Durga Puja in Kolkata Joined UNESCO's Intangible Heritage List on 15 December 2021, After a Nomination File That Counted About 5,000 Pujas in the City

Durga Puja in Kolkata was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity on 15 December 2021. The Press Information Bureau (PIB), the Government of India’s press office, counted it as the 14th element from India on the list, after entries such as Yoga (2016) and the Kumbh Mela (2017). The decision came at the Intergovernmental Committee’s 16th session, which PIB says ran in Paris from 13 to 18 December 2021.

India’s nomination, numbered 00703, describes the festival as the worship of the Hindu mother-goddess Durga, which in Bengal is also her yearly homecoming. In the file’s account she comes down from her husband Shiva’s home in the Himalayas to her parents’ home, with her four children, Ganesh, Kartick, Lakshmi and Saraswati. The file calls it the best instance of public performance of religion and art in the city.

What the Committee decided, and the five criteria it checked

The Committee’s decision (16.COM 8.B.15) took note of the nomination and decided to inscribe the element. Under the 2003 Convention a nomination has to meet five criteria.

On the file, the Committee found that the element is intangible heritage as the Convention defines it, with families, puja committees, priests, drummers, artists and craftspersons among its bearers (criterion R.1). It found that the communities had consented, through fieldwork and a public stakeholder meeting (R.4), and that the festival sits in India’s national inventory, which the Sangeet Natak Akademi keeps and updates every year (R.5). The file gives the inventory entry date as 25 March 2011.

On information the Government of India gave at the session, the Committee found that inscription would raise awareness (R.2) and that safeguarding measures were in place (R.3). The decision lists among them the management of traffic, crowds, sound and pollution, along with workshops, digital archives and sustainability guidelines.

The decision also commended the organisations in Kolkata for involving marginalised groups, and women, in safeguarding the festival. PIB’s release of 15 December 2021 repeated that commendation and carried a message from Union Culture Minister G Kishan Reddy, who called the inscription a celebration of feminine divinity and the spirit of womanhood.

Who wrote the file, and how

The Sangeet Natak Akademi, India’s national academy of music, dance and drama, is the Ministry of Culture’s nodal body for nominations. Its secretary signed the form on 28 March 2020, three days before the deadline for inscription in 2021.

The dossier was prepared by a research team at the Jadunath Bhavan Museum and Resource Centre in Kolkata, led by Professor Tapati Guha-Thakurta. The file says the team did four months of fieldwork before and after the festival, watched idol-making and pandal design (a pandal is a temporary pavilion) at close quarters, and recorded the immersion at Taki, on the Ichhamati river along the India and Bangladesh border, where it says people from both countries immerse images together.

On 28 December 2018 the team held a public meeting at the museum. The file lists idol makers, designers, family patrons, neighbourhood clubs, councillors, sponsors, scholars and officials among those present. Their consent letters were signed on paper, some in Bengali, with translations attached.

The ten days, and the five at the centre

The nomination calls Durga Puja a ten-day worship. It begins on Mahalaya, when the clay images have life invoked in them by painting the eyes, and ends on the tenth day, Bijoya Dashami, when they are immersed in the river. Incredible India, the Ministry of Tourism’s site, says the ten days of ritual peak in the last five, Shashthi to Dashami. The British Council’s 2019 study counted those five days as 4 to 8 October 2019.

Mahalaya has a broadcast tradition too. All India Radio’s Kolkata station airs Mahishasuramardini before dawn that day, about 90 minutes of verses from the Chandi (Chandipath) recited by Birendra Krishna Bhadra, with music by Pankaj Mullick. Newslaundry dates the first broadcast to 1936 and WION to 1931.

Outlook Traveller’s guide lays out the days that follow. On Shashthi the goddess’s face is unveiled and the dhak, the festival’s big drum, begins. On Saptami a bundle of nine plants is bathed in the rite called Kola Bou snan, dressed in a saree and placed beside Ganesh.

Ashtami brings the pushpanjali, in which devotees offer flowers and bel leaves with the priest’s mantra, and Kumari Puja, in which a young girl is worshipped as the goddess. Sandhi Puja is held at the junction of Ashtami and Navami, with 108 lamps.

On Navami comes the dhunuchi naach, in which dancers move to the dhak holding clay pots of burning coconut husk and incense. On Dashami married women apply vermilion to the goddess and to each other (sindoor khela), and the idols are paraded and immersed in water (visarjan). People then seek elders’ blessings in the greeting called Bijoya.

Clay from Kumartuli

The nomination names Kumartuli in north Kolkata as the oldest and main hub of the hereditary clay modellers, the mritshilpis. UNESCO’s element page says the images are made from unfired clay taken from the Ganga. Sahapedia says the supply at Kumartuli comes from riverside deposits at Uluberia, with a bamboo frame, a coat of mud and then colour as the three stages of the work.

Accounts of how the quarter began differ in detail. The People’s Archive of Rural India says the first potters came from Krishnanagar in Nadia district about 300 years ago and settled near Bagbazar ghat. Sahapedia says Raja Nabakrishna Deb of Shobhabazar Rajbari began a puja at his home around 1757 and brought modellers from Krishnanagar, which it describes as the start of Kumortuli. The British Council study counted about 150 idol studios in the Kumartuli area, roughly 500 artisans and about 3,000 skilled and unskilled workers, and found that 40 per cent of the studios are more than 60 years old.

The nomination file also lists what it wants safeguarded next. For Kumartuli it proposes a special financial forum, because it says the modellers have gained little from the rising budgets of puja committees.

How the barowari puja grew into the pandal

The nomination says traditional families have held Durga Puja in their mansions for over 200 years. The Ministry of Tourism dates Kolkata’s first puja to 1610, held by Laxmikanta Majumdar, founder of the Sabarna Roy Chowdhury family.

Neighbourhood pujas came later. The nomination says many of Kolkata’s community pujas began in the early and mid twentieth century. The British Council study quotes Guha-Thakurta’s definition of the barowari as an event organised by a voluntary association of twelve friends, and says its evolution in Kolkata can be traced back almost 100 years, from zamindari mansions to household pujas to neighbourhood alleys and parks.

The sources disagree on the first barowari puja. Live History India writes that it was held at Guptipara in the late 1700s, and notes that some sources say 1761 and others 1790. Abhijna e-Museum, written by Sudipta Garai of Jawaharlal Nehru University, says twelve friends of Guptipara, a town in Hooghly district, held it in 1790. For Kolkata, Sahapedia gives 1910 and Balaram Basu Ghat Road for the first community (sarbojanin) puja. Live History India, citing Sudeshna Banerjee’s 2006 book, says it was probably held in 1910 on the same road and organised by the Sanatan Dharmotsahini Sabha. Abhijna e-Museum places that sabha’s puja at Baghbazar and adds that some accounts name a puja on Bhawanipore’s Basu Ghat Road as the first. The same source dates the Simla Byayam Samiti puja to 1926, begun with freedom fighters including Atindranath Basu, Sarat Chandra Bose and Bhupendranath Dutta.

The pandals that now draw the crowds are themed. The nomination says pavilions draw on monuments and archaeological sites and show folk and tribal crafts. Incredible India says awards are given for idol design and environmental sustainability. The nomination also lists efforts to bring unmarried women, widows, sex workers and transgender people into the rituals.

How many pujas, and what the economy around them is worth

The nomination file says about 5,000 Durga Pujas are held in Kolkata. The 2019 study counted by other measures. It put registered pujas at 2,200 with Kolkata Police and more than 28,000 with West Bengal Police, plus around 10,000 run by housing societies and another 10,000 unregistered, and put the state total at about 50,000. The electricity supplier CESC received 4,487 applications for puja connections in Kolkata in 2019, which together used 52 megawatts, the study reports.

That study was commissioned by the British Council on behalf of the West Bengal Department of Tourism, under a memorandum the state and the council signed in July 2018. Queen Mary University of London led it with IIT Kharagpur, and Smart Cube prepared the quantitative report. It valued the creative industries around the 2019 festival at Rs 32,377 crore (3.29 billion pounds), excluding sponsorships, which it equates to 2.58 per cent of West Bengal’s economy in 2019-20.

Retail is the largest share at Rs 27,364 crore, followed by food and beverages at Rs 2,854 crore, pandal and decoration work at Rs 860 crore and idol-making at Rs 260 to 280 crore. The study estimated 14,87,688 (about 14.9 lakh) tourist arrivals into Kolkata over the five days. In its survey of 240 respondents, 35 per cent earned 81 to 100 per cent of their yearly income from the festival. These are 2019 figures from before the pandemic, and the study says sectors such as logistics and banking could be added in a second phase.

What the West Bengal government does

The nomination lists several departments of the Government of West Bengal (profiled in our West Bengal explainer) among the festival’s bearers. It names Kolkata Police and the Kolkata Municipal Corporation as the main providers of logistical support, and says the state’s tourism department organises each year the Bisarjan Shobhajatra, or Durga Puja Carnival, a parade of prize-winning images on Red Road before immersion.

The state also put Durga Puja before an international audience. Its tourism department and the British Council staged a photography exhibition, Bengal’s Durga, at the Totally Thames festival in London in 2018, which the British Council says 270,960 people saw over 43 days.

The file credits the state’s rules on immersion, and on clearing image remains from the river soon afterwards, as the main success of its civic regulations. For the river itself, see our report on the Ganga clean-up.

Support to the organisers is financial. PTI reported on 31 July 2025 that the state government raised its grant to puja committees from Rs 85,000 to Rs 1.10 lakh each, for about 40,000 committees, and said the fire service, the Kolkata Municipal Corporation, panchayats and municipalities would not levy taxes or service charges on them. Outlook India reported on 8 September 2026 that the state government had announced Rs 1 lakh for committees that apply.

The Government of India also promotes the festival abroad. In a Lok Sabha reply released by PIB on 9 March 2026, Culture and Tourism Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat said the Incredible India 2.0 campaign is being expanded to draw international visitors to Durga Puja. The reply adds that a dhunuchi naach was performed at the Red Fort during the Intergovernmental Committee’s meeting of 8 to 13 December 2025, the session at which UNESCO inscribed Deepavali, as our Diwali guide reports, before representatives of more than 190 participating countries.