Pujas, a tribute to Calcutta's diversity & creative habitation

This story was first published on December 19, 2021Calcutta’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. A ‘total work of art’ is not simply a staging; it not only should, but can, include everything. And ‘everything’, in the Pujas, includes contraries that categories like ‘experimental art’ and ‘religious practice’ won’t allow for in the West – the idea that experiment with form might also be indistinguishable from religious observance, and that religious observance might be indistinguishable from the savouring of a contemporary artistic spectacle. In recognition of its sui generis nature, the Unesco website states: ‘Durga Puja is seen as the best instance of the public performance of religion and art, and as a thriving ground for collaborative artists and designers … During the event the divides of class, religion and ethnicities collapse as crowds of spectators walk around to admire the installations.’Untitled Carousel 86987997 I find the word ‘installation’ moving, because it aims to get at what makes the Pujas different from carnivals and from other festivals as well as to revivify a term that’s been worn out by the over-monetarised art-world circuit. The dossier prepared by the historian Tapati Guha Thakurta and her team at the CSSSC (who, along with the British Council and a few key members of the West Bengal bureaucracy, did the work leading to the Unesco listing) uses the word too, pointing out that the Pujas comprise ‘the greatest public installation in the world’. One might mention at least two things here in relation to this observation. The first is that historical and economic differences between so-called ‘first world’ and ‘third world’ cities don’t necessarily mean that their heritage should be thought of differently. Great cities have great histories of modernity, and ‘first world’ and ‘third world’ contrasts are useless after a point: Cities are in conversation with each other, and the Pujas as ‘installation’ remind us of this fact. (This conversation is of greater importance to the Pujas’ creativity than the emergence of a market for tourists: That’s important too, but carries with it dangers that the Pujas need to guard themselves against now more than ever.) Second, the installation-like character of the festival burgeoned in the 1980s, just as the middle class began to disengage from both the Pujas and Calcutta. Maybe the Unesco listing will encourage both the West Bengal government and its diasporic citizenry to rethink its relationship to the city beyond nostalgia and ‘beautification’. medium nocaption88375969 Speaking of Calcutta brings to me what’s most significant about the listing – its site-specificity. Guha Thakurta said in an interview that Unesco insists its potential listings have ‘regional specificity’. This probably allowed the dossier to argue for Calcutta as the site of the Pujas despite pressure from the Union government ‘to make a case,’ as a report says ‘for “Durga Puja across India”’. The truth is that the Pujas are not just located in Calcutta: They’re located in, and are a response to, Calcutta’s neighbourhoods – to the idea of the neighbourhood itself. They’re referred to, for instance, as the Paddapukur Puja, the Bakul Bagan Puja, the Maddox Square Puja, or the Kidderpore Puja, names implying localities integral to the festival’s sense of transformation. People will go from South to North Calcutta and vice versa to ostensibly visit a pandal but also, partly, to rediscover an area they may not have encountered in years. It’s customary to not only spend time looking for a particular Puja, but, sometimes, in distinguishing a pandal – most often made to simulate a building – from a neighbouring house. This astonishment and confusion wouldn’t be possible if the houses didn’t have something implicitly fantastical and diverse about their architectural forms. The Pujas are a tribute to, and product of, not only Calcutta’s humanity, but its historically multifarious and creative forms of habitation. The Pujas are rooted in the tangible, and can’t really achieve the levels of extraordinariness we associate with them in sequestered spaces meant for expos, or in suburban gated developments, or, for that matter, in other cities. Bustling Pujas take place in Chittaranjan Park, Delhi, and Shivaji Park, Bombay, but the spectacular strangeness of the Calcutta Pujas depends crucially on the inherent air of foreignness of the city’s historic neighbourhoods. If the tangibility of these neighbourhoods were to vanish – that is, if they were to be destroyed (a not-implausible prospect given the passionate intensity of the developers and the Kolkata Municipal Commission’s lack of conviction) – the ‘intangible heritage’ that the Pujas comprise would become less than intangible: It would become near-meaningless. If Calcutta’s neighbourhoods were not to remain, neither would the Pujas we know and love. With this listing, the West Bengal government and Calcutta’s citizens should wake up with some urgency to the fact that the intangible is inextricably woven, in their city, with the tangible heritage they’re losing irreversibly. The writer is a novelist, essayist and critic