Pratyusha Pan
For most of the year, Allen Park is a quiet green square at the Park Street and Camac Street crossing.
In December, it becomes the centre of the city. Every year, the Park Street stretch turns into a human sea under dazzling lights from Christmas until the New Year, with the streets filled with Christmas lights, nativity scenes and Santa hats adorning Calcuttans out for the night to celebrate the last days of the year.
This year, for the first time, at the behest of BJP leaders who have recently come to power in West Bengal after the May elections, the same park will host a Durga Puja. And for people who remember a different, more tolerant Kolkata, the show of power in conducting a Puja in an area famous for its Christmas cannot be missed in the current state of the state and the country.
From Shaheb-er Para to Kolkata’s Christmas Landmark
The construction of Park Street began in 1767 as a road to a new burial ground and was later renamed after the private deer park of Sir Elijah Impey. Bengalis called it Shaheb-er Para, the neighbourhood of Englishmen.
The Christmas festival that made Allen Park famous began in 2011, started by the state tourism department, headed by former Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, together with the Christian community.
BJP-Linked Group to Organise Puja
The Puja is to be organised by the Kolkata Sanatani Sangha, a body led by BJP functionaries, among them Shankudeb Panda, a close associate of Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari and, like him, a Trinamool defector.
Panda was general secretary of the Trinamool Congress before joining the BJP in 2019. He began as a student leader, worked as a journalist and made his name with a sting operation on a CPI legislator from Nandigram.
Nabin Mishra, the Sangh’s secretary and Adhikari’s election agent in Bhabanipur, says earlier attempts to hold a Puja at Allen Park were refused permission. The opportunity, he said, now exists because there is now a “Sanatani government”.
Adhikari is expected to inaugurate the Puja on the day after Mahalaya, and the organisers expect several senior BJP leaders to visit. They have hinted that chief ministers of BJP-ruled states may attend too, and priests from Varanasi will conduct the Ashtami anjali.
A local Puja does not require that kind of retinue.
Echoes of Earlier Christmas Controversy
The implications are only too obvious to those versed in the BJP’s tendency to hijack other religions’ festivals with their eternal insecurity about their own.
In 2002, Suvendu Adhikari, then a leader of the opposition, urged supporters to perform Tulsi Puja on the morning of December 25, saying Christmas would be observed later. The line has followed him ever since, and it followed the Allen Park announcement within hours.
CPI(M) leader Sujan Chakraborty said it is not the case that only Christians may hold events on Park Street, but asked why the BJP had suddenly rushed there, and whether a Tulsi Puja on December 25 might come next.
Panda says both festivals will be observed and that Allen Park will be decorated for Christmas as usual.
A Question of Kolkata’s Shared Public Culture
However, a Puja that no one in the city, and certainly no one in the neighbourhood, ever asked for, that arrives with a chief minister, a saffron repainting of a Christmas venue and a boast about a “Sanatani government”, ceases to be “just a Puja” and starts to look like an attempt at overturning Kolkata’s long-established traditions of coexistence and a show of power.
Allen Park is part of a pattern. Adhikari made clear his wishes on vegetarianism, clay idols and toning down carnival and entertainment. He also declared in the assembly on September 10 that stalls must describe themselves as part of the Durga Puja Utsav rather than Sharadotsav, in what is clearly a bid to recast a communal celebration of the season as purely religious.
Kolkata’s Tradition of Coexistence
Volatile as Bengal’s religious situation is and has been ever since the Partition, Bengal’s public culture has always rested on an unspoken cohabitation.
Every community’s festival gets room, and no one’s arrival requires another’s retreat. Christmas on Park Street, Eid in Zakaria Street and crowds of every faith at every pandal all depend on it.
However, the politics behind Allen Park requires a winner to come off this equilibrium. Hindutva runs on the idea that Hindus have been polite tenants in their own home and should reclaim the front rooms, and the Puja in Allen Park is that claim in miniature.
