Ruthie's Excellent India Adventure: October 2006

Puja 2006

What do you call a festival in India that’s like a combination of Christmas, Fourth of July, New Years, the State Fair and a Rolling Stones concert? In Kolkata you call that festival Durga Puja. Breaking apart the words, Puja means prayer, Durga is a Hindu goddess. Durga Puja is a festival that celebrates the goddess Durga whom the Hindis believe defeated the evil god Shiva. For four days at the end of September devout Hindis believe that Durga visits the city of Kolkata to give her continued blessings. The ‘puja’ season actually begins at the end of August when the pre puja shopping begins. People save year round and spend it all during the month. All shopping areas are packed with people on the weekends buying presents for all members of their family. Puja shopping is like having every day from the end of August to the end of September like shopping the day after Thanksgiving. Everyone is out trying to find that perfect gift or puja outfit. All the retailers are conducting Puja sales and the billboards and newspaper ads all promote pre Puja sales. In the Lifestyle section of the newspaper, articles are published on this year’s Puja trends with articles on traditional foods, traditional dress and articles on how Puja is celebrated through out the area.

The cooking and the shopping are only a small part of the Puja preparations. The larger preparation, and the one that has the most significance, is the building of the Puja Pandals. In mid August, late at night in the empty streets of Kolkata you can see old and young Indian men pulling hand carts full of bamboo 15-20 feet long. They are bringing their carts to public areas within the city to build bamboo structures that are two to three stories tall. Once the main frame of bamboo is erected and held together with jute rope the artists begin building their framework of ornamental display that turn a bamboo scaffold into a detailed and ornate replica of a Hindu temple found in greater India. It is amazing the work that is put into these structures. As the four day festival nears the goddess display is created depicting the battle Durga had with Shiva.

Then comes the actual Puja celebration that lasts four days. As Kolkata approaches the four day fete everything starts slowing down. Very little work is done. Want something delivered? Wait until after Puja. Want someone to come to your flat to fix something? No problem, as long as you can wait until after Puja. All Kolkatans that have moved from the city come back during Puja to spend the holiday with their families. Extra flights are scheduled into the city. Extra trains are routed to Kolkata. It’s hard to believe that a city of 17 million can hold more people but it does! Traffic, which was congested and slow before, now goes to a crawl.

The four day holiday begins, each day having it’s own significance. Farmers are brought into the city from outlying villages to act as drummers before the goddess. Children perform plays in front of proud parents and grandparents. Families gather at their smaller, local pandals and sit for hours sharing their Puja food specialties with family, friends and neighbors. During the festival thousands of people visit the most ornate and popular Pandals. The local paper and city officials conduct a Pandal judging contest with the winnng Pandal earning prize money for their neighborhood. This year at one large Pandal display 80,000 people visited in one day. (No that is not a typo!) When I tried to describe this to Momo on the phone I asked her to imagine the whole city of Duluth going to visit Canal Park to see the Lift Bridge all on the same day. The Puja ends on the fourth day with the devout taking the goddess to the Hooghly river to submerge the idol and send it on its way to the Bay of Bengal. Then everyone collapses from the exhaustion of the four day fete.

While this was interesting to watch and observe and the pandals are truly a work of art our hearts can only be saddened by the knowledge that all this activity is devoted to a statue that cannot save or give a lasting foundation of joy. While Kolkata is named the City of Joy this holiday Puja was a stark reminder that Kolkata’s joy is like the city, built on sand.