In a sombre, dimly lit pandal in south Kolkata, blown-up newspaper headlines and a mock relief truck confront visitors with one of the city’s most painful chapters: the communal violence of 1946. The Samaj Sebi Sangha’s Durga puja, titled Pather Panchali 1946, uses the language of installation art to tell the story of a street and a community that chose solidarity over sectarianism.
Pather Panchali, widely considered a classic by Satyajit Ray means ‘Song of the Road’ in Bengali and this Puja Pandal tells the story of both a road and a time.
Artist Pradip Das, who conceived the pandal, said the installation centres on Lake View Road, a neighbourhood whose residents responded to the turmoil by organising relief and protection efforts.
“The story of Lake View Road is one of communal harmony born out of that crisis,” Das said, noting that the local response helped establish the club that now organises the puja. The pandal also honours key local figures such as Leela Roy, scientist Meghnath Saha and historian Jadunath Sarkar, who feature in the narrative of community action.
Newspaper headlines depict stories of 1946 communal violence (Express/Partha Paul)
Visually the pandal is rooted in the locality’s pre-partition character. Lake View Road is one of the old neighbourhoods of south Kolkata where one can still find houses from the pre-partition era. Das said he mapped the art-deco façades of the area and used a palette drawn from five dominant colours found on those buildings. Props include enlarged wartime newspaper pages and a truck evocative of the vehicles used to ferry relief supplies to affected households.
Sound plays an important role in the experience. Composer Deepmoy Das has scored the installation with sarod, sitar and shehnai, while a prayer recited by Bangladeshi artist Asif Nawaz accompanies the tableaux, lending a cross-border resonance to the theme of shared suffering and survival.
The pandal opens at a politically charged moment: Vivek Agnihotri’s film The Bengal Files, about the 1946 riots sparked controversy in Kolkata. The organisers stress that their work is not linked to that film. “The film presented a one-sided view of 1946,” Pradip Das told reporters. “Our pandal speaks about harmony and about how local people tried to ease the suffering caused by the riots.”
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That emphasis on reconciliation is visible in the idol itself. The earthly Durga here is draped in a plain green cotton saree and deliberately unarmed, a visual statement, the organisers say, that the installation is about healing rather than glorifying violence.
Samaj Sebi Sangha’s puja, now in its eightieth year, therefore functions as both commemoration and reminder: a neighbourhood’s memory of a fraught past recast as a call to unity, and a festival space where art, history and ritual converge to insist that public memory can also be a resource for peace.
