Pandal-hopping crowd has more options

The year was 1929 and there was no T Nagar. It was called Mambalam East, and was home to a handful of Bengali families who, rather homesick and unable to return home for Durga Puja, decided to get together and form the Bengal Association.
“The first Durga Puja was organised in 1934 in what is now T Nagar, and has been held uninterrupted every year since,” says Sushant Prasad Chandra, 72, a member who was teenager at that time.Eighty years later, more than a dozen associations across the city organise Durga Puja celebrations.
Chandra’s father Haripada Chandra came to Madras as a film makeup artist. Just like his family, there were a few middle and upper-middle class Bengali families who had come down south for work. “Before the association was formally up and running, my father’s house was the venue for the puja. There was a handful of Bengalis who would organise the whole thing. Everyone was invited,” Chandra recalls.
Cooks were hired, priests were called and plays were staged. He recalls the celebrations those days as times of unadulterated fun. “We spent a few thousand rupees. There were no auditoriums or airconditioned rooms. We were in-house performers,” Chandra says.
Over the years as the city grew, many government employees, a large number of them Bengali, were transferred to south India. “Post-independence, the number of Bengalis shot up in the city. We were catering to a larger crowd, and people were also coming from Salem, Trichy and Coimbatore just for the Puja. It was no longer just a Bengali festival,” he says.
It’s not just the visitors that have increased; the budgets too have more than quadrupled. Funding and corporate sponsorship have swelled over the past 15 years and the celebrations have got bigger.
“Our Durgotsav was a modest and homely affair a decade ago,” says Sabyasachi Sarkar, president of South Madras Cultural Association (SMCA) in Besant Nagar. “It is a different ballgame now. There was no airconditioning in the halls, not many food stalls, no corporate stalls, and definitely no automobile companies showcasing their latest cars.”
Shushyamal Kundu, 82, one of the founding members of SMCA, says the celebrations are now about everything but Durga Puja. “There are so many pandals in the city and it is all about food stalls, and money steals the show,” he says. “A few organisations like SMCA, Bengal Association and Kali Bari in Mambalam are still trying to uphold traditional celebrations.”
Kundu and a few other families organised Durga Puja celebrations in the CPWD quarters in Besant Nagar in the late 1970s before they formed the association in 1980. “It was an all-inclusive festival. South Indians, Marwaris and other non-Bengali communities helped us. There was a personal touch to the whole affair. You seldom see that sort of participation these days,” he says. Around 10 years ago, Rs 3 lakh was more than enough to organise a grand Durga Puja for the last five days of Navaratri. “Our budget is now Rs 20 lakh to Rs 30 lakh, because prices have shot up,” says Anjan Chakraborty, president of Bengal Association. “Fifty years ago, T Nagar was the only venue for Puja. With passing years, it has got bigger and better.”