The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines festival thusly: a time of celebration marked by special observances; an often periodic celebration or programme of events or entertainment having a special focus; gaiety, conviviality.
The West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee seems to have inadvertently coined a new meaning for the word.
“Ek maash toh hoye gelo…. Aami anurodh korbo ustobey phire aashun ( It’s been almost a month… I request you to return to the festival)”, the chief minister told the citizens of her state. She was ruing that instead of counting down to the Durga Puja festival, as is usual at this time of the year, thousands were taking to the streets every day demanding justice for the doctor raped and murdered at the R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata on 9 August. The angry protest movement that shows no signs of abating has cast a pall over the usual build-up to Bengal’s biggest festival.
Banerjee was trying to say that while she shared the protesters’ grief and outrage, thousands of small businesses, craftspersons and food vendors who rely on Durga Puja for a major chunk of their annual income were having a raw deal. Return to the festive spirit, she said, while exhorting the CBI to deliver justice quickly. But those words reverberated in ways she did not imagine.
In a scathing social media post essayist and lyricist Chandril Bhattacharya wondered if the chief minister was implying that once a festival starts, protests must cease. He said it’s like a parent telling a child, “Alright, enough playing. It’s 7 o’clock. Stop your protest-protest game and sit down to study.”
The chief minster seemed to have given festivals a new definition, a new raison d’être, Bhattacharya said. “We always thought of festival as a reprieve, a time for enjoyment albeit temporary. But now we are told the festival is like a giant eraser that wipes the board clean of all the crimes that happened before. Now begins a time of wondrous fun.”
The chief minister was barely done with her remarks when people angrily shared artful memes that declared defiantly, “Ustobe phirchi na (We will not return to the festival).” Someone tweaked that meme to read ,“Ut-shobe phirchi na.” Shob in Bengali means corpse, an allusion to the doctor whose body kicked off the movement. Whether this movement brings about real change or not, it has certainly generated some amazing social media art. Someone should collect all the graphics that have come out of this protest.
In West Bengal, Durga Puja is of course the mother of all festivals. Before Google told us everything, whenever a new calendar arrived at home, we would hurriedly flip the pages to this time of the year to figure out the dates of Durga Puja. Some looked for the dates to plan their Puja vacations away from the madness. Some looked to the dates to immerse themselves in the madness. Either way, the year revolved around those dates.
As a child a festival just meant a holiday without homework. For my great-grandmother, it meant rituals and chores. There were fruits to be chopped, lamps to be lit, prayers to be chanted. For young people it meant a reprieve from the eagle-eyed scrutiny of parents and aunts, a time when they could wander the streets late into the night, snatching moments of romance, while lost in a crowd of thousands.
Lazy commentators try to explain Durga Puja to westerners as the Christmas of Bengal. But while Christmas, like Durga Puja, comes with sales, shopping and buildings bedecked with lights, the actual festival could not be more different. On Christmas Day, western cities are like ghost towns—all twinkling lights and empty streets. Everyone is at home having a Christmas meal with friends and family. Even the 24-hour supermarket shuts early. In India, for many festivals, whether Durga Puja or Ganesh Chaturthi or Diwali, life spills out on to the street. It’s an exuberant reclaiming of the public commons, which is no small thing in a world where we increasingly cordon off our public spaces into air-conditioned enclosures where entry is guarded by uniformed security guards with wands.
Now Durga Puja as a public festival has a new cachet. Thanks to the Unesco’s intangible living heritage tag, international visitors come to Kolkata and marvel at the biggest temporary street art installation in the world. Durga Puja has become an arts festival as well.
It’s not just Durga Puja. Bengal, indeed India, is home to so many festivals. In many ways, Mamata Banerjee has been the cheerleader-in-chief of this festival culture. The communist leaders who were at the helm before her party came to power were active in many Durga Pujas individually but their party stayed aloof from religious festivals.
Banerjee understood the grass-roots attraction of festivals and embraced them with open arms. She added more festivals to the roster, announcing full holidays for Shab-e-Barat, the Islamic Night of Forgiveness, and Karma Puja, a tribal festival dedicated to the protector of crops and forests, saying, “We give equal importance to all festivals.” During jamai shoshti (a festival held for sons-in-law) , she declares half-day holidays in government offices so that sons-in-law babus can go visit the in-laws and get pampered. Thanks to her the Christmas lights stay up in Kolkata for weeks after the festival is over as if loath to let the festivities end.
Every club celebrating Durga Puja gets a cash grant from the government. She personally is a whirlwind of activity, inaugurating the big Pujas, giving the final touch to the third eye of many Durga idols. She started a new tradition of having a sort of ticker tape parade of the best Durga Pujas of the city as a glitzy finale to a grand carnival.
Until now people accepted this festival bonanza without thinking too much about it. Many grumbled about all the holidays and the work culture. But few soul-searched about the purpose they served beyond being an excuse to wear new clothes, eat egg rolls and stay up all night.
This year it’s different. Durga Puja will happen. There will be mammoth crowds. Though a few clubs have decided not to accept the government grants, there will be still be great installation Durga Pujas. But it feels different. The stores are eerily empty despite the Puja sale posters. The mood is off. The government often boasts that despite huge crowds, one hears very little about major crime during Durga Puja. No one will make that claim this year without remembering the R.G. Kar incident. Even the Durga Puja carnival at the end, if it happens, will feel out of place this year. It seems this will not be the usual eat-pray-love Durga Puja festival.
“Of course there will be a strain of melancholy,” says visual artist Sanatan Dinda. “I paint pictures but I don’t live in an ivory tower. My work speaks about the society around me,” says Dinda who is much in demand at this time for various Durga Puja installations. But he resigned this year from the Rajya Charukala Parishad, an autonomous arts body under the West Bengal government, to protest the rape and murder and the government’s reaction to it.
Recently he joined a protest march by the clay artists of Kumartuli where many of the Durga images are created. This is their busiest time of the year but they left the unfinished Durgas in their workshops and took to the streets wearing black headbands in protest.
Dinda says it might be a day’s work lost but for those whose sculpt the Durga images, this tragedy feels even more poignant.
Durga Puja is a festival for a goddess who vanquishes evil and comes home. The ongoing protest is for a woman raped and killed by forces of evil, a woman who didn’t get to go home.
Dinda asks, “Until she gets justice, how do we paint the smile on our Durga’s face?”
Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.
Sandip Roy is a writer, journalist and radio host. He posts @sandipr.
