Much ado over her 'do' 

The Battle of Plassey was over and the Britishers were well entrenched in Bengal. Robert Clive, the man who paved the path for near two centuries of British occupation in India, found favour among the native elite, and would often accept their hospitality.

The Debs of Sovabazaar Rajbari, one of the most prominent families in Bengal, had a tradition of firing a salvo from their canon to herald the beginning of the Durga Puja season during the month of 'Ashwin'. That year, the Debs had extended an invitation to Clive, giving birth to what could arguably be the first controversy related to Durga Puja. The times were different and the dramatis personae involved were the rich and powerful, so the controversy died a natural death.

A few years later, seven residents of Guptipara in Hooghly pulled in funds to organise Durga Puja that would open its doors to all locals. The idea of a community Durga Puja irked the privileged few, who competed to outdo each other in pomp and show for those few days of the year. The idea of Durga Puja for the masses was further bolstered in 1909, when 12 friends from Bhowanipore came together, giving rise to what is now known as the "barowari pujo", deriving its name from 'baro', the Bengali word for 12, and 'yaar', the colloquial word for friends.

Over the years, Durga Puja in Kolkata has evolved into more of a social festival than a religious one, involving people from across communities. For Kolkatans, it would never be amiss to find a bevy of burqa-clad women visiting a Puja pandal late in the evening on Ashtami, or a Sikh family rating various pandals they visited the night before. Despite its all-inclusive nature, however, Durga Puja has often been mired in controversy, mostly lent credence by political forces opposed to the ideas of social assimilation.

Leaving aside the dark days of communal disharmony during 1946-1947, and some sporadic flare-ups, the bhadralok Bengali's somewhat libertarian attitude towards matters of religion, has often faced criticism, particularly from religionists who felt threatened that the 'sanatan dharma' would lose its way in Bengal. From the likes of Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and Michael Madhusudan Dutt to litterateur Sunil Ganguly, painter Bikash Bhattacharya, and most recently, artist Sanatan Dinda, all have come face to face with such controversies.

Dinda, who recently painted the image of a woman, wearing a hijab (head cover) and a niqab (veil), with the hint of a third eye on her forehead, not much unlike the Goddess, courted controversy from a section of society. No sooner did the artist post the image on his social media feed with the caption, "Maa aschhen (Mother is coming)", it went viral, and mostly for the wrong reasons. Raising a red flag against it, there were tweets saying: "He knows he can get away with it because many intellectual Bengalis are going gaga over it."

Dinda, however, distanced himself from the controversy and pointed out that Maa "could be anybody, not necessarily Devi Durga". "Some people want to kick up a sandstorm and create trouble to gain political mileage; that's exactly what's happening here. They have no other work but to create trouble," he says. Among the art world A-listers, he has been among the few to have been directly involved with the festivities, initially as a designer of thematic Durga Puja idols and marquees, later doubling up as both designer and chief patron of the Durga Puja at Nalin Sarkar Street in North Kolkata. Dinda has since stepped away from the responsibilities, and this year, he is not associated with any Puja committee, even as a designer. "The image is not the blueprint for any Durga idol this year. The controversy around it is a sham, nothing more than unnecessary noise," he states.

The average Bengali's outlook towards religion has often been met with confused contention, more so in recent times, with a certain section of the political milieu taking an eager interest in the state's socio-cultural nuances, believes veteran journalist, Jisu Chaudhuri. "There have been controversies earlier over various works of art and literature but much of the protests came from other parts of India where religion has been more a matter of following scriptures and rituals, unlike how we turn almost every other festival here into community festivities," he says.

Chaudhuri points out that while there was an uproar over painter MF Hussain's creations based on Hindu deities, there was hardly any noise in Bengal, except from some political corners. "When Sunil Ganguly wrote about his adolescent fantasies surrounding Goddess Saraswati or when he equated the looks of Goddess Kali with that of a tribal woman, some went up in arms even in Kolkata but it was short-lived. These issues have been dug up and raised occasionally by a handful of leaders (mainly of the Hindu Right group) but could not catch the fancy of Bengal's electorate," he adds.

What started with Durga Puja pandals being built in the image of landmarks from around the globe has now evolved into a journey of exploring artforms, from historical inspirations to the more abstract, and sometimes even avidly political. In 2020, even in the middle of the ongoing pandemic, Puja committees continued toying with ideas, as themes dealt with subjects like Covid-19, the long march of the migrant workers, and the Sino-India border dispute.

If one popular pandal modelled Asura to look like Coronavirus, the demon's face in another resembled Chinese Premier Xi Jinping, causing footfall to increase in the wake of a controversy. The Puja committee that designed its Durga idol to look like a migrant worker mother with her children in tow pushed some political buttons. Issues that are overtly political might not have found any takers even a decade back, but the idea of displaying such themes has gradually been gaining ground.

Idol maker Mintu Pal from Kumartuli, the artisans' district in north Kolkata, is working on a fiberglass Durga idol this year for a Puja committee in East Kolkata, which is modelled on Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, draped in her trademark white cotton saree and flip-flops. "With Didi becoming Chief Minister for the third term, it is an embodiment of people's aspirations. The idol will hold 10 popular schemes like Kanyashree, Swasthya Sathi, etc, which have been launched after Banerjee came to power in a bid to showcase that for most people in the state she is the matriarch," he explains.

Veteran politician and long-time patron of the popular Ekdalia Evergreen Durga Puja, Subrata Mukherjee, however, feels that the deity should be kept out of the ambit of thematic interpretations. "We have often used themes to showcase our pandal but we have always stuck to tradition and we have no plans of ever resorting to thematic presentation, in case of the idol," he states.

Many would have forgotten by now that when the first thematic Durga Puja made an appearance under the creative stewardship of artist Samir Aich, sometime in the early 2000s, both he and the Puja committee faced flak for moving away from tradition.

In its usual tolerance and patronage of artistic freedom, however, Bengal embraced the idea of thematic Durga Puja, and every autumn, pandal-hoppers look forward to exploring the new and the wondrous apart from the usual fanfare, the rolling drums, and the whirligig of lights, colour and sound.