The Poush Mela in Santiniketan showcases our deep cultural traditions passed on to us over generations. We must preserve them
It was a night of sparks, spreading out in the sky in many-coloured formations, as lines of fire rose like the screaming exhausts of a miniature rockets and exploded with loud reports. Below, the ground was alive with circles of fire, rotating vertically like the wheels of an accelerating chariot, or horizontally, like chakras, exploding and throwing up fiery speckles — red, green and silver. All this while, illuminated balloons, each called a Phanush, floated in the darkness above after releasing their strings of light, as we watched, our jaws dropping.
This was on December 24, last year, the second evening of the fabled Poush Mela in Santiniketan when a fireworks display is traditionally held. My wife Malavika, who had seen the Washington DC sky lit up on July 4, 2013, whispered that the spectacle we were witnessing was no less grand. This was high praise. On the one hand were the huge resources of fireworks manufacturers of the United States and, on the other, the meagre funds the local artisans, known as Malakars, of Surul, a village near Bolpur, where Santiniketan and the Visva Bharati University are located, could rustle up. On display was not only the fiery patterns on the sky but the triumph of sheer skill, ingenuity and the determination to maintain the high standards workmanship travelling through generations, over daunting odds.
While all this was happening at what is known as Baji (fireworks) Maidan (grounds), another breath-taking exhibition of the same human attributes waited to happen at the Purbapalli grounds. Called Raybenshe, it was a display of a local brand of gymnastics by members of the Scheduled Castes who acted as lathials, lathi-wielding musclemen of zaminders. This writer did not see the performance which was, by all accounts, enthralling but had otherwise his fill of the mela, which is famed for its sessions of Baul songs, folk music, jatra (play) performances and stalls selling a wide variety of local handicrafts.
Poush Mela commemorates the conversion of Maharshi Debendranath Tagore and 20 of his followers to the Brahmo faith, established by Raja Rammohun Roy. The date happened to be seventh of Poush, 1250 Bangabda, of the Bengali calendar and coincided with December 21, 1843. The Visva Bharati University organises the mela, the provision for holding which was made when the Santiniketan trust deed was drawn up in 1888.
Both Maharshi Debendranath Tagore and his son, Rabindranath, the Universal Man and the creator of Visva Bharati, realised the importance of fairs. Rabindranath wrote in his essay Mela, “Our country primarily lives in villages. The mela is the principal means for the village to experience in its veins the blood circulation of the wider world when it, from time to time, becomes eager for it. It is the mela which invites to our homes what is outside it. The village forgets all its narrowness [of outlook] in this festival — it is the main occasion for it to give and receive with its entire heart open. As the rains are the time for filling the water bodies with water from the skies — the mela is the right occasion for filling the heart of the village with the thoughts of the wider world.”
For some time, there have been complaints that the Poush Mela, which begins on the seventh Poush — which comes on December 21 and thereabout — every year, had become a glittering confusion that betrayed Rabindranath Tagore's visualisation of it by privileging the stalls of known brand manufacturers and marginalising the works of local crafts people. Happily, in a remarkable reversal of the trend, there were relatively few stalls of consumer goods giants this year, while the local artisans were everywhere. Also, it was remarkably well-managed.