Forging new bonds, rebuilding their lives: The history of Durga Puja in Delhi’s CR Park

Sreemati Chakrabarty, now 72, moved into the neighbourhood the following year. She recalls the red-and-orange pandal where she witnessed her first CR Park Durga Puja. It was there that she forged some of her earliest friendships and discovered her Bengali identity, even as she adjusted to a new life in a place where her father had been allotted a plot after losing his home and belongings in East Bengal during Partition.

“Basically, this was a community of settlers trying to understand their new physical landscape, making sense of their lives and rebuilding their lives,” explains Shahana Chakraborty, who has been documenting the history of CR Park through her co- founded initiative ‘Neighborhood Diaries’, being run by Delhi based socio- cultural organization Shapno Ekhon. The festival of Durga Puja, she says, was central to that rebuilding.

This year, C R Park’s oldest and largest pandals carry special excitement as they mark their 50th anniversary. (Express photo by Adrija Roychowdhury)

Over the years, the CR Park puja has made a special place in the lives of people. A neighbourhood known year-round for its fish markets, sweet shops, and every other element crucial to ‘Bengaliness’, becomes a magnet at this time of the year for anyone eager for a flavour of the Kolkata Pujo spirit.

A neighbourhood for the displaced

The history of Bengalis in Delhi stretches back several decades before the Partition. Records suggest that the first known Bengali resident in the city was Umacharan Basu, who arrived from Chandannagore in 1837. In the decades that followed, Delhi began to attract several Bengali businessmen, professionals, and government employees. By the 1920s and 1930s, a thriving community came to exist in the city, primarily concentrated in neighbourhoods such as Kashmere Gate, Daryaganj, Timarpur, Karol Bagh, Chandni Chowk, and Nai Sadak.

CR Park was established much later, as part of the government’s rehabilitation efforts for those uprooted by the Partition. Most of these efforts, however, were directed toward refugees from West Punjab. CR Park, by contrast, became the space where the story of the Partition of Bengal, in the creation of East Pakistan, played out.

The establishment of the colony was not without negotiation. A stark disparity marked the treatment of those displaced from the west versus the east. Refugees from West Pakistan were the biggest beneficiaries of government aid and attention, as noted by migration scholar Pablo Bose in his article, ‘Dilemmas of Diaspora: Partition, Refugees and the Politics of Home’ (2006). In Delhi, entire settlements such as Lajpat Nagar, Rajinder Nagar, and Kalkaji were designed to house refugees from West Pakistan.

In the east, that was not the case. The lack of rehabilitation aid for refugees in Bengal was attributed to the north-centric political power in newly created India. The West Bengal government was dependent on the Centre for directing resources for rehabilitating its refugees. “The Centre provided these resources grudgingly and too late, since it was preoccupied with the problem of resettling seven million refugees fleeing the massacres in the Punjab,” writes historian Joya Chatterjee in her book, ‘Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition’ (1994). She notes that even prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru was convinced that the situation in Bengal was not as grave.

In the 1950s, a small group of Bengali government employees began pressing for compensation for those who had lost their property in East Pakistan. In 1954, they formed the Association for Central Government Employees Dislodged from East Pakistan. Their initial request was rejected on the grounds that too few qualified for this compensation and that they did not have refugee certificates.

C R Park was originally named as the ‘East Pakistan Displaced Persons’ Colony or EPDP colony (Express photo by Adrija Roychowdhury)

Recognising the need for broader support, the association expanded to include entrepreneurs and professionals who had been affected by the Partition of Bengal. They also decided to use the term ‘displaced’ instead of ‘dislodged’ or ‘refugee’ for their purpose, and demanded allotment in place of lost property, rather than resettlement.

Consequently, the name of the association was changed to ‘East Pakistan Displaced Persons’ (EPDP), which in turn would become the very first name enshrined upon the colony. Their request was approved in the late 1960s, with the Minister of Rehabilitation, Mehr Chand Khanna, announcing the allocation of 218 acres of land adjoining Kalkaji for displaced persons from East Pakistan. A few years later, EPDP Colony was reborn as CR Park, taking its name from the Bengali lawyer and freedom fighter Chittaranjan Das.

Durga Puja in the new Bengali neighbourhood

For Shahana Chakravarty, CR Park has always been her only home, the place where her father pieced together a new life after being uprooted from his ancestral roots in Dhaka. She remembers her father being deeply affected by the upheaval caused during Partition. He latched onto the memories of his life in Dhaka, cherishing most dearly the grand celebrations of Durga Puja in his house. “I grew up listening to stories about baba being an integral part of the Puja at his home,” says Shahana, adding, “My father would sing songs and my uncle would play the khol (a double headed drum used in Bengali devotional music).”

But the Partition had left him terribly hurt, and he turned into an atheist after coming to Delhi. As a result, Shahana recalls, he never actively participated in the Durga Puja celebrations. Consequently, Shahana and her sister too had limited involvement in the neighbourhood puja, except for leisurely wandering through the pandals.

For most other early residents of CR Park, though, the puja turned into a fulcrum around which they were rebuilding their lives. They formed committees for planning the puja, discussing and debating its finer details, spending months rehearsing plays, dance and music performances for the evenings, and in the process forged fresh bonds and a community of their own.

Anandamela at C R Park (Photo archives of Sharon Ekhon’s Neighbourhood Diaries)

Riva Ganguly was about 10 years old during the first puja of CR Park, which she recalls being “absolutely delightful”. “I think anyone who grew up in CR Park in the 1970s would have performed something during puja evenings, be it dance, drama or music,” she says, suggesting that the trend of bringing artists from Kolkata or Mumbai to perform in the pandals was a much later affair. In that first puja celebration, she remembers being part of a musical production of Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Shonar Tori’.

Sreemati Chakrabarty, who was in her late teens when she moved to CR Park, was an active participant in the theatre productions staged during the festival. Her first such performance was in a play titled ‘Char dewal er golpo’ (The story of four walls).

Another vivid memory she has is of her mother preparing the bhog, or the sacred feast offered in honour of the Goddess, every morning. “There would be days when Ma would not sleep at all,” she recalls with a laugh. With the festive excitement stretching on till dawn, she would take little time to rest before dashing out for the following day’s preparation.

Before moving to CR Park, Riva Ganguly had lived in the government quarters of central Delhi’s Gole Market. The nearest puja for her at that time was in the iconic Kali Temple located in the same area. But the flavour of Durga Puja in CR Park was markedly different from that in the Kali Bari, she says. “Suddenly, we found ourselves in a completely Bengali atmosphere. We had never heard Bengali songs in public address systems before. But here we would wake up to the Mahalaya being played on loudspeakers,” says Ganguly.

The experience was not the same for all. Ruma Ghosh, who moved to CR Park from Kashmere Gate in the 1970s, says that she took a long time to understand and warm up to this new Bengali neighbourhood. She belonged to the coterie of Bengalis whose families had moved to Delhi several decades before Independence. In the area around Kashmere Gate, they had, over the years, built their own centres of culture and education. “The oldest Bengali club and Bengali school were in Kashmere Gate and the Old Delhi Kali Bari was close by in Tees Hazari ,” says Ghosh. The Bengali club, she explains, was the cultural fountainhead for almost every Bengali who lived in and around Old Delhi. It also gave birth to the oldest Durga Puja of the capital.

Ghosh explains that during her initial years in CR Park, she rarely got involved in the neighbourhood’s puja, preferring instead to take part in the festivities at Kashmere Gate. She recalls overhearing a group of youngsters in CR Park in the late 1970s discussing the possibility of including a game of antakshari in the puja celebration. “I was completely shattered,” she remarks. She and her husband, Ashish Ghosh, acknowledge that there existed a subtle rivalry with the Bengalis of CR Park, who they thought were less culturally aligned.

Durga Puja in C R Park’s Kali Mandir (Photo from the book ‘And They Lived: Early Years of CR park’ published by Shapno Ekhon in 2022)

With time, asserts Ashish, as they saw theatre and other cultural activities taking off with full swing in CR Park, they too started a theatre group of their own, which would perform in every Durga Puja inside the neighbourhood and elsewhere in Delhi.

The year 1975 brought a major change, as CR Park’s first modest Puja split up into three grand pandals — at Mela Ground, K-Block, and B-Block — each now marking its 50th anniversary. Ganguly remembers being absolutely heartbroken by this shift. The friendships born out of the first few pujas splintered away, while new faces became more and more visible in the pandals. “CR Park had also become a lot bigger by then, and there were many newcomers in the colony,” she says.

In the ensuing years, the number of pandals grew further to around 10 or 12 now. “Today the CR (Park) pujas are completely corporatised,” believes Ashish. The large sponsorships, food and beverage stalls, themed pandals and performances by artists from Kolkata and Mumbai have left several residents pining for the intimate community affair that the festival was five decades ago. “The only good thing to come out of it, though, is that people from diverse communities and backgrounds now join in large numbers during the Durga Puja days,” Ashish says, adding, “It is now a celebration for all.”

There are a couple of pandals where the original character of the CR Park puja is still kept alive. There is the puja at the Kali Temple in the neighbourhood, and the E-block pandal, which residents say started in 2000 in response to most pandals growing larger and more crowded. At the E-block puja pandal, say residents, people from the neighbourhood perform at the evening functions. Devoid of sponsors, the festival is organised through residents’ donations. The stalls are missing, and the bhog is personal. As Shahana explains, “it is like a window into the past, or what the puja would have been when it started in CR Park.”