When the Rhythm Breaks on Purpose: Hatibagan Sarbojanin's 92nd Year Begins With "Chhondo Chhara Chhonnochhara"
It was pouring on Aurobindo Sarani, and nobody under that banner seemed to mind. Confetti mixed with the rain, drifting sideways under a row of striped umbrellas — red, yellow, green, one improbable rainbow one held up right in the front — while phones went up in unison the second the maroon curtain came away from the board. That's the image that's going to circulate from Hatibagan this week: not a clean, sunlit unveiling, but a soaked, jostling, thoroughly North Kolkata one, which somehow suits this particular club perfectly. Hatibagan Sarbojanin Durgotsav doesn't do restraint, and its 92nd year didn't start with any either.
The banner itself, once the paper stopped falling, showed a green-fringed arch framed like a temple doorway, a small dhak resting at its crown, and four words painted across the centre in confident white brushwork: "ছন্দ ছাড়া ছন্নছাড়া."
The Theme: A Pun That Does Double Duty
Translate it literally and you get something like "without rhythm, in disarray" — but the line is really a wordplay built on two Bengali words that sound like cousins: chhondo (rhythm, or poetic metre) and chhonnochhara (scattered, dishevelled, at loose ends). Put together, the phrase suggests that the moment a beat breaks — a dhak missing its stroke, a life losing its structure, a city losing its old order — everything around it slips into disarray too. It's a theme with room to breathe: read it as a comment on the fraying rhythms of urban life, or as something more personal about grief and disorientation, or simply as a meditation on rhythm itself, the thing that holds a Puja's dhak, dance, and crowd together for five days every October.
Whatever direction the pandal eventually takes it, the concept is credited to Rabindra Roy, with the creative and execution team rounded out by Surajit Pal, Ayan Mukherjee, Suman Maity, and Nandadulal Adhikari — a fairly large collective for a single theme, which usually signals a pandal with several moving parts rather than one static installation. Regular Puja-hoppers will recognise that this is exactly the kind of layered, wordplay-driven theme North Kolkata clubs have built their reputations on for two decades now, and Hatibagan has form here: this is a committee that's leaned on heritage art forms and emotionally-loaded concepts in recent years rather than chasing spectacle for its own sake.
Khuti Puja: Garlands, a Kalash, and a Committee Fifty People Deep
A banner reveal gets the applause, but the Khuti Puja is the ritual that actually opens the season on the calendar. At Hatibagan, this year's khuti was a tall bamboo pole dressed almost entirely in marigold — three separate rosette-style floral discs stacked down its length, tiers of orange and yellow petals wound tight around the stem, with peacock feathers fanning out near the top like a final flourish. At its base sat the ritual essentials any Kolkata Puja committee will recognise instantly: small earthen diyas, a garlanded offering wrapped in cloth, and the beginnings of what looked like a proper puja spread laid out on the pavement.
What stood out wasn't just the khuti itself but who was gathered around it. A large group — dozens of women in sarees, several men, a mix of ages that told you this wasn't a token appearance by a handful of office-bearers — packed in tight against a branded backdrop reading "Hatibagan Sarbojanin Durgotsav Committee" in both Bengali and English. That kind of turnout for a ritual that, on paper, is just the planting of a bamboo pole says something about how seriously this particular para treats its Puja as a community event rather than a committee formality. Everyone in that photograph had a hand near the khuti, or a phone up capturing it, or both.
Ninety-Two Years on Aurobindo Sarani
Hatibagan Sarbojanin Durgotsav traces its origins back to 1934, which puts its 92nd year in 2026 squarely in line with the numbers on this year's banner. That makes it one of the oldest Barowari — community-organised, as opposed to family or bonedi bari — Durga Pujas anywhere in North Kolkata, running continuously from a stretch of Aurobindo Sarani that sits close to the old Khanna Cinema Hall and the bustling Hatibagan market itself, a neighbourhood that's given its name to the Puja and, arguably, helped define what a "para Puja" even looks like in this part of the city.
The address matters here in ways that go beyond nostalgia. Aurobindo Sarani — once known as Grey Street — runs through some of the most historically dense real estate in Kolkata, within easy reach of Sutanuti and the Jorasanko Thakur Bari, the ancestral home of the Tagore family and one of the intellectual centres of the Bengal Renaissance. A club that's been organising Durga Puja from almost the same stretch of road for nine decades inherits that weight whether it wants to or not, and it shows in the kind of themes Hatibagan Sarbojanin tends to pick — pandals built around Patachitra scroll art, or around the vanishing culture of the Ganga ghats, are the work of a committee that treats heritage as raw material rather than decoration.
It's also worth remembering that the rhythms this year's theme name plays with — the dhak, the ritual calendar, the beat that carries a whole Puja week — don't start with the khuti. In Bengali tradition, the invitation to the goddess is set in motion much earlier, during Rath Yatra, when the wooden chariot is pulled through the streets in early summer. If you're curious about how that older ritual connects to the Khuti Puja season that's now underway across the city, our piece on how pulling the Rath sets Durga's arrival in motion traces that thread from one festival to the next.
What Comes Next for Hatibagan Sarbojanin
With the khuti planted and the "Chhondo Chhara Chhonnochhara" name now public, the next thing most seasoned Puja-watchers will be looking for is the idol. A theme this loaded with rhythm, disorder, and metaphor usually asks a lot of whichever workshop ends up sculpting the Devi — the face, the posture, even the way the ten arms are angled can shift the entire read of a concept like this one. We'll be tracking which artisan house in Kumartuli picks up the commission, since that's usually the first real clue to how literally — or how abstractly — a club plans to interpret its own theme.
On the ground, expect the usual August rhythm to take over on Aurobindo Sarani: bamboo scaffolding climbing in stages, tarpaulin sheets going up section by section, and the pandal slowly taking the shape that Rabindra Roy and his team have sketched out, right through to Mahalaya.
Following the Season
Hatibagan Sarbojanin Durgotsav's 92nd year is now officially open, confetti, monsoon rain, and all. For updates straight from the committee, their official Facebook page is the most reliable source as the pandal comes together over the next two months. And if you're following how Khuti Puja season is unfolding para by para across Kolkata this year, our continuously updated Khuti Puja 2026 tracker is the place to bookmark — we'll be adding Hatibagan's next milestone there as soon as it lands.
This is a live-tracked story. We'll be back on Aurobindo Sarani as the pandal starts to take shape.
Image Credit: Hatibagan Sarbojanin Durgotsav Committee
