How sarbojanin pujas became art installations

Sarbojanin means 'of all people'. The model is simple: instead of one household paying for a puja, a neighbourhood raises a subscription and holds it in public. The date usually given for the first is 1910 in Bhowanipore, and Baghbazar Sarbojanin from 1919 is the one that made the idea spread.

It changed who the festival belonged to. A subscription puja answers to its para, competes with the next para, and has an incentive to be worth walking to — which is the whole engine of what Kolkata's Pujo became.

From the 1990s onward, committees began commissioning artists to design the entire puja — pandal, idol, lighting and sound as one work with a single concept behind it. The idol stopped being a fixed form and became part of the design; the pandal stopped being a tent and became architecture.

The materials are the fun of it. Whole pandals have been built from terracotta pots, bicycle parts, jute, bamboo woven like textile, mirrors, matchsticks, discarded plastic. Themes range from village crafts to environmental argument to straightforward spectacle, and the good ones commission artisans from across Bengal to build them.

Not everyone is delighted. There is a genuine and long-running argument in the city about whether commissioned art and corporate sponsorship have pushed the ritual to the edge of its own festival. Both positions are held sincerely by people who love the thing.

Read the board. Almost every theme puja posts its concept, its artist and its materials at the entrance, usually in Bengali and English, and it takes thirty seconds to read something that changes what you are looking at.

Go on Chaturthi, Panchami or Shashthi. A theme puja is a work you need to stand in front of, and on Ashtami night you will be moved through it at walking pace with a hand on your back.