In the ’60s and ’70s in Calcutta, Durga Puja meant books, music and food. These are still integral to the festival, but the city has changed. A few weeks before Mahalaya, vendors with piles of books on their heads would visit our home. We pored over the children’s magazines — Shishu Sathi, Shuktara, and Sandesh, and special collections from publishing houses such as Deb Sahitya Kutir.

The collections contained short fiction, poems and plays, and a variety of non-fiction pieces including those on yoga by ‘Bishwashri’ Monotosh Roy and on magic by ‘Jadusamrat’ P.C. Sorcar. The writers were the best in the business, Narayan Gangopadhyay, Shibram Chakrabarti, Premendra Mitra, Ashapurna Debi, Leela Majumdar, with illustrations that should still count as classics. It was not quite dawn in Bengal, but it was certainly bliss to be a child glued to Bengali books.

The link between books and Puja went far back in the year, the day the almanac from Gupta Press or P.M. Bagchi reached home with its strange advertisements of gigantic radishes and handkerchiefs with a magic perfume guaranteed to seduce the most difficult of women and similar wonders manufactured, of all places, in Jalandhar. We would invariably turn to the page that had the familiar picture of the Goddess. That was the first whiff of sharat brought to us in the height of summer, and I remember I had a pitiful colour cut-out of the Goddess made of board similar to the almanac wood-cut. In the countryside, Puja was in the air the day the straw frame of the idol was worked upon with clay: for me in Calcutta, it was the picture in the printed book.

As I reached middle school, I began looking up the badly stitched annual numbers for grown-up readers — Desh, Amrita, Naba Kallol. Then there were those of the movie magazines such as Ultorath and Prasad. The latter carried tinted photographs of actors getting cosy. The captions suggested that they were enjoying a break between shots. For a long time, I had this vision of film shooting as a stifling affair in which the hero and heroine failed to escape the seasonable wantonness of early autumn as also the pink-and-magenta tinted lenses of Bengali film magazines.

The pictures now seem unappetising, and their synthetic backdrops were design disasters. But these tacky publications allowed indigent writers to pay their bills, and carried some of the most readable fiction in the language written by such stalwarts as Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay and Banaphool, and younger contemporaries such as Bimal Kar and Samaresh Basu. I soon discovered the rarefied pleasures of numerous avant garde journals such as Eksan and Parichay, many of them leaning to the left and comically uneasy that their annual number should coincide with a religious festival. But these never stood in the way of the pleasure that the more marketable products provided. Then there were the new entrants, soliciting contributions from young writers. When one such publisher on Bowbazar Street assured me that I was a great writer on the make but had to buy a certain number of copies to let the world know, my aspiration died young. Bengali readers and I owe him an unrecorded debt.

The Puja reminds me of shopping with my father. I remember him buying from Kamalalaya Stores on Dharmatala Street white cotton shirts marked ‘Unidus’, and fine mill-woven dhotis. At the end of the shopping trail, he would disappear into the hair-dresser’s cabin, leaving me, then in primary school, in the company of books in Rambabu’s shop inside Kamalalaya. I waited as he had his hair cut, and my patience would be rewarded by an English book, usually a classic from J.M. Dent’s house.

As we walked back, he would pick up a gramophone record — not the Puja numbers, but old Bengali and Hindustani songs. The Puja numbers, however, were aired by All India Radio in their half-an-hour Anurodher Asar programme. The lyrics with the singers’ photographs were brought out by HMV in a catalogue titled Pujor Dali (later Sharad Arghya). The ’60s were a good time for Bengali light music, with composers such as Sachin Dev Burman, Salil Chowdhury and Hemanta Mukhopadhyay around, and Manna Dey scoring his own early music. I soon outgrew Bengali ‘modern’ songs, and hated the music drowning the human voice in marquees. But the tunes remain with me like playhouse memory, as do some of the lyrics.

Public music could take less hideous forms. After Lakshmi Puja was over, there was a session of kabir larai or a battle of poets through songs in several pandals. Some called it a tarja. There were few singers in the pre-urban tradition left in the city, and the musical duel was all rehearsed. Yet, it brought home to a large community a sense of belonging and access to tradition that is now the guarded privilege of a few family Pujas.

In the wealthier community Pujas, Lakshmi Puja would be followed by a jalsa, where urban tastes shaped by films and the radio ruled. These jalsas were mixed events, with the odd film star making an appearance, bauls and qawwals thrown into a stew where the primary ingredient was adhunik songs, and dances and a few stand-up acts by comedians used as fillers. There were a few jalsas of classical Hindustani music at which the listeners sat on the grass, although outdoor ‘musical conferences’ did not catch on till late November. There were a few Pujas where all varieties of entertainment were included in a clutch of open-air programmes that lasted for nearly a fortnight.

What jalsa was to the tarja, modern plays performed on a curtained stage was to the jatra. The city Puja had room for both, although there was an especial fondness for the jatra, perhaps because of the open-air setting. I remember my father paying more for the jatra than for the Puja to the local club one particular year, on condition that the tarpaulin covering a side of the pandal would be removed so that he could watch the performance from his second-floor flat.

Everyone talks of food when it comes to the Puja in Calcutta — the street food, the bhog, the home-made nimkis, soru chaklis and patisaptas after Dashami that have all but disappeared. There are, however, forms of communal eating that have quietly died off. One was the kangali-bhojan or daridranaryan seba at which beggars were served food by the organisers and we sat on the turf and ate with them. It was not always a pleasant experience, although I doubt if its demise has been an unmixed blessing.

As I look back on past Pujas, what I miss most is ease of access. We have to virtually crawl into designer pandals, we pay for bad food cooked in makeshift stalls and for third-rate post-Puja entertainments, the parks and the river front drive away those unable to pay, and we have shut the city off from the homes where we gather to chat, eat and listen to music. Calcutta had once turned a private act such as reading into a community affair.

The tide seems to have turned the other way.

Swapan Chakravorty is director general, National Library, Calcutta. He is on lien from the post of Professor of English, Jadavpur University.Chakravorty writes in English and Bengali, and his books include Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton, Bangalir Ingreji Sahityacharcha and Shakespeare.