Architecture

প্যান্ডেল শিল্প / বাঁশের কাঠামো

Pandal Shilpa (Bamboo Architecture)

Bengal; decorator teams drawn chiefly from Purba and Paschim Medinipur, Nadia and the 24 Parganas

Where it stands

Thriving

The decorator firms of Medinipur and Nadia, family businesses, often four generations deep, that supply Kolkata's 3,000-plus community pujas

A pandal facade built entirely from bound bamboo canes, laid in geometric courses with round openings and small painted faces.Rakeshmallick27, via Wikimedia Commons

A pandal is a temple a hundred feet tall, built in a street in six weeks, occupied for five days, and then taken apart. Its primary structure contains no nails and no welds, it is bamboo lashed with coir rope at every joint. That is not primitive, it is clever, a lashed joint is semi-rigid, so the whole frame flexes under monsoon wind and crowd load instead of shearing. Construction opens with khuti puja, in which a ceremonial post is consecrated to Vishwakarma and planted where the pandal will stand. The men who build them are farmers for the other eleven months, and the knots are taught the way folk songs are, by watching a father's hands.

ইতিহাস History

Where it came from

A pandal is a temporary temple. It is a full-scale building, commonly sixty to a hundred feet tall, put up in a street or a park in three to eight weeks, used for five days, and taken down. Its primary frame contains no nails, no welds and no bolts: it is bansh (বাঁশ, bamboo) lashed with coir rope at every joint.

The form follows the festival's social history. Household pujas needed no pandal because they had a thakurdalan, the permanent pillared hall of the family house. The pandal arrives with the baroyari puja — the subscription puja, conventionally traced to Guptipara around 1790, where twelve friends excluded from a household rite pooled money and held their own — and becomes essential with the sarbojanin puja of the twentieth century, when worship moved permanently into public streets and parks. Everything that had been permanent architecture in a mansion now had to be built each year and then taken away again.

Until the 1990s a pandal was a decorated enclosure and the art was the idol. From the late 1990s, competitive Kolkata pujas began commissioning fine artists to design pandal, image, lighting and sound as one installation with a title and a concept. Bhabatosh Sutar, Sanatan Dinda, Partha Dasgupta, Susanta Pal and Pradip Das are the names usually cited; Bosepukur Sitala Mandir is most often credited with launching the wave around the turn of the millennium. A decade earlier, the sculptor Meera Mukherjee had made an Adivasi-idiom Durga in a Santhal sari for Bakul Bagan Sarbojanin in 1990, before "theme puja" had a name.

The bamboo frame underneath has not changed at all.

A pandal wall of split bamboo and reed matting carrying a painted Kalighat-style roundel, tied on with red cord.Goutam1962, via Wikimedia Commons

সংস্কৃতি Culture

Who does it, and who used to

The people who build pandals are called decorators, and they are not from Kolkata. They come above all from Purba and Paschim Medinipur, and from Nadia and North and South 24 Parganas. Medinipur alone has an estimated hundred decorator teams, each with its own bamboo specialists, carpenters, cloth workers and artists. Most are farmers the rest of the year, and the firms are family businesses often four generations deep.

The bamboo craft is transmitted as folk knowledge and not as training. Nobody is certified. Boys learn to tie coir on bamboo watching their fathers on site, and a senior bandhai — the man who ties the joints — reads wind load and crowd load by experience alone. There is no drawing office; for a themed pandal the artist supplies a maquette or a sketch and the decorator's team works out how to stand it up.

The hierarchy on a large theme pandal is worth stating plainly, because it is where the money and the credit diverge. The theme artist is named in the press, judged for awards and increasingly treated as an author. The decorator firm is a contractor. The men who spend six weeks on bamboo forty feet up without harnesses are daily wage labour, unnamed and largely uninsured. The pandal-making sector is the single largest employer in the Puja creative economy and the least visible part of it.

Construction begins with Khuti Puja, which is now a media event with celebrity guests.

Inside a Kolkata pandal in 2005: a tapering bamboo-framed column hung with lamps and painted with folk motifs around its base.aster28, via Wikimedia Commons

তাৎপর্য Significance

Why this, and not something else

The pandal is the reason Durga Puja is an open-access exhibition rather than a temple festival. A temple has a threshold, a custodian and, historically, caste rules about who may cross it. A pandal built in the middle of a street has none of these. It is free, it is open all night, nobody checks who you are, and the queue is the same queue for everybody. UNESCO's 2021 inscription of Durga Puja in Kolkata cited exactly this — public performance of religion and art, and inclusion — and it is a property of the building type.

Its second property is that it is designed to disappear. Lashed bamboo joints are semi-rigid: they flex under wind and crowd load instead of shearing, which is why these structures survive monsoon storms that would snap a rigid frame, and also why they can be untied rather than demolished. The bamboo goes back to the supplier or to scaffolding work; the cloth is reused. The building is a loan.

Khuti Puja makes the theology explicit. Before anything is built, a ceremonial post is consecrated to Vishwakarma, the artisans' god, garlanded and planted at the centre of the future pandal. The foundation rite of a Durga Puja honours not the goddess but the people who are about to build her house.

Two workers barefoot on a lashed bamboo scaffold in Kolkata, the same rope-tied joint used to build Durga Puja pandals.Jorge Royan, via Wikimedia Commons

কীভাবে How it is made

The work itself

The primary structure is bansh — usually the thick-walled species locally called borak or bhima — cut to length and lashed at every intersection with coir or jute rope. There are no fixings. The joint is made by wrapping the rope repeatedly around both members and then frapping it, turns pulled across the wrapping to tighten it, exactly as in a scaffold lashing. A lashed joint is semi-rigid: it takes bending by deforming slightly and returning, which is why a hundred-foot bamboo tower rides out a storm. Work on the primary kathamo (কাঠামো) typically begins in August, six to eight weeks out. Verticals go up first and are cross-braced with diagonals; a working platform is tied at each level as the frame rises, and the men climb the structure they are building. Cladding is then hung on the frame: cloth, plywood, tin, thermocol, jute, cane matting, terracotta panels, split bamboo screen, palm leaf, sholapith, or whatever the theme requires. The decorative surface carries no load. Lighting rigs, sound and the idol platform are tied into the same frame. Dismantling takes days, not weeks, and the bamboo is recovered.

প্যান্ডেলpandal: The temporary pavilion housing the goddess; a full building erected and dismantled within weeks.
বাঁশbansh: Bamboo — the sole structural material of the primary frame.
কাঠামোkathamo: Frame or skeleton — used both for the idol's armature and for the pandal's bamboo structure.
খুঁটি পুজোkhuti puja: The consecration of the first post to Vishwakarma, which begins construction months before the festival.
বাঁধাইbandhai: The tying of the lashed joints, and the man who does it — the load-bearing skill of the whole trade.
মণ্ডপmandap: The ritual pavilion proper, the older word for the space where the deity is installed.
সর্বজনীনsarbojanin: "For all" — the open community puja, the social form that made the pandal necessary.
থিমের পুজোthemer pujo: The theme puja, in which pandal, idol, light and sound are designed by one artist as a single installation.

কাহিনি The stories

What people tell each other about it

A post before a goddess

No pandal begins with the goddess. It begins with Khuti Puja: a ceremonial bamboo or wooden post is consecrated to Vishwakarma, the god of artisans, garlanded and planted at the centre of the ground where the pandal will stand, usually on Rath Yatra or in the weeks after. It is the foundation-stone ceremony of a building that will exist for five days. Big committees now hold it as a media event with film stars and politicians present. The rite itself is unchanged and its content is precise: before anything is made, you honour the people who are going to make it.

Not one nail

A Kolkata theme pandal can stand a hundred feet high, carry lighting rigs and several tonnes of cladding, and hold crowds for five days without a single nail, bolt or weld in its primary frame. Every joint is bamboo lashed to bamboo with coir rope, wrapped and then frapped tight. The reason is structural rather than traditional: a lashed joint is semi-rigid and deforms slightly under wind and crowd surge instead of shearing, so the whole frame sways and recovers. Monsoon storms that would snap a welded steel frame leave these standing. The men who tie them have no training and no certification.

The 88-foot Durga that had to be closed

In 2015 the Deshpriya Park puja in south Kolkata installed an 88-foot Durga and advertised it as the tallest in the world. About 5.5 lakh people converged on the site. Eleven were injured in a near-stampede, and Kolkata Police shut the ground and turned crowds away before the puja had properly begun. The bamboo held; the crowd management did not. Every season since has come with stricter conditions on exit widths, capacity and fire safety, and the episode is still cited in Kolkata whenever a committee announces a record-breaking height.

Farmers who build a hundred-foot tower

The decorator teams that build Kolkata's pandals come mostly from Purba and Paschim Medinipur, with more from Nadia and the 24 Parganas; Medinipur alone has an estimated hundred teams. For most of the year these are farming households. From August they move to Kolkata, live on site, and put up structures ten storeys tall using bamboo, coir and inherited judgement, with no engineering drawings and usually no safety harnesses. The theme artist's name goes in the newspaper and on the award. The bandhai who tied the joints goes back to his field in November.

দেখুন Watch

Kolkata’s Glorious Durga Puja! | India’s Mega Festivals | Full Episode | National GeographicNational Geographic IndiaNational Geographic's full episode on Kolkata's Durga Puja, which follows pandal construction as engineering rather than as decoration.

Making of a Durga Puja pandal in BiharWildFilmsIndiaWildFilmsIndia's documentary record of a pandal going up in bamboo, filmed on site with the decorator team.

Indian workers make Durga Puja Pandal in Darbhanga, BiharWildFilmsIndiaCloser footage of the lashing itself — workers tying coir joints on a rising bamboo frame.

এখন Now

What state it is in

Thriving, and the largest single component of the Puja economy. Kolkata alone hosts well over three thousand community pujas; the British Council and Queen Mary University of London study, with fieldwork in 2019–20, valued the creative economy around Durga Puja at ₹32,377 crore — about 2.58 per cent of West Bengal's GDP — of which the art and decoration segment alone was ₹860 crore. Kolkata accounts for roughly 15 per cent of the state's pandal-making industry by value. The pressure points are crowd safety and material cost. In 2015 Deshpriya Park installed an 88-foot Durga billed as the world's tallest; about 5.5 lakh people converged, eleven were injured in a near-stampede, and Kolkata Police closed the ground and turned the crowds back. Every subsequent season has brought tighter fire-safety, exit-width and capacity conditions, which the bamboo trade absorbs without difficulty because bamboo is easy to modify on site. Bamboo prices and labour costs have both risen faster than committee budgets, and thermocol cladding — cheap, light and non-biodegradable — has spread despite periodic bans. The craft itself is not endangered. It has no formal training pathway, no award and almost no documentation, which is a different problem.

Sources for this page

Beforeচণ্ডীপাঠ ও মহিষাসুরমর্দিনীChandipath and Mahishasuramardini After থিম পুজোTheme Pujo and the Eco-Puja Movement