DURGA
PUJA - ART & CULTURE
News:
From beyond seas, to
revel in joy of puja
What's
in the news?
●
In an initiative that spans continents,
two artists from the Netherlands are collaborating with their Indian
counterparts in the installation of a Durga Puja pandal at Behala Natun Dal in
south Kolkata.
Key
takeaways:
●
Describing the Durga Puja in Kolkata as a
“spectacle”, the artists said they were amazed at the community participation
in the festival.
●
Durga Puja in Kolkata is often referred to
as the world’s biggest public art
festival touching the lives of millions of people.
Durga
Puja:
●
Durga Puja is an annual festival celebrated in September or October, most notably in
Kolkata, West Bengal.
●
The festival marks the ten-day worship of the Hindu
mother-goddess Durga.
●
In the months preceding the festival,
small artisanal workshops sculpt images of Durga using unfired clay pulled from
the Ganga River.
●
Although celebrated across the country -
notably in Tripura, Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, Assam, Maharashtra, Delhi, and
Uttar Pradesh and in neighbouring Bangladesh, the heart of the 10-day annual
Sharodotsav festival is in Kolkata, where more than 3,000 community Durga Pujas
are held, apart from a large number of pujas in Bengali households.
●
UNESCO
inscribes ‘Durga Puja in Kolkata' on the Representative List of Intangible
Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2021.
UNESCO's
Intangible cultural heritage of India: