Durga Puja in Kolkata housing complexes

Durga Puja is a four day affair with hundreds of rituals that need to be followed meticulously and, it used to be an annual festival of the landlords or zamindars. They stayed in huge palatial buildings and the whole village would be invited to join in the prayers. There would also be associated festivities comprising lunch in the afternoon and entertainment in the evening that would be presented by troupes from Kolkata. The total cost would be borne by the landlord himself.
Some of these landlords stayed in Kolkata itself and the festivities here was one of showing off their assets and the invitees used to be British nationals who were employed in different levels of the government. Then there were Bengali businessmen who mattered. Here also, the total cost was met by the landlord himself – it was his method of remaining in the good books of the British rulers.

However, once the British left and the Bengalis began to move out of villages and settle in cities, they missed the annual festivities – and, in order to revive the culture, they began to pool their resources in the form on money and manpower and perform the Durga Puja in their communities. These came to be known as ‘baroari pujas’ – or pujas conducted by twelve friends. The figure twelve is a figurative one – it could be any number of families who join to participate in the festivities.
Suddenly one day, the scenario changed and multistory buildings began to come up in the city of Kolkata. There emerged a new breed of businessmen who were after land. They would pounce on any vacant land, coerce the owners to sell it and offer them ready cash plus a flat in the proposed housing complex. Such an offer was not easy to turn down and, soon, there mushroomed innumerable housing complexes. Along with them came a new set of culture and values. It was the period of changes in all walks of life and Durga Puja was no exception.
Thus it came to pass that housing complexes decided to join hands and perform the pujas. All the residents pool their resources, the women take over the religious rituals of the pujas, the young boys and girls perform song and dance programs while the men gather to play cards or go vocal on political topics. They have lunch together and even dinner. And, these pujas bring back the village culture and one wonders – the wheels have turned a full cycle! (to be continued …)
(Image courtesy wikimediacommons.org)

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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.