THE LIGHT MANAGERS

The fabled lights of Chandannagar now illuminate festivals across India, not just Kolkata’s Durga Puja celebrations

For a street that has the distinction of lighting up festivals and celebrations across the country, Bidyalanka, a neighbourhood in West Bengal’s Chandannagar (or Chandernagore) town, can hardly be accused of being flashy. Electrical stores, with displays of decorative lights, share space with chemist shops, grocery stores and the like. Behind the displays, men fit LED lights along designs sketched on fibreglass boards – blooming flowers, figures of birds and animals, clowns.

Not far is the residence of Sridhar Das, a light artist who claims credit for having brought innovative lighting to Chandannagar.

A former French colony, Chandannagar has long been known for its decorative light works. The colourful panels of lights are timed and sequenced so well – one strand lighting up, as another dims – that they give the impression of figures being in motion. The panels often tell a story – children’s fiction, highlights from the Olympic Games, or as is the case this year, scenes from the superhit film Bahubali.

For years the light works of Chandannagar were the pride of Durga Puja celebrations in Kolkata. In his heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, Das remembers doing the lighting for some of the most renowned and bigbudget Pujas.

LOOKING BACK

It is not really documented how Chandannagar came to be known for its lights. “We have heard from our parents and grandparents that it started in the 19th century. The people of Chandannagar used to take out a procession during festivals. They would illuminate the procession with gas lamps set in bamboo frames. Ever since, Chandannagar came to be known for its innovative lighting,” says light artist Asim Dey, sitting in his sprawling workshop. Behind him are stacked countless boards where lights have been used to create images of bees hovering over flowers or an overflowing mangal kalash.

In recent times though, Das claims to have started the trend of innovative decorative light in Chandannagar. “I was in class 7 at the time. There was a Saraswati Puja celebration at my school. I volunteered to do the lights. I put small bulbs inside three empty barley tins and covered the opening with coloured cellophane paper. I sat behind the idol for the entire evening, adjusting the wires so that the lights in each of the tins would light up one by one to fall on the idol. This was the beginning of automated lighting in Chandannagar,” recalls Das, whose work with lights has been displayed internationally as well. His school experiment was sometime in the 1950s. A few years later he offered to do the lights at a Jagadhatri Puja celebration – the biggest festival in Chandannagar. After that there was no looking back. Though one of the best-known pioneers of lighting in Chandannagar, Das was not the only light artist in town.

The Nineties, however, brought both trouble and change.

LET THERE BE LED

Over the years the light artists of Chandannagar had worked with various kinds of lamps – “from torch bulbs to loop lamps and then 6 volt lamps. The 6 volt lamps were locally produced at factories in West Bengal’s Barasat and Madhyamgram areas. There were 200-250 factories producing these lamps at the time,” remembers Das.

But sometime in the late 1980s-early 1990s, the light artists of Chandannagar hit a low. “Power companies were complaining that they did not have enough electricity to meet the needs of Puja organisers in Calcutta. The organisers were having to pay through their nose for the lights. The 6 volt lamps consumed a lot of power,” remembers Asim Dey. “As a result organisers started experimenting with and concentrating on other aspects of decoration – such as the pandals. Theme pujas began making an appearance and light artists of Chandannagar began finding it difficult to cope.”

The year was 1990. Dey brought LED lamps from Germany, Korea and Japan – Chinese LEDs were yet to come – and made a series of frames in the image of famous personalities such as Vivekananda, Jawaharlal Nehru, Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, all lit up with LED lights. It was a huge hit. “LED consumes 15 times less electricity than the 6 volt lamps that were being used,” says Dey.

There are some drawbacks .“LED is very bright on the eyes. If you look at it for too long, the lines tend to blur,” says Babu Pal, creator of the Bahubali lights. To give the soothing softness of the indigenous lamps, artists have started fitting them with coloured plastic caps.

This ease of working with LEDs though, has proved to be its bane, at least for a section of artists. “Shops have mushroomed in the last few years, selling readymade

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