Art and the Pujas

The Pujo is here! Goddess Durga has come down to Earth with her two daughters and two sons and it is a time for rejoicing, but she will soon be gone, back to her abode at Mount Kailash. And there will start another wait till she comes again next year.

People all over Bengal do their utmost to make Her stay on Earth as pleasurable as possible by building pandals and idols of exquisite form and beauty. The idols and pandals are a work of art - art that is as temporal as Her stay. And that I feel is tragic.

Artists, sculptors, architects and designers get together and toil for months to create monuments with bamboo, cloth, straw, cardboard, thermocol and other items of temporal construction (even buiscuits and candy!) that are built to the model of temples, churches, mosques, historic buildings and even ships. The effort that goes into the construction of these aweinspiring pandals is gargantuan in proportion and deserves all the praise.

The idols are also works of art, examples of exquisite sculptures. They come in various sizes and shapes. Sometimes all five members of Goddess Durga's family are put together and sometimes they are paired and at other times they are created individually. They are adorned with intricately designed ornaments and dresses that would put any emperor to shame. The idols are made mostly of clay, but sculptors also create idols from straw, from wood-shavings, from paper, from chalk, and from other materials.

The sad part of this is the end - these works of art last only for the duration of the pujas, after which they are dismantled or sold off in pieces. It does not feel right that these works of art should stop existing so soon and so easily. We need some way of preserving them, but their size and their number are too daunting for any conservationist programme. It is almost impossible to preserve them. It is very difficult to preserve pandals that replicate the Ajanta Caves or the Taj Mahal or the White House, and are at least 20 feet tall and covers the area of a football field. Where do you keep such pandals, how does one preserve them? But I think if we try a little harder, we might be able to preserve the idols. They do not take up so much space as the pandals, but even then we would require a huge space for preserving them as thousands are created every year but only a hundred can be regarded as works of art.

I hope that the pujas bring joy to everyone and everyone enjoys themselves as I will, but at the same time I wish I could do something to preserve these works of art. Anyone has any ideas?