Durga Puja in Kolkata

It is that time of the year again - when Ma Durga comes visiting with her four children (Lakshmi, Saraswati, Ganesh and Kartik) to her natal home down in the plains, leaving her husband's (Lord Shiva) abode in the Himalayas for ten days. It is a Hindu festival, particularly special to Bengalis, who celebrate it unfailingly wherever in the world they may be. However, nothing can match the native celebration in Bengal, especially in the city of Kolkata.  

This will be my third Durga Puja in Kolkata after leaving the Netherlands in 2017. For a decade before that, I was always away during this time, visiting the city annually only in Christmas.

The Expat Experience

Honestly speaking, I didn't exactly miss Durga Puja in the Netherlands. As part of KALLOL, the Indian Bengali Association there, we celebrated it with much fanfare at Voorschoten every year; and actually did it in a way, and with an involvement, that we'd never done in Kolkata. But the expat experience is very different - both less and more 'authentic' than the real one. More, because in its eagerness, it often goes overboard in observing the rituals; and less, because it can never approximate the experience of the city.

Back in Kolkata

For the ten days of the Puja, Kolkata is transformed - the whole city is decked as a bride and looks beautiful! I witnessed this after ages in 2017 and 2018. My predilection was actually to sleep through it - the previous two months in both the years having been exceptionally exhausting for me - but my daughter, Srishti, was super-enthusiastic about the Pujas and I couldn't deny her that. Especially, in the first year, as it took her mind away from missing Amsterdam. By the second Durga Puja in October 2018, however, she was already enjoying the Puja for its own sake. 

Incidentally, what she loves most about it - the lights in the streets - is neither  very uniquely Indian nor Bengali. The big capitals of the West are as resplendent with light during Christmas. And for a longer time. The festive mood always prolonged a tad bit (I feel). What is unique about the Durga Puja, however, is the 'pandals' - or pavilions - where the goddess is housed with her family.

'Pandal-hopping' during the Pujas is an inevitable part of a Bengali's (actually anyone's) childhood in Kolkata. I have had my fair share of it as a child and teenager, but had long stopped enjoying that bit later. Because, over the years, I felt, the core of the festival had been overshadowed by the frills. The puja itself - the worship of the goddess, the prayer part - had been pushed into the background; and what became increasingly important was the scale and grandeur of the pavilions. And I hated the gendered long queues before all the reputed pandals, having to spend hours to see just one idol. What an utter waste of time! I much preferred spending the puja days with my two bosom pals at each other's homes, wearing new sarees of course (that part I've always loved), and content with admiring each other!

In 2017, I didn't mind the usual Puja stuff so much as I was seeing everything afresh through Srishti's eyes; and because we did very low-key pandal-hopping, restricting  ourselves to our neighbourhood (with no queues), and a spin through (part of) North Kolkata in our car one evening. But last year, Srishti got a real taste of the excitement of pandal-hopping when, sitting atop her dad’s shoulders, amidst a jostling crowd of some hundreds, she saw one of the most famed and expensive pandals (with its idols decked in gold) at Sreebhumi. She also enjoyed her time with the children of two of my friends who are roughly the same age as her, the meetings allowing inter-generational friendships that added a totally new dimension to our socializing!  

The 'para'

Throughout the Pujas in the last two years, in the midst of all the renewed excitement imparted by my daughter, I was reminded a lot of one of my conversations about vanishing neighbourhoods in Asian cities with Prof. Mike Douglass, a social scientist renowned for his work on urban planning in Asia (in an interview that I’d taken of him at IIAS, Leiden, in June 2016). Because if the Durga Puja is anything, it is one great valorisation of the neighbourhood - the 'para', as we call it in Bangla. For the ten days of the festival, one's identity is principally tied to one's 'para' - and there is fierce competition regarding the pandals. Especially after Asian Paints instituted an award for the best pandal in the 1990s. 'Durga Puja Committees' in hundreds of paras have vied with each other ever since to rope in the best idol-makers, artists and architects in a bid to win the prize. There is tremendous creativity that this months'-long effort and enthusiasm engenders. I admire that enthusiasm - though never unreservedly. 

The unsavoury bit 

Let me share an anecdote to explain why: On the last working day before the Pujas in 2017, I was late in returning home. On my way back from College Street, the only cab-driver who agreed to take me home decided to go for a shortcut - just before Manicktola, to avoid the inevitable longer waits at the main signals on that route during this festive season. But it turned out to be not so much a shortcut of distance as a shortcut to darkness. For within a few seconds, from blinding lights, we were literally plunged into total darkness - a stinking, suffocating darkness, where ghost-like figures in hovels went about resignedly with a cursed existence.

It's such a cliché to talk of the disparities between the rich and the poor in the metros in India (as in most mega-cities in the world). We in Kolkata are used to seeing slums along the road - people washing, cleaning, bathing openly, displaying almost a cheerful kind of street domesticity. But the experience of that pre-puja evening was very different: it brought home to me the fact that all those glittering lights on the main streets in long preparation for festivities to come must necessarily exclude the poor, esp. the abysmally poor. 

It is this disparity that I've found the most difficult to accept after my return, post my ten years in the Netherlands. I had lived in Kolkata for 33 years before that. So the differences of caste and class are not new to me. And yet, the utter disparity between the haves and have-nots now strikes me in a way that it didn't before. Not even during our mandatory, annual 3-week holidays. Have I changed? Or has the city become more unequal? I don't know.

'Pujo-pujo rob'

Durga Puja is in the air. The seasonal markers of 'sarat' - when the Puja happens - are unmistakable: 'shoroter megh, kaash phool' (the clouds of sarat, kaash flowers).... 

Kolkata dwellers don't get to see much of that, though. But there are other unavoidable signifiers: for one, there are the innumerable hoardings for Puja shopping everywhere, with all brands advertising their 'special Puja collection' and all products offering a 'special Puja discount', of course. Not to speak of all female models (read Tollywood, and of late Bollywood, heroines) wearing the traditional Bengali red-bordered white sari to endorse everything from jewellery and clothes to turmeric and cooking oil.  

But increasingly, as the Puja days approach, the most visible sign of its countdown are the work-in-progress 'pandals' that come up everywhere - that not only restrict the traffic flow at several important junctions of the city, but also necessitate all kinds of commuting re-arrangements within neighbourhoods. The resulting inconvenience is usually borne willingly by the residents!   

The ten days of the Puja - with the festivities rising to a crescendo in the last four days - can easily be termed as one of the greatest shows on earth: it definitely rivals the biggest cultural festivals anywhere in the world. But on the tenth and last day - ‘Dashami’ - the gregariousness of the celebrations is toned down by the poignancy of the goddess's return to her husband, leaving her natal home. In a culture where a woman's identity is still overwhelmingly tied up with her marital status, Durga's return has an emotional resonance that few other pujas have in India.

But then, Bengalis look forward to the next year saying, ‘Ascchhe bochhhor abar hobe’, even as they immerse the goddess in the Ganges.