Keya Sarkar: Puja in Santiniketan

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Thanks to the mushrooming of TV channels and the latest trend of corporate ranking of "best" pujas, those interested in the Bengali annual festival must be completely in the picture of the five-day high that Kolkata experiences. My decision to stay back in Santiniketan during puja and not head for Kolkata to see some works of art in the creation of the idols and the pandals, was due to my fear of crowds and noise.

Santniketan was nice. Thankfully no depression could mar the blue of the autumn sky and no drizzle played spoilsport. God was kind but some humans were not. I didn't need my alarm to wake me up on mahalaya morning. The firecrackers did the job! There is a huge number of people from Bihar in our district and they may not have known the rituals of mahalaya. In a good neighbourly gesture, I reconciled myself to the sound of crackers. If I missed my memories and yearned for the mahalaya magic of yesteryears, I chided myself for not being more accepting of change.

But Ma Durga hears it all and so it happened that the puja celebration for me was more a going back in time and encountering sights, sounds and smells familiar. In spite of prolonged holidays, Santiniketan does not get too crowded during puja. It is probably not too "happening" for revelry either. No restaurants, no coffee shops and no rocking pandal puja to show off halter necks or heavily sequined "ethnic" wear! Venturing out without the fear of traffic, we actually managed to see quite a bit of what puja still means, away from over-dressed puja pandals being judged by equally over-dressed TV serial artists!

Anyone familiar with Santiniketan is aware of Surul, a nearby suburb which houses a famous zamindar house. The puja at Surul was our first stop. Although the glory is long-gone, the house is freshly painted in readiness for the puja with all the old gas lights taken out and hung. As drummers take their position in front of the idol, you just have to shut your eyes to imagine how it must have been in days past. The entire family descends on the ancestral home from across the globe and one feels privileged to witness such a special reunion.

From Surul we made our way through car-unfriendly village roads to a little known zamindar house at Moukhira. This house makes up in quaintness what it lacks in grandeur. Tucked between crumbling terracotta temples that have dates inscribed on them, the puja here is modest. The dates, harking back to 200 years ago, transport you to a different period altogether.

Nothing that I have seen in Birbhum had quite prepared me for the zamindarbari at Kalikapur, only a kilometre away from Moukhira. A crumbling but huge mansion boasted a thakurdalan (space for worship), the size of which rivals a football field. The columns in the dalan and the verandah, which must have served as the viewing gallery and sleeping quarters, had a sense of dignified decay to them. Against this background, the family inheritors bravely carry on the tradition of the puja but the pathos is almost palpable.

Our next stop was a village called Sirsha. Dotted with terracotta temples, this village is also famed to have a puja at a borobari. We followed the noise of the dhak and found what we were looking for. Although modest compared to our earlier stops, it was the most lively. Most of the family still lives in the village or close by, and the whole atmosphere was anything but ritualistic.

It was late afternoon by then and the head of the family insisted we partake of lunch. We were hungry but a little shy of accepting hospitality from total strangers. But the family insisted and as we sat in line on the floor with a hundred others for a simple Bengali meal on dried saal leaves, the disappointment of mahalaya was certainly made up.