STAR Shower: Shah Rukh Khan with (top) Priyanka Chopra, (centre) Arjun Rampal and Mehr Jessia and (above) Sussanne Roshan and Gauri Khan at IPL Nights. Telegraph pictures

The Indian Premier League has lost quite a few fans in Calcutta — because the game-meets-glamour extravaganza will no longer be the Indian Party League.

After all, the first casualty of Lalit Modi’s exit from the IPL has not been any auction by the after-party.

“The show will go on. IPL 4 would be on schedule and it would be bigger and better. The cleaning up is already happening. I don’t know about the cheerleaders but the IPL Nights will be stopped,” said Chirayu Amin, minutes after taking over as the interim IPL chief recently.

The home team did not give fans much reason to cheer at the Eden Gardens during the IPL 3 matches but what got Calcuttans all excited was the after-match action at ITC, The Sonar Calcutta.

In those seven nights in less than seven weeks, the city witnessed its first sustained brush with “celebrity partying”. Open bar, elaborate dinner buffet (albeit no dessert), fabulous fashion shows and a star shower from the world of cricket and Bollywood with Shah Rukh Khan leading the way — it was a dream package for the star-starved Calcutta partygoer.

No wonder Amin’s axe has left Calcutta’s night riders “sad” and “shocked”.

“This was our only glamour quotient… when you are at these parties, you feel you are not in Calcutta but in a really happening city,” says party girl Deepika Agarwal.

“The IPL Nights brought in a lot of freshness to the local party crowd,” adds Ratul Sood. “It was very aspirational for regular people to hang out with stars and celebs. It was the feel-good factor that we will miss.”

Unlike Mumbai or Delhi where “a good crowd (read: star showers)” is “no big deal”, the city got a taste of what a power-packed party ought to be like. No wonder Bharat Sureka, 24, who attended four out of the seven IPL 3 parties, is “upset” at the axe on the after-party. “The different environment that the IPL Nights managed to create was the main draw. The shows and all were nice but the ambience was something else. Also, it was a very different social crowd. Of course, the star aspect was the big draw,” he says.

Not just the party people, no after-party means a setback for the city’s fashion fraternity. Not only did Calcutta get to see the latest lines of outstation biggies like Manish Malhotra and young turk Prashant Verma, it also witnessed some fab fashion by city designers like Anamika Khanna and Kallol Datta who don’t usually show in Calcutta.

Nil from Dev R Nil says that along with the loss of a great platform and starry front rows, they managed to get “new clientele” through these shows. “We got many new orders, some from Juhi Chawla and some from Shah Rukh Khan’s best friend’s wife! But the main thing for us was the interaction with the cricketers. That was a nice opportunity. All said and done, these parties did add to the overall hype of IPL,” says the designer.

As the city limps back to the old club-nightclub routine, the IPL Nights will be like a shooting star — dazzling but fleeting.