Durga Puja is when art meets devotion. When creativity meets culture. When tradition meets fashion. When crowds mean celebration. Every autumn, during the nine evenings known as Navaratri, the whole of east India lights up with festivities, and this being India, east also makes its presence felt in the north, south, and west. There are installations calledpandalsall over the country, hosting not only Goddess Durga and her four children but also depicting the moods of the moment. Onepandalin New Delhi looks like the new Parliament house; apandalin Bhopal has been designed after the upcoming Ram temple in Ayodhya; also in Bhopal, onepandalis celebrating the Chandrayaan; at a pandal in Guwahati, theaartiis happening exactly how it happens by the Ganga in Varanasi.
Then there is Kolkata, where the year is split between the time one waits for Durga Puja and when one celebrates Durga Puja. The actual worship is limited only to five days, but the celebration now extends to all the nine nights, especially after the festival earned a place last year in UNESCO’s heritage list. There is so much to see — Durga Puja is the biggest outdoor art installation in the world — that even those many nights are not enough.Pandals, apart from being works of art, are also social levellers: it doesn’t matter who you are, at a puja you are part of the crowd — the crowd that’s synonymous with celebration.
Text by: Bishwanath Ghosh
