Idols coming into form. Kumortuli, 2009. Photo by author.

The journey to the confluence of Ganga and Durga was a throwback to the collective past, finds Sayandeb Chowdhury and Joyjit Ghosh

Chhalat chhal chhalat chhal chhalat chhal

Ghater sathe golpo kore nadir jal

(Splish‘n’ splash splish‘n’ splash splish ‘n’ splash

The ghat hears the river’s tale go back‘n’ flash)

The best person to ask about the ancestry of the ghat-river rendezvous would be the visiting goddess because the ancestry predates us, mere mortals, by a few millenniums. But we preferred not to wait for the goddess and instead headed to the ghats to eavesdrop on the conversation, just in case they were found gossiping about the forthcoming festivities. And yes, the ghats did whisper a thing or two to the river about how she, the river deity, was close kin of Durga. 

Ganga meets Durga at several bends. To begin with, Durga wins over the evil and Ganga helps wash away the dirt and sin, the evils of everyday life. Second, Durga’s mortal form is consigned to the waters of the Ganga. 

The two women are also connected mythically. On hearing Shiva play the flute, Vishnu was so overwhelmed that his feet melted. Alarmed, Brahma caught Vishnu’s feet in a vessel and from the potion created Ganga. Originally, Ganga was to flow in heaven, but when it was asked to go down to earth, it threatened to flood the world. The gods ran to Shiva for help and he rose to the occasion, breaking the flow of Ganga by holding her in the lock of his hair. Ganga was restrained and has since washed India with unmatched generosity. And since then, Ganga lives on Shiva’s head as his second wife, the first being Durga! 

So our journey to trace Durga pujas on the banks of the Ganga in Serampore was a journey sautéed in mythology. We wanted to see if Durga still shares any of her ecumenical relations with Ganga and if under the watch of her three eyes, the banks of Ganga were showing any signs of entering post-millennial modernity. We are happy to report that Durga’s relation with Ganga remains as mystical as ever and no, the banks of the Hoogly have not changed much since the British left the jute belt with a permanent look of pestilence.

Our first stop was Chhatra Kumorpara, a stripped-down version of the teeming Kumortuli. It houses a dozen studios of artists with no urgent need to produce theme-based idols. As we found out, puja organisers were also in no hurry to replicate Kolkata in such matters and, as the accompanying pictures will doubtless testify, idol-making in Serampore is a numbing blast from the past. Most idols we saw were gigantic and unabashedly a throwback to the kitschy 80s — the dresses are a patchwork of garish blow-painted gold, the asura has an eighteen-pack torso, the lion’s head is thrice that of his body and the Durga is inevitably cross-eyed in anger. But such artistry has a sweetness of intent that is unique to them and since idol-making in Kolkata has far passed such disagreement between form and style, we felt nostalgic for days when they were common in Kolkata. 

Later, young idol maker Sayan Pal revealed a satisfied, if innocent, scent of success of being able to sell 22 such idols of the 25 he had made this year at anything between Rs 5000 and Rs 25,000. A similar zeal was witnessed in the studio of Jibon Krishna Pal, now run by his sons Swapan and Tarun. The one idol, of the dozens they have made, they were proud of was to have a “marble finish that had gathered dust”. 

Situated on the banks of the Ganga and with a mosque nearby, Kumorpara rubs shoulder with a Muslim locality. We saw septuagenarian Mohd Ismail with his van near Kumorpara who would have enough work from Panchami when the idols will be needed to be ferried to the pandals, many of which dot the banks of Ganga. 

Our next few stops were to see these ghat pujas. None of them was complete but that was in no way taking away the extraordinary location of these pujas, which were otherwise ordinary. One of the stops was the Siddheswari Ghat, a pandal adjacent to the charming little Siddheswari temple. We saw workers in the pandal working in tandem with the cool breeze and a banyan tree. The Gargari Ghat Puja further south is bigger in scope but no less unhurried. Here we met recession-hurt but spirited fisherman Samir Das who was making chalchitra for the idol. “I have shifted to this profession to overcome the slide in the fish market. I make enough money during Puja”, Das said. At Hariharpara, the pandal blocked the way to the ghat but the river breeze, unchained as always, blew in between the bamboo shaft. 

Our next stop, Ganga Darshan Apartment, was a revelation. Who had imagined that there was such an apartment whose walls were washed by the river? It had a small jetty next door where a bunch of people were gurgled in and out by motorised boats with as much quiet as that of the apartment itself. 

As we zipped down south to keep pace with the setting sun, we had a feeling of the happy denouement of having witnessed not only a way of life and festivity far removed from the loudness of our own, but also having walked back a few miles into our collective pasts. 

(Opening ballad by Kabir Suman, translation by Sudipto Chatterjee)