Poems, Puja tracks, paintings: What drives Mamata Banerjee’s prolific artistic output?
Day after saying she has penned 26 poems against SIR, West Bengal CM and Trinamool Congress chief releases song on the occasion of Saraswati Puja.
The Left parties, along with the Congress, have miserably failed to transcend this and create an alternative space From penning songs, poems, and children’s rhymes to painting and, at times, singing. Mamata Banerjee has never shied away from expressing her artistic side.
On Friday, as people across the state celebrated Saraswati Puja, Banerjee posted on X a song sung by Trinamool Congress MP Aditi Munshi, a professional singer. The CM said she had written the lyrics and set them to music. The first stanza went like this: “On this Basant Panchami, may the youth surge forward with renewed energy, break down every barrier and obstacle, and tear despair to shreds.”
“আজ বসন্ত পঞ্চমীতে
যৌবন এসো নতুন স্রোতে,
ভেঙ্গে ফেলো বাধা বিঘ্ন
হতাশাকে করো ছিন্ন। “সকলকে জানাই সরস্বতী পুজো ও বসন্ত পঞ্চমীর আন্তরিক প্রীতি, শুভেচ্ছা ও অভিনন্দন।
এই উপলক্ষে আপনাদের সবার সঙ্গে আমার লেখা ও সুর করা এবং অদিতি মুন্সীর গাওয়া সরস্বতী পুজোর একটি গান শেয়ার করে… pic.twitter.com/VoCxpglF5D
— Mamata Banerjee (@MamataOfficial) January 23, 2026
A day earlier, while inaugurating the Kolkata international book fair, Banerjee said she had penned 26 poems against the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls that she and her party have consistently targeted for allegedly trying to disenfranchise voters. Banerjee said these poems on the “harassment and suffering faced by common people due to SIR” were penned in two days while she travelled to various engagements in a helicopter.
This time, nine books written by the CM will be for sale at the TMC stall at the book fair, taking the total number of books she has authored to 162. Over the years, Banerjee’s books and “thousands of poems” cover subjects as varied as her struggles as an Opposition leader, the Singur and Nandigram movements that brought down the Left citadel and propelled her to the CM’s chair in 2011, the Centre’s policies such as demonetisation, GST, CAA and NRC, and violence.
Banerjee’s projection of her artistic self — through poems, artwork, and songs — may be read as an attempt to lay claim to cultural authenticity despite being far from the ideal as defined by Bengali bhadralok norms. In contrast, her predecessor and CPI(M) leader Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee was lauded for his cultured Marxist persona. He was known for being a film connoisseur, a person who admired theatre and poetry, and translated the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Bengali.
“Yet, rather than trying to live up to the elevated bhadralok ideal, Mamata Banerjee has turned her lack of proper cultural capital to her own advantage, seeking to establish an alternative model for political leadership in which her simplicity and emotionality become assets rather than liabilities,” anthropologist Kenneth Bo Nielsen wrote in 2016 in an edited volume titled India’s Democracies.
“In a very revealing foreword to one of her collections of poetry Mamata Banerjee writes, ‘I am afraid the collection may not find readers’ attention as far as the quality of verses is concerned, but I may expect appreciation for their simplicity and emotional content.’ Similarly, as a painter she presents herself as ‘just a vagabond dabbling with colours’. Her paintings are (sometimes) appreciated by other artists sympathetic to her political agenda not for their inherent artistic quality, but for the ‘honesty and vibrant emotions’ or for the ‘passion, zeal and grit’66 that shine through her canvases. In much the same way, she seems to attract the voters’ attention not because of the quality of her ideology and political eloquence, but for her simplicity, passion and emotional content,” he added.
Political scientist Proma Raychaudhury argues in her 2022 article in the Politics & Gender journal that the role of Banerjee’s “upper-caste social positionality” is crucial to how her Didi persona is cultivated, one that is seen as representing the marginalised even while laying claim to the “cultural inheritance of the elite bhadralok establishment she is considered an opponent of”.
Prolific songwriter
Banerjee is not just a prolific poet but also a songwriter. During last year’s Durga Puja, the CM released a song on X on each day of the festival. She also composed the theme song, which was sung by minister Indranil Sen, for a famous Durga Puja in north Kolkata. Famous community pujas are known to request the CM to compose songs for them and one of her most popular songs is Maa Go Tumi Sarbojanin, which was sung by singer Shreya Ghoshal.
Before that, the CM in September 2025 penned a song on the theme of “Bengali Asmita (pride)”, one of her key strategies to counter the BJP’s Hindutva politics, to protest against the alleged mistreatment of Bengali migrant workers in other states.
On June 21, 2025, she published a song, “Ami sangeet piyasi (translated as “I am a music enthusiast)”, on the occasion of World Music Day. Earlier that year, on January 12, at a special concert in Kolkata, Sen and other singers took to the stage to sing the CM’s compositions.
In 2019, a collection of seven songs written and composed by Banerjee, titled “Mati (soil)”, was released before the Durga Puja. Some of the songs were: Pahar kande, sabuj kande (the mountains weep, the greenery weeps), Mati aamar moner foshol (Soil is the harvest of my heart), Akash tumi brishti dile (Sky, you poured down rain). Ma go tomar bhalobasha e (Mother, in your love), Iki uki buki hamba hamba hoo, De dol dol (Rock it, back and forth) and Chhilo ekta chhotto meye (There was a young girl).
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