Durga Puja on the UNESCO heritage list

'Durga Puja in Kolkata' was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in December 2021, at the committee's sixteenth session. It was the first festival from India to be listed.

The Representative List is not a ranking and not a protection order. It is a register of living practices that communities themselves identify as part of their heritage, and inscription is a recognition rather than an award.

Read the nomination and what it emphasises is not the theology. It is the collaboration: clay modellers, pandal designers, lighting technicians, sculptors, drummers, priests, and the neighbourhood committees that hold it all together — an economy of skilled craft that runs for months and produces something enormous and temporary.

It also notes the festival as a moment where distinctions of class and caste are, in the streets at least, set aside — anyone may walk into any pandal, and on the peak nights most of the city does.

Visibility, mainly. The listing brought international coverage and a noticeable rise in visitors from outside Bengal and outside India, which the city's tourism apparatus has leaned into hard.

What it did not change is the thing worth protecting: the festival is still made by neighbourhood committees, and it still costs them a year of work. If you visit, put something in the subscription box.

There is also a real conversation in the city about what heritage status does to a living practice — whether attention and sponsorship strengthen the craft economy the citation praises, or gradually turn a neighbourhood ritual into a product. Both readings have serious people behind them and the answer is not settled.

The part of the citation that repays attention is the list of trades. Clay modellers in Kumartuli. Shola pith artisans making the crowns and the ornaments. Bamboo workers and carpenters who put up structures the size of buildings and take them down a fortnight later. Lighting technicians, many from Chandannagar, working a tradition of animated electric tableaux that exists almost nowhere else.

Then dhakis brought in from the districts, sculptors and designers commissioned for individual pujas, priests, cooks, and the volunteers who run the whole thing for nothing.

None of this is preserved in a museum. It is rebuilt from scratch every year, by people who mostly do something else for the other eleven months, and that is precisely what an intangible heritage listing is meant to describe.

Read the boards at the entrance of the theme pujas — they name the artist and the craft, and increasingly the village or the cooperative the work came from.

Go to Kumartuli before the festival. Buy from the artisans rather than the souvenir stalls. And go on the quieter days, when the people who made it have time to talk about it.