The eco-feminism of Ma Durga and family

KOLKATA: Images and pandals made of sugarcane or coconut fibres, date leaves or dried dhundul and Dal Bori have not only enthralled puja revel-lers in Kolkata but also NRI Bengalis coming home to enjoy the festival.
Even the scholars among them feel that the trendy promotion of folk handicrafts in creating the pandal ambience mark the collective urge to renew contacts with cultural roots.
Dr Lina Gupta, a Fulbright scholar and teacher of comparative religion and philosophy at Glendale college, USA, is one of them. Lina, a con-sultant to the United Nations, has flown in to her home town to study the Pujas as the part of a research project.
From the studio of artist Alok Sen to the natmandir of Shobhabazar Ra-jbari, she has devotedly videotaped the making of the thematic idols as well as traditional Puja rituals. Interviewing scores of people, Gupta has been trying to identify the continuity and changes in the biggest festival of Bengal since last year. It is a journey down memory lane for a Kolkata girl who had left her city in 1971.
"Corporate sponsorship has commercialised Kolkata Pujas. But I appre-ciate the efforts to renew connection with cultural tradition, already a global trend now. It helps to create the cultural conditioning to go back to nature and people close to nature," says Gupta.
For sceptics, it is a collective annual self-deception for the urban middle class whose nostalgia lasts only for four days. Gupta disagrees. "Even if the community tries to come out of the Western stereotypes for four days, it reveals its collective yearning and trials. When you try to manage a plaited dhoti, it needs involvement," she observes.
For her, the Pujas can be understood in the context of eco-feminism. "The planet earth as well as women is oppressed. The mother cult of Bengal, particularly Durga Puja, is fascinating. Contrary to violence-dominated patriarchal interpretations of scriptures, Durga''s family in-cludes all life forms including Kalabau, one of the nine plants in which the deity had hidden herself when male Gods were searching for her," Lina argues.
She has found a new assertion of women''s empowerment in the sex workers'' refusal to allow the traditional collection of soil from their doorsteps for the Pujas.
"It reveals new attitudes of the women. In my childhood, I never heard about all-women Pujas. The dress and make-up of the girls in Puja crowds also indicate a zeal for carefree physical expression. Unlike our generation, they value their wishes," says the researcher.