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This picture of a pandal or marquee was taken on my cellphone from the automotive window as we handed by Dover Terrace in south Kolkata, India. Dover Terrace is a middle- and upper-middle-class space, however simply over right here there’s a slum. So the Kali Puja festivities, which this marquee was on the centre of, have been primarily participated in by working-class individuals who anyway deal with elements of the highway as their drawing room, in order that automobiles want to barter this transient, congested stretch no matter whether or not it’s internet hosting festivities.
The principle pageant in West Bengal isn’t Kali Puja however Durga Puja, which takes place in late September or early October. It celebrates the mom goddess Durga’s creation along with her kids into the world for per week, after which she returns to Kailash (the height within the Himalayas the place she lives along with her husband, Shiva). She’s visiting her father’s home, after which, like all married girls, should return to the home she shares along with her husband. The pageant’s different mythic narrative has to do with Durga vanquishing a demon, Mahishasura, who threatens to destroy the world; Durga, 10-armed, and bearing weapons, rides a lion and tramples the demon underfoot. The pageant is a mixture of triumphal adoration (Durga’s victorious slaying of the demon) and, more and more, because it attracts to a detailed, a way of valediction (the daughter should, once more, go away the home she grew up in).
Quite a lot of inventiveness has knowledgeable the Durga Pujas, particularly previously 40 years: the pandal is usually a fantasy constructing that resembles a well-known landmark (a pyramid, say, or an historical temple), or the complete momentary edifice itself turns into an set up. The demon could reference a political determine. The lighting exterior, a vibrant, animated sequence of panels, is a pamphlet or bulletin: it could cite outstanding cultural or political occasions that befell that yr.
The Kali Puja takes place a couple of month later, often coinciding with Diwali. Although small-scale as compared, it attracts on the identical type of inventive licence. Its fable is that Kali, Durga’s black, eccentrically crazed incarnation, is on the warpath as a way to rid the world of evil: one other session of cosmic spring-cleaning. In neighbourhoods, we see but once more the conceptual play with lights, marquees and clay photos.
In Dover Terrace, the unprepossessing pandal was made to appear to be an Aadhaar card – the distinctive identification card now deemed indispensable for Indian residents – and is controversial for that motive. This one has the important particulars required for one “Maa Kali”, together with “title of husband: Mahadev” (one other title for Shiva), and her deal with: “Kailash Parbat, High Flooring/ Close to Mansarovar Lake”, a mythic deal with plausibly resembling an city one (Kailash Parbat can also be a candy store in Mumbai). The Bengali phrases on the underside proper, sadharan manusher adhikar (“each unusual individual’s proper”), remind us, movingly, that the Aadhaar card is doubtlessly empowering. The doorway to the marquee on the left frames the clay picture inside and serves as an ID picture. Kali is, on this method, affectionately seized, humanised, even politicised.
The pandal, like a lot of the festive efflorescence, arises from a comedy that has knowledgeable Hindu iconography for millennia. Kali along with her tongue protruding is usually defined in Bengal by the accompanying story: on a rampage to rid the world of evil, she was at risk of destroying it. To subdue her, Shiva lay down in her path; when she realised she’d stepped on her husband, she bit her tongue in embarrassment. In India the story, just like the picture capturing that awkward second, all the time raises a smile and induces the affectionate recognition with which we view what’s each flawed and acquainted; the colonial-Orientalist-Christian response, then again, targeted on the picture being terrifying. It was Allen Ginsberg, talking of Durga’s son, the elephant-headed Ganesha, who noticed this mythic creativeness for what it’s, “such a classy, quixotic, paradoxical mixture of the human and the divine”.
The pata or sacred watercolours made exterior the Kali temple in what was then Calcutta within the nineteenth century took this humanisation of divinity a step additional, giving the gods not solely a familial obstreperousness, however turning them into residents of a brand new colonial phenomenon, town of Calcutta. In these footage made by nameless artists, Durga’s different son, the divine dandy Kartik, wears buckled footwear and has a Prince Albert haircut. The artwork historian Jyotindra Jain attracts our consideration to the best way one patua (artist) depicts a pot-bellied Shiva with Ganesha in his arms, out on a night stroll along with his household like every unusual (sadharan) household in Calcutta on the time. Right now’s pandals, that are intricate however ephemeral, lasting for under so long as every pageant does, carry ahead the legacy of the pata in exploring new methods of exhibiting us how those that dwell for ever additionally dwell amongst us now.
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