Bengal's Durga Puja Has Always Had a Patron. The 2026 Question Is Who Decides Its Form

The Patron Has Always Changed. This Time the Question Is Who Owns the Form In 1757,

months after the Battle of Plassey, Raja Nabakrishna Deb opened the Shobhabazar Rajbari puja in north Calcutta and invited Robert Clive as guest of honour. The goddess was worshipped and the new colonial power was courted, at the same ceremony.

From its first urban appearance, Bengal's grandest festival was also a statement of who stood close to power. That is the frame for what Kolkata is seeing in October 2026. Since the change of government in May, BJP ministers and MLAs have replaced TMC leaders as patrons of Sreebhumi Sporting Club, Suruchi Sangha, Hathibagan Sarbojonin and Tala Prottoy.

At Sreebhumi, Health Minister Sharadwat Mukherjee has taken the place of Sujit Bose, the former minister now facing an Enforcement Directorate case in the municipal recruitment scam. The handover itself follows a pattern this festival has repeated many times.

A festival built by successive patrons -

1790, Guptipara: twelve friends shut out of a household puja raised public subscriptions and created the Barowari form. The festival moved from the landlord's courtyard to the community.

• 1926, north Calcutta: Atindranath Bose's Simla Byayam Samiti dressed the goddess in khadi. The Swadeshi Thakur put the anti-colonial movement into the idol itself.
• After Independence: neighbourhood committees became civic networks. Ekdalia Evergreen in Gariahat came to be identified with Congress leader Subrata Mukherjee from the 1970s.
• After 2011: the TMC built a puja economy of state grants and, eventually, the Red Road Carnival. Art historian Tapati Guha Thakurta has called this a festival mode of governance. Each phase brought a new patron and a new message delivered through the festival's form. The zamindar used scale to signal status, the nationalist used khadi and the TMC used spectacle.

Where the

parallel breaks The 1926 khadi goddess shows that changing the deity's appearance is not new; nationalists did exactly that. The direction of the change is what differs. Every earlier patron used the form to add something: grandeur, a political message, a carnival. The 2026 turn runs the other way, towards restraint and prescription.

• Artisans in Kumartuli report that an 11-foot height limit, earlier ignored, is now being strictly enforced by many committees.
• A BJP MLA organising the Santosh Mitra Square puja has argued that idols should follow tradition rather than experiment.
• The state has made Maha Ashtami a dry day, banned DJ music in processions and scrapped the Red Road Carnival. Other organisers and artists deny any pressure and designer Bhabatosh Sutar has maintained that no one can dictate how the goddess should look. The evidence is mixed and that ambiguity is the story.

Why the

form matters more than the name on the banner UNESCO's 2021 inscription recognised a living tradition and under the 2003 Convention such heritage stays alive only as long as its practitioners keep recreating it. In Kolkata those practitioners are the clay artisans and pandal designers, whose creative economy a 2019 British Council study valued at Rs 32,377 crore. Patronage can enlarge their canvas or narrow it.