Baghbazar’s Durga: Goddess of freedom motion

By PTI

KOLKATA: The drums rolled and the colourfully dressed crowds milled because the 28-feet-high Durga idol decked in conventional ‘Daker Saaj’ towered over a park, dotted with stalls promoting every little thing from Ashirwad atta to Kwality ice-cream, in north Kolkata, at a stone’s throw from the Baghbazar jetty.

This is Baghbazar Sarbojanin, the oldest neighborhood Durga Puja within the megapolis, identified for its carnival-like ambiance through the 5 days of worship of the Goddess.

The annual puja festivities had been began right here in October 1919, and inside a decade, Durga worship within the municipal park grew to become a car for spreading the message of ‘Swadeshi’ by promoting ‘Made in India’ merchandise, with freedom fighters together with the redoubtable Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose becoming a member of in.

“Earlier big landlords and merchant princes used to organise Durga Puja at their homes but common people often found they were shut out of parts of it, especially if English patrons were invited. So, people in this area got together 104 years ago to start the city’s first community Durga Puja at 55, Baghbazar Street,” mentioned Abhoy Bhattacharya, 77-year-old vice chairman of the puja committee.

As the puja grew to become common, it shifted out from the unique website to open areas which had been larger and will accommodate extra folks.

At the identical time within the Twenties, social reformer Nagendra Nath Ghoshal and ‘Swadeshi’ activists corresponding to Hem Mukherjee, Durga Charan Banerjee and Chuni Lal Chatterjee joined the puja committee.

“They approached Subhas Chandra Bose, who was then general secretary of the Congress and CEO of Calcutta Municipal Corporation, and he allotted the current site of the puja – a huge park — officially to us in 1928. From 1929 onwards, Baghbazar Sarbojanin started the Swadeshi Mela to coincide with Durga Puja, at Bose’s suggestion. This was a way to popularise ‘Swadeshi’ products such as locally-made matches, textiles, ink, paper, machinery, medicines, etc., as opposed to Lancaster or Manchester-made products which were ruling the Indian markets,” mentioned Bhattacharya.

The use of the Mother Goddess imagery and worship to gender think about the motherland and herald emotions of nationalism among the many plenty had began with writer Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and was continued within the twentieth century by each armed revolutionaries of the Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar social gathering in addition to non-violent Congress employees.

IN PHOTOS | Kolkata kicks off Durga Puja 2022 celebrations in full spirit

“Bankim babu fathered the idea of using gender imagining of the motherland in the 19th century and this was picked up by nationalists afterwards. The use of the festivities to get messaging across to the common people was an obvious extension,” mentioned Professor Maroona Murmu, head of the Department of History at Jadavpur University.

However, Murmu added that ideologues corresponding to Rabindra Nath Tagore quickly identified to leaders like Bose that “the mother worship imagery was alienating Muslims” and makes an attempt had been made to carry them into the fold.

Luckily, the Muslim neighborhood in addition to many others had been concerned within the Baghbazar puja from the beginning itself and the custom has since solely been strengthened.

“People from the ‘Mikiri Patti’ (fishermen’s locality) and Muslim drivers from the coachmen’s ‘bustee’ (slum) had always played an important part in the puja here and the Swadeshi leadership insisted that this must continue. I can proudly say they are still as involved as their forefathers. We are in the true sense a ‘Sarbojanin’ (for everyone) puja,” mentioned Bhattacharya.

Aditya Mukherjee, a well known professor of latest historical past and writer of a number of books on India’s freedom battle defined, “Since Tilak’s time, Indian nationalists have used popular festivals such as Ganesh Chaturthi and Durga Puja and iconography associated with the motherland to popularise their messaging.”

“But this appropriation was not intended to promote religion and conscious attempts were made to use them as ‘all religion-supported events’. The tradition continues in Kolkata where we even have Durga seated in a marquee copy of St.Peter’s Basilica,” he added.

The Goddess idol at Baghbazar has at all times been a conventional one, ‘ek chala’ (in a single platform) with ‘Daker Saaj’ (actually décor despatched by submit, in actuality fabricated from silver foil).

“The same Pal family of clay sculptors has been making our Durga for the last 70 years,” mentioned Soumendra Lal (Raja) Kar, a life member of the puja committee.

As the ‘dhaaks’ (drums) continued enjoying and extra folks entered the park to see the Goddess and be a part of the carnival of colors, historical past, custom and commerce meshed into one single stream of infinite heads, below the watchful eyes of the Goddess of Baghbazar and of the liberty motion.

KOLKATA: The drums rolled and the colourfully dressed crowds milled because the 28-feet-high Durga idol decked in conventional ‘Daker Saaj’ towered over a park, dotted with stalls promoting every little thing from Ashirwad atta to Kwality ice-cream, in north Kolkata, at a stone’s throw from the Baghbazar jetty.

This is Baghbazar Sarbojanin, the oldest neighborhood Durga Puja within the megapolis, identified for its carnival-like ambiance through the 5 days of worship of the Goddess.

The annual puja festivities had been began right here in October 1919, and inside a decade, Durga worship within the municipal park grew to become a car for spreading the message of ‘Swadeshi’ by promoting ‘Made in India’ merchandise, with freedom fighters together with the redoubtable Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose becoming a member of in.

“Earlier big landlords and merchant princes used to organise Durga Puja at their homes but common people often found they were shut out of parts of it, especially if English patrons were invited. So, people in this area got together 104 years ago to start the city’s first community Durga Puja at 55, Baghbazar Street,” mentioned Abhoy Bhattacharya, 77-year-old vice chairman of the puja committee.

As the puja grew to become common, it shifted out from the unique website to open areas which had been larger and will accommodate extra folks.

At the identical time within the Twenties, social reformer Nagendra Nath Ghoshal and ‘Swadeshi’ activists corresponding to Hem Mukherjee, Durga Charan Banerjee and Chuni Lal Chatterjee joined the puja committee.

“They approached Subhas Chandra Bose, who was then general secretary of the Congress and CEO of Calcutta Municipal Corporation, and he allotted the current site of the puja – a huge park — officially to us in 1928. From 1929 onwards, Baghbazar Sarbojanin started the Swadeshi Mela to coincide with Durga Puja, at Bose’s suggestion. This was a way to popularise ‘Swadeshi’ products such as locally-made matches, textiles, ink, paper, machinery, medicines, etc., as opposed to Lancaster or Manchester-made products which were ruling the Indian markets,” mentioned Bhattacharya.

The use of the Mother Goddess imagery and worship to gender think about the motherland and herald emotions of nationalism among the many plenty had began with writer Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and was continued within the twentieth century by each armed revolutionaries of the Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar social gathering in addition to non-violent Congress employees.

IN PHOTOS | Kolkata kicks off Durga Puja 2022 celebrations in full spirit

“Bankim babu fathered the idea of using gender imagining of the motherland in the 19th century and this was picked up by nationalists afterwards. The use of the festivities to get messaging across to the common people was an obvious extension,” mentioned Professor Maroona Murmu, head of the Department of History at Jadavpur University.

However, Murmu added that ideologues corresponding to Rabindra Nath Tagore quickly identified to leaders like Bose that “the mother worship imagery was alienating Muslims” and makes an attempt had been made to carry them into the fold.

Luckily, the Muslim neighborhood in addition to many others had been concerned within the Baghbazar puja from the beginning itself and the custom has since solely been strengthened.

“People from the ‘Mikiri Patti’ (fishermen’s locality) and Muslim drivers from the coachmen’s ‘bustee’ (slum) had always played an important part in the puja here and the Swadeshi leadership insisted that this must continue. I can proudly say they are still as involved as their forefathers. We are in the true sense a ‘Sarbojanin’ (for everyone) puja,” mentioned Bhattacharya.

Aditya Mukherjee, a well known professor of latest historical past and writer of a number of books on India’s freedom battle defined, “Since Tilak’s time, Indian nationalists have used popular festivals such as Ganesh Chaturthi and Durga Puja and iconography associated with the motherland to popularise their messaging.”

“But this appropriation was not intended to promote religion and conscious attempts were made to use them as ‘all religion-supported events’. The tradition continues in Kolkata where we even have Durga seated in a marquee copy of St.Peter’s Basilica,” he added.

The Goddess idol at Baghbazar has at all times been a conventional one, ‘ek chala’ (in a single platform) with ‘Daker Saaj’ (actually décor despatched by submit, in actuality fabricated from silver foil).

“The same Pal family of clay sculptors has been making our Durga for the last 70 years,” mentioned Soumendra Lal (Raja) Kar, a life member of the puja committee.

As the ‘dhaaks’ (drums) continued enjoying and extra folks entered the park to see the Goddess and be a part of the carnival of colors, historical past, custom and commerce meshed into one single stream of infinite heads, below the watchful eyes of the Goddess of Baghbazar and of the liberty motion.