After the success of the miniature Seven Wonders of the World, Eco Park has opened a section to showcase rural Bengal. Banglar Gram had a soft launch on August 15 and visitors can now reach the section easily from gate numbers 2, 4 and 6. 

“It was chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s idea to build this section and she may come and inaugurate it formally herself later,” said Debashis Sen, chairman cum managing director of Housing and Infrastructure Development Corporation (Hidco) that is in charge of Eco Park. “Visitors will now get a glimpse of rural Bengal surrounded by the urbanisation of New Town.”  

The three-acre Banglar Gram has been designed by artiste Anirban Das, who says his reference points were Satyendranath Dutta’s poem Palkir Gaan and Rabindranath Tagore’s poem Dui Bigha Jomi. “I’ve tried to portray all that is described in these poems about village life,” he says.   

The walkthrough begins with a lush paddy field with life-size fibreglass farmers and oxen ploughing the land. “The paddy is real,” asserts Sen. “And the produce is sent to Eco Park’s restaurant Cafe Ekante.” The plot cultivates mustard and til in other parts, besides indigenous fruit trees like mango, banana, litchi, jaam, and jackfruit. Tall trees like radhachura and krishnachura and flowers like hibiscus and togor are dotted all over the region. 

There are mud huts with cowdung cakes plastered on the walls, cow sheds and dhaan-er morai (storage houses for paddy). The market place has vendors selling vegetables (made of clay) and bullock carts are shown to be transporting people around the village. 

A “Potol-da-r cha er dokan” has models of youths sitting to have tea and a chandimandap has elderly villagers smoking hookah. “In these places we are keen to set up a real tea stall so visitors can sit with the models and have a snack,” said Sen. 

There is also a chariot and palanquin and Sen says that on special occasions children may be given rides on the latter. 
“We were lucky that the land we got for this project had some natural water bodies. So we have shown a man fishing there, a woman washing utensils…. Children are shown playing with ducks, goats and marbles and girls are shown headed for school on cycles,” says Das, who has been doing up the Jago Bangla stall at the Book Fair as well as the Dum Dum Park Tarun Dal Durga puja pandal over the past few years. 

The entrance to Banglar Gram, near the Eco Park office building, has 150 traditional hand fans, 10-ft high, and a kulo, about four times as high with rural motifs painted all around and the opening stanza of Tagore’s Dui Bigha Jomi written out at the centre. “We have been working on this Banglar Gram for two years and hope visitors like it,” said Das.