Durga Puja themes: Lord’s to Vatican, Van Gogh to Satyajit Ray

The divine mother is compassionate. We sing paeans to her greatness and glory. Her name is on the lips of one and all --- the devatas, the mortals, the munis, and every enlightened soul.Bhavani is another name for Goddess Durga. We embrace her in many forms, in many places. We find her at Vatican City, the Indus Valley Civilisation, an African folk village, a Van Gogh painting, in Satyajit Ray classics and even at cricket’s mecca, the Lord’s ground. Surprised? All of these are conjured right in the heart of Kolkata and its surrounds. In this episode, we talk about the theme puja phenomenon, its spectacular grip on the masses, its aesthetics, and how that drives a thriving economy around the festival.One Goddess, many themesThe Sreebhumi Sporting Club in north-east Kolkata has made a replica of The Vatican’s grand St Peter’s Bassilica Church for the 2022 Durga Puja, complete with Roman sculptures and paintings on the walls and ceiling, done by artists from Kolkata and Shantiniketan. In Baranagar, North 24 Parganas district, a public ground has been transformed into Nishchindipur village, where Satyajit Ray had shot his iconic film Pather Panchali. The famous scene where protagonists Apu and Durga are running to catch a glimpse of a train through kaash fields has been recreated by the Nainan Bandhab Samity Puja, which is aptly themed, Satabarsher Poreo Satyajit (Satyajit Beyond Centenary). Remember Indian cricket captain Sourav Ganguly’s famous Lord’s moment in 2002, where he took off his shirt and cheered for his winning teammates from the balcony of the London cricket ground during the NatWest trophy final? Well, the very same Lord’s balcony can be found in south Kolkata’s Garia this year, thanks to the Navo Durga Puja pandal committee. Now the BCCI chief, Ganguly has even inaugurated the Garia Puja, waving the Tricolour from the balcony.Sourav Ganguly inaugurates Mitali Sangha's Puja pandal that recreared Lord's iconic balcony for this year's theme. Image credit: Mayukh SenguptaThese are just a handful among a sea of themes that have kept this year’s Durga Puja revellers in thrall. But the phenomenon goes back a good 50 years.How theme Pujas startedTapati Guha Thakurta, a historian and former director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata, has worked extensively on the contemporary history of the Durga Pujas. Her book, titled In the name of the Goddess: The Durga Pujas of Contemporary Kolkata, is an exhaustive chronicle of theme pujas, ‘art’ pujas and their milestones from the turn of the millennium. “Alongside worship and cultural celebrations,” she says, “an important part of the Durga Pujas is about touring the city and watching the wonders of every puja installation and the ways it transforms space, the way it takes you on a journey across the globe and a journey in time. Durga’s presence is everywhere, but not necessarily only as a worshiped icon. She’s also there as a work of art, and she enthrals audiences and critics, and connoisseurs with the beauty of her appearance and the wonderful installations that come up around her.”It all began with thematic departures on the Durga idol itself by Gopeshwar Pal, a clay-modeller from Krishnanagar in West Bengal’s Nadia district. Renowned ceramic artist and art scholar Partha Dasgupta, who has envisioned many a theme puja, shares how the seeds of change were sown: “During the 1940s, Gopeshwar Pal divided the ekchaala murti, which had the goddess and her children under one single backdrop, into the paanchchaala murti, where Ma Durga and her four children each had a backdrop for themselves. The story goes that the completed Durga murti had caught fire and a new idol had to be made overnight. So, five different people were tasked with making the five gods and goddesses. This was an important milestone as Bengalis began to realise that Ma Durga is not a family photograph. It was created in parts as each god had a separate identity.” Met with scorn at first by the middle-class Bengali bhadralok for breaking tradition and depicting Ma Durga in a naturalistic, more human form, this idol later became an indispensable part of the contemporary theme pujas. As the larger-than-life art installation Goddess pulled the crowds, the Brahmins used this very idol for the rituals in one corner of the pandal. How the Durga idol changed over the yearsIn north Kolkata’s Sovabazar area, the Jagat Mukherjee Park Puja pandal is shaped like an ark. Inside, Ma Durga is in a boat, midstream, mast flapping, with the illusion of a downpour created by pieces of mirrored glass. The theme is borshamongol, a celebration of monsoon. And, given the incessant rainfall the eastern parts of India got in the run up to the festive season, it couldn’t be more apt. Dwaipayan Ray, joint secretary of the puja, says Jagat Mukherjee Park had organised the first-ever theme puja way back in 1957. But the theme purely revolved around the idol. Veteran clay-modeller Ashok Gupta, who was also a puja committee member, envisioned and executed the idol themes there till the seventies. He even depicted the Naxalite movement through the Durga protima. Satyajit Ray was said to have eagerly waited for each of Ashok Gupta’s creations, shares Dwaipayan. Ashok Gupta was the guru of Sanatan Dinda, who is one of the torchbearers of the more modern theme pujas that happened around the turn of the century. These were the art pujos, with a composite thematic thread running through the pandal, the decorations, the lighting and the idol. These were installations meant to awe and inspire… Artist Sanatan Dinda has incorporated Van Gogh's famous painting, Starry starry night, into the global warming theme for Bokul Bagan Sarbojonin Durgotsav at Kalighat, south Kolkata. Credit: Sanatan DindaSanatan Dinda fondly calls the Goddess a girl with 10 hands, around whom he can weave many, many stories. Sanatan’s journey began with north Kolkata’s Hatibagan Sarbojonin Durga Puja in 1998. That was the year the US and the UK had launched Operation Desert Fox, a joint bombing campaign on Iraq. Sanatan decided not to put weapons in Ma Durga’s hands that year. Instead, the hands depicted the Gayatri Mantra mudras in a bid for peace. This year, he has brought Vincent Van Gogh’s famous painting, The Starry Night, into the puja pandal at Bakul Bagan Sarbojonin Durgotsav in Bhowanipur, south Kolkata. “I have amalgamated Rabindranath Tagore’s song, Akash Bhora Shurjo Tara, with Van Gogh’s Starry Night,” he says. “In India, 90 per cent of the people don’t know what a great post-modern painter Tagore was. I need to also tell people about Van Gogh’s stature as an artist. In his painting, he had seen the sun, the moon, the planets, the stars in the very same night sky. I need to talk about the greatness of Nandalal Bose in the modern Indian art space. My installations are an attempt to talk about this rich cultural legacy we have. For me, Durga Puja is a means to spread a social message.”Partha Dasgupta shares that Nandalal Bose’s paintings of the Goddess have inspired doyens like clay-modeller Jiten Pal, Gopeshwar Pal’s successor, to mould idols during the late Seventies, further changing the protima’s contours. That Durga idol was worshipped in the Bhowanipur 23 Pally puja. In 2020, at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, artist and sculptor Pallab Bhowmick created a Durga idol, drawing from a painting by Bikash Bhattacharjee, a leading surrealist painter from Kolkata who had also made Durga idols himself. The image was that of a migrant worker walking home with her four children. “We were told at Barisha Club that owing to the Covid-19 pandemic, there won’t be much of a puja budget,” Bhowmick remembers. “The club members had donated sacks of rice as part of Covid relief. So, a lot of empty sacks were lying around. They planned to decorate the pandal with these sacks. A Durga protima was planned around the migrant labourers who were returning home during the Covid-induced exodus. The idea was to create an ordinary migrant woman trudging home with her children in tow. I looked to Bikash Bhattacharjee for inspiration.”Novelty in Durga Puja Moumita Sen, associate professor of culture studies at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion, and Society, explains what makes the Durga Puja quite the crowd-puller. “One of the main forces driving Durga Puja is that of novelty,” she says. “Among the artists and the creative professionals, it’s very important to show something new. The public, as they say, comes to see something new. You can also think about this in terms of the neoliberal economy and the importance of novelty there, in the commercial space.” Jagat Mukherjee Park has three distinct categories for these novelty pujas --- the imitation puja, the gimmick puja and the theme puja. The imitation pujo replicates any public space, whether it’s a temple, a ghat, or any monument. The gimmick puja, like the recreation of a local train or a submarine, is designed to invoke a sensational reaction in the public. The theme puja or art puja is based on novel artistic concepts, with a distinct storyline and message, like the depiction of a film scene or a painting.There is no linear trajectory as to which kind of puja came first. Some puja committees like Samaj Sebi Sangha and Jodhpur Park Durgotsav in south Kolkata adopted themes first into their pandal and ambiance while keeping the idol traditional. Some like Jagat Mukherjee Park started with concept-specific idols. All these kinds have endured and peacefully cohabit Durga Puja’s carnivalesque space. Corporate magnetThe new scale of art installations brought commercial publicity and sponsorship in their wake from a plethora of multinational companies, who also announced awards in their name. As historian Tapati Guha Thakurta says, every advertisement, every hoarding carries a Durga theme to it. Along with the consumer economy revolving around Durga Puja --- which includes fashion, food, electronics, jewellery and many more --- there is also the creative economy, which is the source of livelihood for a large number of local artisans, cottage industries as well as freshly minted art college graduates, Tapati shares. Art scholar Partha Dasgupta adds, “The 100-day employment is being practised in the field of Durga Pujas long before the government made it a policy. When we are working for a particular puja, nearly 40 to 50 people are employed for three to four months to complete the installation. This is, in turn, sustaining 30 to 40 families. Now imagine that being multiplied manifold. That’s the sheer scale in which Durga Puja is sustaining livelihoods.”Debasish Kumar, general secretary of the Tridhara Sammilani Durga Puja in south Kolkata, insists that Durga Puja is a major contributing factor to West Bengal’s GDP and that transactions worth thousands of crores take place during this time. So, theme pujas have a huge responsibility on their shoulders, says Sumanto Ray, president of Jodhpur Park Durgotsav Committee. “If you do not create theme pujas, you cannot sustain this industry,” he says. “You cannot support such a large number of people just by doing traditional pujas. If we do not do theme pujas, we will have no work to give to the decorators, the lightmen, the artisans and other workers associated with these pujas. If we do not do theme pujas, we just have to do the rituals and go home.”Naturally, theme pujas draw the most crowds. And Moumita Sen feels no Durga Puja is complete without its teeming crowds of revellers, eagerly waiting for a yearly celebration. “Of course, there is no festival without the revellers, the people, the devotees, the young people eating phuchka with their crush, you wearing your best sari and falling in love --- I mean, that is Durga Puja,” she signs off.Also see: What Unesco Tag For Durga Puja Means For Kolkata’s Favourite FestivalAlso see: How Durga Puja Has Many Histories, From ‘Colonial Link’ To Independence StruggleAnchor: Anindya ChakravortyAudio production: Sahil Gupta