Abhyuday Unveiled: Dhakuria Sarbojanin Durgotsab's 97th Year Begins With a Face Still Emerging From Stone
Half a face looks back at you from the new Dhakuria Sarbojanin Durgotsab banner, and it isn't finished yet — not on purpose. Carved in weathered grey, one eye barely open, a hairline crack running down the cheek like the sculpture hasn't decided whether it's turning into stone or stepping out of it. Behind that face sits a soft yellow circle, glowing like a moon caught at the exact moment before sunrise, and beside it, resting almost carelessly on the ground, a blue diya shaped like a leaf. Nothing about this banner is loud. It doesn't need to be. On 16th August, the pole went into the ground at Tanupukur in Dhakuria, and with it, the 97th year of one of South Kolkata's most quietly consistent Durga Pujas got underway.
The Banner: Reading "Abhyuday – The Emergence" Frame by Frame
Most Durga Puja banners this season are choosing to announce their theme through colour — a burst of red, a wash of gold, something that photographs well on a phone screen from thirty feet away. Dhakuria Sarbojanin has gone the other way. The dominant tones on this year's artwork are stone-grey and a single, restrained yellow, and the effect is closer to a museum still life than a festival poster. The half-carved face is the obvious centrepiece, its texture rough and cracked like old temple sculpture left out in the weather for decades, and it's positioned exactly where a viewer's eye lands first — inside a soft-edged yellow disc that reads, depending on how you look at it, as a rising sun, a full moon, or simply a halo the artist hasn't bothered to explain.
The name printed in bold Bengali script across the right side of the banner is "অভ্যুদয়" — Abhyuday — and beneath it, in smaller English lettering, the committee has spelled out exactly what they mean by it: The Emergence. It's a title that does a lot of work in two words. Abhyuday isn't a common festival theme word; it's a Sanskrit-rooted term that carries meanings of rising, ascent, prosperity and dawning — the kind of word usually reserved for describing the birth of a new era rather than a single evening's spectacle. Paired with a face that is only half-formed out of raw stone, the theme reads less like a slogan and more like a promise: something is in the process of becoming, and the banner is only the first frame of that process.
It's worth pausing on why a "half-carved face" works so well as an opening image for a Durga Puja theme in the first place. Kolkata's pandal art has, over the last few seasons, leaned increasingly toward this kind of unfinished, in-process aesthetic — sculptures shown mid-creation rather than complete, clay figures still bearing the marks of the artisan's hand, backdrops that look more like a Kumartuli workshop floor than a finished stage set. It's a visual language that tells the viewer, before a single line of text is read, that they're being invited to witness a process rather than simply consume a result. Dhakuria Sarbojanin's banner sits comfortably inside that trend, and the fact that it does so with a single sculpted face rather than a sprawling tableau makes the statement feel more personal than most.
Ninety-Seven Years, One Pole, One Afternoon
The khuti puja itself, held on 16th August, was everything the banner's stillness doesn't show you — noise, marigold, smoke, and a small crowd of people who clearly weren't there just to watch. In the photographs from the ceremony, the bamboo pole stands wrapped almost entirely in yellow and orange marigold rosettes, strung in a spiral from top to bottom, with strips of pink-and-white checked cloth woven in between the flowers — the traditional dressing that turns an ordinary length of bamboo into something worth garlanding. A red ceremonial cloth is knotted near the top, still fluttering loose as the pole is lowered into a small mound of freshly turned earth.
Around the khuti, committee members and neighbourhood residents crowd in close — a common sight at these ceremonies, where everyone wants a hand on the pole at the moment it's fixed into the ground. Men in yellow and red kurtas hold the base steady while others reach in to add one more garland, one more strip of cloth, before the priest's rituals are complete. A small child stands off to one side in a striped waistcoat, watching the adults work with the kind of patient curiosity that only a Durga Puja ceremony seems to produce in very young children. At the foot of the pole, a brass incense holder sends up a thin curl of smoke, next to a modest spread of puja items — vermillion, flowers, a coconut, a small clay pot — laid out on woven mats. It's an unhurried, hands-on ceremony, the kind that photographs beautifully precisely because nobody in the frame is posing for the camera; they're just doing the puja.
Just behind the gathering, part of the new "Abhyuday" banner is visible in the background — the club's freshly-erected pandal signage doubling as a backdrop for its own foundational ritual, which is a small but telling detail. Khuti puja and banner reveal, two milestones that many committees space out over separate weeks, arrived here almost as a single event, the visual theme and the ritual beginning literally in the same frame. For a puja with 97 years of institutional memory behind it, that kind of quiet, unfussy efficiency feels entirely in character.
The Team Building Abhyuday
Every Durga Puja theme is only as strong as the people translating it from banner to bamboo to finished mandap, and Dhakuria Sarbojanin has named its core creative team clearly this year. The visual narrative — what the committee calls "দৃশ্যকথক," or the storytellers who will shape how Abhyuday actually unfolds inside the pandal — is being handled by Hrittik Chakraborty and Parimal Pal. Supporting the artistic execution are Majuli Ganguly and Paulomi Sarkar, credited with art assistance, while the physical mandap decoration is being led by Arun Manna and Kamal Samanta. Lighting design, which will matter enormously for a theme built around emergence and gradual illumination, is under Biswajit Saha, and the ambience — the music and soundscape that will fill the mandap once it's complete — has been entrusted to Aheli Sarkar.
It's a fairly compact credit list for a puja entering its 97th year, which suggests a team that has worked together before and trusts each other to execute a theme this understated without losing its impact along the way.
Tanupukur, Dhakuria: A South Kolkata Fixture That Doesn't Need to Shout
Dhakuria Sarbojanin Durgotsab isn't a puja chasing viral moments or record footfall numbers. Ninety-seven years in, based out of Tanupukur in South Kolkata, it belongs to a category of neighbourhood pujas that build their reputation slowly — through consistency, through community participation, and through themes that reward a second look rather than demanding an immediate reaction. This year's "Abhyuday" banner fits that identity closely. It's restrained where other pujas are maximalist, and that restraint is very likely the point: a puja entering its late nineties doesn't need to prove it's arrived. It's already here, and this year, it's simply choosing to talk about what comes next.
South Kolkata's 2026 Durga Puja season has been unusually active through the second half of August, with khuti pujas and banner reveals arriving from committees across Dhakuria, Golf Green, and the neighbourhoods that ring the Lakes — and Dhakuria Sarbojanin's ceremony on Tanupukur slots into that wider calendar as one of its more thoughtfully designed openings. For readers tracking how this ritual is unfolding across the city this season, our running Khuti Puja 2026 coverage stays updated through the month, and as Abhyuday moves from banner to bamboo to finished idol, our Kumartuli coverage will be following the artisans shaping this year's pratimas across the city.
What to Watch for Next
With the khuti now fixed in the ground at Tanupukur, the real work for Dhakuria Sarbojanin Durgotsab's team begins — turning a half-carved face on a banner into a fully realised mandap experience over the next several weeks. Given how deliberately restrained this year's visual language is, the more interesting question isn't whether the pandal will look striking, but how a theme built around gradual "emergence" translates into something you walk through, rather than just look at.
For the most reliable day-to-day updates as Abhyuday takes shape, the committee's official Facebook page remains the best source straight from the organisers themselves, and we'll be back with ground coverage as the structure starts rising on Tanupukur.
Have photos, updates, or a closer look at the Dhakuria Sarbojanin pandal as it comes together? Send them our way through our Contact page — community-submitted coverage is always welcome.
Image Credit: Dhakuria Sarbojanin Durgotsab Committee
