Durga-Puja Mandapa Making

This book is the 24th-month report from 18th August to 17th September 2015 on the ideas of the pandals, which gradually increased and diverged into a broader view, with growing expectations. Pandals made with bamboo structures, covered with elongated meters of colourful cloth, sometimes decorated with fabric designs, along with the idols from kumartuli was considered as the craft materials needed, thus resulting in the idol and pandal makers not to be considered as artists. But at the contemporary scenario, infusion of the artistic mind, conceptualisation, process of execution, the amount of spectators creating the interacting and dialogical landscape of the space has completely altered the situation. Interference of the professionally trained artists, arise the search for the identity and the broad and blur border between art and craft to deliberately fading away. This publication is an outcome of the project under Lalit Kala Akademi, Ministry of Culture, Government of India, which is titled as "Preservance and Digitising Art Activities During Puja Festival in Kolkata."