Durga Puja in Kolkata
For five days each autumn Kolkata becomes an open-air exhibition of temporary art, installed street by street.
Durga Puja marks the goddess Durga’s victory over the buffalo demon Mahishasura. In Kolkata it is also, straightforwardly, the largest public art event in the country. Neighbourhood committees commission pandals — temporary pavilions built for the festival and taken down afterwards — and compete, hard, on design.
A pandal may be a bamboo-and-cloth replica of a monument, a conceptual installation on a social theme, or a structure built entirely from one material: terracotta, jute, bicycle parts, glass bangles. The idols inside are made in Kumartuli, a working potters’ quarter in north Kolkata where the clay images are built on straw and bamboo armatures through the preceding months. The workshops there can be visited well before the festival, and often are.
The city stays awake for the duration. People walk pandal to pandal through the night — pandal hopping is the usual phrase — eating as they go. On the final day the idols are carried in procession to the Hooghly and immersed.
UNESCO inscribed Durga Puja in Kolkata on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2021. The dates move each year with the lunar calendar.