Hopes had been high about the restoration of the famed winter fair, Poush Mela, at Santiniketan this year, thanks to the change of guard at Visva-Bharati. All that came to nought as the university on Monday announced that it would not be holding the event. The fair was last held in 2019.
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A joint statement issued by the Santiniketan Trust (under whose aegis the event is held) and Visva-Bharati (which actually organises the event) after a meeting held on Monday morning said that it did not seem feasible for them to organise the Poush Mela in 2023 “despite all good intentions”.
“Despite [Prof. Sanjoy Mallik’s] efforts since joining as Vice-Chancellor, the period since that date (November 5), as well as days remaining from today, is extremely short to arrange an event of the scale and significance of the Poush Mela. All stakeholders unanimously opined for the transparency of the online system for booking of stalls; however, despite an email message and a follow-up phone call the university is yet to hear from IIT-Kharagpur (which had created a software that has now expired),” the statement said.
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“The opinion in the last meeting of the Executive Council regarding obtaining fresh directives from the National Green Tribunal [due to the gap of years between the last mela] is also awaited. Members of the Santiniketan Trust emphasised that a small, symbolic mela is financially non-viable. Associated essentials like cleaning of the water bodies adjacent to the mela ground [essential to both daily use of visitors as well as possible emergency fire-fighting efforts], sanitation, electricity, security and related arrangements is a work of a massive scale which the university is not in a position to manage within the short duration,” it said.
Poush Mela, which begins on the seventh day of the Bengali month of Poush (usually late December), was held for the first time in 1895, and the decision to hold it figures in the deed of the Santiniketan Trust founded by Rabindranath Tagore’s father Debendranath in 1888. For several decades, it was held for the benefit of local villagers. However, over the years, it began to draw urban visitors and became a primary contributor to Santiniketan’s economy.
Until 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the fair had been conducted religiously with only two breaks in the 1940s — once due to the Bengal famine and the other due to the Second World War. Since 2020, Santiniketan has not seen a Poush Mela, one of the reasons being Prof. Mallik’s predecessor Bidyut Chakrabarty dissociating himself from the event.
All along, the Visva-Bharati V-C has been a member of the Santiniketan Trust and conducted the Mela in this capacity. Prof. Chakrabarty refused to be a part of the Trust and has made no attempt to restart the event post-pandemic; one of the reasons probably being that the 2019 fair was not a memorable one for the university, which got slapped with a fine of ₹10 lakh for flouting environmental norms.