Ramprasad Das and Madhusudan Mal may not be Brahmins but they are the officiating priests at the Dakshin Malpara Puja in the Birbhum village of Baswa. They claim to have taken a leaf out of Lord Ram’s book.

Ramprasad and Madhusudan are the face of a 45-year-old tradition that started here after the lower-caste communities, tired of being excluded from the village Puja by the Brahmin residents, decided to hold their own Puja in 1974.

“Until then, we were only allowed to have a darshan of the deity from outside the pandal. We did not like this and resolved to do something about it,” a 65-year-old villager said.

“So we pooled our resources and got our own Durga idol and mandap (stage). However, one of the many hurdles we faced was that no Brahmin priest would conduct the rituals for us.”

It got the organisers thinking about how they could solve the problem without hurting sentiments.

“We turned to the epics and found that Ram had performed yagnas despite being a Kshatriya rather than a Brahmin. We reasoned that we could do it too,” Ramprasad said.

Ramprasad and Madhusudan are the sons of Subarna Das and Aswini Mal, folk singers who had participated in the 1974 show of self-assertion by the lower castes. They have been officiating as the Puja priests for the past 15 years.

“While training me, my father had warned that the Brahmin community would not accept what we were doing. But today, people from all backgrounds come to our pandal,” said Ramprasad, the chief priest.

“We keep ourselves updated about the traditions. This year we bought books to learn in detail how the Kola Bou snaan and bisarjan (immersion) are performed.”

Baswa, 230km from Calcutta, is home to nearly 6,000 people. Of them, nearly 750 participate in the Dakshin Malpara Puja, now held in a permanent shrine built with the help of donations from local people.

“There are 16 Pujas in our village, but so many attend ours,” one of the organisers said.

Usha Das, a 35-year-old homemaker from Dakshin Malpara, said: “We are all so involved in this Puja that I can’t find the time to visit my parents’ home during the festival.”

Nanda Dulal Das, deputy chief of the Trinamul-run Bishnupur gram panchayat, lauded the organisers.

“We make it a point to visit the Dakshin Malpara pandal every year because it stands as a reminder of how an oppressed community prevailed over odds. They are the torch-bearers of a movement,” he said.