Behala Young Men's Association Durga Puja 2026: Khuti Puja Kicks Off the 77th Year of "Chhuti"

Durga Puja Of Kolkata
28 Sep, 2026

Ask a ten-year-old today what they do when it rains, and the answer will almost certainly involve a screen. Ask that same question to someone who grew up in Kolkata's lanes in the eighties or nineties, and you'll get an entirely different story — one about staring at clouds until they turned into elephants, ships, or a grandmother's face. That exact gap, between a childhood built on imagination and one increasingly built on algorithms, is what Behala Young Men's Association has chosen to sit with this year. And on the 9th of August, at noon sharp, that idea took its first physical shape on J.K. Paul Road.


A Banner Full of Kites, and a Theme Called "Chhuti"

The khuti puja banner for Behala Young Men's Association doesn't look like most others going up around the city this season. Instead of a single central illustration, it's built entirely out of overlapping kites — teal, orange, magenta, purple — scattered across the frame like a sky caught mid-festival. It's a small design choice, but it says everything about where this year's theme is headed: "Chhuti", meaning holiday, or more precisely, the long, lazy, unstructured freedom that used to define a Bengali child's break from school. The banner names the committee's advisors, including Indranil Kha and Sankar Sikdar (representing the Purba constituency), and its joint secretaries — Arijit, Suman, Chiranjib, and Arunava — the people who'll be steering this 77-year-old club through the months ahead.

What makes this year particularly interesting for anyone tracking Kolkata's theme-puja circuit is the name attached to the concept: Team Sanatan Dinda. Dinda is one of the most recognisable names in contemporary Durga Puja art direction, known for pandals that don't just decorate a space but argue a point. With "Chhuti," the argument seems to be a gentle one — that somewhere between a monsoon sky and an AI chatbot, an entire generation's way of dreaming got quietly rewritten.

Noon on J.K. Paul Road: The Khuti O Bhumi Puja

The ritual itself followed the pattern that's been repeated on this same stretch of Sahapur, Behala, for seventy-six years running. A priest in a red kurta and saffron dhoti stood barefoot before the freshly erected structure, ringing a small brass bell as he completed the khuti o bhumi puja — the twin rites that consecrate both the ceremonial pole and the ground the pandal will eventually stand on. Marigold and tuberose garlands, threaded with the occasional gamchha, hung down the length of the bamboo, while a plate of fruit, sweets, and flowers sat waiting on the ground beside him. There was nothing rushed about it. Khuti puja rarely is — it's one of those rituals that insists on being done properly, garland by garland, regardless of how many hundred more tasks the committee has waiting after it.

This timing — a puja held months ahead of Durgotsav itself, marking the symbolic start of preparations — isn't a modern invention. It borrows its logic from a much older tradition. If you've ever wondered why Kolkata's clubs plant a ceremonial pole so far in advance of Mahalaya, our piece on how Rath Yatra ties into the Durga Puja calendar traces that connection back to its roots — and it explains why a khuti puja in early August is, in a sense, a very old idea wearing a new banner.

Behind the Tin Sheets: A Pandal Already Taking Shape

Walk a little past the khuti itself, and you'll find the real evidence that this year's build is already well underway. A curved, corrugated-metal arch has gone up over the main structure, its ribs still exposed in places, with a length of blue tarpaulin thrown over one side to keep the monsoon out of unfinished sections. A three-tier scaffold rises inside — the kind of skeletal framework that, in six or seven weeks, will disappear entirely behind whatever Sanatan Dinda's team has planned for "Chhuti." A wooden platform stretches out at the entrance, still bare, still waiting for the crowds it will eventually hold. It's an unglamorous stage in a puja's life, but it's also the most honest one — before the paint, before the lighting, before the queues, this is just carpenters, tin sheets, and a shape slowly becoming a building.

The Clay Is Already Speaking


What's unusual for a club still weeks away from its official reveal is how much sculptural work is already visible. A large tableau — richly painted in reds, blues, greens, and gold — shows Ganesh seated amid a swirl of outstretched arms and half-formed figures, some still in raw grey clay waiting for their first coat of colour, others already fully painted and vivid. It's not the main Durga idol; it reads more like a companion installation, part of the larger visual world the theme is building. Seeing it this early, mid-construction, colour bleeding onto some figures and not others, is a small privilege — by the time visitors walk through in October, every one of these details will have settled into its final, deliberate place.


Seventy-Seven Years of Chasing the Same Sky

There's something quietly poignant about a club old enough to have hosted its first Durgotsav in the late 1940s choosing, in its 77th year, to make a theme out of nostalgia for childhood itself. Behala Young Men's Association has watched Sahapur change completely across seven decades — new buildings, new roads, new generations of organisers taking over from the ones before them — and yet the ritual on J.K. Paul Road every August has stayed recognisably the same: a pole, a priest, marigolds, and a neighbourhood gathering around it. "Chhuti" isn't just a theme concept for this club; in a way, it's also a description of what the club itself has been doing for 77 years — protecting a small, unhurried tradition against the pull of everything that keeps speeding up around it.

Where BYMA Fits Into This Year's Khuti Puja Season

Behala's calendar in August and September is packed with these ceremonies — one bamboo pole after another going up across the borough, each with its own banner, its own priest, its own story. If you're following the season as it unfolds, our running Khuti Puja 2026 coverage is where every ceremony we've been able to reach gets logged, ward by ward, club by club. Behala Young Men's Association is very much part of that South Kolkata cluster worth watching this year — not for scale, but for the thoughtfulness of what it's trying to say.

What Comes Next

With the khuti in the ground and the tin roof already curving overhead, the next milestone belongs to the artisans. The white-and-black pandal design that's been described for this year's murti — a stark, almost monochrome backdrop meant to make the Goddess's colours burst forward — will need its idol to match, and that work is already quietly happening in the workshops of Kumartuli, where Kolkata's clay artisans are shaping this year's entire pantheon of Durgas one layer of straw and mud at a time.

For live updates straight from the source, Behala Young Men's Association's official Facebook page is the best place to watch as "Chhuti" comes together over the next few weeks. And if you've got photos or an update from a Behala club we haven't covered yet, our Contact page is always open — several of our best ground reports started with exactly that kind of message.

Image and information credit: pujorporibar

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