The year 2026 will mark my third consecutive year away from Durga Puja in West Bengal. For Bengalis, Puja is much more than a religious festival or annual holiday. It’s inseparable from our personal identities. Yet after moving to the United States, I have realised that much of what made Puja special in Bengal was not the festival itself, but also the anticipation leading up to it.
In Bengal, nobody needs a calendar to know that Durga puja is approaching. The monsoon gradually retreats and the autumn sky becomes clearer. Kashphul begins appearing across open fields. Meanwhile, bamboo skeletons rise in neighbourhood parks and slowly develop into elaborate pandals. Conversations increasingly turn toward Puja — which sari for Ashtami? Should we go north on Saptami or save it for Navami? Which restaurant, which friends for social gatherings?
Our neighbourhood puja is held at the park opposite our apartment in FD Block. Since we lived on the top floor, each year’s pandal was visible from our balcony. We could watch its journey from the first pieces of bamboo being assembled to the finished structure opening to thousands of visitors. On my way home from ????? school, I would periodically visit the construction site to see how much progress had been made.
The pandals themselves are an important part of our anticipation as they are not simply temporary buildings constructed to house the idols. They are expressions of arts, imagery, and visual creativity. Architecture, sculpture, lighting, sound and traditional craftsmanship are combined around different themes. The result is that pandal-hopping is partly a religious tradition and partly an enormous public art exhibition spread across the state.
My family moved to the United States in 2024 and I am now pursing undergraduate studies here, majoring in biology with honours.
Here we are members of a local temple where Puja is celebrated, albeit on a much smaller scale. The celebration is concentrated on a single day. We visit the temple, attend rituals such as pushpanjali and eat community meals of khichudi bhog. Yet the biggest difference is not the size or duration of the celebration. It is the absence of that months-long anticipation and how the city transforms. Outside the temple premises, life continues with its ordinary October schedule. There are no pandals gradually rising in every neighbourhood, no everyday conversation about which pandal has the best theme, no fairs set up around the neighbourhood. Schools, universities, and workplaces continue normally.
Saying that my family and I miss Calcutta’s Puja celebrations is an understatement, but this year, my experience will change again. My family and I will be visiting Washington Kali Bari in Washington, D.C. It occupies a unique space between the two worlds I have known: Calcutta’s citywide celebrations and the much more concentrated community celebration in my local temple.
While I don’t expect the trip to recreate Calcutta’s atmosphere entirely, I look forward to discovering how a larger and well-established Bengali diaspora has carried out the cultures and traditions of Puja into one of the largest metros of the United States.
Puja is not just a religious Hindu festival for Bengalis, it’s attended by people of all religions, cultures, and languages. That is why I wish people from all over the world get to visit Calcutta during Puja and get to experience the greatest public celebration of unity, culture, artwork and feeling of brotherhood, particularly Bengalis of my generation who were born and brought up abroad and have not experienced an important cultural heritage of theirs.
I wish everyone a happy and healthy Durga Puja.