These days, as the time nears for her annual descent to earth, Ma Durga is overcome by a new kind of anxiety. Not her usual set of worries about whether the September rains will abate to allow her beautiful images, grand architectural abodes and street tableaux to be completed in time for her arrival, or about whether the autumnal skies will remain clear for the few days of her homecoming. There is a different edge to her current trepidations.
Nowadays, the goddess finds her puja competing with a feast of festivals in the city, each borrowing the template of her event and taking on bigger and bigger proportions. Why, she wonders, has every other Bengali neighbourhood club taken so fervently to the public worship of Ganesh, in tandem with the cities of western and southern India? She reminds her gloating elephant-headed son that his public appearance in Bengal was for long restricted to a spot within her family entourage. And the only moment of glory allowed to this bachelor god was on Saptami morning, when he was ceremoniously wedded to a banana tree (kola-bou).
Competing with Ma
Durga watches in bewilderment, and not without a little irritation, at the way Christmas in Park Street has been converted, with government support, into a plebeian Jishu Utsab, blazing with garish Chandannagar lighting, and drawing crowds almost on the same scale as her puja.
She is astounded by the way the worship of many subaltern deities like Shitala, Tara Ma or Raksha Kali is trespassing into elite south Kolkata neighbourhoods where her puja had always reigned supreme.
Also multiplying by the day are the anniversary celebrations in every locality of a line-up of Bengal’s secular gods — with Vivekananda and Netaji Pujas presaging Saraswati Puja, come January, and come Independence Day, the fanfare of ‘Freedom at Midnight’ pujas.
The irony of the new hype around the inaugural ritual of the Khoonti puja is not lost on the goddess. What used to be a small traditional ritual among idol-makers — who on Rathayatra day would initiate the idol-making by consecrating a piece of slit bamboo (bansher khoonti), which goes into the inner frame of the idol — has now become all the rage in the fund-flush puja organising committees, who use the ritual to herald the Pujas in June and July.
Meanwhile, the plight of the impoverished clay-modellers of Kumartuli, among the biggest idol-making centres in the country, remains unchanged. Divided between these two locations, still awaiting their promised rehabilitation by the government, these artisans are now freshly burdened by the imposition of GST on their craft.
Who then are the main beneficiaries and what is sustaining the city’s endless spate of festivities? The key players are the neighbourhood clubs, all of which enjoy the largesse of the ruling party and are controlled by political patrons, big and small, for whom the year-round organisation of festivities has become a prime political activity. Riding on the festival wave is the government-led ‘beautification’ drive of public spaces.
First came the trishul-shaped lamp-posts, and then the strings of blue and white lights lining avenues and flyovers. And later, a series of tableaux across parks and street roundabouts, featuring fibreglass menageries, disproportionate statues of famous people, curious replicas of the London and Howrah bridges, and the eyesore brand of the Biswa-Bangla globe to showcase the Chief Minister’s imagination of a global Bengal.
Aesthetic assault
Places like Lake Town, Salt Lake or Baishnabghata Patuli have borne the main brunt of these beautification whims. An unaccounted flow of civic funds is going into these newest variants of ‘popular art’, whose aesthetic assault on the city is legitimised by the new visual thrust of the State’s populist politics.
There are good reasons here for Durga’s apprehensions of being decentred. The illuminations, architectural replicas, theme parks and folk-art villages that were once the sole prerogative of her festival have today swamped Kolkata all through the year.
Ma Durga has also had to learn to live with her larger-than-life human prototype, whose face now competes with hers on all hoardings and persists through the year long after her own image disappears.
She is aware, of course, that this other ‘Ma’ of Bengal has not only become the greatest sponsor of her festival, but has also freely grafted on her persona. She is grateful though that this Ma’s experiments in puja designing (tried once at Bakul Bagan in 2010) never took off and that both she and the city were spared more of her ‘abstract’ art of the kind on permanent display at New Town.
And she is both relieved and amused at the central role her political counterpart has now assumed in bringing her image to life, by personally painting the third eye of the goddess on Mahalaya morning at some of the city’s prominent puja sites.
Beginning with the frenzy of inaugurations, the Chief Minister has gone all out since 2011 to convert Durga Puja into a State event. She has made it mandatory, for example, for municipal departments to sponsor 10 pujas in the city and at least one in each district; she has introduced the government’s own series of Biswa Bangla awards; she has also extended Puja holidays to over a week and has ensured a complete shut-down of all offices, including those of newspapers, during this time.
Most importantly, she has developed an apparatus — through her party, the police and the bureaucracy — to master-manage the entire festival from the beginning to the crescendo of the immersions.
Durga is particularly embarrassed by the latest takeover. Since last year, a new ritual has been introduced to the immersion procession, in which the largest and most spectacular images are paraded in their river-bound trucks along Red Road, offering and taking their last salutes from the Chief Minister.
Durga, we must admit, has always been the most sporting and accommodating of deities. For over two centuries now, she has indulged worshippers as they turned the occasion into one of hedonism and revelry, feasting, competitions and awards.
She has seen the pomp and ostentation move from the aristocratic homes of old Calcutta to the big Sarbojanin (community) pujas of the north, centre and south.
The religiosity of her worship has always freely blended with the sociability of a larger cultural and communitarian celebration. The goddess has been equally at home in the small family pujas and in the big-budget, crowd-pulling, glitzy public affairs, where her idols morph to suit current fads and the pandals take on the form of architectural monuments from across the world.
Humanised and domesticated, she has shown remarkable adaptability in keeping up with changing times and tastes. In today’s consumerist festival, Durga is easily the most sought-after advertising icon of the season.
She has liberally lent her image and her iconography to the endorsement of all products and services, from computers to alcohol brands, from matrimonial services to hospital packages, without any sense of threat to her sacrality. Her promiscuous entanglements with the everyday world of consumption and celebration have never diminished but only enhanced her presence as Bengal’s most beloved goddess.
Durga in the beauty salon
That’s why Durga is particularly appalled by the recent malicious controversy around an advertisement that showed her and her family at a fashionable Jawed Habib parlour.
As many avid supporters of her salon visit have pointed out, the goddess feels not the least bit defiled by this light-hearted depiction. If every other modern Bengali woman has felt free to don her identity during this season, why is she not entitled to some pampering too?
Who are these Hindus whose religious sentiments have been offended by her visit to Habib’s parlour, she demands to know. And how dare they direct their venom against its owner for his Muslim name and force an apology out of him? There is much at stake here: the festival has a rich history of humour, irreverence and creative licence that must be defended. She cannot let the narrow-minded politics of religious chauvinism that is invading the rest of India destroy the markedly different spirit of her puja in Bengal.
Return to brashness
In recent times, the festival has been taking an unmissable and striking artistic turn. In the 2000s, Durga revelled in the trend of modern artists and designers entering the fray of her festival productions, working closely with traditional craftsmen and folk artists, to produce ‘art’ and ‘theme’ pujas and convert the occasion of her homecoming into Kolkata’s biggest public art event.
Her ephemeral images and abodes came to be coveted as art collectibles. These were also the years when municipal authorities and corporate sponsors came together to bring a modicum of civic order to the event, introducing regulations against electricity pilferage, encroachment of roads, rising decibels and river pollution.
The festival has turned many cycles. In the latest, Durga is witnessing the jading of ‘theme’ pujas, the sidelining of artists by political patrons, and the return of the festival to brashness and gimmickry.
The premium on artistry and connoisseurship has given way to crude excesses of scale and publicity, even as Durga Puja remains Kolkata’s most successfully administered mass public event. Over time, the goddess has experienced different political appropriations, for instance, by Congress nationalists in the 30s and 40s, or by Youth Congress activists in the 60s and 70s.
She has watched the Left Front’s prolonged ambivalence and slow entry into the thick of this populist event, and the growing political mileage that the rival Trinamool Congress gained from its full-fledged involvement. But never before has she faced such complete cultural and political assimilation by a ruling party and a State government as today.
Striking a bargain
There are, of course, strong strategic advantages here that cannot be ignored. For the assimilation has happened not in the name of a majoritarian religion but under the long-established rubric of a Sarbojanin Utsab — “a festival for all” — of an inclusive secular celebration that must transcend religion, creed and class. Durga is fully aware that her current political patron remains her most powerful safeguard against the incursions of the Hindu right-wing in the State and their growing claims on her worship.
So she condones the iron will with which Mamata Banerjee has, in recent years, imposed stringent rules on the timings of the immersion of her deities, to ensure that it does not clash with Eid or Muharram that have followed immediately afterwards. And she approves of the way Bengal’s government has slammed BJP’s plans for a processional worship of weapons on Bijoya Dashami to compete with the flags and swords of the Muharram procession that will take place the day after.
In this newest cycle of her festival, the goddess seems to have unwittingly struck a bargain with her effervescent political boss: if Durga is hers to own, propagate and impersonate, her pujas have in turn offered the Chief Minister a full paraphernalia of running the State, dissolving all boundaries between modes of festivities and modes of governance. And this is why, whatever the season, it never ceases to be festival time in her city.
The writer is a professor of history and author of In the Name of the Goddess: The Durga Pujas of Contemporary Kolkata.
