A 10-Armed Goddess Charms a Frenetic Megalopolis

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A 10-Armed Goddess Charms a Frenetic Megalopolis

The New York Times

October 22, 2007

 

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

 

CALCUTTA, Oct. 19 - Every year around this time,

the awesome figure of a woman, with three piercing

eyes and 10 arms splayed, appears in every nook and

corner of this city.

 

Fashioned by hand, usually out of clay, she turns up

everywhere, from the dense warrens of the old city to

the new high-rise apartment blocks. She can be found

jutting out from narrow sidewalks and tiny parks and

inside crumbling aristocratic homes. She sits in her own

elaborately imagined pavilions - some intimate, some

gaudy - each one serving as a platform for art or

spectacle and together turning this thick, steaming,

argumentative city into a cross between an open-air

museum and a sprawling amusement park.

 

Half Mardi Gras and half Christmas, Durga Pujo, a five-

day festival dedicated to the Hindu goddess Durga, is

the most important religious event for Hindus in this

part of India. Worship is only one part of the ritual.

 

Shops and offices have remained closed since

Wednesday, when Durga Pujo began this year, and the

streets have been packed late into the night.

 

Durga herself represents both martial prowess - spear

and club in hand, she is portrayed as slaying a demon

(half man, half buffalo) at her feet - and benign

motherhood. The festival celebrates her homecoming

with her four children in tow. Her story represents the

oldest fable: the victory of good over evil.

 

That fable is constantly reinterpreted during Durga Pujo,

and in the ensuing spectacle are glimpses of the city's

contemporary desires and fears. Nowadays, rural crafts

are all the rage, even as some pavilions look more like

cool, modern, hotel-lobby installations.

 

Eco-friendly pavilions are in. But the traditional system

of neighborhood fund-raising is disappearing in favor of

more lucrative corporate sponsorships. It is a trend that

this year brought giant banners to the pavilion at College

Square, in the city center, peddling everything from

fairness cream to mustard oil.

 

Some Pujo watchers see a move away from bling to an

emphasis on artistry and authenticity. Pujo in Calcutta,

they say, caters now to many different tastes.

 

" There is kitsch and gimmick, but so many other things,

too, " said Tapati Guha-Thakurta, an art historian who

studies the aesthetic of Durga Pujo. " People from all

walks, all classes take to the streets. The city's

intellectual elite have always wanted to leave the city -

the crowds, the noise, the excess. I feel there is excess,

but also a culture of moderation and artistry. That's a

change. "

 

The festival is not universally embraced. Rudrangshu

Mukherjee, the editorial page editor at The Telegraph, a

local newspaper, described it as " a mixture of excess

and frenzy. "

 

" This is the Bengalis' safety valve, when they let loose,

bring the city to a standstill, get away from work - not

that they do work for the rest of the year, " he fumed,

only half-joking. " It's ridiculous. Then this colossal

waste of money. " (Mr. Mukherjee is Bengali.)

 

Either way, Durga Pujo unleashes the imagination of the

city. One neighborhood festival committee erected a

pavilion this year based on Incan motifs. Meanwhile, in

a narrow North Calcutta alley, with green window

shutters and the scent of fried fish at lunchtime, stands a

shimmering gold-painted Durga, her form plainly

inspired by Tantric art traditions.

 

In a South Calcutta park, an artist has portrayed the

demon with a gas cylinder strapped to his body, a

would-be suicide bomber. In another corner of the city,

organizers eager to educate people about global

warming have reproduced melting glaciers, with real ice

that requires five giant air-conditioners to sustain.

 

The pavilion organizer, Gautam Halder, pointed to the

long line outside and said the extra greenhouse-gas

emissions were worth it for the sake of spreading the

message. " Look, people here have a craze about ice, " he

said. " If I did this with trees, they wouldn't come. "

 

This year, the mother goddess proved susceptible to the

global intellectual property regime. One neighborhood

committee faced a copyright infringement lawsuit after

it modeled its pavilion on the Harry Potter books. A

local court dismissed the case, and Harry Potter, made of

plaster of paris, has been installed inside a reproduction

of Hogwarts Castle, along with Durga and her demon.

 

A recurrent motif in recent years is what Ms. Guha-

Thakurta, the art historian, calls a return to " ethnic

chic, " or the re-creation of village life in the city. On a

daylong pavilion tour this week, she found a pavilion at

the end of a narrow street in North Calcutta decorated

with handmade wooden toys - big, bright rocking

horses and dolls in painted saris. The organizer, Dipto

Ghosh, told her that he had seen them in a crafts

museum and had sought out the artisan who made them.

 

The artisan, Gauranga Sutradhar, said that virtually no

one bought his wooden toys anymore and that he was

happy for the work. Mr. Ghosh said the pavilion was his

way of bringing a dying rural tradition to jaded city

eyes.

 

" You're seeing all these malls, " Mr. Ghosh said. " If you

suddenly see something rural, something totally

different, it strikes you. "

 

The city's police department said Thursday that it had

issued licenses for 1,127 pavilions this year, not

counting those inside private homes in the suburbs,

which are outside its jurisdiction. The biggest pavilions,

the police said, can draw as many as half a million

spectators a day, a big crowd even by Indian standards

and, from the sound of it, all of them becoming art

critics for the week.

 

" Is that supposed to be a sun? " a spectator murmured at

a highly conceptual installation in a neighborhood called

Kidderpore. " Everybody says it looks like a satellite. "

 

The ephemera last only five days. Sunday is the end of

the festival, with the pavilions being dismantled and

parades from each neighborhood carrying the goddess to

the banks of the Ganges River, where Durga is

immersed and bade farewell, until her spectacular return

next year. The poor will pluck from her figure whatever

they can recycle and sell.

 

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