"Mon Diye Dekhun": Kumartuli Sarbojanin Durgotsab Opens Its 96th Year With a Banner That Asks You to Look Closer

 Look at the banner for more than a few seconds and it stops being a banner. A young girl in a school pinafore stands with her braid swinging, chin tilted up, eyes wide open toward something outside the frame — and in her hand, almost forgotten, dangles a paintbrush wrapped in red cloth. Behind her, the ochre-and-green wash of a Kolkata street blurs into the distance. Above her, four words sit in bold Bengali type: মন দিয়ে দেখুন — "watch with your heart," or perhaps more simply, "look properly, look with feeling." It's not a slogan that explains itself in one reading, and that seems to be exactly the point. Kumartuli Sarbojanin Durgotsab Committee has just stepped into its 96th year, and its opening banner is less an announcement and more an invitation.

For a puja committee based in Kumartuli — the very neighbourhood where the Goddess is born in clay every single year — choosing a theme about seeing is a quietly loaded decision. This is a locality where thousands of idols pass through narrow lanes and cramped workshops before reaching pandals across Kolkata and beyond, and where the artisans doing that work are so used to being walked past that their craft has almost become wallpaper to the city around them. A banner that asks people to stop and actually look feels less like marketing copy and more like a neighbourhood talking about itself.

Where This Puja Actually Stands

Kumartuli Sarbojanin Durgotsab Committee runs its celebrations from Abhoy Mitra Street, Kumartuli, Shobhabazar, deep in the lanes of North Kolkata that give the potters' quarter its name. This isn't a puja that had to import its identity from somewhere else — it sits inside the very locality that supplies idols to a large share of the city's Durga Puja committees, Kumartuli's own artisans among the people who quite literally shape the season for everyone else. A puja born and organised from within that community carries a certain authority that a newer club, however lavish, simply cannot borrow.

Ninety-six years is also not a small number to sit with. It places the committee's earliest celebrations somewhere in the years just before Indian independence, meaning this year's khuti puja is only four years away from Kumartuli Sarbojanin joining the short, respected list of Kolkata's centenary pujas — the ones that get spoken about not just for their pandal each year, but for having survived nearly a century of changing tastes, changing neighbourhoods, and changing ways of celebrating the festival itself.

The Names Doing the Work Behind the Banner

Every banner reveal is really a preview of the people who will spend the next two months building toward it, and Kumartuli Sarbojanin's lineup for this year reads like a locally rooted, tightly knit team rather than a rented committee of outside specialists.

The overall creative direction — what the committee calls shomogro bhabna, or the complete conceptual vision — belongs to Manash Roy. Everything from the "Mon Diye Dekhun" theme itself down to how it eventually translates into the finished pandal experience will trace back to decisions made under his direction.

The idol — the matri rupayan, or the way the Goddess herself is given form — is credited to Dipankar Paul. Given the address, there's a good chance this isn't a name unfamiliar to the lanes around Abhoy Mitra Street; an idol-maker crafting the Devi Murti for a puja based inside Kumartuli itself is about as close to a hyper-local, hyper-authentic production as Durga Puja gets anywhere in the city.

Rounding out the crew, lighting design has been handed to SB Electric, and the mandap — the physical structure that will eventually replace the bare bamboo khuti with a full pandal — is being built by SB Decorator. Between the four names, Kumartuli Sarbojanin's 96th year is being assembled almost entirely by hands that already know these narrow lanes well.

Reading the Banner a Little Further

Beyond the central image and the tagline, the banner also states the essentials plainly: শারদ উৎসব ২০২৬, ৯৬ তম বর্ষ — Sharad Utsav 2026, 96th year — printed near the top, alongside the committee's own emblem in the corner, a stylised design that appears to nod toward an artisan's tools. It's a fairly restrained layout compared to some of the more maximalist banner reveals doing the rounds this season, and that restraint fits the theme. A design built around the idea of looking closely doesn't need to shout; it just needs one striking central image and enough white space for that image to actually breathe.

The choice of a schoolgirl as the central figure is worth sitting with too. She isn't dressed as a goddess, isn't posed dramatically, isn't surrounded by symbolism explaining itself. She's simply a child mid-glance, caught looking at something with total, unselfconscious attention — which is arguably the most honest visual translation of "watch with your heart" that a designer could have chosen. Durga Puja, at its core, asks exactly that of everyone who walks through a pandal each October: to look, properly, at what a community has built together.

Khuti Puja Day: An Eye Watching From the Pole Itself

The theme stopped being just a banner on Saturday, 2nd August, when Kumartuli Sarbojanin actually planted its khuti on Abhoy Mitra Street. The street had been turned over entirely to the occasion — a wide canopy in hot pink, yellow, and lime green stretched overhead, its scalloped valances trimmed with gold embroidery, the kind of full-street tent structure that tells you a committee has treated day one with the same seriousness it'll bring to the final pandal in October. Rows of plastic chairs sat underneath it, already filling up with neighbours, families, and members of the committee well before the ritual itself got underway.

Pinned to the tent's rear wall was a poster that did double duty as both invitation and public notice: কুমারটুলি সর্বজনীন দুর্গোৎসব, ৯৬ তম বর্ষ — খুঁটি পূজা ও রক্তদান শিবির. Alongside the puja, the committee had folded in a health camp for the day — thalassemia carrier screening for children and a blood donation drive for adults, organised in partnership with the Rotary Club of Sonargaon, Kolkata. It's a detail that says something about how the committee sees the day: not purely ceremonial, but an occasion the whole para can use productively, with donors and young patients moving through the same tent as the priests and the puja essentials.

Away from the canopy, a second image tells the more intimate half of the story — the khuti itself, dressed and ready. Mounted partway up the bamboo pole is a carved, gold-painted ornament shaped like an unmistakable eye: a black pupil ringed in orange and green, ornately framed, looking straight out at whoever approaches. Months before Dipankar Paul's workshop will paint the final, delicate stroke onto the idol's own eyes — the moment known as chokkhu daan, considered the instant a clay figure becomes the Goddess — Kumartuli Sarbojanin has already placed an eye on its ceremonial pole. For a puja built entirely around the idea of "watching with your heart," it's hard to read that as coincidence.

Just below the eye, the pole is further wrapped in a heart-shaped gold filigree ornament holding a red rosette, stamped simply with কুমারটুলি সর্বজনীন দুর্গোৎসব, ৯৬তম বর্ষ. Behind it all stands a red-and-white checkerboard backdrop printed edge to edge with the committee's own logo and name — the kind of branded step-and-repeat panel usually reserved for a puja's biggest press moments, here used for something as foundational as the khuti itself.

What Usually Comes Next for a Puja Like This

With the theme now public and the khuti puja marking the season's official start, the following weeks typically bring the parts of the process that don't photograph as dramatically but matter just as much — bamboo deliveries to the Abhoy Mitra Street site, the early kathamo (structural skeleton) work beginning under SB Decorator's supervision, and Dipankar Paul's workshop moving from early clay-and-straw armature stages toward a fuller form. Because the committee sits inside Kumartuli itself, it's worth keeping an eye on how closely the pandal's visual language ends up echoing the artisan quarter it calls home — a self-referential touch that would fit this theme rather neatly.

For anyone tracking how the wider Khuti Puja season is unfolding across Kolkata's clubs this year, our continuously updated Khuti Puja tracker logs each committee's ceremony as it happens, and our ongoing Kumartuli coverage follows the neighbourhood's artisan community through the same months.

Quick Facts: Kumartuli Sarbojanin Durgotsab 96th Year

Where is the puja held? Abhoy Mitra Street, Kumartuli, Shobhabazar, North Kolkata.

When was the khuti puja held? Saturday, 2nd August 2026, on Abhoy Mitra Street.

Which year is this? The 96th year (৯৬ তম বর্ষ) of Kumartuli Sarbojanin Durgotsab.

Was anything else happening alongside the ritual? Yes — a thalassemia carrier screening for children and a blood donation camp for adults, held on the same day in association with the Rotary Club of Sonargaon, Kolkata.

What is this year's theme? "মন দিয়ে দেখুন" (Mon Diye Dekhun) — "Watch/Look with your heart."

Who conceived the theme? Manash Roy is credited with the overall concept (shomogro bhabna).

Who is sculpting the idol? Dipankar Paul is responsible for the idol's form (matri rupayan).

Who is handling lighting and the mandap? SB Electric for lighting; SB Decorator for the mandap structure.

Where can I follow live updates? Through the committee's official Facebook page and our own continuously updated Khuti Puja 2026 tracker.

A Small Note to End On

It says something that a puja committee sitting in the middle of Kumartuli — surrounded, every single day, by artisans shaping goddesses for the entire city — chose this particular year to remind everyone to actually look. Ninety-six years in, Kumartuli Sarbojanin isn't trying to reinvent what Durga Puja means to its neighbourhood. It's simply asking its visitors to pay the kind of attention the artisans a few lanes over have been paying, quietly, for generations.

This is a developing story for the season — we'll return with more from Kumartuli Sarbojanin Durgotsab as the pandal takes shape between now and Mahalaya.

Image Credit: Kumartuli Sarbojanin Durgotsab Committee