Durga Puja pandals are not just sites of devotion and celebration, they are also becoming classrooms, offering students valuable lessons in art, collaboration and self-expression. In recent years, students from West Bengal’s art colleges have stepped into pandal projects as interns or artists-in-residence. The experience is very different from structured college assignments. Deadlines are tight, the scale is massive and the audience runs into lakhs.
For Abhijit Halder from Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati, the pandal was his first real test. Having studied ceramic art, artist Partha Dasgupta asked him to create the vast landscape behind the Durga idol at Purbachal Shakti Sangha in Haltu in south Calcutta. Abhijit says, “At first I thought it was impossible. But Parthada encouraged me saying ‘just get started, it will happen’. Later he also corrected me. He told me ‘if you do it like an assignment, it will never get finished’. That pushed me to work faster. I gave my 100 per cent, and now it’s done.” From morning until night, he worked on massive clay structures, work he had never imagined attempting in college.
Dasgupta served as an external examiner at Kala Bhavana this year. He identified two outstanding master’s students and arranged for their works to be displayed at the Purbachal pandal. One of them, Rahul Sarkar, produced a remarkable 12-by-8-feet wood carving that has now been included in the pandal. Dasgupta considers this part of his responsibility. He says, “To locate what is happening in mainstream art, and bring institutionally trained young artists into it.”
Such stories are increasingly common. Artists like Partha Dasgupta and Purnendu Dey, who lead major pandal projects, regularly bring students into their teams.
Some are fresh graduates, others are still in their second or third year of art college. They may begin with clay mixing or stencil cutting, but eventually they are entrusted with bigger, more visible parts of the installation, guided closely by seniors.
At Dum Dum Park Tarun Dal in north Calcutta, chief artist Dey is working with the theme of impressions — fingerprints, barcodes and markers for mind and soul. For him, the collaborative spirit is the key.
He says, “A pandal is not an individual show. Students learn to work together within the theme, while also picking up skills that go far beyond art — from sculpture and print to lighting, mechanics, even how water and electricity are managed.”
That sense of scale is exactly what excites students. Parna Halder, who is in her second year at Calcutta’s Rabindra Bharati University, admits she had never imagined working on something so huge. She says, “In college we do small projects. Here we are carving and installing works several feet tall. It is challenging but also exciting. We get to experience Puja in a completely different way — not just pandal-hopping, but creating it.”
Her classmate Joyita Byapari from the graphics and printmaking department agrees. “This is different from internships we’ve done in museums or digital design work using Photoshop. Here we learn by creating on a large scale, and we also see how people respond to it.”
For Kuheli Barui, a third-year student working with Dey for the second year in a row, the responsibilities have grown. This time, she was given bigger tasks, “a promotion”, Dey jokes. But his guidance was not limited to the technical. “I told her that as an artist you must be able to talk about your work in English. It opens up opportunities and audiences beyond Bengal.” For Kuheli, the Puja has been as much about confidence and communication as about line drawing or wood carving.
The learning during Puja prep is not limited to visual arts. Technology too has found its place. Titli Nath, a BCA student from JIS University in Calcutta, co-created the UtshobBondhu app to help people book passes, plan pandal routes, check metro guides and access SOS services. “We wanted to make it easy, especially for older people who struggle with tickets or navigation,” she says. “We learnt much more here than in the classroom. We had to solve real problems, not just write code.”
The audience, diverse and massive, is part of the learning. Unlike a gallery, where the audience is niche, a pandal draws people from every walk of life. “It’s a real-world test,” says Sayantan Maitra, vice-president of massArt, a non-profit that promotes Bengal’s art and culture by taking Durga Puja creativity to wider audiences. Maitra says, “For interns this is not only about skill. They learn teamwork, deadlines and, most importantly, how to communicate their ideas. That kind of exposure is rare in classrooms but when it comes to pandal work, it is imperative.”
Maitra has seen this firsthand through the interns working at mass Art, who contribute to design, audio-visual production and community outreach. According to him, the most lasting takeaway is learning to stay creative amid the chaos.
He says, “A festival is unpredictable as deadlines shift, materials change and the weather intervenes. In that environment, you either sink or you learn to adapt. And when you do adapt, you grow much faster than you would in a controlled studio setting.”
