Chaltabagan Durga Puja unveils 2026 Puja theme ‘Nishan’ inspired by Ramnami Samaj; announces Durga Puja Connect global app for the festival
Chaltabagan’s 84th Durga Puja theme draws on Ramnami tattoos and faith, with a special musical composition and a planned global digital platform.
Sundeep Bhutoria with Pt Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, Shishir Bajoria, and Ashok Jaiswal at the Chaltabagan press meet in Kolkata with Ramnani Samaj members from Chhattisgarh.
Kolkata (West Bengal) [India], September 4: The Manicktala Chaltabagan Lohapatty Durga Puja Committee today announced ‘Nishan — The Mark’ as the theme of its 84th Durga Puja along with the release of a especially composed musical theme by Pt. Vishwa Mohan Bhatt and the soon-to-be launched Durga Puja Connect app, a global digital initiative that will carry Durga Puja — inscribed by UNESCO on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2021 — to devotees, organisers, the diaspora and admirers across the world. Elders of the Ramnami Samaj of Chhattisgarh — a devotional community whose members inscribe the name of Ram across their bodies, a practice that began in the 1890s as a peaceful answer to being denied entry at the temple door — were present as guests of honour. The announcements were made by the Chairman of Chaltabagan Durga Puja, Sundeep Bhutoria, at a press conference in Kolkata in the presence of Grammy Award winner and Padma Bhushan Pt Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, Shri Shishir Bajoria and other dignitaries. “The theme, the music, the presence of the Ramnami Samaj and Durga Puja Connect app are not separate announcements but one idea. A celebration of faith, sacred inscriptions and sounds and a global bridge linking devotees worldwide. Nishan is the mark that is written; the music composition is the audible mark; the Ramnami Samaj are the living proof that a mark, faithfully inscribed, can outlast everything that was used to exclude the people who carry it and the app is the modern mark of technology. It is all about – ink on skin, sound in the air, clay and structure (pratima) in a North Kolkata street and the global connect. With Durga Puja Connect app, we are asking a second question: If a mark can travel across a lifetime, why should a puja not travel across the world? One idea looks inward at what we carry; the other looks outward at how far it can reach,” said Mr Sundeep Bhutoria. The Chaltabagan Durga Puja Committee describes the movement in a single Bengali phrase — ‘Akshar theke Aakar’ (from the letter to the form). The 2026 Puja theme Nishan has been conceived by artist Aditi Chakraborty, whose work continues to centre on communities at the margins of the national picture. “Nishan traces godna, the tattoo, as one of India’s oldest acts of faith, protection and quiet protest — the mark a person carries when there is nothing else to carry. The thematic narrative spans communities and geographies: the Baiga woman’s ornament that poverty cannot take away; the healing ‘Jahar Ulki’ of Latehar; the protective and magical designs of the south; and the fertility motifs whose geometry echoes, remarkably, in the 9 plants of the Nabapatrika that Bengal has worshipped for centuries” said Ms Aditi Chakraborty Grammy Award winner and Padma Bhushan recipient Pt.Vishwa Mohan Bhatt released a special musical composition created for the theme. “When the committee described this theme to me, I recognised it at once as `nishan and naad’. A raga is also a mark — you cannot see it, but it is inscribed, passed from teacher to student, carried for a lifetime. The Ramnamis write the name on the skin; we write it in the air with naad (musical sound). I have tried to compose something that holds both: the sound of a chant that has been repeated for a hundred years, and the sound of an instrument (Mohan Veena) that did not exist before I made it,” Pt. Vishwa Mohan Bhatt said.
