Every Durga Puja, there is an astonishing outburst of creativity throughout Calcutta. The combination of traditional worship, inherited skills, contemporary ideas and techniques and public art is unique, as UNESCO’s acknowledgement in 2021 indicates. It is not just the images of the deity that are unique, but the pandals too, often reflecting urgent contemporary themes through visual narratives, sculpture, symbolism, imagery, illuminations, music and powerful suggestion. Each of these pandals takes up an idea and the organisers and the artists together design the most vivid expression for it. History, sometimes of the city itself, edifices elsewhere in the world, mythology, social and political commentary, environmental and conservationist concerns or reflections on the future — all appear on the roads and in the parks. The environment is a popular theme, with plants arranged to suggest afforestation, for example, or the scene set with mountains, rivers, waterfalls and woods as though to remind viewers of nature’s beauty and importance. Animals and birds suggest
conservation while the deity as a farm girl, her plough a trident, brings forth the theme of nature, agriculture and sustainability, the enemy being pesticides and policies that destroy fertility and health.
Social commentary is as important. Caste — the story of Ekalavya, for example — with a reference to recent caste oppression, the deity as hunter killing discrimination, unity — mosque, temple and church together — gender equality and violence against women — trafficking girls, for instance — all are part of the meticulously thought out, magnificently wrought pandals. The political assertion of the Bengali language, possibly an allusion to the Delhi Police identifying it as the Bangladeshi language, is one of the themes this year, complete with a language tree. Another thought-provoking pandal is the creation of a future world where AI robots and human beings co-exist in a world with towering structures, but where the deity shows the triumph of human values over technology.
Organisers take up themes that affect the world around them. Artists create expressions for them with painstaking care. Yet the viewers, who start their Puja rounds three or four days before the actual worship begins, so eager are they to witness as many unique pandals and images as they can, often remain peculiarly unaffected by the serious themes that these depict. A tower made of empty plastic bottles does not stop people from littering with plastic; a language tree does not urge youngsters to learn or speak Bengali when they prefer to learn some other language; neither environmental nor conservationist themes penetrate deep into awareness; caste discrimination and gender inequality remain untouched among those habituated to these. It is a mark of hopefulness in organisers and artists that they strive to create artistic expressions of serious themes year after year, achieving an aesthetic excellence unmatched in public art. Yet the inference that can be drawn is this: viewers are impressed, but seldom seem to be influenced, by the serious themes that Durga Puja pandals present each year.