School days – celebrating Durga Puja

Durga Puja is the greatest festival of Bengalis and initially it was restricted to the rich and the famous zamindars and other affluent people. The four-day festival involved not just different types of material and labor but also adequate amount of finance.

Tradition has it that the villagers would wait expectantly all the year round to partake of the goodies that would be distributed by the zamindars – there would also be eats on the occasion and, in the evenings, the unique Bengali theater groups would conduct ‘jatras’ to entertain the villagers.
One of the oldest such pujas was that of Sabarna Roy Choudhury – it started in 1610 and is over 400-years old. Anyway, with the passage of time, the festivities went public and came to be known as the ‘baro-yari’ pujas – ‘baro’ means twelve and ‘yaar’ means friends. Hence, baro-yari literally means twelve friends. This culture took off in the early 1900s and gradually gained momentum. And – true to Bengali culture, the pujas kept multiplying mostly because of dissidents breaking away from the original group to form new groups.

Of course, finance invariably ruled supreme and, in order to generate the funds, the organizers would go in for collecting advertisements apart from donations. Later it all was about sponsorships – the better contacts one had would translate into lucrative sponsorships.