A Durga idol. Autumn, 2014. Photo by author.

If there is one word to describe the explosion of gaiety amidst a wrecked urban landscape, it would probably be ‘flourish’, as Shakespeare used it. Writes Sayandeb Chowdhury.

Shakespeare, otherwise so abundant with words and the magical incantations of poetry was, in keeping with the norms of Elizabethan playwriting and Globe Theatre conventions, severely frugal in matters of stage direction. Hence in many a Shakespearean play, after the entry of the principal characters, there would be mention of one single word that would define the rest of the cast, the setting and the attendant paraphernalia, especially in denoting a scene of regalia. That word is ‘flourish’. And it was enough to carry the weight of half a page of directions to be followed on stage. Like many words in the Shakespearean lexicon, flourish attained an unparalleled depth of meaning under him, but has since, possibly, shrunk in scope.

If the setting of Duga Puja in Kolkata, a festivity abundant in unabashed gaiety in an otherwise wrecked urban landscape, invites any one word of description, there is perhaps no word better suited than the Shakespearean word ‘flourish’. The short four-day span of the Puja in Kolkata is as if Shakespeare, after a long poetic sojourn through a particularly blasted landscape, a burnt heath in the middle of nowhere with no visible promise of happy denouement, takes a microphone and shouts “flourish”, and the next moment the black as granite barren stage is enveloped in a riot of colours, music and scopophelic splendor.

Puja in Kolkata is that envelope of magical flourish that momentarily transforms a teeming city of a million filths into a continuous parade of heartbreakingly gorgeous tableaux whose beauty is more profound precisely because of its transience. Every year the four days of festivity teases us into believing in the healing powers of effervescent glory only to dislodge us with an equally hard pull of treacherous reality. Four days later, Kolkata looks like an abandoned Vaudeville omnibus, all decked up and then stranded in the forlorn highway, its blocks of colours peeling off with accompaniment of a slow tinkling of tattered chimes left-back by the actors who left in a hurry.

But in that abandonment there is that hint, that faint whisper of a return; a hint so fleeting that we yell in collective euphoria, “asche bochor abar hobe”; as if by yelling louder and louder, we would be able to catch the whisper by its tail and bring it back to nurture it till it becomes a full announcement of arrival the next year. And between this cycle of arrival and departure lies the hypnotic four days of… flourish.

But is flourish the dominant word to describe a Hindu festivity? Didn’t we hear, when last we heard sense on any religion, that it was the transience of time and the intractability of the soul that lies at the heart of Hindu matter? Didn’t we come to learn that Durga Puja, whose genealogy in Bengal is intricately linked to the identity politics of colonial subjectivity and the foundations of Bengali consciousness, is essentially a religious festival? Perhaps once upon a time, under the British, there was a need, however inveterate it might have been, to expound the mythical origins of the festival and trace it to the Ramayana. Durga Puja, worship of idolatry of power, was doubtlessly linked to the streak of Hindu revivalism in the 19th-century that had run parallel to the movement for holistic reform, fronted by talismanic figures of Bengal Renaissance.

But historically and socially, Durga Puja is way past its original meaning and being, thankfully. Thankfully it’s past its need to stick to religious or spiritual frames of reference. And thankfully it’s past its need for being a specimen of holy festivity.

Puja, notwithstanding its semantic and semiotic intent, has now correctly come to mean a joyous festive moment, has come to represent an erasure of reductive mythical logic and has come to be an inclusive, and breathtaking spectacle of hundreds of magnificent sites of art and artistry where millions mingle in a conspicuous burst of secular freedom. In other words, Puja is not a Puja anymore, but a Carnival!

But what is a Carnival? Those of us who assume that Carnival is what Fashion Television broadcasts in short bursts of exotic erotica every February from Rio De Janeiro would only consider Carnival as skin-deep. The Rio festival (Brazil alone has several types of Carnival or Carnaval) of richly adorned voluptuous dancers, a heaving, rambunctious beating of drums and an eye-popping march of crackling colours represent the essence of a classic carnival no doubt, but underneath it lies a raging irony, an irony as big as the gigantic Sambadrome where Rio samba schools compete for glory and where revellers converge in infinite ecstasy; an irony that as big as that of the Durga Puja.

The Rio Carnaval begins four days before Ash Wednesday, which heralds the inauguration of the 40-day Lent festival, which concludes in the Easter. Lent is hence the period of ablution, forgiving and abstinence in remembrance and piety of Christ’s conquest of sin and death that the Easter signifies. “On certain days of Lent,” says Wikipidia, “Roman Catholics and some other Christians traditionally abstained from the consumption of meat and poultry — hence the term ‘carnival’, from carnelevare, “to remove (literally, “raise”) meat. In fact, Carnival celebrations are believed to have roots in the pagan festival of Saturnalia, which, adapted to Christianity, became a farewell to sex in a season of religious discipline, to practise repentance and prepare for Christ’s death and resurrection.”

So Carnival literally is abstinence, and in actuality is just the opposite. Before Lent sets in, the carnival is hence, historically, the touch down upon bacchanalia and hedonism, the celebration of everything that means to stay alive and to kick ass. Globally, Carnival is that period which celebrates an appetite, literally and figuratively, for life. It has come to mean nothing of the original meaning and intent of carnelevare and would perhaps be closer kin of ‘carnivore’.

The same irony underlies the Puja festival. Ostensibly, Puja is about the ostentatiousness of the brief vacation of the Mother Goddess on Earth, after she emerges triumphant against an assortment of evil figures crystallised in the Asura in a fight for the future of the species. It’s the same story that underlies a thousand mythologies but then each festival in most languages and religions need a back-up story, a narrative to justify itself. But notwithstanding the often-heard grand narrative of the Puja, its is all about celebrating the coming of a time to further the cause of consumption – to convert four holy days into four jolly days. Puja is no doubt the time to renew faith in the power of the pleasure principle.

In fact, the recent fad for choosing a theme at various Puja sites is also in keeping with the differential ethic of a Rio Carnival. In Rio, samba schools choose exquisite themes and music to compete for the grand prize, a practice that can be traced to the Afro-Caribbean roots of the carnival. In the Pujas, organisers compete with more and more adventurous themes — ranging from villages in Ghana to pottery in Transylvania — for prizes of every conceivable category. The subtext is to be daring and different, keeping the overall architecture of the idol similar in spirit than shape. This is one critical aspect of the Puja’s underlying Carvivalesque aspiration and to subvert the pious need for sameness and sanctity of traditionally accepted forms of idolatry.

`But Carnival has an even more rewarding, if a more complicated legacy. Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian thinker and theorist, gave an elaborate and eloquent analysis of the Carnivalesque in his book=length thesis, Rabelais and his World while re-reading Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. With Rabelais as a vantage point, Bakhtin re-imagines the Carnival as a setting for the upsetting of every feudal and traditional norm, an usurpation of handed-down notions of value and virtue, a social trapeze act whose ropes are hinged perilously to the edges of acceptability and accountability. Carnival, for Bakhtin, is a colourful conglomeration of disenfranchised groups, who in a mock show of splendour cock a fist or two at the socially dominant factions. See it as space especially created for subversion or one which is used for subversion, the Bakhtinian Carnivalesque stands for a unique alteration of truth and collective wisdom.

And it is in this sense that the Durga Puja, as much as the Rio carnival, remains a classic model of Bakhtinian fantasy. Puja celebrates the coming together of odds and ends in ways that remain unseen throughout the rest of the year. In the happy mingling of the sunset crowd, in the insistence of young women to go out unattended into the night, in the mock-serious gunfights of otherwise chubby Bengali boys, in trans-generational sessions of an alcohol-soaked binge, in the conspicuous absence of checks and balances on security and safety, in the carefree negotiation of bumper-to-bumper traffic, in the clockwork working of road management, in the explosion of kink and kitsch, in the public choreography of jocund women in dance and trance, in the display of mercy and mirth to fellow travellers and the communal supper of noontime bhog, Puja celebrates, only if temporarily, the erasure of difference and the reversal of socially binding roles. Differences, if any, is in the aggressive marketing of themes that help bring the Puja closer to being a complete Carnival experience.

In being unique an intercourse between a Shakesperean Flourish and Bakhtinian Carnival, Puja remains, and should rightly be so, an Autumn Sonata — a cause for and magnification of joie de vivre of a city that otherwise lives in extreme and blighted ignominy.