A new public Durga Puja is planned at Allen Park in Kolkata’s Park Street, with the organising Kolkata Sanatani Sangh announcing a 10-day programme of religious rituals, cultural performances and evening events at the historic city-centre location. The organisers describe it as the first such public Durga Puja at the site in about 370 years of Park Street’s history.
The announcement was made by Navin Mishra, the organisation’s secretary and co-convenor of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Swachh Bharat campaign, according to Sanmarg. The event is being presented as a large-scale cultural gathering rather than only a religious observance, with the programme expected to combine traditional Bengali performance forms, Vedic rituals and national-level music acts.
The organisers said a group of around 100 priests from Varanasi would conduct the rituals. A daily maha-aarti is planned at Allen Park from Chaturthi to Dashami, modelled on the evening Ganga aarti at Dashashwamedh Ghat in Varanasi. The puja will include idols of Durga, Shiva, Ganesha, Kartikeya, Saraswati and Lakshmi, with the rituals to use Bengali pronunciation and Vedic chants, the organisers said.
The cultural programme is expected to include Chhau performances from Purulia and Bankura, Baul music and dhak playing. The organisers also said that singers and musicians including Shankar Mahadevan, Kailash Kher, Maithili Thakur and Hansraj Raghuwanshi were likely to perform. The report does not establish final performance schedules or confirmed contracts for these artists.
A large women’s devotional gathering is planned for Mahashtami night. The organisers said more than 5,000 women would participate in a jagrata while wearing similar traditional attire. They also said that the Prime Minister, the Union Home Minister and diplomats from 15 to 16 countries had been invited or were expected to attend. The Union Home Minister could inaugurate the event, but the report does not provide confirmation of attendance from the minister’s office or the diplomatic missions concerned.
The proposed festival places a large public religious and cultural programme inside one of Kolkata’s best-known commercial and hospitality districts. Park Street is a high-footfall area with restaurants, offices, hotels and established public spaces, making the use of Allen Park relevant not only to worshippers but also to the city’s event-management and public-space systems. The available announcement does not specify crowd-control arrangements, traffic diversions, security plans, sanitation facilities, permissions or the financial arrangements for the event.
The organisers have described the puja as a cultural initiative intended to restore public visibility for Hindu traditions in the area. Those claims are part of the organisers’ stated rationale and are not independently established in the supplied report. The next formal milestones are expected to be the announcement of the confirmed programme, participating artists, inauguration arrangements and operational plans for the festival.
