An exhibition and discussion series in Delhi’s Chittaranjan Park is presenting Kolkata’s Durga Puja as more than a cultural celebration. Through photographs, information panels and curator-led conversations, the initiative is examining how a festival can temporarily reorganise public life, bring communities into shared spaces, support artistic and traditional skills, and create economic opportunities beyond the formal urban system.
The programme, presented by architect and urban designer Anjan Mitra with photographer and electronics engineer Aniruddha Guha Sarkar, began on Monday and is scheduled to conclude on Wednesday. Its subject is Kolkata’s Durga Puja, which has been recognised by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Its setting is significant: Chittaranjan Park is a Delhi neighbourhood closely associated with Bengali cultural life, allowing the exhibition to carry a Kolkata urban tradition into another city and community context.
The initiative’s central proposition is that festivals should be understood as temporary urban environments. They are not confined to ritual or entertainment. They occupy streets and open areas, shape movement, bring different groups into shared public settings and create spaces where artistic production becomes visible to a wide audience. The exhibition uses the festival to explore that relationship between culture and the city.
This perspective shifts attention away from the finished spectacle alone. A Durga Puja celebration is also a process involving artisans, designers, organisers, residents, visitors and local networks. The source report describes the exhibition as an exploration of public life, imagination, artistic practice and intangible heritage. It also highlights the role of traditional knowledge systems, artisanal skills, community participation and the informal economy.
That combination is important for understanding how urban culture is produced. The visible installation may last for a limited period, but the knowledge behind it is accumulated through skills, techniques and social relationships. The exhibition’s focus suggests that heritage is not only a matter of preserving old objects or documenting established customs. It can also involve maintaining the practical knowledge and collective participation required to create a contemporary public event.
The temporary nature of festivals is central to this urban reading. Unlike permanent civic infrastructure, temporary festival spaces are assembled for a defined period and then dismantled. Yet their influence on how people experience the city can be substantial. They create what the exhibition describes as meaningful temporary spaces and turn public areas into settings for participation, interaction and visual expression.
This does not make a festival equivalent to a road, park or public building. Its contribution is different. It lies in the way it activates shared urban space through a cultural code understood by the participating community. Mitra described festivals as a spontaneous expression of Indian society guided by a shared cultural code. In his account, this shared framework allows people and professionals to interact, while also creating room for design and artistic evolution.
The distinction between spontaneous expression and organised urban production is also revealing. Festivals may appear organic, but the exhibition’s description points to a complex system of coordination. Community participation has to connect with artistic practice, traditional skills and design decisions. The event becomes a meeting point between inherited knowledge and new forms of visual and spatial expression.
For cities, that meeting raises a larger question about who gets to shape public space. Conventional urban planning often treats public areas through permanent land uses, transport functions or formal development controls. Festivals introduce another layer: time-bound, community-led occupation that can give residents an active role in defining how shared spaces are used.
The source material does not provide details of the specific venues, dimensions or permissions associated with the exhibition or the Durga Puja celebrations it presents. It therefore cannot establish how such temporary spaces are governed in practice, or how they affect traffic, waste management, public safety or neighbourhood services. What it does establish is the curators’ attempt to place festivals within a broader discussion about public life and urban development.
The economic dimension is equally important. The exhibition links Durga Puja to the informal economy and to the traditional knowledge and skills that support festival production. This framing recognises that cultural events generate value through many forms of work that may not always be visible in formal economic accounts. Artisanal production, design activity and community organisation are presented as part of the festival’s wider urban ecosystem.
Mitra said the mechanism supports the informal economy to a great extent. That statement is an attributed view rather than a quantified assessment; the supplied report does not provide figures for employment, income, visitor spending or the number of workers involved. Even without those figures, the claim identifies an important area for urban reporting: the relationship between public celebrations and livelihoods that depend on seasonal, cultural or project-based work.
The exhibition also places professional design within that ecosystem. Mitra’s background in cultural heritage and inclusive development and his call for an “alternative design campaign” indicate an attempt to move the discussion beyond festival decoration. The phrase suggests a design approach shaped by community participation, inherited skills and public use rather than by purely commercial or formal design processes.
That approach could matter because festivals provide a visible testing ground for how design operates outside permanent buildings. Temporary structures, visual installations and public settings can bring design into direct contact with large and diverse audiences. They also allow communities and design professionals to interact in a way that the exhibition identifies as capable of producing further evolution.
The involvement of Mitra and Sarkar adds another layer to the initiative. The exhibition combines architectural and urban-design perspectives with photography and technical expertise. Its use of photographs, panels, talks and discussions indicates that the curators are treating the festival as something to be documented, interpreted and debated rather than simply displayed.
The choice of Chittaranjan Park as the venue reinforces the role of cultural networks in urban life. The programme is not taking place in Kolkata but is presenting Kolkata’s heritage in a Delhi neighbourhood. This creates a cross-city exchange in which a cultural practice associated with one metropolitan setting is examined by audiences in another. The source does not state how visitors responded or whether the programme will lead to further initiatives, so those outcomes remain unestablished.
What the event confirms is narrower but still significant. It shows that Durga Puja is being presented not only as a religious or cultural tradition, but also as an urban system involving public space, artistic practice, community participation and livelihoods. UNESCO recognition provides an international heritage framework, while the exhibition’s content connects that recognition to the lived processes through which the festival is created and experienced.
The urban policy implications should not be overstated. The programme is an exhibition and discussion series, not a government plan or an announced municipal reform. It does not present a new funding model, administrative framework or regulatory change. However, its themes touch on responsibilities that cities routinely have to negotiate when public celebrations occupy shared spaces: the relationship between communities, designers, local authorities and informal workers.
The absence of operational details is itself a limit on what can be concluded. The supplied account does not specify how Kolkata’s festival spaces are planned, which institutions manage them, how artisans are compensated, or how the economic benefits are distributed. It also does not provide comparative evidence from other festivals or cities. Those questions would require separate documentation and reporting.
Still, the exhibition offers a useful analytical lens. It treats temporary cultural spaces as part of the built environment’s wider social life. A city is experienced not only through its permanent structures but also through recurring events that change how people gather, move, interact and express collective identity. In this account, heritage survives through use and participation, not only through preservation.
The larger urban question is whether cities can recognise these temporary systems without reducing them to spectacle. The source material establishes the curators’ belief that festivals conserve knowledge, support skills and strengthen community interaction. It does not establish the scale of those effects, but it makes clear why they deserve attention from planners, cultural institutions and urban designers.
The exhibition in Chittaranjan Park therefore matters less as a standalone cultural event than as an invitation to examine how Indian cities produce public life. It places Kolkata’s Durga Puja at the intersection of heritage, design, community and livelihood. The programme will conclude on Wednesday; the next question is whether the conversations it begins can generate more evidence about how temporary festival spaces are planned, funded and sustained.
