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 set-
up 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 0.2 The goddess Chitteshwari at one of the city’s
worship of different incarnations of goddess Kali. 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
 introduction 7

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 non-
Western 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 untrans-
latability of the concept to ‘non-disciplinarian,
voluntaristic, localized cults of non-centralized
religions such as Hinduism.’ Can there ever be any
15
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
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
8 in the name of the goddess
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 prize-
wining 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
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)
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 0.9 Snowcem ‘Pujo Perfect’ awards hoarding, Khidirpur,
street hoarding near Science City, October 2010 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

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 offence-
taking that has invaded contemporary India and
introduction 11
severely compromised the scope of any humorous
or artistic license with religious iconographies. The 20
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
21
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.
If I take for granted the now well-established
identity of the city Pujas as a commercialized mass-
celebration, I also turn to the huge outpouring of
12 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

0.15 Bhabatosh Sutar, Durga, Naktala Udayan Sangha Puja,
2012, now in the Rabindra Sarovar art gallery
intricately conceived architectural replicas, theme-
parks, 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
introduction 13
0.16 A new-style fair complexioned Kali by Pradip Rudra Pal at
the Kalighat Natun Sangha Puja, Kali Temple Road, 2010
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 master-
event, 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
14 in the name of the goddess
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
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.
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 image-
complex 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 apartment-
block 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

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.
introduction 15
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 17

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 0.20 Para residents with their Puja awards on display at the BE
Block (East) Puja, Salt Lake, 2008
redefines the internal territorial identity of the para
and delimits its boundaries vis-à-vis other Pujas in pandal construction with bamboo, ply planks and
the immediate and surrounding neighbourhoods. cloth cladding, and of electrical lighting decorations.
At the same time, it is the thickening network of In place of the earlier practices of the distribution
outside contacts which determines the competitive of commissions between separate groups of idol-
budgets, publicities, and awards profile of a Puja, makers, pandal decorators and light-bulb makers
inscribing various big and small neighbourhoods entered the period’s new notion of the ‘theme’ Pujas
on the festival map of the city through the cultural as an integrated unit of production, conceived and
prestige of their Pujas. (See 0.21) executed by a single designer and his work team.
With the change in creative personnel came a new
Closely tied to the unit of organization is the unit stake on individual authorship and style, and a new
of production, where a Puja consists of the central emphasis on synchrony and coordination between
ensemble of the goddess group, an elaborately all parts of the tableau. (See 0.23. 0.24) As my study
fabricated pavilion on the open grounds and streets of delves into these transmuting spheres of festival
a locality, often with gateways and a walkway leading productions, what emerges are a complex set of
into it, and the attendant surrounding topography negotiations and collaborations between older and
of illuminations and commercial signage. (See 0.22) newer practices, where we witness at different levels
It is in this sphere of production that contemporary both a congealing and a dissolving of boundaries
times have left their strongest imprints—in the between the work of ‘artists’ and ‘artisans’.
experimentation with different materials, mediums
and thematic concepts; in the changing appearances What also unfolds is the way the commercially
and iconographies of the goddess; and in the radical endorsed, corporate-sponsored identity of the
reconceptualization of the form of the pandal into ‘theme’ Puja transforms the social and spatial
‘art’ and ‘theme’ installations. This is where the logistics of the parar Puja and ends up both splitting
modern vocations of art and design have most and galvanizing the sense of the neighbourhood in
visibly intervened within the hereditary artisanal which it stands. The physical entity of the Puja, in
trades of idol-making in unfired alluvial clay, of 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

0.23 Interior of a ‘theme’ pavilion designed by Amar Sarkar,
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
introduction 19
0.24 Synchronized Durga image of the Behala Agradoot Club
Puja, 2008
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?
20 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
22 in the name of the goddess
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.
a time for ending
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

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
introduction 23
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
24 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
0.29 Century Ply advertisement banner enveloping the full Puja pavilion, Chakraberia Sarbojanin Puja, 2012
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

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.
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
introduction 25
0.30 Hoarding with the Chief Minister’s festival greetings for
Durga Puja, Id, Deepavali and Chhat Puja, 2013
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 Debi-
paksha, 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
26 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.
5 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.
6 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.
7 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.
8 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 year-
long 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 Nineteenth-
Century 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

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.
14 Ibid., p.77
15 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons
of Power in Christianity and Islam, London and Baltimore:
John Hopkins University Press, 1993, Introduction, pp.1-
2, ‘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.
16 This is extensively shown, for instance, in Sukumar Sen,
Kabikankan Mukunda-birachita Chandi-Mangala, New
Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1975.
17 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.
18 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).
19 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.
20 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,
introduction 27
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
28 in the name of the goddess
through a full month of their construction; (ii) free-
lance film-maker Nilanjan Bhattacharya’s Ninety Degrees
(Kolkata, 2013, 38 minutes), which centres on a much-
publicized ‘collaborative’ production by the German
installation artist Gregor Schneider, with conventional
pandal-makers at the Ekdalia Evergreen Puja site during
the season of 2011.
26 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.
27 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.
28 Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, Jonathan Van
Antwerpen, Rethinking Secularism, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011, p.77.(Emphases added)
29 ‘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.