Every autumn, Ghoramara Island builds a temporary civic world even as the permanent one is being taken away. The island’s annual Durga Puja continues amid severe riverbank erosion, damaged access infrastructure, out-migration and the loss of entire neighbourhoods. Its four-day festival is therefore more than a religious event: it is one of the few occasions when a fragmented settlement physically gathers and publicly affirms its continued existence.
A report published by Anandabazar – Kolkata describes an island whose map changes each year. River water has claimed settlement land in some places and damaged ghats in others. At one landing point, residents reportedly have to cross mud and use wooden planks after the jetty was broken. The surroundings are defined by salt-laden air and river water, while many men from the island work in other states. Women, children and older residents remain behind for much of the year.
This combination of erosion and mobility creates a form of urban vulnerability that cannot be measured only through the loss of land. When a jetty becomes unusable, the immediate problem is physical access. But the consequences extend to every activity that depends on reliable movement: reaching a market, transporting supplies, accessing services, receiving visitors or organising a public event. The report does not provide a formal assessment of the jetty or identify the agency responsible for its repair. It does, however, show what infrastructure failure looks like at ground level: a muddy crossing, improvised wooden planks and a community adapting around a damaged connection.
Ghoramara’s shrinking geography is also visible in the history of its pujas. The report says that settlement began to develop on the island around 1920, after which Durga Pujas were held in the Khasimara and Hatkhola areas. Khasimara was eventually almost wiped out by river erosion, and its puja stopped around 25 years ago. The Hatkhola puja later became known as the Ghoramara Sarbojanin Durga Utsav.
That history matters because it places the festival inside the island’s physical transformation. A neighbourhood disappearing is not only a housing or land-use event. It also removes the local institutions, gathering places and shared routines that make a settlement socially legible. When the Khasimara puja ended, the loss was not limited to one annual programme. It marked the weakening of a neighbourhood’s collective presence after erosion had already dismantled much of its physical base.
The surviving puja, now entering its 71st year according to the report, has become a form of social infrastructure. The celebration takes place at the field of Bishalakshmitala Nabarun Sangha, where a pandal is being built and a local artist is making the idol in the association’s veranda. Residents prepare the decorations, construct the bamboo framework and cook communal khichuri. Kirtan, theatre and jatra are scheduled during the four days.
The language of social infrastructure is useful here because the festival performs functions that formal civic systems often perform elsewhere. It creates a recurring place and time for residents to meet. It connects people who remain on the island with those whose work takes them outside. It allows women, older residents and children to participate in a shared public life even when household and economic pressures keep the community dispersed for much of the year.
Tapas Kark, vice-president of the puja committee, told Anandabazar that the celebration is a meeting place for the entire island. He said residents have lost many things to erosion but have not allowed the puja to stop, with everyone contributing according to their capacity. His account presents continuity not as a result of physical security, but as a collective effort made despite its absence.
The report also records how residents understand the island’s disappearance. Elderly villager Sheikh Aptaunddin recalled seeing a different Ghoramara in his childhood, with more neighbourhoods and more people. Land where water now stands once contained homes, he said. The annual puja temporarily restores the feeling that everyone remains together, even though the settlement has been altered by the river.
That testimony points to a central feature of climate vulnerability: displacement can begin before residents formally leave. A community may continue to occupy an island while its neighbourhoods, access points and familiar landscapes vanish around it. The result is a settlement that is physically present but increasingly difficult to navigate, service and sustain. The supplied report does not establish whether there is a formal relocation plan, a long-term shoreline management programme or a government-backed adaptation strategy for Ghoramara. Those questions remain outside the available evidence, but they are central to understanding what happens after repeated erosion.
The island’s gendered geography is also significant. The report says that many men work in other states, while women manage households and participate in the organisation of the puja. Jharna Mondal, a woman associated with the celebration, said women handle much of the festival’s work even as they deal with household responsibilities, employment and other concerns throughout the year.
This is not simply a cultural detail. In vulnerable settlements, the people who remain are often responsible for maintaining daily life while working-age residents migrate for employment. The report does not quantify the scale of this migration or describe the island’s wider service economy. It does show, however, that community resilience depends on labour that can be overlooked when attention is focused only on embankments, jetties or the movement of land. Preparing food, coordinating events, building the pandal and sustaining collective participation are all forms of work that help a settlement function.
The festival’s final ritual carries the island’s physical contradiction into the river itself. The idol is immersed in the Muriganga, the same river that has erased many of Ghoramara’s neighbourhoods and memories. In ordinary circumstances, immersion marks closure. Here, it also returns the community’s most visible temporary structure to the water that threatens its permanent settlement.
Yet the report’s most important detail may be what follows immersion: the waiting for the next autumn. The puja committee’s continuity does not resolve erosion, repair the jetty or restore lost neighbourhoods. It provides a dependable civic calendar in a place where the physical geography is unreliable. That distinction is important. Community resilience can preserve belonging, but it cannot substitute for safe access, functioning infrastructure, secure housing or a publicly accountable response to land loss.
For urban policy, Ghoramara raises a difficult question about what counts as a settlement worth protecting. Infrastructure planning often privileges permanent assets and measurable networks. But in an erosion-prone island, permanence is precisely what is under pressure. A jetty may fail, a neighbourhood may disappear and households may split between the island and distant workplaces. Planning must therefore account for changing settlement boundaries, seasonal movement, social institutions and the practical needs of residents who remain.
The evidence supplied in the report confirms the social consequences of erosion: damaged access, lost neighbourhoods, demographic separation and the persistence of a community festival despite those pressures. It does not establish the technical causes of the erosion, the condition of other infrastructure, the number of affected households or the responsibilities of specific public agencies. Those are essential gaps for any fuller assessment of Ghoramara’s future.
What is clear is that the island’s Durga Puja is not a distraction from its vulnerability. It is a way of reading that vulnerability. Each new pandal records that residents are still there; each returning festival marks the effort required to remain connected; and each reference to submerged homes shows the cost of allowing physical change to outpace institutional response. On Ghoramara, the next autumn is both a cultural certainty and a reminder that the island’s urban questions remain unresolved.
