This year’s Durga Puja officially starts today (festive greetings, all). As a child from the mofussil making occasional trips to Calcutta for the Puja experience in the 1970s, my tryst with thakur dekha would have begun yesterday, Shasthi, the sixth day of the lunar calendar. Nowadays, however, for many organisers of Calcutta’s grandest Pujas, the crunch time may already be over, with the major awards announced, celebrity visitors handled, and the selection for a carnival parade for the best and the brightest done and dusted. For the next four days, it’s essentially a battle of number-crunching — with several newspapers running a front-page crowd-o-meter of how many extra zeroes the major players can add to the number of their visitors.

Statistical metrics have been an integral part of the festival for years. A Google search on ‘the world’s largest public art festival’ returns Durga Puja at the top of the search results. This is also an epithet that UNESCO formally used while inscribing Durga Puja as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity in 2021. This by itself is a big deal, meaning that Durga Puja is way bigger than some of the world’s other humongous — and, sadly, better-known globally — festivals, like the Rio de Janeiro Carnival, the Venice Biennale, or the Mardi Gras celebration in New Orleans. In terms of size, the Durga Puja is also among the world’s largest annual public gatherings — smaller than the Kumbh Mela but bigger than the Arba’in pilgrimage, an arduous, annual, three-day trek to Karbala (bigger than the Hajj pilgrimage). And it’s also unique and of a different scale altogether, representing a vast, collective imaginarium of creativity for people and communities for a few days. The question is, how can this be made into a signature element of Bengal itself, a template of democratic practice that the state can create at this fraught moment of its history?

A few years ago, West Bengal’s tourism department and the British Council brought out a creative economy report for Durga Puja in Bengal based on a 2019 survey. This meticulously compiled document was a crucial component of the successful application for the UNESCO inscription. But somewhat disappointingly, it limited itself to statistical data without diving deep into the nuanced and intermeshed fabric of human endeavour at all levels that makes the Durga Puja a many-splendoured social phenomenon. Hints to this web of human activities are, however, strewn throughout the numbers-driven document. Its “recommendations” called for a host of things: assessment and analysis of sustainability, access and environmental impact, especially with regard to recycling models, measures fostering diversity and inclusion like developing, training and capacity-building opportunities to enable more women to undertake decision-making roles within the Puja festival and for including less-represented groups, more research on remittances from migrants into and out of West Bengal during the Puja and on the unorganised retail market’s contribution to the Puja economy, among other things. Another important point that the report raised was the need for recognition by NGOs, Puja committees, and the government of “work by economically weaker section of the society, including workers, artisans, loaders, farmers, carpenters, masons, etc.”

The core mandate of the report was, of course, to add statistical clout to the application for Durga Puja’s UNESCO inscription, but it may not be entirely out of place to conjecture that, if the report’s non-statistical observations and recommendations were treated as a programmatic and actionable White Paper with a time-bound implementation plan, the Durga Puja’s multiplier effects could have been turned into a longer-term driver of social and economic change.

The diversity of themes adopted by Pujas as their signature content in the last couple of decades has been bewildering. True, some of them have sought to merely astonish, for instance, an 88-feet-tall ‘mega-idol’ (claimed to be the world’s tallest) in a South Calcutta Puja a decade ago that produced stampedes and traffic disruptions, or a stunning replica of the Disneyland castle in a North Calcutta one a couple of years ago. But many, many more, have gone in for themes of immense social relevance. Just a couple of examples should suffice. An award-winning theme of a major South Calcutta Puja in 2019 was ‘labour inclusion’, which embraced the stories of people belonging to the working class and their lifestyle along with a token of respectful salutation, ‘Kurnish’. The following year, the sufferings of migrant, working-class mothers caught in the merciless vortex of the pandemic found expression in one of the Pujas of southwestern Calcutta.

There is no doubt that these were wonderful gestures to the ideas of empathy and inclusivity and dignity of workers, and the media coverage raved about the Pujas ‘going inclusive’. However, it remains to be seen what longer-term impact these symbolic initiatives create outside of sensitively curated and socially-relevant week-long shows that jostle with similar thematic shows for relevance, public attention, and recognition (and, understandably, validation through awards). Two of the most moving theme-based Puja installations that I have ever seen are ‘Hridaypur’ (‘Heartland’, 2023, picture), which, with a lot of love and sensitivity, depicted the plight of the colonies displaced after the Partition; and ‘Kheyalsetu Boitarani’ (‘The Imaginary Bridge of Time’, 2024), a nostalgia-laden recreation of the Ahiritola region of North Calcutta, with its narrow lanes, old ghats on the Ganga, and rustic charm. They offered the briefest of glimpses of what a magical combination of artistic creativity and documentation of memory the Durga Puja could weave for all of us, albeit ephemerally.

Despite its vast scale, Durga Puja has historically remained less visible internationally than Rio’s Carnival — a disparity that reflects both the geography and the uneven circuits of the global media. Its global appeal, therefore, may lie less in mass tourism and more in cultural diplomacy and art tourism. That brings me to my last point. Why is there no repository in Bengal — ideally, a museum and archive or documentation centre — that can go beyond the scattered clusters of a few preserved Durga idols, a small collection of digital images and data, and short-term fairs and ‘preview shows’ of Durga Puja art, to capture and narrate the phenomenon of the Durga Puja as a central element of Bengal’s culture? This could include not only the supreme artistic creativity involved in the Puja — along with specimens or scaled models of idols, pandals, and theme-based arrangements — but historical surveys of the Durga Puja over time, its unique meshing of devotional and secular aspects, the massive organisational effort bringing together the government, civil society, neighbourhoods, communities, artisans, all the way down to the unorganised workers at the fringes of the Puja economy. The need to educate youth and children through workshops, archiving, and documentation about the Durga Puja was also strongly emphasised by UNESCO.

The opportunity for a round-the-year enjoyment and appreciation of similar celebrations, though on a smaller scale, exists in other parts of the world. In Rio de Janeiro, one can visit Samba City workshops offering some sort of a carnival experience, learning about costume creation, seeing parade floats, and trying on costumes. A similar experience is also provided by a small, unofficial Carnival Museum near Rio’s Sambódromo, the long avenue that’s the main site of the parade. Multiple museums and year-round workshops in New Orleans celebrate the history of the famous Mardi Gras tradition of the city. And something as culturally ‘uncomplicated’ as the Tomatina — the annual tomato-throwing spree celebrating the crop’s harvest in Spain — has given rise to a small museum in the town of Buñol in Valencia. But Indian and foreign tourists visiting Calcutta throughout the year have nothing to see to form an idea of what makes the world’s biggest public art festival so unique. That, obviously, is not ideal, and needs to change.

So as the whole of Bengal erupts into a joyous, weeklong celebration, I look forward with hope to a future of celebrating better, imagining a Durga Puja that dazzles as ever, but also serves as a model for sustainable urban celebration, inclusive cultural practice, and heritage management. That would make Bengal’s autumn carnival not only one of the world’s greatest festivals but also one of its most responsible.

Jayanta Sengupta is Director, Alipore Museum; jsengupt@gmail.com