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The mayurpankhi of lights in Sridhar Das’ workshop before being shipped
off to London. Picture by Pradip Sanyal | Organisers
of mega-Durga pujas are always under pressure to come up with novel spectacles
to attract the hordes to their pandals. In the 60s, Chandernagore, already famous
for its mega-Jagaddhatri pujas, came into the limelight when the streets and alleys
of this small town glittered with panels of rainbow coloured lights representing
anything from sensational news stories to Hindu myths. It seemed as if thousands
of dancing, twinkling, winking lights were used to paint mobile pictures. It
proved once again that Bengali ingenuity and showmanship are truly world-class.
It required the combined skills of the folk artist and the electrician to produce
these panels. All they had done was to exploit the potential of the tiny points
of light created by minuscule bulbs known in the local argot as the “tooni”. One
of the pioneers in this field was electrician Sridhar Das. The
brilliant light panels soon became an integral part of the Durga puja. When these
are reflected in a waterbody, say College Square, they create a truly magical
effect. This had caught the eye of Nandita Palchoudhuri, Calcutta-based curator,
and in collaboration with Das, she had presented these at the Belfast Festival
in 2001. This year, the Thames Festival has commissioned
Palchoudhuri to design a huge three-dimensional bajra — a ceremonial peacock
barge — using Das’ panels studded with 135,000 “tooni” bulbs. Eighteen interlocking
units made in Chandernagore of plywood, plastic, wood, paper, bamboo, iron rods,
threads and an electrical circuit will be shipped to London and assembled there
onto a wheeled trolley. Twelve artists spent the last two-and-a-half months to
prepare the 30-ft-long and 17-ft-high barge of light. About
2,000 people will take part in The Mayor’s Thames Festival’s night procession
on September 14, a Sunday. The mile-long procession highlights the multicultural
nature of London with huge illuminated sculptures, carnival costumes that light
up, brilliant images built on floats, vibrant street music and hundreds of children
with hand-held lanterns. More than 50,000 people are expected to congregate to
watch the procession as it runs along a traffic-free Victoria Embankment, crosses
the Thames at Blackfriars Bridge to end at the Royal National Theatre. This year,
part of the night procession will be created by Kinetika, a London-based arts
group, as part of the Thames Festival’s initiative to forge a link between the
Thames and the Hooghly; between London and Calcutta. Pushed by 30 people, the
mayurpankhi will be the procession’s centrepiece. The
day before the procession, it will be exhibited fully illuminated on the South
Bank. This section featuring over 250 costumed performers has been named Din Shuru.
For the last two years, Ali Pretty’s arts group Kinetika has recruited an international
team of artists and created carnival presentations inspired by other cultures.
This year the procession celebrates the Indian influence on contemporary carnival.
This influence originates with the huge Indian migration from the 1850’s, when
thousands of indentured labourers were shipped from the port of Calcutta to the
sugar plantations in Trinidad. Three artists from West Bengal, Asis Kumar Bagchi,
a zari craftsman, choreographer Tanushree Sankar and Kalyan Banerjee, project
manager/documentation, will work alongside the Kinetika team to explore these
cultural connections. — A STAFF REPORTER | 
