bengali culture Archives - DU Beat - Delhi University's Independent Student Newspaper

One of the most famous tourist spots in the heart of North Kolkata, Kumartuli is a slum district dominated by the potters and sculptors of the city. Often online travel blogs are found to be romanticising the aesthetic offered by the place, but beyond all the artistic beauty lies a darker side to this place: caste-induced labour, immigrant struggle, and the economic divide.

Perched on the banks of the Hooghly River, Kumartuli has been a go-to destination for travel vloggers and art enthusiasts alike. In the narrow lanes, barely wide enough for a hand-pulled rickshaw to pass through, the only people you will usually meet are the Kumars, the idol-makers of the city. It is from here that idols of Goddess Durga and other deities make their way into Kolkata every year. Especially during the months preceding West Bengal’s biggest annual religious festival, Durga Puja, the old alleys of Kumartuli are thronged with customers ordering 13-foot-tall Durga idols for neighbourhood associations and residential pujas, as well as Instagram vloggers and art enthusiasts capturing the essence of Bengal’s artistic culture.

However, beyond the camouflage of this aesthetic beauty and the illusion of tradition, lies the tragic reality of the Kumartuli potters. A recent visit to the place revealed the unhealthy and unhygienic conditions in which the potters work. Streams of sewage running past idol-workshops, rotten food strewn across streets, naked children running through gullies, the makeshift idol workspace constructed out of plastic and bamboo, and the ‘kutcha’ residential huts of the workers that have fallen to rust with time paint an altogether different picture of the area. Despite working day and night—from shaping the idols with clay to painting and drying them—the workers are provided with a meagre income, sometimes not even enough to suffice for three days of meals.

The months preceding Durga Puja generally witness an influx of immigrant labour from other parts of Bengal, like Krishna Nagar, Nadia, Orissa, and Bihar. And so the rivalry between the old-established potters of Kumartuli and the temporary workers begins. According to research, 40 percent of the shops export less than 5 units of idols per year, while the rest sell more than 110 idols per year. The economic gap resides within the district as well. While some shops have an annual turnover of 15 lacs, there are others that make more than 60 lacs. However, no policies or renewal projects have been taken up by the government over the years to enhance the living conditions of the workers or provide them with better employment opportunities.

The oppressive conditions of the Kumartuli potters are intrinsically linked to their caste-induced status, which has often been deluded by the lens of culture and art of the ‘Bengal aesthetic’.

Most of the Kumars (or potters) you meet at Kumartuli are Bengali Hindu workers. Their occupation is decided by caste, as all the Kumars at Kumartuli share the same last name, ‘Pal’, belonging to the ceremonially pure Shudra caste. The homogenization of the area with people of a particular ethnicity can be credited to the British. The British East India Company, during the colonisation of Bengal following the Battle of Plassey in 1757, allotted “separate districts to the Company’s workmen”. These neighbourhoods in the heart of the Indian quarters acquired work-related names: Suriparah (the place of wine sellers), Collotollah (the place of oil men), Chuttarparah (the place of carpenters), Aheeritollah (cowherd’s quarters), Coomartolly or Kumartuli (potters’ quarters), and so on.

Looking at Kumartuli through a caste lens, can the poor living and working conditions be traced back to the caste-induced labour and oppression of the idol-makers? Is the economic divide between the potters’ quarter and the rest of urban Kolkata a direct result of caste division? Why has the government not taken enough measures to emancipate the conditions of these lower-caste workers? Is there ever a possibility for these sculptors to break through the ‘ceiling of caste’?

The answers to all these problems can be found only once the authorities and the people of Bengal start acknowledging the complex social dynamics involved in the subjugation of these workers rather than overshadowing them with the fanatical glamour and grandeur of ‘culture’. It’s high time that the illusion be broken.

Featured Image Credits: Google Images

Priyanka Mukherjee
[email protected]

Keep Reading

alumni

My City: An Open Art Gallery

By Anwesh Banerjee October 15, 2022

The festival of Durga Puja is not just a celebration of the homecoming of the goddess but also a cultural bonhomie, celebrating art of all sorts. Read on for more.

Durga Puja or as we bengalis fondly call it pujo, is probably the greatest celebration of art Calcutta sees on an annual basis. There might be special art drives in the Lake area where people end up drawing twelve feet long alponas (the bengali version of rangoli but done with ground rice paste traditionally) and bizarrely absurd, politically provocative graffitis on walls along the Jadavpur campus and other upcoming up-market cafe areas. There is also the latest mandatory tourist spot – the Old Currency Building, now turned into a three floor specially curated celebration of the Bengal School of Art – from colonial times to independent India. But none of these sporadic clusters exemplify the community euphoria in viewing and consuming art the way pujo does.

It is a cultural whirlpool. Turn a corner and you will see an entire alley, otherwise dingily darkened – now turned bright and dreamy with a canopy of yellow fairy lights hanging overhead. A few more turns and you will see a variation of the same display of luminosity in terms of a street where the lights are now multi-coloured and are strung together vertically, on either side of the road. As you make your way through, it is not just a simple lane you are walking through any more. It is like walking into the dreamscape of your unposted letters of love, now strung together in the form of a million glistening light orbs. But the magicality of the moment I described – nowhere near the actual experience because pujo as a festival can only be felt – is exemplified further in areas with the bigger pandals and celebrations where the canopy is no longer just strings of light bound together. But an entire canopy put together in glorious designs and colours. You are no longer in a street you have traversed all year round. It is a tunnel of a fantasy land from another world, which self activates every year briefly and disappears – only to appear bigger and brighter the next year.

Who is the sculptor of this figure? Did this club change their usual guy? Is Sanantan Dinda doing Naktala this year or did Chetla Agrani buy him out? Why did they have to distort the face thus? Doesn’t she look too angry in this one?

A cacophony of voices asking the same questions together. Having spent so many years in the city and vehemently holding my ground before parents who would have much preferred to go on a holiday – far removed from the nauseating sweat and crowd infestations of the festival – I like many others have become quite familiar with the varied sculptural styles we see our idols built in. Kumortuli or the Potter’s Colony is the stuff of absolute photo stories across the world.

But the potters or sculptors as I prefer calling them, who spend their many years under makeshift shacks in the midst of floodwater and mud, have their own distinctive styles and contributions to the evolution of the festival as a whole. The traditional yellow face of the goddess with long draw, darkly lined eyes is still to be seen in many places, but in the larger discourse of the creation of idols, it has give way to the more humanist thickly eyelash-ed faces of the Rudra Pal brothers – who now are at the receiving end of commissions from the biggest clubs in the city.

Thousands of people flock every year to see these idols, which although unchanged in their style have served to give vision to the popular imagination of what the goddess looks like. Their figures are adorned in the traditional golden foil called the daaker shaaj or the ornament that came by post (the foil used to be imported from Germany at one point) or the pristine white of the sholaar shaaj or the ornamentation made from thermocol. Art historians will never consider this but the potters of Calcutta are the true holders of the legacy of Ravi Varma, the first Indian to give face to our gods. But even beyond these traditional portrayals there are daring artists like Bhashkar Sur and Sanatan Dinda, all exemplary modern artists in their own right who come up with visualisations of the goddess figure in accordance with the theme of the club they are hired by that year.

Which brings me to the next big thing about pujo in my city – the theme. Much before people even start their shopping for the festival, posters and advertisements proudly announcing the themes for each individual club go around the city. People sitting huddled in autos are found discussing-

Did you hear Chetla Agrani is going to be doing something based on Kalidasa? But I really liked what Bosepukur did last year- though I am not sure if I completely understood it – did you? I do not know about the rest but I am most definitely going to go to Sreebhumi first – haven’t you heard they are doing Burj Khalifa this year?

I have been to galleries and seen art installations and then I have attended Durga Pujo in my city. If cities could be works of art then the thousand and more pujos spread across the length and breadth of the city are the many brush strokes and colour splashes on its expanding canvas. I have seen, within two months or sometimes three, artists and workers make an entire temple structure out of steel utensils. Award winning clubs which have conjured simply out of nowhere temple structures out of – wait for it- knit grass blades. But this is not just a celebration of empty art. This art is deeply political too. Many high concept pujos find people crowding the exit area poring over long standees explaining the concept of the theme and the decoration people just saw. For there are clubs standing in solidarity with the farmer’s protest – with massive installations of feet joined together and the blisters resembling melting faces of the heroes we will never know. Some turn an entire lane into a brothel with extra figures of women waiting for customers and finally leading upto the room of the brothel madame who sits there protecting them all – envisioned in the form of the goddess. But sometimes in the hands of a different artist, she takes the shape of a migrant woman – carrying her four children sitting on the back of a truck, her third eye glaring at you in the face.

During Durga Pujo, my city is an open art gallery with its people turning from one lane to another partaking in and bringing to life the glorious art on display.

Anwesh Banerjee
[email protected]

Keep Reading

Arts & Culture

This Lonely Spring

By Anwesh Banerjee July 15, 2022

A non-resident Bengali relative of mine groaned to me on call, how he scarcely felt Saraswati Puja this year. Something seemed off, he complained. I don’t think anything was off, just that the sedentary yet meditative festival somehow got ferociously conflated into the pompous celebrations of Repubic Day this year, I chimed in with my know-it-all voice. But I was not entirely wrong in drawing this connection. Saraswati Puja or Vasant Panchami, has always been a massive cultural celebration in Bengal. Every year beyond this annual ritual of worshipping and invoking this (Brahminical) Hindu Goddess of Knowledge, Bengali students across ages are supposed to dress up in colours of Spring – yellow, ochre, orange, red, blue and the likes. It is a day dedicated to eating khichudi and begun bhaja, praying for academic wisdom and most importantly going on dates with your romantic interests.

The origins of the concept of vasant panchmi as the “Bengali Valentine’s Day” is something that is a futile exercise in the labyrinthine annals of Time. The cultural construct of this festival is now unquestioned and widely embraced and celebrated. This day, in the early morning cold breezes of January, the city wistfully turns into a liminal space of sanctioned transgressions. The best, and often most provocative, pieces of traditional finery are donned. The greys and greens of schools give way to loud pinks and bright reds of lipsticks which are hidden in purses – stolen the previous night from the mother’s dresser. Blisters from wearing forbidden heels are hardly any price for a day spent in the company of your lover, giggling your way through sidewalks and standing outside already-full-at-10-in-the-morning bars across Park Street and Quest Mall.

This year, after a brief annual hiatus, I had the fortune of being in Kolkata again for the occasion. But even as my mother rudely awakened me from my sleep to help her with preparations, an early morning disoriented me found myself almost unconsciously drawing himself to the television set first, switching on Doordarshan and sitting down brush in hand to see the live telecast from Raj- oops, Kartavya Path. The conflation of a day which, all my woke understandings of nationhood and patriotism notwithstanding, had been carefully constructed to invoke feelings of patriotic fervour in my heart somehow felt at an alien odd with the other natural emanating sense of desire and youthful fervour for this annual celebration of springtime extravagance. As post-colonial queer subjects in a world where ideas of the post-nation are at their highest, where does one erase the line between multiple registers of desire? Is militantly performed desire for the historically amenisa-inducing nation anyway similar to the exhaustive desires of love on display on this singular day? Are all desires essentially linked to performance and demonstration? If so then what about lonelinessand its performance? How do you navigate the contours of that?

As I sat in the backseat of my cab in the evening of the same day, on my way to airport to catch a flight back to Delhi in time for the 8:30 AM class the next day, I found myself unconsciously smiling at the familiar of sight of multiple young girls and boys in love – or atleast pretending to be in love. All my school days, before the pandemic took away from me the privilege (I use this word fully aware of its connotations) of attending college in person, I had been a blessed witness to the Saraswati Puja romances of my friends. The month-long plans, the carefully colour coordinated outfits, the lies told at home, the multiple tuition places to hop onto under the excuse of attending the “puja”, the innocent grazing of the fingers and the final stretch of weeping from the blisters on the ankle – I have seen it all. At twenty-one years of age, that day when I whirled past these young hearts in love at the very peak of springtime, I pondered a few moments over the politics of performing a love that is qeer. What would it mean for young girls or boys or gender non-conforming minorities to be out there, on this same day, hands clasped and in love? Would this liminal temporal space of the city embrace their transgression as willingly as it did of their heterosexual counterparts? Especially in the context of this year’s festival, in the occurrence of such a rare conflated oddity, what would one make of surveilling love in a Nation State that is increasingly intolerant towards delinquent expressions of desire?

As I sat on my aircraft, pondering about the many like me who must have spent lonely festivals of love for years on end, I found myself wishing if this Valentine’s Day our markets would perhaps for once sell not love but a soothener to the itchy aesthetics of structural loneliness.

Anwesh Banerjee

[email protected]

Keep Reading