Folklore, Intangible Cultural Heritage, and Durga Puja in Kolkata, India
UNESCO’s designation of Intangible Cultural Heritage has allowed cultural religious customs such as the Durga Puja in Kolkata, India, to be included on the coveted list.
I used to think of folklore as things we read in books and or heard through storytellers who weave tales as people sit around a fire. Or perhaps as something that is passed down through generations. It is all that and more. Folktales may become part of the “narrative” of a place or a narrative can be created around folklore (like Metropolis, Illinois being coined the home of Superman). It can be an intangible custom or a non-material event, ritual, or experience.
UNESCO has an Intangible Cultural Heritage designation that is international in scope, and that is also affiliated with local and national heritage organizations. It is affiliated with the American Folklore Society (AFS), which is based in North America but is “dedicated to the study of folklore and expressive cultural traditions in the United States of America and throughout the world.” [1]
How folklore and intangible heritage are perceived and expressed, and how it manifests in physical form in various locales and heritage areas, appears to be very diverse and unique to each situation. There seems to be a push in recent years to explore more diverse forms of folklore and recognize how each form is essential to the culture in which it is honored.
Defining Folklore
It seems the definitions of folklore are diverse, too. There is a 1969 National Council of Teachers of English journal article by Alan Dundes called Folklore as a Mirror of Culture. [2]That title says so much about the meaning of folklore. I was curious to dig a little deeper for official descriptions. I found these.
The American Folklore Society says: “The word ‘folklore’ names an enormous and deeply significant dimension of culture. Considering how large and complex this subject is, it is no wonder that folklorists define and describe folklore in so many different ways. Try asking dance historians for a definition of ‘dance,’ for instance, or anthropologists for a definition of “culture.” No one definition will suffice–nor should it.” They are a member organization of folklorists, so they see folklore expressed in many ways. [3]
The Book Folklore in the Digital Age says: “The formal academic discipline devoted to the study of folklore is known as folkloristics, although it is sometimes also termed as folklife research and folklore studies. Because of its interdisciplinary character, folkloristics shares methodological approaches and insights with anthropology and ethnography, history and art, literature and linguistics, semiotics, musicology, etc. But unchangeably since its beginnings, the discipline of folkloristics has been always focused on collecting different kinds of folklore forms as evidence of everyday cultural knowledge and the collective memory of the group (‘folk’). The aim of ‘lore’ items collection is their preservation because folklore is — ex definition — a vanishing subject, and then its classification and systematization (archives, inventories, repositories). [4]
UNESCO offers this “intangible heritage” definition in their paper from the Round Table: Intangible Cultural Heritage — Working Definitions in Piedmont, Italy, 14 -17 March 2001: “Folklore (or traditional and popular culture) is the totality of tradition-based creations of a cultural community, expressed by a group or individuals and recognized as reflecting the expectations of a community in so far as they reflect its cultural and social identity; its standards and values are transmitted orally, by imitation or by other means. Its forms are, among others, language, literature, music, dance, games, mythology, rituals, customs, handicrafts, architecture, and other arts.” [5]
This apparently grew out of the 1989 Recommendation on the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore, in which the definition was developed in relation to “intangible cultural heritage.” Following the 2001 meeting that evoked the definition above, The United Nations Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage was adopted in 2003 and came into effect in 2006. [6]
UNESCO created an Intangible Cultural Heritage list. And they define it as: “Intangible cultural heritage refers to the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, and skills — as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated — that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage.” [7]
Thus, the Intangible Cultural Heritage List meets each year to evaluate proposals and decide “whether or not to inscribe those cultural practices and expressions of intangible heritage on the Convention’s Lists.” [8]
Fascinating Things on the List — Including Durga Puja
You can peruse the list, and the diverse intangible heritage included, from 2008 to 2022 here.
It includes some very interesting and cool things. For example, “Knowledge and skills of the water measurers of the foggaras or water bailiffs of Touat and Tidikelt from Algiers are listed, along with Tradition Korean Wrestling from Korea and Traditional Hand Puppetry from Egypt.
I found at least 13 listings for India and the one that surprised me the most was Durga Puja, as I have always known that as a religious festivity. It is a ten-day celebration that represents the worship of the Hindu Goddess known as Durga. She is a mother goddess, with eight arms, and in her hands she has the weapons and sacred tools of the three main gods of Hinduism — Shiva, Brahma, and Vishnu. She was created by the gods because they could not fight off an evil Buffalo demon known as Mahishasura on their own. However, fierce and powerful Durga was able to cut his head off with her sword.
Durga Puja retells the legend of her Victory and is complete with a huge celebration. Durga Puja is widely observed across India (and around the world) but West Bengal was a main area. However, Kolkata Durga Puja in Kolkata, India has become an important location in recent years. There, huge clay idols of the Goddess are created and painted, and they are placed in “pandals” where they are worshipped. Communities come together. It also includes traditions of folk music, culinary feasts, crafts, and performing arts.
Puja, by its very name, indicates religion and ceremonial worship. However, a historian named Tapati Guha-Thakurta was able to help get Durga Puja onto the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list by highlighting the folklore aspects of the festival. As the author of In the Name of the Goddess: The Durga Pujas of Contemporary Kolkata, she has participated and observed Durga Puja in Kolkata since the early 2000s and is a well-known expert on interpreting this major cultural event for modern times.
“Guha-Thakurta was invited by the Ministry of Culture to put together an extensive dossier to submit to UNESCO, based on her decades-long research. The government’s previous attempts to bring this recognition had not taken the required shape,” according to an article in The Better India. She was joined by a team from the Centre for Studies and Social Sciences, where she has worked as a professor and director of history. “Our focus was very much on the present, the modern history of this mega-urban festival, and we wanted to look at several issues,” she explained. “My main goal was to look at the transforming visual culture of the festival, the new aesthetics, the designs of the pandals. My colleague Anjun was looking into neighborhoods and communities, and how the puja occupies and transforms public spaces.” [9]
How will the UNESCO list help? The history professor who made it happen offered these telling comments: “For a cultural phenomenon like Durga Puja, we do not know yet what the benefits of this international branding will be,” Guha-Thakurta said. “It is now up to stakeholders, regulators, and governance bodies to bring international attention. The question of the creative and cultural economy existed long before the tag. In fact, surveys beforehand analyzed these economies well to show the huge turnover generated by Durga Puja. So there is no denying that a large commercial economy of the state rests on this one festival.” [10]
-Laurie Sue Brockway, posted Mar 27, 2023
More Information:
You can read the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage here.
You can find out more about Durga Puja and see an image here.
SOURCES
[1] “About,” The American Folklore Society, accessed March 27, 2023.
[2] Alan Dundes, “Folklore as a Mirror of Culture,” Elementary English 46, no. 4 (1969): 471–82.
[3] American Folklore Society, “What Is Folklore?,” The American Folklore Society, accessed March 27, 2023, .
[4] Violetta Krawczyk-Wasilewska, ed., “Towards a Digital Folklore Heritage,” Cambridge University Press (Jagiellonian University Press, 2016).
[5] UNESCO, “International Round Table: ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage — Working Definitions’ Piedmont, Italy, 14 -17 March 2001ANNOTATED AGENDA,” 2001, .
[6] UNESCO, “Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage | UNESCO,” www.unesco.org, n.d., .
[7] “What Is UNESCO’s List of Intangible Cultural Heritage? And What’s on It?,” World Economic Forum, accessed March 27, 2023.
[8] UNESCO, “UNESCO — Browse the Lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage and the Register of Good Safeguarding Practices,” Unesco.org, 2019.
[9] Divya Sethu, “Historian Who Got Kolkata’s Durga Puja Its UNESCO ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage’ Tag,” The Better India, September 28, 2022.
[10] Divya Sethu
