Growing up in Kolkata, Durga Puja was a fact of life. We knew to expect the 15 day break from school, and planned our vacations around it. Parents were happy to leave the city, because they knew everything here was going to be shut anyway. When we were in town, I remember three days of intense planning, commotion, and excitement. Nine cousins, along with parents, and sometimes one set of common grandparents, piled into one to two cars, setting out for a night of pandal-hopping. VIP passes were pre-arranged wherever possible; from relatives, and neighbours, and relatives of neighbours. For the pandals where we didn’t have passes, which was often the case, we stood in long queues, squished between sweaty crowds, clutching onto each others’ hands, in order to not get lost. I was the youngest of the lot, and was paid special attention to.
There was some kind of method to the madness. Adults of the group, of which I was definitely not a part, had an area-wise list of pandals worth visiting. This included the pandals they had been going to since they were kids, and the ones that people around them were talking about. Newspapers carried lists of the top twenty pandals, and sometimes we took these clippings with us on our nightly outings. I am sure I must have been awed by the creativity of the pandals (I considered myself an artist after all)–but mostly, I remember looking forward to the giant ferris wheels, the swinging columbus rides, and the spinning seats with Eveready stickers plastered on them–where I sat squished between cousins, and laughed endlessly from the butterflies in my stomach. My father loved taking us to the maut ka kua, the well of death, where cars and bikes raced each other at extremely high-speeds, along the slanted walls of a cylindrical rink. The whole setup was made of wood, and part of the excitement was feeling the rink vibrate under our feet, as cars and bikes whizzed past us.
Over time, cousins started shifting out. One got married, two moved out for college, the rest got busy with their higher education. I was growing up too. Friends had entered the picture, and pujo turned into an opportunity for us to develop and explore our adolescent relationships outside of adult supervision. We were keen to see what the world looked like, beyond the one that our parents had allowed us to experience.
When I left for college in Pune in 2017, I became aware for the first time of a world outside my city. By now, Instagram had permeated deep into our everyday lives, and so, come pujo, our feeds showed us what the festivities back home looked like. Still, I did not feel the kind of intense longing that you might expect from someone who had grown up around these festivities. College was a confusing time. We were figuring out our relationships with religion, and the politics of religion, and being seen posing next to a Hindu god felt like a big taboo. With a heavy dose of judgement, and righteous scorn, we turned our noses up against anyone even remotely religious. Going home to celebrate the festival was out of the question.
In 2023, when I landed in Kolkata, freshly proffered with a Masters degree from the US, the city felt like it was in the midst of a grand celebration. I sent pictures of the lights on the street, and videos of people squished in serpent-like queues, to my friends abroad. Just 22 hours ago I was in a country that felt like it was devoid of religion. And here I was now, surrounded by hordes of people, gathered together in the backs of trucks, drawn to a single deity, almost like by a magnetic pull they could not resist. The difference between yesterday and today, the west and the east, felt stark.
Was no one else seeing this? Why wasn’t anyone talking about it? I wanted desperately to communicate this disconnect, but didn’t know how.
This year, pujo rolled in per my expectations. Bamboo barricades started appearing around the city a month prior to the festival, and pujo traffic–especially in shopping heavy areas–was a thing we were constantly trying to avoid. It was exciting to see the city transform itself with adult eyes–without disdain, scorn, or anxiety laden anticipation. I received whatsapp forwards about donation drives, and pre-booked tours that take you to the city’s top pandals. Carefully curated whatsapp groups were formed to make pujo-plans. Newspapers started feeling thicker with several pages of advertisements, and Instagram stories from all-night pandal-hopping trips made sure to keep me updated about who was hanging out with whom (in more than just a friendly way).
In 2021, Durga Puja was inscribed on the “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity” list by UNESCO. With this tag came UN and other important delegations to the city, international visibility, and a responsibility for the government to further formalise and structure this existing community tradition. This year, I sensed slightly the weight of this responsibility in how things were carried out. Even as the pandal themes covered the spectrum of political to purely aesthetic, they felt slightly more polished and curated, with rough edges sanded off in order for them not to offend. It was not just fun and games anymore. The world now has its eyes on us.
Politics and commerce are not new to the pujo festivities. However, something felt different this year. Brand campaigns surrounding the festival were not only much more numerous, but also more attuned to what people want to see and share. Reels on Instagram felt more produced and prolific than before; not just the ones coming from ‘content-creators,’ but also those coming from normies surfing the app–in fact the line between the two feels increasingly more blurred. I sensed a renewed festive gusto, where going pandal-hopping had become an event, and documenting and sharing this event was an inadvertent part of this experience.
It feels like something is shifting– the potency of religion feels like it is slowly and gradually subsumed by the performance of it. This takeover, however, is far from complete.
In this series of drawings, I was on a search for the moments of the festival that lay outside of its performance. I visited a pandal that was still under construction, and two neighbourhood pandals which were bereft of elaborate themes and grand productions. This wasn’t intentional–as I walked around my house, it was the quieter pandals that caught my attention. They had visually interesting setups– old iron grills, brightly coloured shamiyanas, and elaborate chandeliers; I saw people sitting around, or walking in, in the middle of the day with a child, or an older relative, to offer pranam. I saw pandits dosing off to sleep during the afternoon lull, and dhakais changing out of their jeans and sneakers into their dhotis, just in time for the aarti. While these pujos were not on my pandal-hopping circuit, they offered me time and space to draw in, without being pulped by a sweaty crowd, or inundated by the whistles of guards telling you what not to do. It was these neighbourhood pandals that gave me a hint of what the festival looks like behind its chest thumping performance.
