‘Bar puja’, a Kolkata football tradition tackled into touch
With sports suspended, sporting rituals with unbroken traditions have also been disrupted for the first time in decades
KOLKATA: It was a request Bablu Halder couldn’t refuse. Responsibilities as vice-president of the Kalighat Temple Committee left him with little time to spare but how could he say no when, in 2010, Mohun Bagan chose him as their messenger to god? Haldar had been a club member for 30 years and was at Eden Gardens when Mohun Bagan held Pele’s New York Cosmos 2-2.
Since then, Halder, 69, would begin the Bengali New Year’s Day by praying for Mohun Bagan at Kalighat Temple and travel to the club for the ‘bar puja’, an annual Kolkata Maidan ritual where a newly painted goalpost and football are worshipped and garlanded. It is usually the only day Halder goes to Mohun Bagan now.
On April 14 this year, the first day of the month of Baisakh, Halder won’t be able to get the football gods in Mohun Bagan’s corner. It is one of the two things he can’t remember not happening—Kalighat Temple being closed to the public being the other.
Mohammedan Sporting don’t do it, but usually with priests from one family over whom they have proprietorial hold, many of the 277 clubs in the Calcutta league—some over 100 years old—follow this decades-old tradition. One, which Covid-19 has tackled into touch.
While Mohun Bagan have called off the event, general secretary Srinjoy Bose saying on Sunday that safety of fans and colleagues is priority now, East Bengal want to defer it to another ‘auspicious’ day. “Once the crisis passes, the clubs can meet and decide on a day. How can we not perform the bar puja?” asks East Bengal official Debabrata Sarkar.
It is unclear when and why this became an important day for football clubs in Bengal. Sarkar says it is nearly 80 years old. “I couldn’t find anything on it before independence in newspapers of the time. But I remember the occasion at East Bengal in 1956 because I was there,” says Gautam Ray, a football statistician and former East Bengal media officer.
“Then it would happen only at Mohun Bagan and East Bengal. They would announce captains of the season who would join the priest for the ‘puja’,” says Ray. The captain’s religion did not matter. Robert Lalthlamuana and Mehtab Hossain have taken the lead at East Bengal when they had the armband. But though he led both teams, Bhaichung Bhutia said he was never part of the ritual. “Captains are often chosen on the basis of seniority which meant while they performed the puja, they rarely made the first team,” says Bhutia.
“Our scriptures don’t have a mantra for football,” says Haldar. “So I use prayers that invoke Ganesha and Lakshmi and Kali. I also worship the idols in the players’ change room.”
“The continuity of the pandit (priest) often depends on how successful the club has been,” says Debasish Dutta, Mohun Bagan’s finance secretary. “Because we have won the I-League, even if the world went upside down, we wouldn’t have changed ours.”
“Groundstaff who have been around for long at these clubs ensure the puja is done in a particular way even if the priest has been replaced,” says Ray.
With the Calcutta league beginning in May, the Bengali New Year’s Day was when fans got to see the new signings at Mohun Bagan and East Bengal. “It was also the day when we started feeling that the season was around the corner,” says former India captain Shabbir Ali who was at East Bengal in 1978.
Two years later, nearly 5000 fans came to the East Bengal ground to see three unheralded Iranians—Majid Beshkar, Jamshed Nassiri and Mehmud Khabazzi—who had reached Kolkata on April 11 praying that they would be adequate compensation for many worthies who had left. Across the street, Mohun Bagan supporters went to see a new Goan arrival, striker Francis D’Souza.
With East Bengal and Mohun Bagan dominating the Indian football scene in the 1970s, ‘bar puja’ replaced the annual sports day as the clubs’ marquee event, says Ray, 73. “In 1975, when I returned to East Bengal there were around 15,000 people who had to be reined in by club officials. We were sat on the pitch; boy, that was one crazy morning,” says Shyam Thapa, the former India forward. The crowd had swelled because East Bengal were favourites to win their sixth successive Calcutta league title, a record then.
Ali recalled players’ shooting in goal from the penalty spot after the worshipped frame was erected. And Thapa remembered the feast clubs laid out for players and how as East Bengal coach he once joined the puja. “Former players would also play with the current team,” says Sarkar.
With India starting a national league that spills into May, the Kolkata football season’s contours have changed since 1996. “Often, the team is out for I-League games. There have also been occasions when a captain has been announced but he then left the club,” says Dutta.
But through the change in the calendar, through ebbs and flows, the bar puja has endured. “It is a festival where players, fans and club officials got together, had ‘prasad’ and a good time,” says Thapa.