Kolkata is a historic cultural capital of India, known for its colonial architecture, vibrant arts scene, and intellectual heritage. It is famous for its literature, cinema, festivals like Durga Puja, and a unique blend of tradition and modern urban life.
Durga Puja evolved from an elite religious ritual into Bengal’s inclusive cultural festival through caste struggles, Partition, refugee resettlement and agrarian change. This article explores how a shared celebration challenged social hierarchies and became an expression of Bengali identity and pluralism.
A programme by an RSS-affiliated organisation at SRFTI escalated into a clash involving students, faculty and organisers, with competing allegations over provocation and assault.
For nearly 270 years, Sovabazar Rajbari’s Durga Puja has preserved a distinctive Bengali food tradition where vegetarian rituals coexist with fish and meat. From the offering of magur fish on Navami to elaborate feasts, its customs reveal how food, faith, family and ritual have remained intertwined through generations, offering a window into Bengal’s culinary heritage.
The raids across the state from restaurants to confectioneries have exposed more than dirty kitchens and expired food. They have raised a far bigger question: how much remains unseen on a day to day basis?
Bengal’s Durga Puja food row is about more than fish, mutton or vegetarianism. It raises a deeper question: who gets to define Bengali Hindu identity?
The Kolkata Book Fair celebrates the circulation of books, ideas and cultural memory. Gaza has witnessed the destruction of the very institutions that preserve them. If Israel becomes the fair’s theme country, can the Boi Mela celebrate Israeli culture without making Palestinian suffering invisible?
West Bengal is celebrated for women’s education, welfare and demographic progress. Yet child marriage remains stubbornly high, exposing a striking gap between Bengal’s progressive image and the social reality reflected in its latest data.
Uttam Kumar was more than Bengali cinema’s Mahanayak: he was the cinematic construction of th ideal Bengali man. From romantic heroism to the psychological disquiet, his screen persona mapped Bengal’s evolving ideas of masculinity, cultural capital, respectability and aspiration.
What does it mean when a wall carrying Chittaprosad’s image is erased? The artist who documented the Bengal Famine, working-class lives, displacement and hunger was already disappearing from public memory long before his graffiti vanished. His story exposes a deeper cultural erasure: how Bengal’s political art, Left history and visual archive of suffering have been steadily pushed out of sight.
May 1968 turned Parisian walls into a radical public sphere, where anonymous graffiti became a medium of dissent, collective authorship and political imagination. Nearly six decades later, as outrage agianst graffiti walls of Jadavpur University begin to reshape public political vocabulary, the walls of from Kolkata to Paris raise a sharper question: who controls the commons of expression?
The UN has warned that millions in South Asia, including Kolkata, face the growing risk of permanent inundation. But for Bengal’s capital, the danger is more complicated: as seas rise, parts of the city are sinking — while the Sundarbans is already losing land, livelihoods and people.
Jadavpur University’s walls are now being whitewashed after the state government flagged 'anti-national' and 'offensive' graffiti on campus, turning a dispute over political slogans and murals into a larger confrontation over dissent, nationalism and freedom of expression. But before these walls became targets of administrative erasure, they were canvases on which students painted their politics, histories and heroes. One such student was Sagnik Vajra, who painted a mural of Comrade Chittoprosad — and remembers why.
Kolkata’s pavements have never been empty spaces. For decades, they have been homes to migrants, workers and families who remained invisible even though their labour sustained the city. Today’s eviction drives bring an old question back into focus: whose city is Kolkata?
A red flag burned inside a university campus. Days earlier, the Prime Minister warned of 'dimaagi Naxals' who, he said, must be 'identified and isolated'. In between these moments lies a question larger than the mob attack and violence in Jadavpur University: when dissent, Left politics and student mobilisation are repeatedly cast as threats, what exactly is being fought—and why?
Subscription Economy of Colonial-Era Bengali Newspapers: No advertisements, no government patronage—the Bengali newspapers of the nineteenth century survived on the strength of ordinary subscribers paying monthly or annual fees. From Samachar Darpan to Grambarta Prakashika, it was these low-income readers who built the first resistance against colonial exploitation. The story of that struggle can serve as a timeless lesson for today’s news media.
Kolkata’s Academy of Fine Arts has become an unlikely canvas for Bengal’s cultural power struggle—saffron, white and saffron again. Behind the paint battle lies a larger contest over political symbolism, cultural ownership and who gets to define Bengal’s public identity as its political landscape shifts.