Ask people in Kolkata when their year really begins and many will tell you: on the morning of Mahalaya, when the radio plays Mahishasura Mardini before dawn. A week later the city gives itself over to the goddess for five days. Offices empty, roads close to cars, and whole neighbourhoods turn into galleries that stay open all night.
It was not always a street festival. For most of its history in Bengal, the autumn puja belonged to the households that could afford it.
The goddess in the courtyard
The autumn worship of Durga is called akal bodhan, the untimely awakening. Its story comes from the Krittivasi Ramayan, the Bengali retelling of the epic, in which Rama calls on the goddess out of season before his battle with Ravana. The older worship of Durga falls in spring, as Basanti Puja, and is still kept in some homes.
In Bengal the grand autumn puja grew up in the houses of landowners. The rites were held in the thakurdalan, the pillared hall that opens onto a family’s courtyard, and the household fed its tenants, priests and neighbours for days. The Sabarna Roy Choudhury family’s puja in Barisha, in the south of the city, traces itself back to 1610, which makes it one of the oldest in the Kolkata area.
In 1757, after the Battle of Plassey, Raja Nabakrishna Deb held a lavish puja at his new house in Sovabazar, reportedly with Robert Clive among the guests. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the pujas of these old families, the bonedi bari, became occasions to show wealth and connections, with music, dance and feasts. Many still run today, mostly in north Kolkata, and visiting them is a different experience from the big community pandals: quieter, older, and run by the same families for generations.
Twelve friends and a new idea
In 1790, in Guptipara in Hooghly, twelve friends pooled their money for a puja that anyone could attend. Bengali calls twelve friends baro yaar, and the word barowari, a puja paid for by a group rather than a family, came from them.
In the early twentieth century the idea reached Kolkata as the sarbojanin puja, the puja for everyone. Bhowanipore’s Sanatan Dharmotsahini Sabha held one in 1910, and Bagbazar’s community puja began in 1919. Neighbourhood committees collected chanda, a subscription, from every household, and the puja moved from the courtyard to the street corner and the local park.
The freedom movement found a home in these pujas. Some committees used them to promote swadeshi goods, physical training and patriotic exhibitions; Simla Byayam Samity, whose puja began in 1926, was known for it. The community puja became something a neighbourhood did together, and it still is: the para, the neighbourhood, is at the centre of it.
The age of the theme
For most of the twentieth century a sarbojanin puja looked familiar: a single frame, the ekchala, holding Durga and her four children, under a pandal of bamboo and cloth. From the 1990s, competition between committees and the arrival of corporate awards pushed things further. Committees began to hire artists to design the whole pandal around a theme: a temple from another part of India, a social cause, a craft from a Bengal village, or a single material such as clay cups, jute or glass.
Today the biggest pujas work with art directors for months. The pandal, the idol and the lighting are designed as one piece, and award juries tour the city before Shashthi to judge them. The traditional pujas never went away. In north Kolkata especially, the ekchala idol in silver-foil ornaments still draws crowds of its own.
A city’s festival
The puja is also an economy. Idol makers, carpenters, electricians, tailors, dhakis, caterers and printers all depend on it. A 2019 study commissioned by the British Council put the creative economy around Durga Puja in West Bengal at about ₹32,000 crore.
In December 2021, UNESCO added Durga Puja in Kolkata to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, describing it as the best example of religion and art performed in public. Since 2016 the state government has also held a carnival on Red Road after Dashami, where a selection of the year’s pujas parade their idols.
Asche bochor abar hobe.
For all its scale, the festival is still made locally. Someone on your street collected the chanda, someone’s uncle argued about the budget, and someone’s children will be up all night on Ashtami. That is what UNESCO listed, and what the city waits for all year.