Image-makers of Kumortuli and the Durga Puja Festival

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Overview
This book is a tribute to the image-makers of Kumortuli, as well as a social and cultural account of Durga Puja—the most important religious festival of Bengal.
The potter community of Kolkata, the kumors, as they are colloquially known, are more than what the name suggests—they are artists. Tangible images of deities that form the crux of Hindu worship, find shape in the hands of these artisans, who, with sheer dedication to the craft, have kept the tradition alive for generations. It is a fascinating experience to observe how clay, straw, bamboo and other ingredients bit by bit transforms into tactile human forms which are then infused with divinity through different rituals.
Durga Puja, on the other hand, is not only the major religious festival of Bengal but has also evolved into a cultural extravaganza. From the point of view of sheer vastness and magnitude of organizational mobilisation, it is comparable only to the global impact of Christmas.
Through vivid photographs and absorbing text, the book captures Kolkata's spirit of artistic creativity and spiritual ecstasy, embodied in these ephemeral constructs of clay, straw and bamboo. It also sensitively documents Bengal's unique and most enduring cultural heritage of image worship.

About the Author
Born in Calcutta and educated in India and the UK,
Krishna Dutta
has been living in London sincethe late 1960s. She specialises in the history and culture of Bengal an has co-authored a biography of Rabindranath Tagore The Myriad-Minded Man, co-edited Tagore's selected letters and translated Bengali short stories and poems. Her book Calcutta: A Cultural and Literary History, published in 2003, was critically acclaimed by many and now has a recently updated Indian edition. In 2013, she published a popular culinary cultural book on Indian dal recipes, titled The Dal Cookbook, in London, which has already gone through several editions.