• ISBN13: 9789384082468
• Binding: Hardcover
• Subject: Religion and Philosophy
• Publisher: Ratna Sagar
• Publisher Imprint: PrimusBook
• Publication Date: February 15, 2015
• Pages: 408
• Original Price: INR 5500.0
• Language: English
• Edition: N/A
• Item Weight: 1630 grams

The book’s central concern lies in conceptualizing a specically contemporary and artistic history of the urban festival. In keeping with its title, the book examines the diversity of images and practices – from the consumerist spectacle and the bonanza of awards to the eorescence of public installations and art and craft productions – that unfurls in this season ‘in the name of the goddess’. While proling the Durga Pujas as Kolkata’s biggest public art event, the book also addresses the ambivalence of the designations of ‘art’ and ‘artist’ in this eld of production and viewership. One of the main aims of this study has been to lay open the claims of ‘art’ in this festival both as a set of insistent projections as well as a mesh of incomplete formations. The new artistic nomenclature of the festival, it is shown, is not easily secured and has to struggle to assert itself within the body of the religious event and the ephemeral mass spectacle.

Tapati Guha-Thakurta is Professor in History and currently the Director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC). Her two main books are The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, Cambridge University Press, 1992, and Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India, Columbia University Press and Permanent Black, 2004. She is also the author of several articles on the art and cultural history of modern India, and exhibition monographs.