘art’ goddesses (of the kind produced by Sanatan Dinda or Bhabatosh Sutar) are valued primarily as aesthetic objects. Escaping the same demands for immersion, they can be left to negotiate their post-festival preservation. 8 Milan Datta, ‘Bisarjan ki Gangar dushan baday, utchhey prashna’, ABP, 6 October 2011; ‘After immersion KMC to go on a river purging drive’, Hindustan Times, Kolkata, 16 October 2013. 9 Debamay Ghosh, ‘Icchamati bisarjan brings two Bengals closer’, The Bengal Post, Kolkata, 19 October 2010. 10 Abhiroop Ghosh Dastidar, ‘Pray for recycled goddess this season’, The Bengal Post, Kolkata, 12 September 2010. 11 The lives and livelihoods of these boys are evocatively narrated by Shubhendu Dhar in ‘Atal jaler ahban’, Ei Samay, Kolkata, 2 October 2013; ‘Pratimar matha thekey du’poysha ashey Bishwa-Bishal-der hatey’, Ei Samay, Kolkata, 18 October 2013. 12 ‘Barjya-bidhi meney bisarjan ebar onektayi byatikrami’, ABP, 19 October 2010; ‘Mahanagar utsab ekhon paribesh-bandhu’, ABP, 4 October 2013.

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Green Tribunal on the noise pollution, river pollution and damage of greenery caused by the Pujas. 15 Despite the requirement of the worship of a small Lakshmi image at every Durga Puja altar, the public event is generally lacklustre, except in some bazaars and commercial establishments where this goddess of wealth and fortune is lavishly feted. By and large, Lakshmi Puja remains a home event in Bengal. Traditionally performed every Thursday by women reading the Lakshmi-panchali before a Lakshmi-sora, the annual autumnal Lakshmi Puja is held on a different scale at homes with a purohit and a small clay image that is retained till the next year, for it is inauspicious to let the goddess of wealth leave one’s home till it can be replaced by a new one. 16 This regional cultural geography of festivals across the different district towns of West Bengal, and their connected economies of production, recirculation and sponsorships, requires a separate study. Situating the metropolitan event of Kolkata’s Durga Puja within this broader regional festival economy will open up a critical new dimension to the kind of study I have undertaken here. 17 This strong sense of the town’s pride and identity with this festival resonated in my interview with an elderly resident and man of letters, (the now deceased) Kamalacharan Mukhopadhyay, at his home in Chandannagar on 29 October 2006. He shared with me his article, ‘Chandananagarer Gourab’ in a little magazine he edited, Chua Chandan, Chandannagar: Underground Sahitya, 2006. I am extremely grateful to Mr. Mukhopadhyay and his family for hosting our research team and providing us with a wonderful introduction to the city and tour of the Jagadhhatri festival on 29 October 2006. 18 Interview with Pranab Mondal of the Charmandirtala Jagaddhatri Puja of Chandannagar, cited in ‘Pandal same, Puja different’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 5 October 2009. 19 ‘Pandal same, Puja different’, ibid. 20 Interview with Shibshankar Das at this Puja venue at Chandanagar, 12 November 2010. 21 Anasuya Basu, ‘Collectors queue up for Puja art work’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 25 October 2007. 22 Interview with Ajitangshu Chakraborty at his boutique in Barisha, 3Behala, 12 December 2011.

13 ‘Elaka bhag kore bisarjaney bikendrikaran chan muhkyamantri’, ABP, 28 September 2013.

23 ‘Sangrangskhan hochhey shaharer duti pujomandap’, ABP, 20 October 2010.

14 Since 2010–11, much of the initiative and credit for these moves is taken by Debashis Kumar, Mayor-in-Council (Squares and Parks), along with Debabrata Majumdar, Mayor-in-Council (Solid Waste Management) at the KMC. Significant interventions have also come from the state Environment Department head, the river scientist Kalyan Rudra, and the inveterate environmental lobbyist of the city, Subhas Datta, who has repeatedly moved the

25 Owned by the Hindustan Times, New Delhi, Radio FM’s Fever 104 channel had wanted to flaunt a 104-foot Durga (which however had to be reduced to half the size by police and Calcutta High Court regulations) and had chosen the FD Block Puja grounds as the location. They had provided the entire budget for this gigantic sculpture

24 Dwaipayan Ghosh, ‘Delhi date for Thakurpukur Puja’, Times City, Times of India, Kolkata, 19 October 2011.

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in the name of the goddess and commissioned it from the studio of Mintu Pal. The FD Block Puja committee, which made maximum capital out of this sponsorship and publicity, was left to coordinate the making of this Durga by Mintu Pal, and had a matching backdrop of hills and caves made by the set design team of Sanjit Ghosh. While a smaller clay Durga image was worshipped and immersed, the representative of Radio FM talked of how they wished to save the river from ‘idol pollution’ by creating an image that was not intended for immersion—but which they

26 27 28 29

did nothing to preserve either. Interview with Susanta Gupta, member, FD Block Puja Committee, Salt Lake, 13 October 2011. Tapati Guha-Thakurta, ‘Goddesses by the Lake’, The Telegraph, Editorial page, Calcutta, 22 November 2012. Interview with Vivek Bharadwaj and Mudar Pathereya at Rabindra Sarovar, 31 October 2012. Ibid. Swati Chattopadhyay, Unlearning the City, p. 241.

Glossary Note on transliteration of Bengali words I have not used diacritical marks and have tried to keep to the phonetic spelling and usage of words. A main problem occurs here with different phonetic uses of the vowel ‘a’ which is used here as equivalents of both the short and long vowels of ‘awe x’ and ‘ah xy’ – for instance. both ‘a’s in anjali or bisarjan fall within the first short phonetic category, while the ‘a’ in adda or bagan come within the second long category. Sometimes to differentiate between the two, I have used ‘o’ in one case and ‘a’ in another, as with ghot as against ghat, or as in sora. Though pronounced the same way, the difference between the palatal and dental ‘s’ is indicated by the use of ‘sh’ and ‘s’. In keeping with the Bengali pronunciation, I have also used ‘b’ rather then ‘v’ in words like debi or utsab, whose standard Sanskrit spellings are devi and utsav. abir-khela

smearing each other with coloured powder during the Holi festival; a play with colour now extended to other celebrations and election victories

adda

animated social conversation on any topic; a quintessential Bengali pasttime and special feature of Bengali sociability and intellectual life

adimata

primitivism

Agamani

repertoire of songs associated with the coming home of goddess Durga

aithijhya

heritage

alpana painted

floor patterns with rice flour and coloured powders

anjali

prayer and offering to a deity with flowers; group anjali is conducted by a priest on the mornings of Saptami, Ashtami and Nabami of the Durga Pujas

apasankriti

decadent, ideologically retrograde culture

arati

ritual salutation to the deity by a priest by moving around a lighted lamp and other auspicious objects in front of the image; during the Durga Puja, arati is conducted after all the main rituals to the sound of the beating drums

Ashar

month of the Bengali calendar (mid June–mid July), associated with onset of monsoons

Ashvin

month of the Bengali calendar (mid September-mid October), which heralds the autumn season and the annual Durga Pujas

Ashtami

eighth day of Debi-paksha and the main day of the Durga Puja

atchala

roof of a hut or temple, segmented into eight parts

atithi-apyayan

hospitality to guests

bagan

garden or orchard

baiji

courtesan singer/dancer

Baishakh

first month of the Bengali calendar (mid April-mid May)

Banedi bari

traditional aristocratic, wealthy household

Bangal

colloquial term indicating a person from East Bengal

Barobhuinyas

cohort of twelve landed warlords who ruled in different parts of Bengal in the seventeenth century

Barowari

an event organized by a voluntary association of twelve friends; this literal meaning has expanded to connote a general community event, more specifically a community-organised puja

batam

thin wooden battens used for pandal construction

batik

art of fabric decoration using the wax-coating and colour dyeing method; the art of batik

366 in the name of the goddess decoration was introduced as part of the craft teaching at Santiniketan and transferred from fabric to leather surfaces, making leather batik work a unique form of Santiniketn craft baul

community of itinerant mystic folk singers of Bengal

bhasan

immersion and floating in water of images of deities

bhog

cooked food offered to the deity, then had as a community meal

Bijoya Dashami

tenth day of the Debi-paksha and final day of the Durga Puja; a day associated with the victory of Ramchandra over Ravana in the Ramayana

Bijoya Sammilani

community gathering and evening function organised after Bijoya Dashami

binashini

the godsess who destroys evil forces

bisarjan

act of giving up or renunciation; immersion of images of deities

bishay-bhavana

conception of theme

bismay

awe, wonder

Chaitra

last month of the Bengali calendar (mid March-mid April)

chalchitra

semi-circular painted frame forming the backdrop to the single-cluster grouping of the goddess and her family

chakkshudan

the bringing to life of a sculpted or painted figure by the painting of the eyes

chala

roof or background frame; ek-chala indicating the grouping of Durga and her family behind a single semi-circular frame; panch-chala indicating five separate frames for the figures of Durga, Lakshmi, Saraswati, Ganesh and Kartick

chandmala

ornamental garland, made with round white moon-shaped discs, for decorating deities

chanda

subscriptions raised from a neighbourhood to meet the costs of a community puja

Chaturthi

fourth day of Debi-paksha

chitrakar

folk painter, maker of pictures

daker saj

ornamentation for the goddess crafted in golden and silver tinsel foil; the name derives from the history of this imported material initially arriving by post (dak) in colonial India.

darpan

mirror, reflection

dhak

large barrel drums, the resonant sound beats of which form an integral part of all the rituals of the Durga Puja

dhaki

village drummers, who take on this seasonal occupation during the autumn festivals

dharna

sit-in demonstration

Debi-paksha

the bright lunar fortnight of the month of Ashvin associated with the worship of the goddess

debi-roop

appearance faithful to the iconography and look of the goddess

darshan

the experience of seeing, especially of the beholding of a deity in a ritual site

dhunuchi

incense burner made with clay, used in the ritual felicitation of the goddess

dhunuchi-nach

dance performed with the incense clay burner, which takes on a frenetic fervour in the farewell ceremony leading to the immersion of the goddess

dhuti

traditional unstitched lower garment for men; Bengali version of the term dhoti

dushan

pollution

Ekadashi

eleventh day of the bright lunar forthnight of the month, and the day after Bijoya Dashami

galar putul

lacquer painted clay dolls, a traditional craft form of Bengal

goyna-bori

dried lentil cakes cast in special ornamental moulds, a disappearing culinary decorative skill of rural Bengal

glossary 367 ghat

river embankment for bathing, landing of boats, worship and immersion of deities

ghot

pitcher-shaped painted clay pot, worshipped as a ritual object during the Durga Puja, and often immersed along with or in place of the figure of the Goddess; also called mangal ghot

Ghoti

colloquial term for a persom from West Bengal

hat/haat

village or urban open-air temporary market

hogla

variety of large leaves which are dried and used for thatching roofs and temporary structures

jagir

land grant and revenue collection rights endowed under Mughal rule

jank

ostentation, extravagance

jabardasti

heckling, forced extortion, oppressive demands

jatra

genre of popular theatrical performance of Bengal

jowar

rising tide

kaj

work

karigar

artisan or craftsman,

karigari

skills of fabrication and craftsmanship

kash

tall white feathery flowers that grow amidst grass during the autumn season in Bengal

kathamo

wooden and bamboo framework on which the figure moulds of the deities are mounted; these wooden frames are usually retained in household Pujas from one season to another; these are also routinely recovered after the immersion for recycling

khamta, kheyur

types of ribald popular dances and performances that flourished in nineteenth-century Bengal

kulo

bamboo tray or platter used for winnowing grains

kumor

potter and clay modelers, who belong to a hereditary occupational trade

kutir- shilpa

handicrafts, cottage industry

Lakshmi-r jhampi

small wicker basket with offerings given to goddess Lakshmi

lokshilpa

folk art form

ma

mother, a term widely used for Durga in Bengal

Mahalaya

new moon day in the month of Ashvin inaugurating the Debi-paksha and marking the ritual beginning of the Durga Puja; the day offerings are made to one’s ancestors in an early morning river ritual called pitri-tarpan

makara

mythical aquatic creature

mandap

roofed pavilion serving as an altar, or covered stage; chandi-mandap or tulsi-mandap are small pavilions containing goddess shrines or the sacred tulsi plant

mangal

well being, auspiciousness

manusher dhal

descent of people on the streets, described using the metaphor of a landslide

mati

soil, earth, alluvial clay

matir bhanr

earthen cup-shaped vessel used for serving tea, or packing sweets

matir pradip

earthen oil lamp

mela

fairground

mritshilpi

specialist in clay modeling, usually part of a hereditary clan, with claims to the status of artist in this field of work

murti

incarnation or sculpted figure, used here mainly to indicate figures of deities

Nabami

ninth day of Debi-paksa and the penultimate day of the Durga Puja

368 in the name of the goddess nagarik

urban, citizen

namabali-chadar

cotton body covering with printed prayer chants, normally used by priests for conducting rituals

nirdeshana

guidance and direction

pabitrata

anctity

pally

village; main municipal division in nineteenth century Calcutta prior to the formation of boroughs and wards

pandal

temporary covered pavilion or marquee created for housing the goddess or for hosting religious and social functions; a generalized term used for all kinds of artistic tableaux and installations created on the streets for the Pujas

panjabi

male garment worn over a dhuti or pyjama; Bengali equivalent of the north Indian kurta

para

neighborhood, locality

paribesh

environment

parikalpana

ideas, plans, conception

parikrama

circumambulation, act of peregrination, travel and touring

patachitra

genre of folk painting, made as narrative scrolls or single-frame images

patua

folk painter of Bengal

prasad

food offered to deity and distributed

prashasan

administration

pratima

sculpted image of a goddess

pratima-shilpi

clay-modeller specialising in the art making images of deities

purohit

priest

rajbari/rajbati

home of a wealthy land-holding aristocrat, given the appelation of Raja

ruchi

taste

ruchishilata

tasteful, the cultural discretion of taste

rupayan

giving visual form and shape to an idea

sabeki

traditional, old-fashioned

sampriti

goodwill towards each other

salam

salutation

sanatan

of an ancient tradition and lineage

Saptami

seventh day of Debi-paksha and the first full day of the Durga Puja

sardar

head man of a village or a team; the chief person in a pandal making team

Sarbojanin

belonging to all; used here to indicate a community and neighbourhood Puja, where all are welcome

sawng

tradition of folk performance in Bengal, where actors dress up as different divinites and mythological characters

Shashti

sixth day of Debi-paksha and the day of the awakening (bodhan) of goddess Durga

shilpa

art, craft, industry

shilpa-nirdeshana

art direction

glossary 369 shilpi

artist, a term that also stretches to include the artisan and craftsperson

shola

white stem pith of a water plant, used as a medium for ornamentation of deities and crafting decorative objects

shuchi

pure, clean, sanctified

shudhhata

purity

Shyama-sangeet

genre of devotional songs dedicated to goddess Kali

sindur-khela

ritual of married women smearing each other with sindur (vermillion power used on the forehead and parting of hair by married women) after bidding farewell to goddess Durga on Bijoya Dashami

sora

round painted clay tablets, carrying images of goddesses; goddesses like Lakshmi are specially worshipped in Bengal in the form of a sora painting

sustha

healthy

sushrinkhal

well-disciplined and moderated

Tandava

Shiva’s dance of rampage and destruction

thakur

deity; also used for priests and Brahmins

thakur-baran

welcoming, felicitating a deity

thakur-dalan

collonaded courtyard altar situated within the courts of large traditional mansions

thakur-dekha

touring and seeing images of goddesses in different pandals

thana

police station, indicative of a jurisdictional rual and urban division

tol

traditional places of Sanskrit education

uddipana

avid eagerness and enthusiasm

utsab

festival, festivities

Bibliography 1. books and articles (english) Agamben, Giorgio, ‘In Praise of Profanations’, Profanations, tr. Jeff Fort, New York: Zone Books, 2007. Asad, Talal, Formations of the Secular: Christinalty, Islam and Modernity, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Genealogies of Religion: Disciplines and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam, Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1993 Banerjee, Sudeshna, Durga Puja: Celebrating the Goddess Then and Now, New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2006. Baudelaire, Charles, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, first published in French in 1863, tr. Jonathan Mayne, London: Phaidon, 1964. Baudrillard, Jean, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’, in Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. ———, The System of Objects, tr. James Benedict, 1968; rpt. London: Verso, 1996. Bean, Susan, ‘The Unfired Clay Sculpture of Bengal in the Artscape of Modern South Asia’, in Rebecca Brown and Deborah Hutton, ed., Companion to Asian Art and Architecture (London:Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). ———, ‘Vessel for the Goddess: Unfired Clay Images of Bengal’, in Goddess Durga: The Power and the Glory, ed. Pratapaditya Pal, Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2009. Benode Behari Mukherjee, 1904-1980, Centenary Retrospective Exhibition, curated by Gulam Mohammed Sheikh and R.Siva Kumar, New Delhi: NGMA, 2006. Bhattacharji, Sukumari, Legends of Devi, Mumbai: Orient Longman, 1995. Bhattacharya, Tithi, ‘Tracking the Goddess: Religion, Community and Identity in the Durga Puja Ceremonies of Nineteenth-Century Calcutta’, Journal of Asian Studies, vol.66. no.4, November 2007. Blurton, T. Richard, ‘The Goddess Durga’, Bengali Myths, London; The British Museum Press, 2006. Bose, Nirmal Kumar, ‘Calcutta: A Premature Metropolis’, Scientific American, vol. 213, no.3, September 1965. ———, Calcutta: 1964, A Social Survey, Bombay: Lalvani Publishing House, 1968. Bose, Pradip, ‘The Heterotopias of Calcutta’s Durga Pujas’, tr. Manas Ray, in Memory’s Gold: Writings on Calcutta, ed. Amit Chaudhuri, New Delhi: Penguin, 2008. Boyn, Svetlana, The Future of Nostalgia, New York: Basic Books, 2001. Calhoun, Craig, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan Van Antwerpen, ed. Rethinking Secularism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Chakrabarty, Dipesh, ‘On Garbage, Modernity and the Citizen’s Gaze’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol.27, nos.10–11. March 7–14, 1992, rpt. in Habitations of Modernity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Chakrabarti, Prafulla K., The Marginal Men, Calcutta: Lumière Books, 1990. Chatterjea, D.P., ‘Bidhannagar: From Marshland to Modern City’, in September 1965,Calcutta: The Living City, Vol. II, ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri, Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1990. Chatterjee, Kumkum, ‘Goddess Encounters: Mughals, Monsters and the Goddess in Bengal’, Journal of Asian Studies, vol.47, issue 05, September 2013. Chatterjee, Partha, ‘Are Indian Cities Becoming Bourgeois at Last?’, in Contested Transformations: Changing Economies and Identities in Contemporary India, ed. Mary John, Praveen Kumar Jha and Surinder S. Jodhka, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2006. ———, Critique of Popular Culture’, Public Culture, vol. 20, no.2, May 2008; rpt. in Lineages of Political Society, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2011.

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372 in the name of the goddess Materiality and Practices, ed. Partha Chatterjee, Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Bodhisattva Kar, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013. ———, ‘From Spectacle to Art: The Changing Aesthetics of Durga Puja in Contemporary Calcutta’, Art India (The Art News Magazine of India), 2004, vol. 9, no. 3, Quarter III; rpt. in The Goddess: The Power and the Glory, ed. Pratapaditya Pal, Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2009. ———,’Locating Gandhi in Indian Art History: Nandalal and Ramkinkar’, Theorising the Present: Essays for Partha Chatterjee, ed. Anjan Ghosh, Janaki Nair and Tapati Guha-Thakurta, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011. ——— , ‘The Blurring of Distinctions: The artwork and the religious icon in contemporary India’, in The India Postcolonial: A Critical Reader, ed. Elleke Boehmer and Rosinka Chaudhuri, London and New York: Routledge, 2011. ——— ,‘Visualising the Nation: The Iconography of a “National Art” in Modern India’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, Nos. 27–28, March 1995. Gupta, Bunny, and Jaya Chaliha, ‘Chitpur’, in Calcutta: The Living City, ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri, Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1990. Husken, Ute and Axel Michaels, ed. South Asian Festivals on the Move , Weisbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2013 Iconography Now: Rewriting Art History?, New Delhi; Sahmat, 2006. Jain, Kajri, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art, Durham and London: Duke Univeristy Press, 2007. Kaur, Ramindar, Performative Politics and the Cultures of Hinduism, New Delhi: Permanent Black 2003, London: Anthem Press 2005. Kaviraj, Sudipta, ‘Filth and the Public Sphere: Concepts and Practices of Space in Calcutta’, Public Culture, vol.10, no.1, Fall 1997. Kejriwal, Leena, Calcutta: Repossessing the City, New Delhi: Om Books, 2007. Mathur, Saloni, India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007 McDermott, Rachel Fell, Revelry, Rivalry and Longing for the Goddess: The Fortunes of Festivals, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011 McGowan, Abigail, Crafting the Nation in Colonial India, London: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2009. Mitchell, Timothy, ‘The World as Exhibition’, Comparative Studies in History and Society, vol. 31, no. 9, 1989; Reprinted as ‘Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Complex’, in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology ed. Donald Preziosi, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Mitter, Partha, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India: Occidental Orientations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. ———, Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. ———,The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922–1947, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007 Mohanka, Payal, ‘The Light-Makers’, In the Shadows: Unknown Craftsmen of Bengal, New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2007. Nandalal Bose 1882-1966, Centenary Exhibition Volume (New Delhi: NGMA, 1982). Nair, Janaki, ‘Social Municipalism’ and the New Metropolis’, in Contested Transformations: Changing Economies and Identities in Contemporary India, ed. Mary John, Praveen Kumar Jha and Surinder S. Jodhka, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2006. Nair, P. Thankappan, A History of Calcutta Streets, Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1987. Nicholas, Ralph, Night of the Gods: Durga Puja and the Legitimation of Rural Power in Bengal, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan and RCS Publishers, 2013. ———, Rites of Spring: Gajan in Village Bengal, New Delhi: Chronicle Books, 2008 Ostor, Akos, The Play of the Gods: Locality, Ideology, Structure and Time in the Festivals of a Bengali Town, first edition, University of Chicago Press, 1980; new edition, New Delhi: Chronicle Books, 2004.

bibliography 373 Pal, Pratapaditya, ed., Goddess Durga: The Power and the Glory, Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2009. Pinney, Christopher, Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006. Ramaswamy, Sumathi, ed., Barefoot Across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India, London: Routledge, 2011. Ramaswamy, Sumathi, The Goddess and the Nation; Mapping Mother India, Durham and London; Duke University Press, 2010. Ramkinkar Baij, A Retrospective, curated by K.S.Radhakrishnan, and R.Siva Kumar, New Delhi: NGMA, 2012. Ray, A.K., A Short History of Calcutta, 1902; rpt., Calcutta: Riddhi, 1982. Ray, Manas, ‘Growing up Refugee’, History Workshop Journal, no. 53, , 2002. Ray Choudhury, Probal and Devarshi, Bara Bari: The Abode of the Sabarna Ray Choudhury Family at Barisha, Kolkata: The Saborno Sangrahalay, 2003. Rodrigues, Hilary Peter, Ritual Worship of the Great Goddess: The Liturgy of Durga Puja with Interpretations, Albany: SUNY Press, 2003. Roy, Ananya, City Requiem, Calcutta; Gender and the Politics of Poverty,Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Roy, Indrapramit, ed., Varta, Discussing Art, vol.3, no.1, Kolkata: Akar Prakar, 2011. Chaitanya Sambrani, ‘Tracking Trash: Vivan Sundaram and the Turbulent Core of Modernity’ in Vivan Sundaram, Trash, Exhibition Catalogue, Mumbai: Chemould Prescott Road and Project 88; New Delhi: Photoink; New York: Sepia International; Chicago: Walsh Gallery, 2008 Scanlan, John, On Garbage, London: Reaktion Books, 2004. Sculptures of Asis Ghosh, Kolkata; Academy of Fine Arts, 2008. Sharma, Jyotirmoyee, ‘Puja Associations in West Bengal’, Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 28, no. 3, May 1969. Singh, Raghubir, Calcutta, Hong Kong: Perennial Press, 1975. Sinha, Gayatri, ed., Woman/Goddess, An Exhibition of Photographs, New Delhi: Multiple Action Research Group, 1999. Siva Kumar, R., Santiniketan: Growth of a Contextual Modernism, New Delhi: NGMA, 1997. Strasser, Susan, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash, New York: Henry Holy and Co., 1999. Subramanian, Lakshmi, The Hooghly: Living with our river, New Delhi: Roli Books, 2009. Tripathi, Salil, Offence: The Hindu Case, London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2009. Veniyyor, E.M.J., Raja Ravi Varma, Trivandrum: Government of Kerala, 1981.

2. book and articles (bengali) Acharya, Haripada, Mahalaya Thekey Bijoya, Kolkata: Ramakrishna Mission, Narendrapur, 1991. Agnihotri, Anita, Kolkatar Pratimashilpira, Kolkata: Ananda Publishers, 2001. Amritalal Basur Smriti o Atmasmriti, Arun Kumar Mitra ed., rpt. Kolkata: Sahityalok, 1982. Bandopadhyay, Sandip, Durga Puja: Borobari Thekey Barowari, Kolkata, El Alma Publications, 2011. ———, ‘Kolkatar Durga Pujo’, Lok, Krorpatra: Bangalar Janpad, Kolkata: November 2002. Bandopadyay, Raghab, ‘Banglar Mahishamardini bonam Marxbahini’, Desh, Sharadiya Sankhya, 19 September 1998. Banerjee, Anjan, Sri Sri Durga Parikramanika, Kolkata: Mayurakshi, 2007. Bhadra, Gautam, ‘Kshamata ladai-er bhinna naam, Akaal Bodhan’, Desh, Sharadiya Sankhya, 19 September 1998. Biswas, Indira, ‘Jantrik Thekey Ajantrik: Kolkata Betar Kendrer Prabhati Anushthan, Mahishasuramardini’, Ekaler Raktakarabi, Sharadiya Sanhkhya, 1417/2010.

374 in the name of the goddess Bose, Pradip, ‘Pujor Kolkatar Bikolpolok’, Baromas, Sharadiya Sankhya, 1404/1997. Chakrabarty, Sudhir, Krishnanagarer Mrtishilpa o Mrtishilpi Samaj, Kolkata: K.P.Bagchi and CSSSC, 1985. Chattopadhyay, Samrat, ed., Durga Pujor Note Book, Kolkata: Deep Prakashan, 2013 Das, Jayanta, ‘Kumortulir Charsho Bochhorer Biborton’, Desh, Sharadiya Sankhya, 19 September 1998. Dasgupta, Manisha, ‘Pujor Bipanan, Bipananer Pujo’, India Today (Bengali edition), 25 September 2006. Datta, Arindam, ‘Art-er Thakur’, Cha-Book, Puja Sankhya, 1413/2006. Datta, Bimal Chandra, Durga Puja, Sekal Thekey Ekal, Kolkata: Ramakrishna Vivekananda Institute of Research and Culture, 1986, Datta, Samar, Itihasey Khidirpur, Kolkata: published by the author, 1990. ‘Ekada Sarajagano Gopeshwar Pal-ke amra kotota mone rakhte perechhi’, Sutanuti Katha, 1st year, no. 11, Kartick 1411/ October-November, 2006. Kar, Saibal, ‘Pujor Arthaniti’, Samay Paribartan, October 2013 Mitra, Anjan Kolkata o Durga Pujo, Kolkata: Ananda Publishers, 2003. Mitra, Radharaman, Kolikata-Darpan, 1980; rpt. Kolkata: Subarnarekha, 2008. Mukhopdhyay, Harisadhan, Kolikata Sekaler o Ekaler, 1915; rpt. Kolkata: P.M. Bagchi & Co., 1985. Mukhopadhyay, Kamalacharan, ‘Chandananagarer Gourab’ Chua Chandan, Chandannagar: Underground Sahitya, 2006. Nag, Arun, ed., Satik Hutom Pyanchar Naksha, Kolkata: Subarnarekha, 1398/1991. Nandy, Heerak, ‘Barowari Brittanta’, Desh, 15 October 2003 Pathak, Ramratna, Durgotsab, Kolikata Ram Nrisingha Bandyopadhyay, 1281/1874. Pattrea, Purnendu, Purono Kolkatar Kathachitra, Kolkata: Dey’s, 1979. Rahimuddin, Abdul Kashem, Hey Nagar, Hey Mahanagar, Kolkata: Shilpakala, 1989. Sen, Sukumar, Kabikankan Mukunda-birachita Chandi-Mangala, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1975. Sircar, Jawhar, ‘Durga Pratima: Juktibadir Binirmaney’, Sahitya Parishat Patrika, year 111, no. 1, Baishakh-Ashad, 1411/2004, Srijata, ‘Dharma Jakhan Utsab’, India Today (Bengali edition), 25 September 2006. Sripantha, Smritir Pujo, Kolkata: Punascha, 2003. ———, Kolkata, Kolkata: Aanada Publishers. 1999 Sur, Atul, Kolkatar Chalchitra, Kolkata: Sahityalok, 1983 Vidyanidhi, Yogesh Chandra Ray, Puja Parbon, Kolkata: Vishvabharati Granthalay, 1358/1951.

3. newspaper articles (Authors of articles are given wherever known)

Articles in Bengali Ananda Bazar Patrika, Kolkata ‘Sharad holey apatti nei’, 8 October 1975. ‘Purono sei diner katha’ , Birendra Krishna Bhadra, 26 August 1977. ‘Path, puja, prashasan’, Editorial, 23 September 1978. ‘Pujor diney prarthana’, Editorial, 7 October 1978.

bibliography 375 ‘Ebar pratima jemon dekhlam’, Chintamani Kar, 21 October 1980. ‘Puja mandap o chandar julum niye injunction-er arji’, 7 September, 1983 Lokey boley arter thakur’, Kolkatar Korcha, 11 October 1983. Chhelebelay jemon dekhechhilam temon thakur ar nei’, Sunil Gangopadhyay, 13 October 1983. ‘Ma-key ebar jemon dekhlam’, Karuna Shaha, 13 October 1983. ‘Murti rachanar karigar’, Raghunath Goswami, 21 October 1983. ‘Durgotsab: Tin shataker tukro khabar’, Tushar Sanyal, 1 October 1984 Pujor arthaniti o sanskriti niye toliye bhabar somoy eshechhey’ , Ashis Ghosh, 17 October 1985 ‘Pujoy notun ki kora jay tar beporoya proyas’, Debashish Bandyopadhyay, 20 October 1985. ‘Mayer songe baro ghanta’, Sunil Das, 25 October 1985. ‘Kumartulitey bahutal bari, uccheder duschintay shilpira’, 25 September 1987. ‘Kumartuli: Respect achhey, prospect nei’, Sudhir Chakrabarty, 26 September 1987. ‘Amar Pujo- Interview with Ramesh Pal’ , 27 September 1987. ‘Ashvin jekhaney phuroye na’, Shibamay Dasgupta, 29 September 1987 ‘Barawari ar barchhey na’, Raghab Bandopadhyay, 29 September 1987. ‘Chena rastaye hariye Jawar Din’, Debashish Bhattacharya, 29 September 1987. ‘Kumartulir ei shilpira’, 29 September 1987. ‘Sarbajaner utsab’, Syed Mustafa Siraj, 29 September 1987. ‘Nana bidhinishedher aropey sarbojanin pujo anishchit’, 11 September 1990. ‘Bangal Durga-yi jitlen’, Jayanta Das, 4 October 2000. ‘Pujor juti’, 21 September 2002. ‘Porpor poda nol jurey holo pratima-Interview with Bhabatosh Sutar’, 18 September 2003. ‘‘Sera howar dourey egiye’, 2 October 2003. ‘Shreshthatwer loraiye sobaikey tekka dilo dakshin’, 5 October 2003. ‘Amar pujo’, Samaresh Majumdar, Rabibasariya, 17,September 2006 ‘Dushan akranta prithibir sushrusha ki bhabey, sei barta mandapey mandapey’, 21 September 2006. ‘Ananda plabaneyi ekakar utsaber shilpa o larai’, 19 October 2007. ‘Mahashtamir janasrot’, 19 October 2007 ‘Barjya-bidhi meney bisarjan ebar onektayi byatikrami’, 9 October 2010. ‘Sangrangskhan hochhey shaharer duti pujomandap’, 20 October 2010 ‘Bisarjan ki Gangar dushan baray, utchhey prashna’, Milan Datta, 6 October 2011 ‘“Mamatamay” udbodhon-i e-bar pujor mukhyo akarshan’ 30 September 2011. “Shantirupena Sangsthita - Puja Parikrama 2011’, 1 October 2011. ‘Mission Durga Pujo, Start Basanta Panchami-tei’, Arup Biswas, 3 October 2011. ‘Pujo Promo’, Chirosree Majumdar, Rabibasariya, 22 September 2013. ‘Mahanagar utsab ekhon paribesh-bandhu’, Surbek Biswas, 4 October 2013. ‘Aj obdhi konodin sindur kheli ni, ebar khelbo’, Parijat Bandyopadhyay, 9 October 2013 ‘Painter thekey Adman: Themenagarir byashtatama brand’, Rwiju Basu, 9 October 2013

376 in the name of the goddess ‘Taka dileyi VIP pass, sahaj Durga darshan’, 9 October 2013 ‘Sangrangskhan hochhey shaharer duti pujomandap’, 20 October 2013. Bartaman, Kolkata ‘Ebar Pujoy boro barowarigulo ke kemon chomok debey?”, Apurba Chattopadhyaya and others, Saptahik Bartaman, 18 September 2002. Ei Samay, Kolkata ‘Apon hotey bahir hoye’, Suman Chattopadhyay, 15 September 2013 ‘Atal jaler ahban’, Shubhendu Dhar, 2 October 2013. ‘Pratimar matha thekey dupoysha ashey Bishwa-Bishal-der hatey’, 18 October 2013. ‘Dharmik na hoye kintu secular howa jay na’, Manas Ray, Editorial page, 7 November 2013 ‘Theme-Sankat’, Rupali Gangopdhyay, 7 November 2013. Robibarer Sokalbela ‘Kolkatar Pujo: Milemishey Uttar Bonam Dakshin’, Doyel Datta, 3 October 2010.

Articles in English The Hindu Magazine ‘On either side of Ganesha’, Shashi Baliga, 16 September 2012. Hindusthan Times, Metro, Kolkata ‘Spectacle of Collective Madness’, Sova Sen, 3 October 2002. ‘Many a bottleneck to be cleared’, Kolkata, 14 September 2003. ‘Towels to Soaps, all adorn Ma’, 30 September 2003. ‘Drive to clean water bodies after bisarjan’, 25 September 2003. ‘UK funds to rehabilate Kumartuli artists’, Arindam Sarkar, 25 July 2006. ‘Welcome to Special Puja: Themesong, Sapnar Bagan’, Live Kolkata, Pujascope, 10 September 2009 ‘A Bus with a View’, 2 October 2013. ‘The Voice of Mahalaya’, Priyasha Banerjee, 4 October 2013. ‘Civic Body set to lose crores on Puja ad tax’, 7 October 2013. ‘Idol worship starts, Didi gets 273 invites’, 7 October 2013. After immersion KMC to go on a river purging drive’, 16 October 2013. Mint Lounge, The Wall Street Journal, New Delhi ‘The Durga Puja Zeitgeist’, Shamik Bag, The Weekend Magazine, 9 October 2010. ‘Where Kolkata turns into a museum’, ‘The Good Life’ column, Shobha Narayan, 13 October 2011. The Bengal Post, Kolkata ‘Pray for recycled goddess this season’, Abhiroop Ghosh Dastidar, 12 September 2010. ‘Few buyers for idols abroad’, Postscript, 5 October 2010. ‘Sinful City’, 12 October 2010. ‘United Colours of Badamtala till next Puja’, 24 October 2010.

bibliography 377 ‘Mahishasurmardini: The Making of a Legend’, Indira Biswas, 7 October 2010. ‘The Day the Goddess is Riverbound’, Bhasker Chunder, The Sunday Post, 17 October 2010 ‘Icchamati bisarjan brings two Bengals closer’, Debamay Ghosh, 19 October 2010 The New York Times ‘A 10-Armed Goddess Charms a Frenetic Megalopolis’, Calcutta Journal, Somini Sengupta, 22 October 2007 The Statesman, Calcutta ‘Janglagarey Shiuli Porey’- ‘A Reflection from History’, 18 September 2003. ‘Not a commercial affair’, Notebook, 25 September 2006. ‘A different ambience’, 4 October 2008. The Telegraph, Calcutta ‘Goddess of the Avant Garde’, Tapas Chakrabarty, 15 September 1990. ‘A Guide for Pandal Hoppers’, Ambar Basu, Calcutta, 7 October 1997. ‘Bengali Extravaganza’, Editorial, 17 October 1999. ‘Market Forces Sneak into Puja Pandals’, 26 October 2001 ‘Graceland, Feat of clay in den of divinity’, Sudeshna Banerjee, 5 October 2002 ‘Why I Flout the Rules’, 10, 11 October 2002. ‘Full stop for traffic stop twins’, 13 September 2003. ‘If it’s all about money, so be it’, 20 September 2003. ‘Claps and Raps in Revelry Report Card’, Mahashashti Puja Guide, 15 October 2002 ‘An ode to oddity this autumn’, Mahasaptami Guide, 2 October 2003. ‘Reality Check, Revelry Road Map’, Mahashashti Puja Guide, 3 October 2003. ‘Metro Matters’, 7 October 2003. ‘Makers of Gods brave the odds: Kumartuli artisans’ struggle against red tape’, Poulomi Banerjee, 31 August 2006. ‘Go Vertical, Make Space’, Sudeshna Banerjee, 12 September 2006. ‘Kumartuli Closer Home’, Sudeshna Banerjee, Friday Salt Lake Supplement, 15 September 2006. ‘Formula 3 for Festivity’, Sunday Metro, 17 September 2006. ‘1944: The year that was’, Sunil Gangopadhyay, 1 October 2006. ‘Puja in the times of the Net’, Anirban Das Mahapatra, Insight, 1 October 2006. ‘Living the Pujas’, Chandrima S. Bhattacharya, Graphiti,The Telegraph Magazine, 1 October 2006. ‘Crowd-pull Policy’, Friday Salt Lake Supplement, 28 September 2007. ‘Pandals put back the clock – Clash of civilizations at community Pujas’, Sudeshna Banerjee, 10 October 2007. ‘Summons for Potter Pandal’, 11 October 2007. ‘Pandal wins reprieve’, 13 October 2007. ‘Bigger, Better, Longer Puja’, 14 October 2007. ‘Festive Fervour, A peek into the behind-the-scene action that goes in to the making of a barowari Durga Puja’, Kundan Chakrabarty, Graphiti,The Telegraph Magazine, 14 October 2007. ‘Kumartuli: Of Earth and Heaven- Interview with Ramesh Chandra Paul’, The Telegraph in Schools, 15–21 October 2007.

378 in the name of the goddess ‘Apocalypse Now - Desperate Search for Happiness’, Soumitra Das, Kolkata, 18 October 2007. ‘The Departed and the Incumbent’, 18 October 2007. ‘Festive Roster’, Friday Salt Lake Supplement, 19 October 2007. ‘Designs on You…Idol Worship’, Susmita Saha, 20 October 2007. ‘Collectors queue up for Puja art work’, Anasuya Basu, 25 October 2007 ‘Crowd Crown’, Friday Salt Lake Supplement, 26 October 2007. ‘Durga before the dhak beats fade’, Sudeshna Banerjee, 26 November 2007. ‘Kumartuli Revamp hits wall’, Jayanta Basu, 11 July 2008 ‘Durga Puja goes corporate’, 26 July 2008. ‘Idol makers in fibre glass fix’, Poulomi Banerjee, 20 August 2008. ‘Facebook address for autumn festival’, Poulomi Banerjee, 26 August 2008. ‘Puja clean-up diktat: Civic bodies free to slap a fee’, 6 & 8 September 2008 ‘Eco-friendly colours for Durga’, 8 September 2008 ‘Don’t have a blast’, 21 September 2008. ‘Fewer orders from abroad hit idol hub’, Poulomi Banerjee, 2 July 2009. ‘Court demands rule rein on road-hog pandals’, 3 September 2009. ‘Axe on road-hog pandals’, 16 September 2009. ‘Puja Peeves: rules and prices’, 17 September 2009. ‘Theme Burns Lights…’, 20 September 2009. ‘Baroari bastion gets budget boost in 100th year’, Sudeshna Banerjee, Calcutta, 10 August 2009. ‘Where pandal-hopping is a way of life for five days every year’, 28 September 2009. ‘Pandal same, Puja different’, Calcutta, 5 October 2009. ‘Idol capital shifts base’, Poulomi Banerjee, 27 April 2010. ‘Idol hubs debate the great divide’, Poulomi Banerjee, 3 August 2010. ‘Artists drift away from Puja’, Arka Das, 21 September 2010. ‘A festival and more’, Jawhar Sircar, Editorial page, 17 October 2010. ‘Artist’s theme for a dream’, 30 October 2010. ‘A German room for the goddess’, Somak Ghoshal, 18 June 2011. ‘The Divine Network’, Sumanto Chattopadhyay, Graphiti,The Telegraph Magazine, 2 October 2011. ‘Puja art finds new pandals’, Jhinuk Mazumdar and Sreecheta Das, 10 October 2011 ‘Puja Guide’, Friday Salt Lake Supplement, 19 October 2012 ‘Salute a goddess, spare a river’, Jayanta Basu, 27 October 2012. ‘Goddesses by the Lake’, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Editorial page, 22 November 2012. ‘CM plays Santa for Puja’, 28 September 2013. ‘An Arty Carnival’. Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Graphiti,The Telegraph Magazine, 28 September 2014 The Times of India, Calcutta Times, Kolkata ‘Durga Puja celebrated among Santhals’, 30 September 2003. ‘Fest on Wheels’, 7 October 2003.

bibliography 379 ‘Save the Ganga order given the go by’, 7 October 2003. ‘Nari Shakti’ bags TOI pandal award’, New Delhi, 30 September 2006. ‘Aaj Ashtami’, 2 October 2007. ‘Tribute to a Living Tradition’, New Delhi, 20 October 2007. Ban Likely on Puja Lead Paint’, 5 August 2008. ‘Artisans still bank on lead paints’, 15 September 2008 ‘Devi now logged on FB’, 27 August 2011. ‘Puja challenge for new Kolkata police set-up’, Times News Nework, 30 August 2011. ‘At Rs.123 crores, Puja spend(ing) touches new high this year’, Subhro Niyogi, 27 October 2012. ‘Delhi date for Thakurpukur Puja’, Dwaipayan Ghosh, 19 October 2013.

4. surveys. maps, reports ‘Asian Paints Sharad Samman completes 20 years: Changing Cultures’, Spandan, The quarterly house journal of Asian Paints, Vol. 11. November 2004. Bera, Anutapa, ed., Puja Power, A Brandwatch Bengal Series, 2011 vol.1, Kolkata; Ananda Bazar Patrika, 2011 Kolkata, Detailed Maps of 141 Wards with Street Directories, 2001, repr., Kolkata: D.P. Publications & Sales Concern, 2007. Metropolitan Kolkata: An Anthology of Some Socio-Economic Studies and Surveys of the KMDA, 1970-2004, vols., 1-5, SocioEconomic Planning Unit, Directorate of Planning and Development, Kolkata: KMDA, 2004. Minutes of the Coordination Meetings held by the Commissioner of Police, Kolkata at the Briefing/Conference Room at Lalbazar, August 28, 2003, 3 September 2004, 12 September, 2005, 17 August 2006.. Police Arrangements in connection with Durga Puja and Lakshmi Puja, Kolkata, Deputy Commissioner of Police, 2002-07. Kolkata Police – Indian Oil Puja Guides, 2000–2007 Kolkata Durga Puja Road Map, 2011, available online at www.bangalinet.co/durgapuja_roadmap.htm Kolkata Traffic Police, Annual Review, 2011, ‘Towards a disciplined horizon’. Guidelines Pamphlet, ‘Sharadotsab 2012’, Police Commissioner, Bidhananagar City Police, 2012.

5. unpublished theses and papers Basu, Rituparna The Rediscovery of Folk Art and Crafts in Bengal: Reappraisal of a Twentieth Century Endeavour, Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History, Calcutta University, 2008. Chakravarty, Sumona, Kolkata and Durga Pujo: The Role of the Festival in Constructing the City dissertation for degree of Master in Design Studies, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2013. Dasgupta, Keya, Genesis of a Neighbourhood: The Mapping of Bhabanipur, March 2003, Occasional Paper no. 175, Calcutta: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences. Goldblatt, Beth, The Image Makers of Kumartuli: The Transformation of a Caste-based Industry in a Slum Quarter of Calcutta, Ph.D. dissertation, Faculty of Economic and Social Studies, University of Manchester, April 1979. Heierstad, Geir, Images of Kumartuli Kumars–The Image Makers of Kolkata: Changing Notions of Caste and Modernity during the last century, Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, June 2008. Sen, Moumita, Enframing Kumartuli; A Study in Space, Practice and Images, M.Phil. dissertation, Kolkata: Jadavpur University and the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, June 2011.

380 in the name of the goddess

6. interviews The work has drawn on a large body of interviews taken with (i) Puja committee members (ii) Puja designers and artists (iii) idol-makers, pandal-makers and craftspeople (iv) advertising professionals and corporate sponsors, and (v) representatives of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation and Kolkata Police. With the first two categories of persons – especially with designers like Sanatanan Dinda, Bhabatosh Sutar, Sushanta Pal, Amar Sarkar or Dipak Ghosh – these interviews have often been carried on over different festival seasons, from 2002–03 to 2012. The list of interviews is not being included in this Bibiliography, but are extensively cited in the Notes to the chapters. The interview recordings and transcripts, along with photographs and newspaper clippings, have been stored as a part of the contemporary Durga Puja archives of the CSSSC.

7. documentary films Mriganka Shekhar Ray, Durga Puja in Calcutta, Calcutta Film Society, 1966, 12 minutes - acquired from Films Division of India archives, Mumbai Ranen Chatterjee, Durga, Films Division of India, Calcutta, 1980, 10 minutes - acquired from Films Division of India archives, Mumbai. Sunanda Sanyal, A Homecoming Spectacle, Kolkata, 2008, 58 minutes. Nilanjan Bhattacharya, Ninety Degrees, Goethe Institute, Kolkata, 2013, 38 minutes.

Index Ananda Bazar Patrika (ABP) 9,10, 27, 46, 49, 56, 72, 74, 75, 76, 101, 111–13, 115–116, 146–48, 164, 169, 173, 183, 194–97, 291, 310, 331, 335, 338, 363. Adi Ganga 121–22, 153, 303 Agamani 1, 25, 365 Agamben, Giorgio 5, 7, 11, 27, 369 Agnihotri, Anita 28, 145, 161, 163, 165, 170, 194–96, 372 Airtel ‘Bishwacup Pujo 11 All-India Radio, Calcutta 12 alluvial clay, different forms used in idol-making 17, 36, 125, 150–51, 161, 234, 239, 342, 367 ‘Art-er thakur’ 121, 125, 146, 373 ‘Artist’s Pujo’ 120, 125, 135, 147, 172, 208 Asad, Talal 7, 27, 369 Ashtami 3, 25 Ashvin 66, 67, 71, 76, 135–36, 223, 258, 365 Asian Paints Gattu 136, 140, 328 ‘Sharad Samman’ awards 148, 203, 206, 212, 244–45, 256–57, 296, 304, 328, 378 Shiromani Purashkar 132 25th anniversary celebrations of ‘Sharad Samman’ awards 72, 140, 148, 256 Asura 86, 119, 154, 161, 270–71, Award and sponsorship banners 221 Ayyanar temple complex – Ayyanar shrine 239–40 Ayyanar 326 Babughat 345 Baij, Ramkinkar 169, 210, 244, 247, 279, 290, 320, 372 Baisakh Baishnabghata Patuli 151, 191, 272, 294, 320, 346, 151, 191, 272, 294, 320, 346, Baje Kadamtala Ghat 344, 346, 349, Balaram Bose Ghat Street 122–123, Bali, Harishchandra 12 Baluchari sari designs 218 Banam tribal sculptures 301, 302, 354

Bandyopadhyay, Raghab 72, 101, 372, 374 Bandyopadhyay, Ramananda 76, 125, 130 Banedi Barir Puja 30, 94, 295, 304, 114 Banerjee, Mamata 22, 24–5, 28, 50, 62, 75–6, 85, 142, 144–45, 148, 197, 349–50 Bangal Durga 166, 196, 374 Bankura terracotta art 243 Barabazar 157, 159 Bardhaman wooden puppetry 201 Barowari 115, 116, 122, 145, 146, 153, 161, 193, 195, 197, 278, 292, 303, 332, 365, 372 Bastar folk art complex Bastar metal art 231, 233, 238, 311, 352 Bastar 237, 281, 289 Basu, Amritalal 92, 96, 114, 372 Basu, Atindranath 97 Batam 137, 179–80, 183, 185–86, 190, 365 Bata Puja advertisement 46, 109, 208 Bates 37–38, 73, 75, 292 Battala wood engravings 291, 337 Baudrillard, Jean 75, 220, 245, 370 BBD Bagh 41, 73 Belur Math 168, 333, 347–48 Bhadra, Birendra Krishna 12, 27, 98, 373 Bharadwaj, Vivek 357–59, 364 Bharat Mata 97, 119, 164–65, 303 Bhattacharya, Bikash 86, 125, 127–28, 130, 172 Bhattacharya, Dipali 127, 141, 147, 208, 244–45, 288–89 Bhattacharya, Tithi 26, 93–4, 114, 369 Bhimbetka caves remake 227 Bhog 19, 99, 366 Bhowanipur Mallick Bari 122 Bidhan Sarani 88 Bidhannagar Bidhannagar Police Commissionerate 63, 72, 79 Bijon Setu 81, 309–10, 312 Bijoya Dashami 5, 50, 79, 86, 99, 104, 141, 323, 331, 337–40, 348–49 366, 369 Bijoya Sammilani 124, 366

382 in the name of the goddess bhashan, bisarjan 112, 140, 345, 347, 363, 365–66, 374– 76 bidri artware 57 Bishnupur temple replicas Jor Bangla temple 323–24 Radha Madhav temple 220 Shyam Rai temple 221 Biswas, Arup 38, 74, 142, 148, 280, 325, 338, 374 Boral, Raichand 12 Boroline advertisements 46, 75 Bose, Nandalal 119–20, 147, 163,165, 171, 196, 247, 289–90, 325 Bose, Sarat Chandra 97 Bose, Subhash Chandra 97, 119 Bose, Tanmoy 358

Chattisgarh folk/tribal art 300 Chattopadhyay, Swati 55, 60, 75–6, 114, 180, 197, 245, 335, 364, 370 Chaturthi 36, 50, 135, 366 Chausatti Yogini temple replica 191 Chhau dance 29–30, 244 Chitpur Road 3, 111, 150, 153, 158 Chittaranjan Avenue 138 Chitteshwari temple 3, 153 Chowdhury, Jogen 172, 208 Chowringhee 73, 121, 133, 146 Columbia Space Shuttle replica 51, 190 Congress politics and the Pujas 101, 104 CPI(M) politics and the Pujas 86, 101, 309 Crafts Council of West Bengal 172, 196

Calcutta Electric Supply Corporation (CESC) 30, 72, 77, 80–1, 87, 104, 107–8, 111, 205, 299, 303 Calcutta High Court 57, 81–2, 104, 106, 112, 146, 172, 348, 363 Calcutta/Kolkata Police 61–4, 77, 79, 82, 87–9, 104, 108, 110–11, 295, 303, 315, 379 Calcutta/Kolkata Police-Indian Oil Puja Guide 61–2, 303, 315, 378 Calcutta School of Art 163 Calcutta State Transport Corporation (CSTC) 78 Calhoun, Craig 22, 28, 369 Chadar-Badar 306 Chaitra 36–7, 366 Chakrabarty, Gautam Mohan 89 Chakrabarty, Mithun 35 Chakrabarty, Subhash 101 Chakraborty, Ajitangshu 354, 356, 363 Chalchitra 8, 122, 150, 194, 234, 236–7, 366 Chamba valley temple replica 44–45 Chanda 102, 112, 366 Chandannagar Jagadhhatri Pujas 350–51, 353, 363 light-makers 50, 183, 212 Sridhar Das 183 Chander Haat, Khudirampally 19, 336 Chandi-path 12, 27, 98 Chattisgarh village complex 54, 341

daker saj 68–9, 103, 137, 163, 166, 366 Danton, West Medinipur 186–87, 197 Das, Badhan 251–53, Das, Sunil 127, 147 Datta, Ranen Ayan 46 Deb, Raja Nabakrishna of Shobhabazar 90, 92, 153, 303 Debi-paksha 2, 12, 46, 50, 98, 366 Desh 26, 37–38, 101, 193 Devi Mahatmya 1 Dey, Mukul 169 dhak, dhakis 71, 73, 108, 140, 328, 339, 345, 366 Dhaka Bikrampur 166, 173 Dhakuria Lakes (Rabindra Sarovar) 53, 97, 293, 355 dhunuchi, dhunuchi-naach 140, 299, 339, 345, 348, 366 Dilwara temple replica 45, 57, 76, 223, 225 Dunlop Puja Road Guide 134, 142 Dunlop Tyres 46–7 Dutta Roy, Shyamal 130 Dutta, Bhupendranath 97 Eastern Metropolitan Bypass 41, 45, 105, 235, 256, 269, 286, 293–94, 309, 319, 342 Ei Samay 5, 7, 22, 112, 338, 363, 375 Ekchala 68–9, 102, 113, 137, 162–64, 166, 203, 222, 272, 298 Environmental Art Collective 84, 260, 291, 301, 336 environmental awareness 206, 82

index 383 Esplanade 73, 171 Fiberglass 11, 51, 53, 144, 158, 160,172, 175, 177, 182– 84, 189–91, 194–95, 197, 225, 231, 234, 246, 259– 61, 269, 277, 281, 304, 339, 342, 355, 357, 359–60 Fontane de Trevi replica 184 Forum for Durgotsav 107, 301, 336, 354, 357 Foucault, Michel 56–57, 75, 334, 338, 370 Frow, John 65, 76, 370 Gambhira tribal art 297 Ganapati festival, Ganesh Chaturthi, Mumbai 1, 37, 73, 97, 78, 110–12, 133 Gangopadhyay, Sunil 97, 113, 115–16, 374, 376 Garia 57, 62, 74, 85, 153, 208, 227, 236, 239, 245, 249, 292–94, 317, 320, 337 Gariahat Road 81, 293, 315 Ghana village complex 57, 230, 246 Ghosh, Anjan 113, 116, 196–97, 244, 338, 370-71 Ghosh, Asis 251-54, 290, 372 ghoter pujo 97 Ghoti Durga 166 Girnar-Loksatta Ganeshotsav awards 133 Gond paintings 112, 223, 234, 299, 301, 352 Government College of Art, Calcutta 127, 172, 177–78, 210, 251, 271, 281 ‘Green Puja’ themes and awards 84–85, 283 Guernica 270–71 Gupta, Ishwar 92 Guptipara Barowari Puja 92 Hakim, Firhaud 142, 148, 292, 355, 359 Harish Mukherjee Road 4, 122 Harrington Street Arts Centre 249, 259, 290 Harry Potter, Hogwarts castle replica 59, 189–90 Hazra Road 119, 122 Himachal Pradesh theme park 44, 225, 227 Honolulu Art Museum 172 Hooghly 85–6, 92, 183, 186, 193, 195, 294, 331–32, 338–39, 344, 346, 348–50 Husain, M.F. 27, 142, 260–61, 372 Hutom Pyanchar Naksha 92, 113–14, 373 Icchamati immersions 363, 376

idol immersion clearance of idol refuse 342, 347, 348 recycling of idol remains 285, 341, 347–48, 352 Kolkata Port Trust cranes 344, 363 Inca art complex 245 India Today 72, 74, 92, 373 Indian Council of Cultural Relations (ICCR) 361 Indian Empire Exhibition, Wembley, UK 167 Indian Foundation for Sustainable Development (IFSD) 35–6, 73, 325 Indian Museum 131, 247, 289, 343, 363 Indian Tourism Development Corporation (ITDC) 331, 338 Indo-Saracenic architecture 117,198, 225 Indus Valley art complex 232 Jacob, Swindon 225–26 Jagaddhatri Puja 4, 187, 286, 350–53, 363 Jagannath Rath replica 189 Jaipur Hawa Mahal replica 53, 197 Jaisalmer Jain temple replica 45 James Long Sarani, Behala 164, 298 Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) 158, 195 Judges Ghat 344 Jugantar 32, 72 Kali Puja 31, 73, 77, 84, 98, 101, 148, 208, 286, 350–52, 354 Kali Studio 124 Kalighat 3, 6, 10, 13, 35–36, 60, 62, 64, 67, 69, 73–74, 97, 119–22, 124, 146, 149–150, 153, 161, 165, 194, 208, 239, 245, 370 Kali temple 153 Kali Temple Road 13 Sangha Kali Puja 13 Kalighat Patuapara 119–20, 122, 124, 146, 149–50, 161 Kangsanarayan, Raja of Tahirpur 161, 295 Kamakhya temple replica 228 Kapoor, Wasim 141–42 Kar, Chintamoni 91 Karmakar, Prakash 61, 76, 244

384 in the name of the goddess Kathakali dance postures and costumes 229 kathamo 36, 367 Kerala dance villages 292 Khiching temple replica 224 Khudirampally, Behala 260, 262–63, 281, 336 Kolkata Book Fair 178 Kolkata Improvement Trust (KIT) 77, 357 Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) 30, 77, 116, 279, 379 Kolkata Municipal Development Authority (KMDA) 77 Kolkata Police-Indian Oil Puja Guide 61–62, 303, 315 Kolkata Port Trust (KPT) 77, 344, 363 Kolkata TV 33, 35, 41, 72, 74 Krishnanagar clay-modellers 163, 171 Kumar, Debashish 18 Kumortuli 149–61, 166–69, 173–75, 177–78, 181, 193–97, 373 Banamali Sarkar Street 153, 158 Bikrampur Shilpagar 173 Kumortuli Mritshilpi Sanskriti Samiti 157, 175, 195 Kumortuli Mritshilpa Samiti 157 Renovation and relocation plans 159, 161, 195 Statue making workshops 168 ‘Temporary Kumartuli’ 159 Kutch village complex 234, 317 lacquer dolls 189, 237, 336 Lahiri, Shanu 120, 126–27, 129–30, 146–47 Lalit Kala Akademi 354 Lower Circular Road 121 McDermott, Rachel Fell 25–26, 195, 372 M.S. University, Baroda 175 Madhubani Durga 262 Madhubani painters and recreated village complexes 201, 234, 244 Godna Paintings Shravan Paswan 227 Urmila Devi 237, 244, 246 Mahalaya 2, 12, 24, 26–28, 45, 49–50, 100, 151–52, 259, 338, 351, 367, 373, 376 Maharaja of Krishnanagar 171

Mahishasuramardini radio programme 12, 27, 373 Maitra, Rathin 125, 130–31 Majumdar, Nirode 125–26, 146–47 Majumdar, Raja Bhabananda of Krishnanagar 161, 295 Majumdar, Raja Lakshikanta of Krishnanagar 161 Majumdar, Samaresh 91, 113, 375 makara 161, 367 Mallick, Pankajkumar 12 mangal-ghot 11 Mangalkavyas 7 Manna, Ramkumar 317 Masan tribal art 234, 236 Medinipur patuas 59, 234, 312 Milon Mela fairground 235 Mitchell, Timothy 56, 75, 372 Mitra, Dinabandhu 92 Mitra, Gokul 154 Mitra, Govindaram 153, 303 Moghalmari, Danton 186, 197 Mohammed, Isha 127–28 mritshilpi, pratimashilpi– Pal, Bharati 159 Pal, Gopeshwar, Paul, G. 119, 162–63, 167–68, 172, 196, 303, 374 Pal, Gorachand 165, 245 Pal, Jitendranath 271 Pal, Mintu 175, 195–96, 355–56, 364 Pal, Naba Kumar 177–78, 195, 197, 213, 239, 271– 72, 283, 357 Pal, Nemai Chandra 171–72, 175, 196–97 Pal, Netai Chandra 118 Pal, Parimal 30, 177, 214–15, 222, 245 Pal, Prafulla 115, 129–30, 245 Pal, Prahlad 119, 124, 244 Pal, Rakhal Chandra 173 Pal, Ramesh Chandra 163, 169, 172, 196, 377 Pal, Sandhya 159 Pal, Shrish Chandra 119, 122 Pal Datta, Kanchi 159 Rudra Pal, Brajanath 173 Rudra Pal, Mohanbanshi 36, 130, 135, 138, 147–48, 166, 173–75, 178, 190, 197, 203

index 385 Rudra Pal, Pradip 13, 36, 79, 157, 173–76, 197, 225 Rudra Pal, Sanatan 36–37, 73, 112, 141, 147, 152, 174, 196, 203, 228, 246, 288 Mudra Communications 35, 73 Mukherjee, Ashutosh 121 Mukherjee, Lady Ranu 131 Mukherjee, Meera 125–27, 129 Mukherjee, Subrata 86, 104, 116, 142, 188, 197 Mukhopadhyay, Shirshendu 140 Mukhopadhyay, Subhash 97, 101, 119, 133 Mukteshwar temple replica 53, 223 Naba Krishna Street 169 Nabami 2, 25, 92, 365, 367 Naga village complex 234 Naihati Kali Puja 348, 350, 354 Nalini Ranjan Avenue 99 namabali chadar 12, 172, 367 Nandigram, police firing 87, 113, 283 ‘Nataraj’ Durga 165 New Town, Rajarhat 36, 72, 144–45, 249, 271, 293, 361 Newari architecture 323 Nimtala Ghat 303 Offbeat 35, 73 Ogilvy and Mather 75, 132, Deb, Sharmishtha 141, 147–48 Roy, Sujoy 147–48 Oriental murti 119 Oriental-style Durga 119, 121 Orissa patachitra 234 Padmanabhapuram Palace replica 217, 223, 226–28, 246, 323 Padmapukur Road 82 Pahari miniature painting 46, 273 Pakistani truck art 361 Pala period stone sculpture 223 panchchala 163, 222 ‘pandal-hopping’ 5, 12, 26, 64–65, 71, 331, 335, 378 pandal-making 187–89, 191, 193, 197, 212, 285, 314 pandal-makers 28, 32, 73, 379

Haldar, Prabir 192–93, 198 Karmakar, Golok 183–84 Khan, Mahfuz 323 Modern Decorators 138, 189 Mokshada Decorators 186 Mondal Decorators, Salt Lake 73, 189, 191, 193, 198, 233 _____ Mondal, Sukesh 73, 189–91, 193, 198 Ma Mongola Decorators, Danton, Medinipur 186– 87, 197 _____ Mishra, Durga Charan (Jota) 187 _____ Sahoo, Amiya 186, 197 Pal decorators, Shantipur, Nadia 73, 186, 197, 205 Rakshit & Company 130 pandal reuse and sales 31, 151, 225, 252, 286, 292, 329, 339, 341, 349–52 papier mache 172 para 17, 19, 29, 35, 38–39, 55, 70– 71, 73–74, 82, 93– 101, 106, 111–12, 114–15, 120, 130, 135, 137, 141, 150, 201, 207–08, 215, 221, 276–77, 283, 296–97, 299, 303–06, 309–11, 314, 321, 325–26, 328, 335, 337, 339–40, 347, 357, 368 parar pujo 100, 276–77, 283, 296–97, 304–05, 311, 314, 319, 337 Paris Opera House replica 51–52, 233 Park Circus 57, 61, 74, 97, 100, 164, 173, 180, 206, 306 patachitra 59, 122, 124, 161, 234, 239, 241, 245, 249, 286–87, 314, 320, 329, 330, 352, 368 Patherya, Mudar 358 Patuapara, Kalighat 119–20, 122, 124, 146, 149–50, 161 People United for Better Living in Calcutta (PUBLIC) 108 Pithora paintings 239 plaster of Paris 112, 178, 184, 189–90, 195, 237 Pollution Control Board (PCB), West Bengal 82, 85, 112, 205, 348 pratima, pratima-shilpi 2, 8, 14, 23, 25, 28, 90, 108, 113, 116, 120–21, 135–38, 145–47, 149–50, 153, 158, 162, 164, 170–73, 177, 191, 193–96, 208, 212, 245, 271, 323, 345, 355, 365, 368, 373–75 Prinsep Ghat 79 Puja advertisements 23, 35, 46, 49, 75, 136 Puja banners 40

386 in the name of the goddess Puja awards and competitions– Ananda Bazaar Patrika ‘Sharad Arghya’ awards 116, 206 Asian Paints ‘Sharad Samman’ awards 9 ‘Green Puja’ awards 85 Kolkata TV ‘Maha Pujo’ contest 74 Snowcem-Pratidin ‘Pujo Perfect’ contest 206 Star Ananda ‘Star, Superstar, Megastar’ awards 41, 71, 74 The Telegraph-CESC ‘True Spirit Puja’ contest 108 The Telegraph-ING Vysya ‘Hand-in-Hand’ contest 109 Times of India sponsored Pujas 34 Zee Bangla sponsored Puja events 33, 69 Puja clubs and committees– Abasar Club Puja 207, 237, 246, 343–44 Abasarika Puja 317 Adi Ballygunge Puja 135, 137–38, 148, 174, 183, 186, 189, 197–98 AE Block Puja, Salt Lake 41 AG Block Puja, Salt Lake 119 Ahiritola Sarbojanin Puja 56, 303 Ajeya Sanghati Puja, Haridebpur 234, 337 Ashok Trust Baisakhi Club Puja 337 Babubagan Club Puja 32, 57, 72 Badamtala Ashar Sangha Puja 35–36, 38, 64, 67, 73, 245, 274–76, 291, 292, 325, 330, 338, 349–50 Baghbazar Pally Puja 177 Baghbazar Sarbojanin Puja 40, 103 Baishnabghata Patuli Upanagari Puja 320 Bakulbagan Sarbojanin Puja 120 Ballygunge Cultural Association Puja 242, 324, 338, 341 Barisha Ekata Sangha Puja 298 Barisha Club Puja 84, 290, 302, 308, 354 Barisha Sahajatri Puja 57, 291, 294 Barisha Shrishti Puja 76, 201, 237, 243, 246, 262–64, 281, 291, 296, 336 BE Block (East) Puja, Salt Lake 17, 33, 83 Behala Agradoot Club Puja 19, 54, 292, 299–300, 336 Behala Club Puja 112, 133, 218, 244, 299, 301, 314, 336 Behala Tapoban Club 97

Behala Udayan Pally Puja 229 Behala Youngmen’s Association Puja 299 Beltala Sangha Puja, Bhowanipur 21 Beltala Sarbojanin Puja, Vidyasagar colony 220 BG Block Puja, Salt Lake 327 Bosepukur Shitala Mandir Puja 66–67, 76, 105–07, 116, 177–78, 231–32, 238, 246, 274, 282, 285, 292, 309, 311, 314, 337, 352, 354 Brindaban Matri Mandir Puja 329–30 CD Block Puja, Salt Lake 348 Chakraberia Sarbojanin Puja 24, 244, 283, 290, 292, 331, 352 Chetla Agrani Club Puja 142, 292 College Square Puja 32, 42, 51, 72, 73, 111, 120, 197, 205, 244 Dumdum Park Bharat Chakra Puja 140, 205, 248, 286, 353 Dumdum Park Tarun Sangha Puja 241, 284–85, 292 Ekdalia Evergreen Puja 28, 44, 75, 116, 174, 186–88, 197, 203, 288 FD Block Puja, Salt Lake 34, 59, 73, 83, 189–90, 192, 198, 240, 246, 356 Fire Brigade Puja, Free School Street 170 41 Pally Puja, Haridebpur 232, 283 GD Block Puja, Salt Lake 52, 101 Hatibagan Nabin Pally Puja 70, 204, 240, 305–07, 337, 354, 361 Hatibagan Sarbojanin Puja 30, 70, 82, 119, 167, 219, 223, 233, 257, 260, 303–07, 336 Hindustan Park Sarbojanin Puja 315 Jatra Shuru Sangha Puja, Garia 85, 153, 227, 236, 249, 292 Jodhpur Park Sarbojanin Puja Jodhpur Park 95 Pally Puja 226, 245, 261, 290, 317 Kankurgachhi Mitali Sangha Puja 287, 329 Kankurgachhi Sapnar Bagan Puja 328 Khidirpur Kabitirtha Puja 42, 165 Khidirpur Pally Saradiya Puja 112 Khidirpur 25 Pally Puja 31, 87, 182–84, 197, 231, 265–67, 278, 336 Kumartuli Sarbojanin Puja 104 Labony Puja, Salt Lake 59, 245 Lake Town Adhibasibrina Puja Sangha Puja, Maniktala

index 387 Lalabagan Nabanku 16, 214–15, 287, 326, 329 Maddox Square Puja 68–69 Miloni Sangha Puja, Vidyasagar colony 208–09, 319 Mohammed Ali Park Puja 42, 75, 100, 172, 179, 186, 203, 206, 338 Mudiali Club Puja 63, 315, 323, 338 Natun Pally, Pradip Sangha Puja 136–37, 148, 265, 291 Naktala Udayan Sangha Puja 13, 50, 269–73, 291, 320–21, 326, 337 Nalin Sarkar Street Puja 42–43, 74, 200, 202, 204, 223, 255–61, 290, 303–07, 334, 337, 359 New Alipore Sarbojanin Puja 99 Northern Park Puja, Bhowanipur 329–30 Park Circus United Club Puja 97 Pratapaditya Road Trikone Park Puja 223–24, 315 Rajdanga Naba Uday Sangha Puja 74, 132, 148, 204, 244, 268–69, 313 Rajdanga Tribarna Sangha Puja 313 Sanatan Dharmotsahini Sabha Puja 96, 122–23, 146, 303 Samaj Sebi Puja 34, 236, 315, 321, 323–24, 338, 361–62 Sanghasree Puja, Kalighat 97, 119, 124–25, 145–46, 177, 291 Santosh Mitra Square Puja 51–52, 68, 87, 100, 104, 142, 170 Santoshpur Lake Pally Puja 200, 244, 273–74, 319 Santoshpur Trikone Park Puja 2, 16, 111, 203, 213, 237, 246, 272, 280, 292 Selimpur Naskarpara Puja 39 Selimpur Pally Puja 203, 211, 218, 235, 241–42, 246, 272, 317–18, 326, 337 Simla Byayam Samiti Puja 96–97, 104, 118, 167, 303, 332 Shibmandir Puja 14, 67, 97, 113, 148, 185, 191, 323, 351–52, 359 Sikdarbagan Sarbojanin Puja 306, 358 Singhi Park Sarbojanin Puja 81, 166, 315 66 Pally Puja, Badamtala, Kalighat 6, 60, 73–74, 245, 333 Sreebhumi Puja 100, 173 Suruchi Sangha Puja, New Alipore 38–39, 44–45, 62, 67, 74, 89, 118, 142, 148, 175–76, 206, 223, 225–29, 245–46, 280, 292, 315, 325, 338, 354

Tala Barowari Puja 278, 292 Talbagan Sarbojanin Puja 284, 292, 311–12 Telengabagan Sarbojanin Puja 243 Tridhara Sammilani Puja, Monoharpukur Road 18, 217, 223–26, 315, 323–24, 340, 360 Ultadanga Pallysree Puja 276 United Club Puja, Paschim Putiary 97, 231–32, 246 Vivekananda Athletic Club Puja, Haridebpur 219, 321–22 Puja designers, artists and craftspersons– Aich, Samir 73, 208–09, 244, 319 Bandyopadhyay, Apu 336–37 Banerjee, Rono 74, 192–93, 279, 298, 325, 336 Banerjee, Subrata 323, 351–52 Basu, Gautam 208, 244, 315–16, 323 Bhaskar, Gopal 222, 245, 354 Bhattacharya, Tamal 6 Chakrabarty, Debabrata 121, 129 Chowdhury, Partha 230, 246 Das, Anirban 16, 73, 214–15, 245–46, 326, 376 Das, Kishore 143 Das, Shibshankar 55, 73, 112, 177, 281–83, 292, 314, 320–21, 331, 352–53, 363 Dasgupta, Padmanabha 305, 337 Dasgupta, Partha 252, 290, 322 Dey, Purnendu 16, 113, 301–02 Dey, Tarun 263, 281, 291, 301 Dhar, Kamaldeep 204, 246, 283, 306–07, 321, 354 Dhar, Ranadhir 135, 137–38, 148, 183–84, 186, 188–89, 197–98 Dinda, Sanatan 42, 140, 145, 203, 207, 222, 254–58, 260–61, 277, 290–91, 301, 304–306, 337, 355, 357–58, 363 Ghosh, Arabinda 189–91, 198 Ghosh, Dipak 18, 44–45, 53, 73–74, 76, 175, 222, 224–26, 245 317, 323, 325, 379 Ghosh, Sanjit 54, 184–85, 191, 364 Goswami, Tamal Krishna 197, 241–42, 245 Kharati, Tapas 32, 220–21, 245 Kuinla, Gouranga 6, 28, 135, 148, 285–88, 292, 315, 326, 329, 352–53 Kundu, Rupchand 236, 248–49, 279, 292, 320. 337 Malakar, Ananta 130–31

388 in the name of the goddess Malik, Nirmal 2, 41, 245–46, 263, 280–81, 291–92, 319 Mukherjee, Sukhendu 304, 306–07 Pal, Prashanta 31, 283–85, 292, 312, 314, 326, 352 Pal, Sunil Chandra 178, 197 Pal, Sushanta 73, 146, 177, 200, 211, 213, 219, 244– 45, 271–77, 281, 283, 290–92, 296–97, 304–05, 312, 314, 317, 319–22, 325, 329, 338, 379 Payra, Souvik 329–30 Paria, Abhay 184 Poddar, Gopal 73, 177, 239–41, 246, 301–02, 305– 06, 317, 326 Rudra Pal, Debraj 178, 197, 297 Raha, Bandhan 67, 76, 116, 222, 245, 285, 310–12, 314, 329, 337 Ray, Subodh 54, 145, 207, 228–31, 246, 279–81, 292, 297, 299–301, 317, 319–21, 325, 336 Sarkar, Amar 19, 67, 73, 76, 145, 177, 201, 228–29, 231–32, 234, 236–39, 244, 246, 263, 277–79, 281–82, 290, 292, 296–97, 311–12, 314, 316– 17, 319, 321, 325, 336–37, 379 Sen, Aloke 172–73, 207 Sutar, Bhabatosh 13, 73, 135, 148, 203, 207, 244, 260, 262–64, 267–71, 277, 279, 281, 283, 290– 91, 297–98, 306, 312–14, 321, 329, 336–37, 344, 355, 357, 359, 363, 374, 379 Puja locations in the city– Ahiritola 5, 56, 265, 303 Badamtala, Kalighat 36, 60, 208, 333 Bagha Jatin 32, 36, 221, 294, 317, 337 Baghbazar 40, 61, 79, 96–97, 103, 137, 177, 203, 206, 245, 303, 332 Bakulbagan Road 122–23 Balaram Basu Ghat Street Road 96 Bangur Park, Lake Gardens 221 Beadon Square Park 165 Behala 6, 19, 45, 54–55, 57, 62–63, 67, 74, 76, 97– 98, 103, 112, 115, 133, 135, 161, 164, 178, 181, 191, 201, 218, 228–30, 235–37, 244, 246, 248, 260, 262–64, 272, 279–81, 290, 292, 295–301, 304, 306, 309, 311–12, 314, 321, 329, 336 Beleghata 51, 74–75, 195, 241, 326, 332 Beltala Vidyasagar Colony 32, 319 Bhowanipur 3, 21, 28, 35, 85, 96–97, 119–24, 143, 145–146, 177, 208, 236–37, 239, 246, 265, 268– 69, 289, 292, 303, 329, 340, 344

Bosepukur 55, 66–68, 78, 76, 105–07, 116, 148, 174, 177–78, 231–32, 236–38, 246, 274, 281–83, 285–86, 292, 306, 309–12, 314, 336–37, 352, 354, 357 Bosepukur Shitala Mandir 66–67, 74, 76, 105–07, 116, 148, 177–78, 231–32, 238, 246, 274, 282, 285, 292, 309, 311, 314, 337, 352, 354 Darpanarayan Tagore Lane 332 Deshapriya Park 130, 315 Dhakuria 32, 42–43, 53, 57, 67, 72, 97, 189, 279, 293–94, 311, 315, 317, 336–37, 355 Dover Lane 81, 111, 294, 315 Ekdalia Road 42, 114, 294 Gangulybagan 55, 107, 317, 319–20, 337 Haridebpur 35, 57, 62, 74, 112, 215, 231–32, 234, 245, 281, 283, 321–22, 337 Hatibagan , 29–30, 42–43, 70, 74, 82, 96, 119, 167, 177, 203–04, 206, 219, 222–23, 233, 239–40, 245, 254–57, 260, 272, 303–07, 312, 336–37, 354, 361 Hindustan Park 208, 239, 291, 294, 315, 317 Jodhpur Park 33, 35, 45, 57, 62, 72–74, 76, 137, 337, 358 Lake Gardens 221, 315 Lake Road 236, 315, 361 Lake Temple Road 14, 35, 54, 113, 148, 185, 191, 323, 352, 359 Lake Terrace 51, 216, 294 Lake View Road 34, 242, 315, 321, 323 Maniktala 16, 74, 95, 148, 214–15, 287, 303, 326, 329, 352 Monoharpukur Road 18, 217, 223, 245, 323, 339 New Alipore 38–39, 45, 62, 67, 74, 89, 99, 118, 142, 148, 175, 206, 223, 227–228, 245–46, 280, 315, 325, 338, 354 Prince Anwar Shah Road 315 Putiary 35, 57, 231–32, 246, 321, Salt Lake (Bidhannagar) 30, 63, 72, 79, 111, 114 Santoshpur 2, 16, 41, 55, 62, 73, 81, 111, 200, 203, 206, 213, 235–37, 244–46, 272–74, 280, 292, 317, 319, 337 Selimpur 39, 89, 197, 203, 211, 218, 234–35, 239, 241–42, 246, 271, 294, 317–18, 326, 337, 354 Puja package tours ‘Pujo Parikrama’ 41, 65, 338

index 389 putul murti 171 Pyne, Ganesh 127, 142, 244, 247 Rabindra Sarani (Chitpur Road) 111, 149–50, 158–61, 196, 303 Rabindra Sarovar (Dhakuria Lakes) 53, 97 Radio FM 355, 364 Rahman, Rizwanur 87, 113 Rai, Raghu 49 Raja Subodh Mullick Road 317, 319–20 Rajani Chitrakar 122 Ramakrishna Mission 26, 168, 347, 372 Ramayana 3, 25, 366 Ramprasad Shyamasangeet 25, 266, 291 Rashbehari Avenue 48, 68, 293–94, 306, 310, 315, 323 Rathajatra 36, 73 Ray, Bidhan Chandra 114, 171 Rio Carnival 334 river pollution: debates, concerns and preventive measures Roy, Debanjan 343, 363 Roy, Jamini 76, 119, 147, 163, 247, 312 Roy, Sumit 132, 135, 141, 147–48 Roychowdhury, Debiprasad 169 Roychowdhury, Sarbari 125 Sabarna Ray Chowdhury, Barisha 161, 295, 336, 372 Samachar Chandrika 92 Samachar Darpan 92 Sanchi Stupa replica 45, 318 Santhal Durga Puja, Sonajhuri, Santiniketan 250–51 Santiniketan 55, 147, 199, 241, 243, 250–51, 254, 283, 290, 306, 320, 325, 354, 366, 373 Saptami 2, 70–71, 87, 135, 148, 218, 245, 365, 368, 377 Saptasati Chandi 12 Saraswati Puja 37, 39 Sarat Bose Road 121, 186, 315 Sarbojanin 4, 14, 22, 24, 26, 29–30, 32, 40, 56, 58, 70, 72–74, 78, 81–82, 91, 93–101, 103–04, 111, 114–20, 122, 124, 133, 137, 142, 145–49, 153, 161, 166–67, 170, 173, 179, 183, 201, 203, 206, 212, 215, 219, 220, 223, 233, 243–45, 257, 260, 283–84, 290–92, 296, 299, 303–07, 311–12, 315, 323, 325, 331–32, 335–36, 352, 358, 368, 375

Sarkar, Nikhil (Sripantha) 91, 115 ‘Save the Ganga’ campaign 85, 112, 378 Schneider, Gregor 28, 187–88, 197, 288 Sen, Paritosh 125–26, 129–30 Sen, Suchitra 100, 166 Senate Hall of Calcutta University replica 57 Shakta 25, 161 Shalimar Paints advertisements 23 shamiana 179, 272 ‘Sharadotsab’ 4, 26, 101, 110, 338, 379 Sharat 3, 26, 40 Shasthi Shitala 37, 66–67, 74, 76, 105–07, 116, 148, 177–78, 194, 231–32, 238, 246, 274, 282, 285, 292, 309–11, 314, 337, 341, 342, 352, 354, Shiv Sena 97, 110 Shobhabazar 90, 92, 96, 114, 131, 150, 153, 163, 169, 303 Raja Nabakrishna Deb 90, 92, 153, 303 Shobhabazar Debs 96, 114 Shobhabazar Rajbati 90, 163 sholar saj 102, 162 Shuvaprasanna 140–42, 208, 357 Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Road 121 Siddhanta, Uma 127, 208, 244 Siddheswari Kali temple 153 sindur-khela 19, 323, 338, 340, 345, 369 Sinha, Kaliprasanna 92, 113 Sinha, Narayan 249, 290 Society of Contemporary Artists 125 Sonajhuri Durga Puja 251, 254, 290 Splash 136, 141, 148 Datta, Kaushik 141, 148 Nandy, Heerak 141, 148, 193, 195, 197, 374 Statue-makers, sculptors 120–21, 125, 127, 129, 158, 167–71, 191, 196, 208, 245 G. Paul & Sons 168 Pal, Sunil 158, 160, 178, 195, 197, 297, 305, 337 Paul, Asim 159

390 in the name of the goddess Paul, Monty 158 Ramesh Chandra Paul & Sons 169 Statues of – Bose, Kshudiram 171 Das, Deshabandhu Chittaranjan 170 Hazra, Matangini 171 Mookerjee, Sir Rajendranath 168 Ramakrishna Paramhamsa 168 Strand Road 159 Sukanta Setu 317, 319 Sydney Opera House replica 55–56 Tagore, Abanindranath 119, 165, 241, 289 Tagore, Rabindranath 243, 247, 250–51, 310, 321, 325, 334 Tantrik art pavilion 58 Tantrik Durga 218, 318 Telengabagan 74, 79, 157, 174–76, 196–97, 239, 243, 303 thakur-dalan 89, 113, 179, 369 Thakurmar Jhuli tableau 279, 320 ‘Theme’ Pujas 13, 17, 20–22 , 25, 29–30, 32, 37, 40, 42, 45, 54, 60–62, 67, 73, 75–76, 107, 117, 131–32, 136–38, 142, 149, 158, 170, 173, 175, 177–78, 183, 185, 188–89, 191, 193, 199–200, 203, 205–07, 210, 212, 214, –15, 217, 220, 222, 231, 233, 235, 243– 44, 247, 250, 277, 279, 281, 291, 293–96, 298–99, 303–05, 310–12, 314, 317, 320, 323, 326, 328, 331, 335, 338 The Statesman, Calcutta 75, 338, 376 The Telegraph, Calcutta 10, 26, 28, 71–76, 86, 109–13, 115–16, 146, 183, 195–97, 243–45, 290, 292, 337– 38, 363, 376

Tibetan Buddhist architecture, iconography 56–57, 257 Tilak, Bal Gangadhar 97 Times of India 5, 32, 33, 34, 72–74, 76, 85, 112, 290, 323, 328, 338, 363, 378 Titanic shipwreck replica 51, 190, 326 Titumeer’s bamboo fortress remake 57 Tollygunge 57, 62, 97, 124–25, 177, 191, 244, 271, 280, 282, 293, 309, 320–22, 335–37 Tribhuj 178, 297 Trinamool Congress 14, 17–18, 22, 38, 75, 104, 142, 148, 159, 187, 325, 337 Tritiya 50 23 Pally Durga Mandir 3 Ultadanga 23, 37, 73–74, 79, 152, 174, 193, 196–97, 246, 276–77, 303 utsab 4, 22, 46, 56, 64, 72, 74, 111, 138, 274, 319, 363, 365, 369, 374, 375 Vaishnav 25, 96 Varma, Ravi 167, 170, 196, 373 Vidyanidhi, Yogeshchandra 96, 114 Vishwakarma Puja 187 Warehouse Gallery, Rabindra Sarovar 357 West Bengal Fire Services 77 West Bengal Government 45, 63, 77, 79, 108, 113, 348 West Bengal State Electricity Board (WBSEB) 72, 77 West Bengal Tourism Development Corporation (WBTDC) 331 West Dinajpur bamboo masks and figures 233, 241 Writers’ Building 171 Youth Congress, West Bengal 100–01, 104