A Durga idol made from around 13,000 pens and an equal number of recycled-plastic refills has been created for this year’s Durga Puja by Tridhara Sammilani, a community club near Rashbehari Avenue in south Kolkata.
The 5.5-foot-tall installation measures 4.5 feet in width and extends 3 feet in depth. It will be displayed alongside the pandal’s main Durga idol, giving the recycled-material sculpture a separate place within the festival setting.
The installation was conceived and created by artist Chandra Nath Saha, popularly known as Tilak. He said the idea came from transforming a familiar, functional object into an artistic representation of Maa Durga.
“The idea of transforming something as familiar and functional as a pen into an artistic expression of Maa Durga was what drew me to the project,” Saha told The Statesman. “I found it fascinating to see how thousands of individual objects could come together to create a form that carries such cultural and emotional significance.”
The project took more than 20 days to complete and involved planning, preparation and execution. The team had to work out how the pens could be assembled while preserving the proportions, structure and visual character of the idol.
Saha said the face presented the most demanding part of the process because the finer details had to retain Maa Durga’s expression and presence despite the limitations of the unconventional material. He also described the early stages as uncertain, as the team worked to understand how thousands of separate objects could form one cohesive structure.
The artist credited the Tridhara Sammilani team with supporting the unconventional concept and allowing him and his team to experiment at the scale they had envisioned. The installation will remain separate from the main Durga idol, which will be immersed after the Puja.
Unlike the principal idol, the pen installation is intended to be dismantled after the festival. According to the report, the materials will then be recycled and used in the manufacture of new pens. The planned dismantling gives the installation a different material cycle from the traditional idol and connects the festival display to the reuse of manufactured plastic products.
The project also reflects how Kolkata’s community clubs are using festival spaces for material experiments alongside conventional cultural displays. In this case, the installation’s sustainability claim rests not only on the use of recycled plastic but also on the stated plan to recover the pens and refills after the exhibition. The materials’ subsequent reuse will follow the dismantling process described by the organisers and artist.
