Keya Sarkar: Commercialising Puja

PEOPLE LIKE THEM

My husband's career had taken me to Mumbai in the early eighties. I remember feeling terribly homesick during every Durga Puja. Although the five days of the Pujas were terribly important dates in my calendar, it didn't even register with anyone else in my office.

We did do the rounds of the Puja pandals at night and ate all the singaras and moglai parathas which reminded us of home, but the flavour of Puja in Kolkata was missing. Over the years, of course, things changed and Mumbai became a city of celebrities.

Soon no one was getting into the pandals to see the idol, but flocking there to see the glitterati. I remember my shock and disgust when one night I saw Abhijeet (the playback singer) at the puja he has started in Andheri.

He was standing in a booth just opposite the one that housed the pratima while someone announced that fans could queue up for autographs!

Thankfully, I left Mumbai that year and shifted to Santiniketan. I was in Kolkata for Puja last year. But the two decades that I had been away has obviously taken its toll and now Puja in Kolkata is no longer about new clothes, new shoes that pinch, offerings in para pandals and hiring cars to see the lights at night.

It is about competition and awards sponsored by corporate houses. And of course, unending hours of TV software in which anybody can be asked the Bengalis' favourite question "how do you feel about Puja?" They all invariably feel "good".

This year I decided to stay back in Santiniketan and it was a wise decision. There are still not too many "public" pujas in this part of the world. Most of the idol worshipping is in peoples' homes. On each day of the Pujas I chose a different family to visit.

From large ex-zamindari families to more modest families of eminent lawyers and doctors, the loyalty to tradition made the experience so special. Just an ambience of no loudspeakers, an absence of western clothes or fast food advertisements took me back many decades.

Observing the puja from a distance was like watching a movie. Large families come together once a year. Some of the members of the family have obviously done well for themselves (the video camera is to announce that), and others have not (the new sarees are a little crumpled). But the once-a-year ritual forces all to interact, making the love obvious.

Probably the most interesting day was when I decided to go to my milkman's village. He had taken some money from me to build a permanent mandir and I think the insistence that I visit during puja was to demonstrate that the money had been put to good use!

About 25 km from Sanitiniketan, his village, Muitil, was like any other in Bengal. Lush, green and poor. But this was Puja. And every village kid was dressed in new clothes as they danced to the beat of traditional drums.

On our way back we stopped at another village, Hatshirandi. I had heard that it was only here they still had the tradition of installing painted idols rather than sculpted three-dimensional ones. A young guy who works in Santiniketan offered to show us around.

We went into a dozen homes to see the paintings and learn about the artists. While some of the Pujas were relatively lavish, others were modest. What was uniform was the warmth in our reception and the intimacy established in offering us prasad.

It was late afternoon as we were leaving. "You should have come in the morning", said our guide. "All the TV crew were here to shoot the morning rituals", he said impressing us with the names of the channels that had been there. It was, I thought, the beginning of the end.