After two years of Covid-19 and UNESCO tag, Bengal celebrates Durga Puja with vengeance

The pandemic interrupted the carnival atmosphere of the festival but Kolkata and Bengal are making up for the lost time this year

UNESCO concluded that the Durga Puja in Kolkata was an intangible heritage for humanity. For Kolkata, regardless of the cultural identity of the visitor, the Pujas are about joining in the celebration and doing it your way.

It is a challenge to find an answer to the puzzle of what makes Durga Puja an "intangible heritage for humanity" because, for the average resident of the state of West Bengal, it is an annual celebration. Everyone looks forward to it, and does their own thing. That looking forward has nothing to do with the solemnity of worshipping a powerful goddess and her four children, all very influential and powerful deities in their own right.

The intangibility of the heritage is the freewheeling spirit of the celebration. It is all very eclectic. Down the narrow road leading up to the famously extravagant and always novel Sreebhumi Durga Puja led by a powerful politician and Trinamool Congress minister, Sujit Bose, among the shops open past midnight, inside a hair salon, there were customers getting haircuts, massages and perhaps a blow dry.

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Sreebhumi this year has put up a pandal that seeks to replicate the Vatican. It is magic created with paint, plaster, plywood, bamboo, ropes, and lights. The dome of St Paul's Basilica, at one end of the square Piazzale San Paolo in Rome, is recreated. Behind the goddess, there are cherubs and angels. In the arched entrance way into the mandap, the ceiling is painted to resemble the work that the great Michelangelo and others produced. No one is bothered that the goddess is inside a basilica, one of the holiest places of the Catholic Church. Everyone is awestruck by the recreation. Last year, the goddess was inside the landmark Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

Some plan getaways because offices and the state government are shut for several days. Some plan a culinary feast, at home or in eateries, restaurants, hotels and even streets, sampling what makes the celebration special. Some plan intensively to go on tours to "see" the pujas across the city. They hop and queue to visit pandals that are prize-winning, noteworthy aesthetically, and have themes and installations that are "new", exceptional and always unique; not one of the 46,000 plus pujas celebrated in West Bengal is like any other.

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The Durga Puja is a bundle of things; worship of the deity is just one part of it for the faithful. For those who have no interest in worship, or performing the one puja on the most auspicious day of the five-day festival, for unbelievers, apostates and others, everyone has their own take on what makes Durga Puja 'The Durga Puja'.

The collective celebration by the community is entirely misleading. Micro-communities, each with their own way of organising the celebration, have specific identities and traditions, reputations and awards. The competition between communities is intense. The organisers work overtime to get noticed and awarded.

Jayanta Banerjee of Chorbagan Sarbojonin Durgotsab Samity is as uniquely himself in his role as the organisation's secretary as he is typical of all such organisers. Clad in shorts, alert and watchful after two in the morning, Banerjee explained his puja, its mission and its journey. As one of the pujas on the list of 22 venues, that were opened with the deity installed for the UNESCO world heritage team, along with the British Council before the formal start of the auspicious Devi Paksha, Chorbagan's secretary was fully conscious of the status his puja had gained.

He said he has been working since 2017 to put Chorbagan on the map. "That year, we began the theme pujas. People were sceptical about a venue called Chorbagan, which literally translates to Thieves Orchard. There were suggestions to rename the location," Banerjee said. He added, "I refused. I said we will make our name stand out."

His partner is artist Bimal Samanta, who has been working with Chorbagan Sarbojonin Durgotsab Samity to create award-winning themes and breath-taking installations said, "Residents are proud of the puja. They put up with welders and decorators working through the night, the lights, the scene and the action." About his work, he said: "For three years, I have collected bottles and glass shards to put together this year's theme of antarshakti, or inner power.

The pandal is a stunning installation, a soaring glass-filled space." The interior is not large, but Samanta has pulled it off by tricking the eye and the mind into believing there is infinite space. That the combination of tiny and larger bottles, some whole and some neatly cut to specific sizes, bottles that have been cut to resemble drinking glasses in green, brown and white, could invoke a very different spirit is the sort of liberty that the Durga Puja celebrants give to themselves, to create just that frisson of excitement by deliberately stunning the visitor.

The ambience, the deity, and the worship come together in mysterious, tangible, and intangible ways. Imposing political agendas on the peoples' festival is like riding piggyback for parties that need the occasion to boost their image.

In recent years, the Durga Puja has become a political battleground. Mamata Banerjee, in some sense, pioneered this. During the Left Front years, when the Communist Party of India (Marxist) was in power, to differentiate herself, Mamata Banerjee seized the pujas as an occasion to demonstrate her god-fearing persona by inaugurating community pujas, chanting the Chandipath or Devi Mahatmya and painting in the eye, in a ceremony called Chokkhudaan, that converts the inert clay image into the living spirit of the goddess.

In the highly competitive politics of West Bengal, the Bharatiya Janata Party, which has been singularly unsuccessful in promoting itself as a Durga Puja organiser since it has not one leader who even comes close to rivalling Sujit Bose or Arup Biswas or the late Subrata Mukherjee as puja patrons, or indeed lesser Trinamool Congress leaders who oversee puja committees, the strategists decided to provoke a fight.

One year, the BJP campaigned that the pujas were being curtailed to accommodate Muharram as part of Muslim appeasement politics. The culturally ignorant party converted this into an election campaign issue in 2021. The absurdity of the campaign, especially when Amit Shah thundered on about it, made Bengalis smirk. They knew better.

The manufactured controversy that erupted over who initiated the decision to apply to UNESCO for the world heritage tag - was it the Centre or the Mamata Banerjee government - is now a forgotten story. The political friction over who converted the local puja into an internationally recognised heritage can go on and on, but the people in West Bengal are getting into the mood to celebrate.

Does the difference between nation and local matter? It does for the intensely political. The Durga Puja claims case, foolishly so, is an event to notch up that entirely intangible thing called political support. Applications to UNESCO, have to be submitted by the national government. In Kolkata, where just anything is sufficient to trigger a confrontation, what mattered was which government, state or union, had originally taken the initiative to apply to UNESCO.

If this is a classic case of making mountains out of molehills, the Bengali public, just to get into the swing of things, as a warm-up to the start of the festival, decided to completely engage in taking sides and lobbing verbal missiles depending on political leanings. Entirely predictably, the CPIM lashed out, as did the BJP and the Congress. They spewed spurious anger and jeers against Mamata Banerjee over ownership of the initiative for the UNESCO application, as though it mattered. The opposition banded together to trash Mamata Banerjee's direct cash transfers to "clubs" that have organically evolved into organisers of the 40,000 odd pujas that are celebrated across the state.

Argumentative as Indians are, competitive politics has taken it to another level. Having overlooked the routine adopted by the Beleghata 33 Pally Adhibasibrindo Durga Puja since 2019, when it played the Azaan this year, the BJP has decided to attack the decision of the local puja committee. Not to be left out of the fight, the Hindu Jagaran Manch jumped in. An FIR has been filed, and the issue is just as divisive and controversial as it was years ago. The difference between 2019 and 2022 is the anxiety that this politics has triggered. "This opens the route to demanding that mosques play the Chandipath," a concerned citizen said.

The pandemic interrupted the carnival atmosphere of the festival. There were restrictions. There was fear, pujas were downsized, and distancing rules queered the mood. Kolkata and West Bengal are making up for the lost time this year.

People began pandal hopping even before Mahalaya, September 25, which is day one of the ten-day Devi Paksha. As soon as the 22 selected pujas on the UNESCO-British Council list opened for sneak peeks, those armed with passes -smart cards with QR Codes – hit the roads. In each of these pandals, the goddess was installed, even as the teams of pandal makers and decorators, electricians and carpenters worked round the clock to finish their work.

As a people's festival, the Durga Puja is inclusive. It has evolved in that way, specifically after 1947 and the Partition. Distinguished scholar and art historian Tapati Guha Thakurta, in a recent conversation with a digital news organisation, pointed out that the pujas have metamorphosed into Sarbojanin, that is, for everybody, celebrations from the original community pujas organised by a brotherhood, baroari, which literally is twelve friends.

These pujas, organised by the local community through clubs or other social organisations, are different from the private celebrations of wealthy, mostly landed families, that is, the zamindars or prices, created mostly through the infamous and now annulled 1793 Permanent Settlement Act.