Book Review: In the Name of the Goddess – Durga Puja & Public Art

This edited volume traces how a Bengali Hindu festival has progressively become a public art enterprise.

Cover of In the Name of the Goddess: Durga Pujas of Contemporary Kolkata.

In the Name of the Goddess: Durga Pujas of Contemporary Kolkata
Edited by: Tapati Guha-Thakurta
Published by: Primus Books
408 pages (Hardcover)

It is said that Kolkata’s social life can be divided into two phases: before the Pujas and after the Pujas.

This five-day autumnal festival is an unparalleled celebration of the religious and the secular, at the centre of which sits Goddess Durga and her four divine children, Ganesh, Kartick, Lakshmi and Sarawati.

In the Name of the Goddess: The Durga Pujas of Contemporary Kolkata is the title of a recently-released book by art historian and director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Tapati Guha-Thakurta. Ten years in the making, it is a serious intellectual endeavour to study and understand Durga Puja in its many-armed splendour. As the author says about it in her introduction “it is a time of mass public festivity, a mega consumerist carnival, and a citywide street exhibition.” Part art history, part urban ethnography, and a chronicle of the popular visual culture of a street festival, Guha Thakurta, a die-hard Kolkatan, offers an insider’s view to many of the 4,000 Puja pandals that typically crop up every year. And in tracing the evolution of the 300-year old Durga Puja – from the Banedi Bari (aristocratic household) to the Barowari (begun by friends and associates), to the Sarbojanin puja (belonging to all) – she also lays bare the history of the city and its attachment to the goddess who sits at the heart of this yearly ritual and spectacle: “in its many roles as an object of worship, collective adoration and artistic connoisseurship.”

The Ever Burgeoning ‘Theme Pujas’

Ordered monitored crowd movement at Badamtala Ashar Sangha Puja, Kalighat, 2010.

In the chapter titled “Age of the ‘Theme’ Puja”, Guha-Thakurta delves into the contemporary phenomenon of theme pujas that have held sway over the public imagination since the end of the 1990s. The “shift from a premium on scale and opulence to a new pride in smallness, moderation and refinement” to the art college-educated Durga Puja artist, to a composite tableau where “the design concept covers the Puja in its entirety: the pandal structure, the image of the goddess, the outer environment and décor, the colour, the lighting and now, often, even the music which is theme-produced by the Puja designer in collaboration with a music composer,” she writes.

More a city-wide celebration, rather than mass religious experience, in another chapter she talks about how despite ‘profanations’ and contemporary liberties taken with the goddess, Durga still continues to hold her own: “the goddess and her festival can be seen to occupy their own secure public grounds of artistic and cultural transactability, seldom having to battle the forces of religious chauvinisms and vandalism that keep levelling charges of defamation of sacred icons in other regions and institutional spheres.”

It is the quality of scholarship – based on field research conducted between 2002 and 2012 – that makes the book stand out. Every chapter is followed by extensive annotations and there is a glossary, index and bibliography at the end, cross-referencing publications by Indian and international thinkers like Rachel McDermott and Giorgio Agamben.

Unimpressive Layout and Design

Subodh Roy’s folk art Durga to match the tribal art of Chattisgarh, Behala Agradoor Club Puja, 2006.

If it is research and scholarship that distinguishes the book, it is aesthetics that prove to be its weakness. The quality of visuals and photographs is average at best, especially for a book that heavily refers to the domain of the visual. Pictures are often cropped brusquely, and pages consist of long stretches of small-font text with little visual relief being offered by unimaginatively laid out photographs.

That apart, the 390-page, eight-chapter tome published by Primus Books is a laudable effort to study and chronicle a phenomenon that continues to grip the Bengali imagination, no matter which part of the world they live in. And while the prose may read academic for many, it remains a worthwhile addition to any collection. The last chapter titled “Destruction, Dispersals, Afterlives” leaves your ears ringing with shouts of immersion processions making their way to the ghats of the Hooghly in Kolkata: “Ashchhey bochhor abar hobe – it will happen again next year.”