Calcutta Journal: A 10-Armed Goddess Charms A Frenetic Megalopolis

CALCUTTA, Oct. 19 — Every year around this time, the awesome figure of a woman, with three piercing eyes and 10 arms splayed, appears in every nook and corner of this city.

Workers at a Calcutta idol market snooze beneath a statue of the Hindu goddess Durga, who was honored in an annual festival.

Fashioned by hand, usually out of clay, she turns up everywhere, from the dense warrens of the old city to the new high-rise apartment blocks. She can be found jutting out from narrow sidewalks and tiny parks and inside crumbling aristocratic homes. She sits in her own elaborately imagined pavilions — some intimate, some gaudy — each one serving as a platform for art or spectacle and together turning this thick, steaming, argumentative city into a cross between an open-air museum and a sprawling amusement park.

Half Mardi Gras and half Christmas, Durga Pujo, a five-day festival dedicated to the Hindu goddess Durga, is the most important religious event for Hindus in this part of India. Worship is only one part of the ritual.

Shops and offices have remained closed since Wednesday, when Durga Pujo began this year, and the streets have been packed late into the night.

Durga herself represents both martial prowess — spear and club in hand, she is portrayed as slaying a demon (half man, half buffalo) at her feet — and benign motherhood. The festival celebrates her homecoming with her four children in tow. Her story represents the oldest fable: the victory of good over evil.

That fable is constantly reinterpreted during Durga Pujo, and in the ensuing spectacle are glimpses of the citys contemporary desires and fears. Nowadays, rural crafts are all the rage, even as some pavilions look more like cool, modern, hotel-lobby installations.

Eco-friendly pavilions are in. But the traditional system of neighborhood fund-raising is disappearing in favor of more lucrative corporate sponsorships. It is a trend that this year brought giant banners to the pavilion at College Square, in the city center, peddling everything from fairness cream to mustard oil.

Some Pujo watchers see a move away from bling to an emphasis on artistry and authenticity. Pujo in Calcutta, they say, caters now to many different tastes.

There is kitsch and gimmick, but so many other things, too, said Tapati Guha-Thakurta, an art historian who studies the aesthetic of Durga Pujo. People from all walks, all classes take to the streets. The citys intellectual elite have always wanted to leave the city — the crowds, the noise, the excess. I feel there is excess, but also a culture of moderation and artistry. Thats a change.

The festival is not universally embraced. Rudrangshu Mukherjee, the editorial page editor at The Telegraph, a local newspaper, described it as a mixture of excess and frenzy.

This is the Bengalis safety valve, when they let loose, bring the city to a standstill, get away from work — not that they do work for the rest of the year, he fumed, only half-joking. Its ridiculous. Then this colossal waste of money. (Mr. Mukherjee is Bengali.)

Either way, Durga Pujo unleashes the imagination of the city. One neighborhood festival committee erected a pavilion this year based on Incan motifs. Meanwhile, in a narrow North Calcutta alley, with green window shutters and the scent of fried fish at lunchtime, stands a shimmering gold-painted Durga, her form plainly inspired by Tantric art traditions.

In a South Calcutta park, an artist has portrayed the demon with a gas cylinder strapped to his body, a would-be suicide bomber. In another corner of the city, organizers eager to educate people about global warming have reproduced melting glaciers, with real ice that requires five giant air-conditioners to sustain.

The pavilion organizer, Gautam Halder, pointed to the long line outside and said the extra greenhouse-gas emissions were worth it for the sake of spreading the message. Look, people here have a craze about ice, he said. If I did this with trees, they wouldnt come.

This year, the mother goddess proved susceptible to the global intellectual property regime. One neighborhood committee faced a copyright infringement lawsuit after it modeled its pavilion on the Harry Potter books. A local court dismissed the case, and Harry Potter, made of plaster of paris, has been installed inside a reproduction of Hogwarts Castle, along with Durga and her demon.

A recurrent motif in recent years is what Ms. Guha-Thakurta, the art historian, calls a return to ethnic chic, or the re-creation of village life in the city. On a daylong pavilion tour this week, she found a pavilion at the end of a narrow street in North Calcutta decorated with handmade wooden toys — big, bright rocking horses and dolls in painted saris. The organizer, Dipto Ghosh, told her that he had seen them in a crafts museum and had sought out the artisan who made them.

The artisan, Gauranga Sutradhar, said that virtually no one bought his wooden toys anymore and that he was happy for the work. Mr. Ghosh said the pavilion was his way of bringing a dying rural tradition to jaded city eyes.

Youre seeing all these malls, Mr. Ghosh said. If you suddenly see something rural, something totally different, it strikes you.

The citys police department said Thursday that it had issued licenses for 1,127 pavilions this year, not counting those inside private homes in the suburbs, which are outside its jurisdiction. The biggest pavilions, the police said, can draw as many as half a million spectators a day, a big crowd even by Indian standards and, from the sound of it, all of them becoming art critics for the week.

Is that supposed to be a sun? a spectator murmured at a highly conceptual installation in a neighborhood called Kidderpore. Everybody says it looks like a satellite.

The ephemera last only five days. Sunday is the end of the festival, with the pavilions being dismantled and parades from each neighborhood carrying the goddess to the banks of the Ganges River, where Durga is immersed and bade farewell, until her spectacular return next year. The poor will pluck from her figure whatever they can recycle and sell.

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