Durga Puja and Circular Design

The Ephemeral City

Durga Puja as an act of collective design — and what circular thinking can teach us about Day 6

By Dr Anindita Roy (PhD) DesignEducatorDelhi@gmail.com

Durga Puja is, at its heart, an extraordinary act of collective design.

Think about it — no other festival in India operates at this scale, with this intensity, for such a short, intentional lifespan.

Every year, an entire ecosystem of designers, artisans, kumars, chitrakars, lighting artists, textile workers, decorators, sound designers, organizers and neighbourhood communities come together to build a city within a city.

Temporary architecture that can hold thousands. Sculpture that is both sacred and contemporary. Textile canopies stitched from hundreds of meters of fabric. Lighting as scenography. Wayfinding, crowd flow, visual identity, sensory experience — all created in ordinary lanes, parks, vacant lots, transforming them into an immersive cultural landscape.

It is arguably the world's largest public art biennale. And it is designed to disappear.

Which is exactly where contemporary design needs to pause and ask:

What happens to all of it when Puja is over?

The pandal comes down in 48 hours. The bamboo skeleton is pulled apart. Fabric, flex, synthetic drapes are discarded. Thermocol — light, cheap, unrecyclable — breaks into particles that stay. Synthetic paint, plastic trimmings, cable ties, single-use decor enter the waste stream. Flowers, bel leaves, and organic offerings get mixed with non-biodegradable refuse. And during immersion, materials that were never meant for water — from paints and varnishes to structural elements and decoration — ultimately reach our water bodies.

We design magnificently for 5 days. We rarely design for Day 6.

This is where the principles of circular design offer such an interesting lens to look at Durga Puja — not as a critique, but as a creative brief.

Because circularity is something Puja already knows in its roots. The traditional idol was clay, straw, bamboo and natural colour — designed to return to the river. The pandal was once jute, cloth, wood, and hand-painted elements. Nothing was waste because everything had a next life.

What if we reclaimed that intelligence with today's design tools?

1. Design for disassembly, not demolition
What if every pandal had a material passport? Bamboo joints that can be unbolted and reused. Fabric systems that are modular and returnable to the decorator for the next event. No fevicol where a tie will do. No material that has only one use.

2. Choose materials with a next life
Natural fibres, undyed cottons, jute, bamboo, cane, clay, reclaimed wood, paper installations. Natural dyes and water-based paints for idols. Lighting designed with rental, not purchase. Can we have a glory without thermocol?

3. Keep the streams separate
Flowers, food and natural offerings are not waste — they are resources, if not contaminated. A simple system at the pandal level to separate nirmalya for composting, fabric for reuse, and synthetics for responsible handling changes everything.

4. Rethink immersion
If the idol is made of shol, clay and natural pigment, immersion is not pollution, it is return. If it isn't, we need to design new rituals of return — symbolic immersion, community tanks with filtration, or reclaiming clay.

5. Celebrate the process as much as the product
Circular design also means valuing makers, repair, reuse. Documenting where the bamboo came from, who wove it, where it will go next. Making sustainability part of the storytelling of the pandal itself.

Durga Puja has always taught us that beauty can be temporary, and still be profound.

The next evolution is to teach us that something temporary doesn't have to be wasteful.

It can be the most powerful demonstration of circular design in public — where devotion, art, community and ecology are not separate ideas, but part of the same immersive experience.

From coming together, to going back to the earth together.