Home away from home

This year, 2010, on New Year’s Day, my twin sister and I had a very special feeling. (Nope, we weren’t thinking of the Delhi Metro or the Commonwealth Games, the latter of which still hadn’t begun to gain the notoriety that it has today.) We were thinking about the fact that in 2010, our family, the Majumdars, would complete 100 years of an unbroken connection to this city, this capital that we continue to love despite the immense changes that it has undergone over the course of the century – over, indeed, our own lives.

In more senses than one, therefore, this Majumdar family has been witness to how the institution of the Durga pujo has been evolving in Delhi over the course of a century.

When my grandfather, a civil servant, came to Delhi in 1911, he began by staying in Timarpur, which is in the ‘old’ Delhi area (which is different in both location and culture from Old Delhi). In 1938, he retired, and decided to settle permanently in Delhi, the ‘new’ Delhi.

Don’t ask me why a Bengali would choose to do that. Delhi, old or new, is as different from Kolkata as Coonoor is from the Thar Desert. During my grandfather’s time, Lutyens’ township was just beginning to take shape; its inhabitants were concentrated mainly in one defined area, the Delhi Imperial Zone. This close-knit area helped the Bengalis to mingle in the compact but highly cosmopolitan society. Still, they needed a place to mingle amongst only themselves, a place for adda, an inheritance from Bengal for plotting for and against the British, and for their love of debating politics. And that blessed spot, from which ripples of ‘Bengaliness’ would spread outwards to the growing city, was Kali Bari. This hallowed ground at Mandir Marg – which is more, and therefore less, than a temple: it is a seasonal cultural centre – is still where most ‘old-time’ Delhi Bengalis home in on when the pujo breaks cover from behind the monsoon clouds.

All said and done, a city’s annual history – its festivals, its culture, its battles – is slave to its weather. Post-monsoon, we knew that the festive season would change things in ways that we could only dream of for the rest of the year.

The first sign of the Durga Puja would be my delighted discovery, one morning, of the kaash phool (Saccharum spontaneum). In Bengal, this long-stemmed grass would also herald in the pujo, which knowledge served to unite us, the probashis, and the homegrown Bengalis. Kaash phool is in short supply these days in an increasingly concretised Delhi, but it would grow in abundance in those years. My favourite spot was opposite the National Museum or near what is known as The Ridge at Birla Mandir.

Years of living in Delhi had not knocked the puja out of us. My sister and I would get this tingling sensation (Pujo is coming!) when we would spot the first five-petal shiuli phool (Parijat flower) sprouting tentatively from the ground – the definite sign that the pujo was round the corner. And the smell of the shiuli phool has a special heady accent to it that never leaves through the duration of the pujo.

The pujo for us was (and still is) always Kali Bari, along with two very old pujos in Minto Road and Mata Sundari Road. The oldest, of course, is still located at Kashmere Gate. (In a kind of familial serendipity, the Kashmere Gate pujo turned 100 years old last year, almost to the year that the Majumdar family’s settling in Delhi did. It’s a matter of amused perplexity to us when people point out to us that the first Durga pujo in Delhi was supposed to have been celebrated in 1842 by one Majumdar of Rajshai, and the following two in 1875 and 1904. But these were private affairs and not baroyari pujo (public festivals). I can assure you that my family had nothing to do with any of them.

But the Kali Bari I can tell you lots about. The history of this iconic location in New Delhi dates back to 1925. Although there was a dilapidated temple (we call it the chhoto Kali Bari) found on Baird Road (now Bangla Sahib Marg), it was obviously too small to accommodate all the festooned and pious – a potent combination – Bengali devotees. A move was initiated in 1925 for the construction of a well-planned Kali Bari, like the one the Bengalis had had constructed in Simla. After a prolonged negotiation, the Government of India, mingy as ever, agreed in 1931 to allot a single acre on the lower Ridge Road (now Mandir Marg) on the payment of a premium of Rs.1,000. Kali Bari finally began functioning on October 1938 – the very year that my grandfather, after retiring, settled down in Delhi. While the Kali pujo utsav started around that time, till 1943 the pujo was restricted to religious functions alone. It was only in 1944 that the pujo committee hit upon the bright idea that cultural functions could serve to attract more people under the pandal.

Durga pujo meant the world to us in those days, when Delhi had no more than a handful of 25-30 pujos, not the hundreds of gaudy affairs that it does today. It was in the mid-1970s that the so-called “East Pakistan Displaced Persons” conglomeration of Chittaranjan Park suddenly appeared on the Delhi map and began to appropriate Delhi’s longstanding ‘Bengaliness’. And thus, too, began the culture of enormous, exorbitant, theme-based pandals and the brassy, crass commercialisation of the pujo in Delhi.

Not that it mattered much to us – we were Delhi’s ‘oldtime’ Bengalis. What was important to us was that we got our new dresses and our new shoes for the whole year – at one shot, no quibbling. Most important of all, we had that rare thing for children called “freedom” (which was a simple concoction of no homework and no studies) for five full days. From Shasthi to Navami, it was one long jamboree, with the mornings and evenings spent at the Kali Bari, gorging on lal chhola and mughlai parathas (which are subtly but noticeably different from the Kolkata brand) and dimer devil. Food, central to the Bengalis’ sense of their space in the world and to their own sense of well-being – the woes of the morning after being another matter altogether – clearly seems to respect no distances. As in Delhi, so in Kolkata.

And well after midnight, we would either walk it home or hire tongas (essentially heavily Indianised versions of governesses’ carts): they were such a convenient mode of travel to and from Kali Bari to wherever one wanted to go in Lutyens’ Delhi.

Another dose of excitement were the sharodiya shonkhas, the ‘Pujo Annuals’, as they are called today. The quality of writers and writings was astounding. How eagerly we waited for the latest Feluda, and little magazines like Ekshan, which had endless surprises between their pages each year. Stuffed with essays, poetry, articles, memoirs, all written with ineffable scholarship. I believe to this day that this is where real writing is still being done, not in English. How wrong Salman Rushdie was! The write-ups were varied, studied and expertly handled. This is where we discovered Binode Behari Mukherjee as an ace writer and Bina De’s wonderful memoir. And, of course, each year, there was a script from one of Satyajit Ray’s films. I remember that, one year, we were wonderfully surprised to see ‘Domru Charit’ in graphic form in Kishore Bharoti. (In those days, the idea of the graphic novel had yet to take shape). It was through these journals that we received the endless river of the sound, the smell, the taste and the images of Bengal.

Dashami , as ever, was bittersweet. The end of the pujo meant, literally for the next week, at least, the end of life for us. Our last excitement was seeing the bisharjan procession from Irwin Road across our house. The procession would always be led by the Kali Bari Joint Committee (which has, over the years, fiercely defended its primacy on this occasion), and would pass through Irwin Road, Connaught Place, Asaf Ali Road and on to Gita Ghat near the Jamuna. That would be the end of it, one might suppose – but one might suppose wrong. In later years, as the number of pujos grew to their hundreds, and bisarjan processions had to be regulated by overworked traffic police, space at the ghat for the immersions was decided by youth gangs doing battle with lathis. They were, invariably, emboldened with good amounts of chang in their bellies from the not-too-distant Tibetan taverns at Majnu-ka-Tilla.

But we, innocents still, would be at home winding ourselves up for the pujo the next year. It would, we knew, always come.