A Chariot Rolls, a Bamboo Goes Up: How Baranagar's Bandhudal Sporting Club Chose Rath Yatra to Launch Its 65th Year

Most khuti pujas in Kolkata wait for an astrologically convenient date somewhere in the monsoon calendar, a Tuesday or a Thursday that a family priest has quietly circled weeks in advance. Sithi's Bandhudal Sporting Club did something a little bolder this year — it tied its opening ceremony to a date the whole city already had marked on the calendar for a different god entirely. On the 16th of July, at five in the evening, while Jagannath's chariots were still being pulled through pockets of Bengal, the ground at Sithi Mor in Baranagar filled up for its own smaller, quieter procession of ritual: a bamboo khuti, a spread of fruit and flowers, and the first official word that this club's 65th Durga Puja was underway.

It's a small scheduling choice, but it says something about a club that's been doing this for six and a half decades. When you've run a puja long enough, you stop needing a special occasion to make an occasion — you just pick a good day already on the calendar and make it yours too.

Why Rath Yatra, of All Days?

There's a practical logic to it as much as a symbolic one. Rath Yatra falls early in the puja preparation window, well before the August rush when priests are booked solid across the city and every club wants the same lucky Thursday. Launching a "শুভারম্ভ রথযাত্রায়" — an auspicious beginning on Rath Yatra — lets Bandhudal Sporting Club get a full three-and-a-half-month head start on a project that, this year, is more ambitious than usual. And there's a poetic layer too: Rath Yatra is a festival about a deity leaving the sanctum and coming out to meet the public. This year, Bandhudal Sporting Club is bringing something to Baranagar that has never left its sanctum either — not a deity this time, but a building.

The Ground Report: Marigolds, a Waiting Priest, and a Neighbourhood That Showed Up

Around them, the club's committee members had gathered in matching yellow-and-red sarees, several standing close together the way women at these ceremonies almost always do — half spectators, half participants, ready to step forward the moment the priest calls for hands on the khuti. A dhaak stood waiting off to one side, not yet in play but present, the way it always is at these ceremonies, a reminder that the drum's real work starts later in the year. A banner reading "Admission Going On" propped against a bench in the foreground was a nice, unintentional bit of honesty about what these grounds do for the other eleven months of the year — before October arrives and turns a football field back into a Durga Puja address.

One Flower, One Temple, One Faith

The theme this year is 'Lotus Temple' — and if that name means anything to you already, you're picturing the same building Bandhudal Sporting Club's artists are: the Bahá'í House of Worship in Delhi, twenty-seven marble petals folded around a central hall, one of the most photographed pieces of modern architecture in the country. It's an unusual choice for a Durga Puja pandal, and a pointed one. The Lotus Temple was built to welcome worshippers of every faith under one roof, no single religion claiming it as its own. Recreating that shape around a Durga idol — inside a Hindu festival, in a Bengali neighbourhood — is its own quiet statement about what a community puja can hold: reverence for one goddess, housed inside the architecture of universal welcome.

The idol itself will pull in the opposite direction, deliberately. While the pandal borrows a modern, secular landmark, the Durga inside it will be sabeki — traditional in form, the kind of idol built the old way, without the reinterpretation that theme pujas often extend even to the goddess's face and posture. It's a combination the club seems to have chosen on purpose: a boundary-pushing structure wrapped around an unapologetically classical Maa Durga. Expect the contrast to be the thing people talk about when they finally walk through in October — modern shell, timeless heart.

The Team Behind the 65th Year

Three names are doing the heavy lifting behind this year's Lotus Temple. The concept — what Bengalis call the bhabna — belongs to artist Shibshankar Das, the person who first looked at a Bahá'í temple in Delhi and saw a Durga Puja pandal in Baranagar instead. Turning that idea into steel, bamboo, and fabric falls to Bidyut Pal, credited with the rupayan, the execution that will decide whether twenty-seven petals actually hold their shape under Kolkata's July humidity and October crowds. Club sources say the lighting design is being built to match the ambition of the structure — the kind of illumination meant to make the petals glow rather than simply be lit.

The idol is in the hands of artist Mintu Pal, whose sabeki Durga will anchor the finished structure once the petals close around her. Overseeing the season as chief patron is Sajal Ghosh, the local MLA, whose name sits at the top of the club's official banner — a reminder that in neighbourhoods like Baranagar, community puja and local public life have always shared the same stage.

Baranagar's Corner of a Busy Season

Sithi doesn't always get the same attention as the marquee addresses further south when khuti puja season is in full swing, but Baranagar has quietly built its own reputation over the years for pujas that punch above their neighbourhood's profile. Bandhudal Sporting Club's Rath Yatra launch adds another entry to what's shaping up to be a packed 65th-anniversary season across North Kolkata's older clubs. If you're tracking every bamboo pole going up across the city this year, our running Khuti Puja coverage is updated continuously as new ceremonies come in — Baranagar included.

What Happens Between Now and October

A khuti puja on Rath Yatra day buys Bandhudal Sporting Club something most clubs don't get: time. Between mid-July and the final week before Mahalaya, twenty-seven marble-white petals have to go from sketch to structure, the lighting rig has to be tested panel by panel, and Mintu Pal's workshop has to finish a sabeki idol steady enough to sit at the centre of all that ambition. Readers who want to follow that last part of the story — the slow, hands-on work of turning clay into a goddess — can track it through our ongoing Kumartuli coverage, which follows artisans across the city's workshops right up to the final coat of paint.

For real-time updates as the pandal takes shape, Bandhudal Sporting Club's official Facebook page is the most direct source — construction photos, lighting tests, and the steady countdown that every club's page fills up with as Puja gets closer.

Why This One Deserves a Spot on Your Pandal-Hopping List

Sixty-five years is long enough that a club could coast on nostalgia alone, repeating a familiar formula every October and letting the anniversary number do the marketing. Bandhudal Sporting Club has chosen the harder route instead — borrowing one of India's most recognisable pieces of modern architecture, handing it to an artist who clearly wasn't afraid of the engineering headache it would create, and then anchoring the whole thing with an idol that refuses to modernise along with it. The khuti is in the ground, the chariots of Rath Yatra have long since rolled on, and Sithi Mor now has a little over three months to watch twenty-seven petals slowly bloom in bamboo and marble-white fabric.

Have photographs or updates from Bandhudal Sporting Club's pandal ground? Get in touch through our Contact page — community-submitted coverage is always welcome.

Image Credit: Bandhudal Sporting Club.