When a City Becomes a Museum: Durga Puja as Public Art in Bengal

26th September 2025

Durga Puja in Kolkata is best understood as a city-scale experiment in installation art: thousands of site-specific, time-bound environments authored by teams of artists and artisans, funded by neighbourhood committees, and experienced by millions as a democratic, free, public exhibition. UNESCO’s inscription of “Durga Puja in Kolkata” on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity formalised what practitioners and scholars already knew—that this is not only ritual but a contemporary cultural form characterised by “large-scale installations and clay sculptures,” embedded in civic life rather than the market.