শারদীয়া সংখ্যা ও পুজো পরিক্রমা

Bengal answers a festival with a book. The habit begins in the nineteenth century: the first Bengali festive collection, Chhutir Samachar, was conceived and edited by the Brahmo reformer Keshab Chandra Sen. It became an institution in the twentieth. Anandabazar Patrika, founded in 1922, brought out its first Sharadiya number in 1926. Desh was launched on 24 November 1933 and published its first autumn issue in 1341 of the Bengali era, 1934. The children's magazine Anandamela first appeared in March 1975 and its October issue grew to nearly four hundred pages.

The form settled quickly and has not changed much: three to four hundred pages, five or six complete new novels, plus novellas, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel writing and, in the women's and lifestyle titles, recipes and fashion. Everything is commissioned for the issue. This is why so much canonical Bengali fiction has an autumn date attached to it. Satyajit Ray published Feluda in Sharadiya Desh — Gangtokey Gondogol in 1970, Sonar Kella in 1971, Baksho Rahashya in 1972, Kailashey Kelenkari in 1974 — and Sunil Gangopadhyay's Kakababu novels appeared the same way in Anandamela. Saradindu Bandyopadhyay's Byomkesh stories likewise ran largely in periodicals and Puja numbers rather than as books first.

The second half of the phenomenon is the guide to the pandals. Once there were awards worth winning — Asian Paints began the Sharad Shamman in October 1985 — there were rankings, maps, lists and routes, and the press built an industry on them. Pujo parikrama, literally the circumambulation of the pujas, moved from a printed route in a newspaper to a live broadcast: Kolkata's FM stations run continuous Puja programming, television channels tour the best-known pandals on air, and since the 2020s ZEE5 has streamed a five-day live Pujo Parikrama. A festival that had always been walked became a festival that could be watched.

The Sharadiya Sankhya is, by volume, probably the largest simultaneous release of new fiction in any language anywhere. Several dozen titles, each carrying multiple complete novels, all commissioned for one date, all bought in one fortnight, every year for a century. Bengali literature has an annual harvest, and it is timed to a religious festival.

It has also kept an illustration tradition continuously employed. Puja number covers and interiors are commissioned work with a recognisable line running from Satyajit Ray, who designed and illustrated his own, through generations of magazine artists, in a country where almost no other market for commercial illustration survived the end of the printed weekly.

The parikrama does the reverse thing. It takes an event that only exists in the street and turns it into a broadcast, a ranking and a map — which flattens it, and also means that a Bengali in Bengaluru who has not been home in five years knows which pandal won this year. Between the book and the broadcast, Durga Puja is one of the very few festivals anywhere that generates a substantial new literature and a substantial new body of criticism about itself, annually, and then does it again.