Unesco heritage status for Pujas speaks of a larger message on multifarious habitations
This story was first published on December 19, 2021
Calcutta’s Durga Puja has been put on Unesco’s poetically named ‘Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity’. The idea of an ‘intangible heritage of humanity’ is conceptually compelling; it’s inspiring, too, in an aesthetic sense, because of its very impracticality – the words ‘intangible’ and ‘humanity’ suggest that everything could, potentially, be included in such a list. What better encompasses the messiness and beauty of ‘everything’ – including the ephemeral quality that ‘intangible’ suggests – than the Pujas?
By the time Richard Wagner came up with the term Gesamtkunstwerk, meaning ‘total work of art’, in 1849, the Pujas in North Calcutta were already on their way towards turning into (at least that’s the sense we get from effervescent accounts in Kaliprasanna Sinha’s Hutom Pyanchar Naksha) the unclassifiable 10-day-long public event they would become in the 20th century.
Calcutta’s Durga Puja has been put on Unesco’s poetically named ‘Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity’. The idea of an ‘intangible heritage of humanity’ is conceptually compelling; it’s inspiring, too, in an aesthetic sense, because of its very impracticality – the words ‘intangible’ and ‘humanity’ suggest that everything could, potentially, be included in such a list. What better encompasses the messiness and beauty of ‘everything’ – including the ephemeral quality that ‘intangible’ suggests – than the Pujas?
By the time Richard Wagner came up with the term Gesamtkunstwerk, meaning ‘total work of art’, in 1849, the Pujas in North Calcutta were already on their way towards turning into (at least that’s the sense we get from effervescent accounts in Kaliprasanna Sinha’s Hutom Pyanchar Naksha) the unclassifiable 10-day-long public event they would become in the 20th century.