The Paroma sculpture, a 40-foot public artwork that disappeared from Kolkata’s EM Bypass in 2014, is set to return to public view through a Durga Puja theme in Bhowanipore dedicated to artist Shanu Lahiri on her 98th birth anniversary.
The recreation will be an 18-foot version of Paroma, originally created in 1987 by Lahiri, artist Manik Talukdar and students of the Government College of Art & Craft, Kolkata. It will be installed at the entrance of Abasar Sarbojanin Durgotsav Samiti, near Lahiri’s maternal home.
The puja’s artists said the theme was developed after they decided to focus on a prominent personality associated with the area. Archival photographs and material provided by Lahiri’s nephew Anshuman Mitra and daughter Damayanti will be displayed inside a reconstructed thakur ghar, which will serve as an exhibition hall.
The installation will also include photographs of Lahiri’s work, recreations of her south Kolkata wall murals and a small statue of the artist. The idols of Lakshmi, Saraswati, Ganesh and Kartik will draw on work Lahiri created for Bakul Bagan’s Durga Puja in 1982. The Durga idol will be different, artist Subhradip Pal said.
Lahiri had designed the Bakul Bagan idol in 1982 and 1996, bringing public art into Durga Puja at a time when the now-common theme-puja format had not yet become prominent. Artist Somnath Sil said Lahiri had involved art college students in Durga Puja work long before artists began taking greater pride in designing pandals.
Paroma’s original fragments were traced to the Tangra residence of Hui Hao Howard Lee, a third-generation Chinese businessman. Lee said his mother-in-law first noticed the pieces near a Chinese temple in Chowbaga in late December 2014. He found fragments of the sculpture at the site, where local people were playing football, and arranged for them to be loaded onto a truck and taken home.
Lee said he considered the sculpture priceless. The fragments had remained with him since then, while members of Kolkata’s art community had continued to remember the disappearance of the work.
Designed with students of the Government College of Art & Craft, Paroma was not based on a political figure or religious subject. Artist Aritra Mukhopadhyay said its form drew on the Bengali clay-art tradition of the pradip putul. The artists involved in the puja believe the sculpture could have become a symbol of Kolkata alongside better-known landmarks such as Howrah Bridge and Victoria Memorial.
The Bhowanipore tribute will therefore combine a Durga Puja installation with an exhibition on Lahiri’s artistic contribution and the recovery of a public artwork that had been absent from Kolkata’s streets for more than a decade. The recreated Paroma will be the main attraction at the entrance to the puja venue.
