Kumartuli: the potters' quarter behind Kolkata's Durgas, and how to visit before Puja

In 2014 the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts made a film about the image-makers of Kumartuli, and in the note that goes with it on the Internet Archive it describes their work in a single line. It is "anonymously produced, anonymously sold, and then cast into the river year after year." Hold on to that sentence when you walk down the lanes. Most of us in Kolkata know the name of our para's pandal. Few of us, we suspect, know the name of the man or woman who made the goddess inside it.

Kumartuli is the potters' quarter of north Kolkata. Wikipedia's article on Kumortuli places it between Rabindra Sarani, the old Chitpur Road, and the Hooghly, with Ahiritola on one side and Shobhabazar on the other. The name says what it is: kumor is a potter, and a tuli or tola is a quarter. So why does a neighbourhood this small matter so much every October, and how old is it really? The answer runs back to the years before the Battle of Plassey.

Where is Kumartuli, and how do you get there?

From the metro, walk west towards the river. The Circular Railway runs along the river itself, so from Sovabazar Ahiritola you only have to turn into the lanes.

How old is Kumartuli?

Older, we think, than most visitors assume, and the best witness is a book printed in 1907. In Calcutta Old and New, H. E. A. Cotton describes the "native town" that grew up north of the English fort in the eighteenth century, swollen by people who crossed the river to escape the Maratha raids of 1742. It was a string of hamlets, and some were named after the trade of the people who first settled them. "Koomartolly was the quarter of the potters," Cotton writes, next to Moocheepara, the cobblers' quarter, and Colootollah, the oil-pressers'.

The same book gives us one of Kumartuli's earliest famous residents. Banamali Sarkar, a dewan who became deputy trader to the East India Company, built a house here "during the years 1740 to 1750", grand enough to enter a Bengali rhyme that Cotton prints in full: Banmali Sarkarer bari, Govindram Mitrar chari, Amir Chander dari, Huzuri Maler kari, ke janen na? Banamali Sarkar's house, Govindram Mitra's stick, Amirchand's beard, Huzurimal's money: who does not know them? Wikipedia says the house stood into the nineteenth century. The street that carries his name is still there.

Where did the potters come from? Bengali Wikipedia's article on Kumartuli says they came from Nabadwip, Shantipur and Krishnanagar in Nadia, looking for a better living in the new city. The Puja that, to our mind, made them indispensable came a little later. Shobhabazar Rajbari, a short walk away, dates its Durga Puja to 1757, when Raja Nabakrishna Deb held it on a grand scale after Plassey, with Clive on the list of invitees. Bengali Wikipedia adds a story that is too good to leave out, though it gives no older source for it: the potters of the time had never seen a lion, so the Raja's Durga rode a horse instead.

1. 1700

   Nandaram Sen, after whom a Kumartuli street is named, assists Ralph Sheldon, the first Collector of Calcutta (Cotton, 1907; Wikipedia calls Nandaram himself the first tax collector)

2. 1740s

   Banamali Sarkar builds his house in Coomartolly, between 1740 and 1750 (Cotton)

3. 1742

   Families from across the river crowd into the native town during the Maratha raids (Cotton)

4. 1757

   Nabakrishna Deb's Durga Puja at Shobhabazar, after Plassey

5. 1933

   Kumartuli Sarbojanin's public Puja begins, with Gopeshwar Pal as its image-maker (Bengali Wikipedia)

6. 1947

   The Dhakeswari idol is brought to Kolkata from Dhaka at Partition; its Kumartuli temple follows in 1950

7. 2014

   The IGNCA's film on Kumartuli's image-makers, later given a Rajat Kamal

The goddess who came from Dhaka

For a reader whose family came from the other side of the border, the most moving thing in Kumartuli is not a workshop at all. English Wikipedia's article on Kumortuli records that when India was partitioned in 1947, the idol of Dhakeswari, the goddess of Dhaka's old temple, was carried out of Dhaka and brought to Kolkata; the same article also gives 1946 for the flight that carried it. She is small, about a foot and a half tall, with ten arms, a Katyayani Mahishasuramardini. In 1950 a businessman named Debendranath Chowdhary built her a temple in Kumartuli.

So the quarter that sends new goddesses out every autumn also keeps one very old one who came to stay. Many families in Kolkata made that same crossing in those years. She is one of the few travellers from 1947 whose journey the city can still go and stand in front of.

Who makes the goddesses

The film's note calls the makers originally potters "by caste", the people around whom the quarter first grew. Bengali Wikipedia dates Kumartuli Sarbojanin, the neighbourhood's own public Puja, to 1933 and names Gopeshwar Pal as its image-maker. It also counts about thirty women among Kumartuli's image-makers, which the easy habit of calling every maker a kumor tends to hide.

Few of us know the name of the person who made the goddess.

Their work travels. In Bengaluru this year, BARSHA's Puja in Electronic City says on its own page that its idol is by an award-winning Kumartuli artisan; our guide to Durga Puja in Bengaluru has the rest. At home, the Kumartuli Park committee has chosen the river itself as its 2026 theme, Ganga, why do you flow, and its September post spoke of the image-makers in the lanes being busy giving the goddess her form. It is on our pandal guide's North Kolkata walk, which ends here by the river.

When you see a goddess you like, ask whose she is. Not the committee's name. The maker's.

▶16:20Play: Kali Katha: Debi Durgar Nirman

Kali Katha: Debi Durgar Nirman

Mirchi Bangla

Mirchi Bangla's Times of Puraan, told by Jagannath Basu: Debi Durgar Nirman, the making of Durga, in about sixteen minutes. Put it on for the metro ride up to Sovabazar, and then go and see how people make her.

▶ Play hereWatch on YouTube · Mirchi Bangla

Visiting Kumartuli before Puja: what to know

This part comes from the sources below and the map, not from a visit this season. The logic of the calendar is simple. Mahalaya falls on Saturday 10 October 2026, and Shashthi, the first of the Puja days, across Friday 16 and Saturday 17 October, depending on the almanac. Idols have to reach the pandals before the Puja begins, so, as we reckon it, the closer you come to Shashthi, the more of them will already have gone, and the earlier you go, the more you will see being made.

• Go in daylight: it is a working neighbourhood, and the day is when the work is on.
• Ask before you take a picture of a person, and take no for an answer. A workshop is someone's place of work, and often their home as well.
• Do not step into a workshop, or touch an unfinished figure, unless you are asked in. Wet clay marks easily.
• Pack light. A big camera bag takes up room that belongs to the people working.
• Make a morning of it: Shobhabazar Rajbari on Raja Nabakrishna Street is a short walk away, and so is the river.

Walk down to the ghat before you leave. It is the river that has run past Kumartuli since Cotton's potters settled here, and the one the goddesses you have just watched being made will be carried back to after Dashami. Made anonymously, the note said, and cast into the river year after year. Standing there, it reads less like a complaint than a description of a very old promise that the city keeps.

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