In a city like Kolkata, hundreds of local clubs and committees start preparing their respective pandals weeks or months before pujo. Bylanes, playgrounds and other civic spaces begin to sprout often expansive and imposing structures of bamboo, metal, tarpaulin and cloth — until, during the five-day festivities, the city is a maze of walk-through installations that occupy thoroughfares and neighbourhood squares. Designed along the plan of a typical Indian temple, the pandal contains a stage at one end to hold the idols and host rituals — thus representing the garbhagriha (sanctum sanctorum) — with the rest of the enclosed space variously serving the functions of communal worship, revelry, and dance and theatrical performances, much like the temple’s mandapa or gathering hall. The outward similarities to the traditional temple, however, end here.

Replacing the intricately carved toranas or sacred gateways are lightweight arches and vinyl screens saturated with corporate logos — from jewellery and cement brands to sweet-shop chains — the landscape of temples is also a commercial canvas. Every year, more than 10,000 pujos are organised annually in the state of West Bengal, and corporate spending in Kolkata alone is between 650–950 crores INR (80-120 million USD) per year. Pandals vie with each other for footfall and for corporate-sponsored awards — and so innovation, artistry, novelty, scale and memorability come to the fore.

Today, themed or topical pandals take forms as diverse as Rajasthan’s fortresses, Mughal monuments, European architectural wonders, even international war zones; they also ride the waves of contemporary issues like the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change and women empowerment. Beyond wood, bamboo and jute, pandal-designers now use materials ranging from papier mache, metal alloys, utensils and found objects, to seeds, nylon mesh and automobile parts. Preparations for some of the bigger pandals often begin a year in advance and many occupations like idol-making, costume-design as well as preparing music and performances for pujo have now become year-round activities, generating income for hundreds of thousands of Bengalis.

Meanwhile, the making and representations of the goddess and her cosmic children, Lakshmi, Saraswati, Ganesha and Kartik, have changed little over centuries; the elongated fish-shaped eyes and graceful countenance of today’s sarbajanin (community) idols follow those that featured in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sabeki (traditional) pujas privately hosted in the sprawling mansions of Bengal’s landed elites. While skilled and unskilled workers raise the structures and installations of the pandal, the icons that will occupy its sacred centre are created by Bengal’s premier patuas (idol makers), some of whom are descendants of nineteenth-century Kalighat patachitra artists. The clay form is made over a core of straw, the face of the goddess expertly sculpted by a specialised mritishilpi, or clay craftsman, who uses a reusable plaster mould unique to his style. Once dried, the clay idols are coated with a base paint of chalk and tamarind seed gum, before being painted with iconographically significant colours — the yellow typically used for her skin, for instance, connotes Durga’s radiant golden hue as described in the ancient Puranic scriptures. On the auspicious new-moon day of Mahalaya, which marks the beginning of pujo festivities, the idols are sacralised with the painting on of their eyes. This final step in their making is entrusted only to the most experienced artisans, whose hands will convert the material artefact and art object into a sacred and living icon. 

Some themed pandals nevertheless replace the conventional iconography of the goddess with faces of national heroes, movie stars, politicians and other famous personalities; and her customary silk, brocade or sola adornments with experimental materials like jute, paper, matchsticks and even broken glass. With the creative aspirations for pujo pandals taking ever greater flight in the last few decades, there has been an impetus among organising committees to treat them as public art in earnest — sometimes revealing tensions, particularly where the icons themselves are concerned. Since the 1980s, many pujos have commissioned renowned contemporary artists to design the idols. Some, like the Surrealist Ganesh Pyne, have refused, citing the incompatibility of Modernist aesthetics with the artistic vocabulary required for religious worship. For a renowned Kolkata pujo in 1990, the artist-anthropologist Meera Mukherjee rendered Durga in an Indigenous idiom inspired by the communities she had been living and working with, and draped the deity in the sari of the local Santhal people. Not only have these deviations from Brahmanical narratives received backlash from spectators, they have also set contemporary artists on a collision course with the hereditary patuas who consider themselves to be true practitioners of the form. Some pujo organisers have attempted to strike a balance by arranging for small traditional icons for devotional purposes, whilst simultaneously installing much-larger ‘art idols’ for public appreciation. 

On the sixth day after Mahalaya, the goddess is revealed to public view amidst ritual and ceremony. As in diverse religious traditions across South Asia, devotees seek blessings from the deity through the act of beholding her, while being ‘seen’ by her. From the crucial painting of the idol’s eyes and the darshan or sacred ‘viewing’, to the carnivalesque galleries this occurs in, as well as the images and logos of its contemporary patrons and sponsors — Durga Puja is solidly premised on the interactive act of spectatorship. In the crowded and frenetic spaces of pandals, however, it is impossible for the devotee or visitor to spend more than a few moments contemplating on the divine, and darshan occurs in a constant state of motion. In these mid-street galleries, there is no white space and hushed silence, no frames and plinths. Exhibits both sacred and worldly are packed together, immersive, jostling for ‘views’ and impact. Masses of people, families and entire neighbourhoods, are hustled through pandals by civic volunteers and guards as they go ‘pandal-hopping’, capturing the ornate yet impermanent sights with their mobile phone cameras.

On the tenth day, it is time for the goddess to return to her cosmic realm: in Kolkata idols are immersed in the Hooghly River, a tributary of the holy Ganga. With song, dance and a symbolic play of vermilion, she is bid farewell. Amid jubilant cries of ‘Aasche bochhor aabar hobey!’ (‘Next year, once again!’), the deities are taken out on a procession to the river, leaving a lone flickering lamp in the pandal. Over the next few weeks, workmen carefully dismantle the structure: the banality of everyday life returns to public spaces, which have hosted both the sacred and the spectacular. Other than the odd pit where a bamboo pole was dug into the ground or a hoarding languishing in the dirt, the city’s streets, squares and fairgrounds will carry no memory of the event. Yet those who witnessed it will carry it — along with the anticipation and knowledge that it will return in forms both reliable and surprising year after year.