Before you reach the gods, you have to wade through the advertisements. Everything, from panties to paneer, vests, oil, bowel regulators, soya chunks, is on sale. Pujo in Kolkata is a spectacle of faith, but it is the ads, plastered across the creaking city, that will first snag your attention; not one large ad, but sizeable rectangles of portable desire replicated a hundred times across a street, with the same faces, products, and messages slurring into one another.

These ads are on bamboo scaffoldings erected for the express purpose of Pujo advertising: to raise money for the pandals, for the politicians. They are temporarily monetised spaces in this ephemerally erected city. Loudspeakers announce the latest discounts between old Bengali songs. The Adani Group is thanked for its largesse: this year, the group’s Aagomoni initiative gave Rs.25 lakh each to eight pandals, a sponsorship that led to invitation-only “preview shows”.

Pujo is a short-circuited carnival of both faith and capital; the spectacle of faith and the spectacle of capital jostle comfortably, with “themes” for pandalsranging from Van Gogh to Santhal art to matchboxes to Partition, even citizenship (Khidderpore’s pandal had Aadhaar cards hanging from the ceiling).

What is this comfort derived from? The bhakti that drives Pujo and the capitalism that girds its sponsorship are not opposing forces, nor are they complementary. They do not build each other up, even as they lean on each other to state their presence. There is an imbricating adjacence here—an intention to be alongside, to be embedded in each other, but to never cohere.

Tapati Guha-Thakurta surveyed the long arc of Pujo, its evolving aesthetics from a ritual to a spectacle, beginning from the 1960s–70s, and its further shift from spectacle to the artistic or the arter murti (artful idols) style at the turn of the millennium, aided by awards sponsored by corporates. The arter murti trend exploded with advertising, awards, and corporate sponsorships. A UNESCO Heritage badge was awarded in 2021, establishing Pujo as intangible cultural heritage.

One of the artful idols of the 2026 Durga Pujo in Kolkata.
| Photo Credit:
BIKAS DAS/AP

Despite this seeming comfort, faith and consumerism still clash. You have to step out of the world of advertising to enter the pandal’s space. The aesthetics of Pujo’s annual impermanence is rooted in classical notions of Durga’s portly beauty alongside art instincts, turning every pandal into an art installation, done with intention and care. The aesthetics of consumerism, on the other hand, is loud, brash, flat, its ideal feminine smooth and lean. The angularity of these ads and their promise are essential to capitalism: maximising space, for advertisement, the real estate of attention. The AI-generated faces and images on many of these ads exude neither intention nor care.

The disappearance of circles—from the facades of buildings to public spaces which prefer cuboids of maximised utility—and curves, essential to the feminine, from the circular Yogini temples to the apsidal Kamakhya, is another way to think about the contrast with the aesthetics of capitalism. What is the shape he prefers? What is the shape she prefers?

Bringing this story forward into the post-liberalised excess of the post-Internet 2020s requires meditation not just on the pandals themselves, as Guha-Thakurta does, but also on the larger visual landscape around the pandals. This space is crammed with marquees of the sponsors and snack counters, floaties and selfie points, neon string lights and hovering drones. What would make a group of young kids—sweating in the oppressive October heat, each pit of sweat marking its own shapely design on their silken clothes—take selfies not in front of Durga or the pandal but against a flickering ad in front of the pandal? The selfie, which registers their presence outdoors during Pujo, need not be embedded in Pujo itself but in the environment around it. Pujo allows this carnival within its ambit. It is all Pujo. The festival approaches faith in the same way it approaches commerce, communism, and the carnival.

Paranoid politics

This year, though, a discomfort was introduced. A restrictive, paranoid politics tried to fit the festival into something solely, exclusively, and forcefully faithful. It was like trying to tame a language into its dictionary, and this is putting it kindly.

There has always been a relationship between this festival and the politics around it. It was thought through by the researcher Moumita Sen, who outlined how, for example, former Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee provided free electricity to pandals in 2014 or gave tax exemptions to pandalsusing blue and white, the colours of her party, the Trinamool Congress.

With the arrival of the BJP and its fraught politics of division in Bengal this year, however, Pujo itself has been remade, shrunk, mangled. On the one hand, Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari increased the number of pandals in the State—by 25 per cent over last year, to more than 57,000. On the other hand, he was on a campaign to strip these pandals of their variegated vitality. Potters in Kumartuli, where the Durga murtis are made, spoke of unwritten directives to steer closer to the traditional form. There were warnings about the presence of non-vegetarian food. Adhikari directed Pujo committees to deny space to bookstalls—particularly those run by Left and Communist organisations—if they referred to the festival as “Sharadotsav” (or autumn festival) instead of Durga Pujo. The festival was tightly yoked to “Sanatan Dharma”.

Adhikari implicitly asked the Pujo committees to get rid of one of the Pujo fixtures: the CPI(M) bookstalls outside pandalsselling Marxist literature and children’s books. Goons came to dismantle the stalls, which were staffed mostly by ageing men encouraging young children to pick up The Communist Manifesto. While the BJP distanced itself from the goons, their presence was only a violent manifestation of what is made possible by the party. I bought a few books from one of the stalls; it took four men over 10 minutes to bill me. One of them gently pushed TheCommunist Manifesto in my direction, sweetly asking me to purchase that too. How paranoid must your politics be to fear this?

Footwear lies scattered outside the Chorebagan Durga Puja pandal after the stampede on October 17, 2026.
| Photo Credit:
PTI

Lists were made of “Sanatani pandals”, whose themes veered close to nationalism and the BJP’s ideological vision. The presence of saffron and the lotus was unmistakable. Trishuls (tridents) had sprung up like mushrooms all over the city.

Last year, at Outram Ghat, I saw men and women weep as they sent the goddess away. Then they turned, their grief now vapour, as the idol they had immersed was brutally picked up by a hydraulic crane, disfigured, broken, and flung, along with other idols, at a spot a mere hundred feet away from the sacred immersion site.

This year, Adhikari announced that manual trolleys and conveyor belts would be used for idol immersion, adding that only those who follow Sanatan Dharma could touch the idols. People would be asked to identify themselves. There is nothing communal about this, Adhikari said, as though looking someone in the eye while stabbing them and saying with a smirk that there is nothing murderous about it. It is this smirk that I could see all around me this year.

While consumerism consumes everything, even its critique, politics bulldozes everything. Especially its critique.

The Chorebagan stampede that killed 19 people drew a pall over this year’s Pujo. In its aftermath, there was excessive vigilance around other pandals. People were not allowed to take photos or videos. Officers and volunteers with plastic noodles thwacked anyone using phones or not moving, too immersed in Durga or looking back for a lost friend. Whistles, shrill and frequent, made up the aural ambience of these spaces.

Faith is in small moments of intimate grace. But at this scale, god can only be indulged. That is what the BJP will do: it will shrink faith into its most tight, amalgamated form, explode it into a spectacle, hollow it of intimacy, possibility, and play, until faith can only be indulged.

Prathyush Parasuraman is a writer and critic who writes across publications, both print and online.

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