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Why India's Durga Puja needed a global recognition
Updated On: 15 October, 2023 07:07 AM IST | Mumbai | Sucheta Chakraborty
As Bengal gears up for its biggest annual celebration, mid-day assesses the economic and political implications of its nascent UNESCO recognition
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MassArt, a non-profit organisation conceived in June 2022 with the objective of promoting the art and culture of Bengal, has joined hands with UNESCO and the British Council to present a preview show of Durga Puja art in a sort of early glimpse into the public art festival before the gates open for the masses to worship
A lot of the time, the coveted intangible cultural heritage tag is given to those performing arts which are dying out or to niche community events. For instance, it has been given to Buddhist chanting in Ladakh, and the ritual singing and drumming [sankirtana] of Manipur. The Durga Puja, however, is a thriving festival that continues to grow and develop in new directions 400 years after it was believed to have first been celebrated in Bengal by Raja Kangsanarayan of Taherpur in present day Bangladesh. So, while it may not strictly need protection, it has certain aspects that need safeguarding,” historian Tapati Guha-Thakurta tells mid-day about why the annual festival needed the UNESCO tag in the first place.
The former director and honorary professor at the Center for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata, whose book on the Durga Pujas of contemporary Kolkata was published in 2015, spearheaded the research that ultimately put the festival on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2021. In August 2018, Sangeet Natak Akademi, a nodal agency under the Ministry of Culture had approached Guha-Thakurta to prepare a dossier to send to UNESCO based on her decades-long research.
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