“That mother walking night after night with her four children – she is Maa Durga to me.”
Meet Rintu Das, the artist who drew up – literally – an idol of the Goddess Durga as a migrant worker. It’s a standout sculpture in the Durga Puja pandal of the Barisha Club, Behala, in south-west Kolkata. Durga has other deities as migrant labourers for company – Saraswati, Lakshmi, Ganesha and more. The whole show is a tribute to the struggles of migrants amidst the coronavirus pandemic.
The lockdown period had Rintu Das, 46, feeling he was “under house arrest for the past six months.” And, he says, “I have seen death as soon as I turned on the television screen, so many people were affected. So many, walking day after day, night after night. Sometimes getting not even a little food, or a little water. Mothers, girls, are all walking. That’s when I thought if I worship this year, I will worship for the people. I will honour those mothers.” And so, Maa Durga as migrant labourer mother.
“The original ideas were something else,” Pallab Bhowmik, 41, who sculpted the idol on Rintu Das’ plans, told PARI from his home in West Bengal’s Nadia district. Even before the fanfare of the 2019 Durga Puja had ended “the Barisha Club organisers had already begun preparing for this year’s puja. But then the Covid-19 pandemic made it clear that 2020 would be different – so the club had to abort the old plans.” And the new ones were woven around the lockdown and labour distress.



