The man who can get a church to celebrate Christmas with alpona - GetBengal story

“I am the most devious person in Calcutta. My job is to go out and seduce people so that a no turns into a yes,” declares the man who says he doesn’t live in Kolkata…Kolkata lives in him.

Through his 60-odd years on this earth, Mudar Patherya has worn several hats, among them journalist and communications consultant. But his everlasting legacy is likely to be his untiring, more or less single-handed efforts to make Kolkata a better, more inclusive, more beautiful place. To keep alive its ideals of pluralism and multiculturalism. 

Those familiar with his earlier campaigns will know of the electricity boxes which Patherya and his team turned into their canvases, covering them with murals of Bengal’s greatest cultural icons.

In the process, he has established a few SOPs that other activists – perhaps even the government – have much to learn from. For starters, he has got over 170 citizens and corporates to donate over Rs 1 crore to his cause. Without fuss, without fanfare, Patherya has shown how artistic and cultural conservation, and urban beautification can be crowdfunded. 

And on a more intangible level, he has effortlessly broken through supposedly rigid barriers of caste, creed, and community. 

For the past 13 months, he has been also engaged in illuminating some of Kolkata’s most notable buildings, and the 58th building on the list is the daddy of them all – the Raj Bhavan, where 30 percent of the work is already complete, he says. Once lit, Patherya says his plan is to keep the illumination going forever, which involves regular maintenance, which  in turn means regular expense. But there’s always the crowdfunding, remember. 

Perhaps more pertinently for this time of year, Patherya and his team have taken up the task of decorating the city’s distinctive Greek Orthodox Church in Kalighat with the quintessentially bengali alpona on the occasion of Christmas. 

This particular revolution began ahead of Christmas 2022, when Patherya and his team comprising artists Ratnabali Ghosh, Prasanta Sain and Lipika Mookerjee decorated the altar of Sacred Heart Church in Dharmatala with alpana motifs that transformed the church’s interior into a magical blend of traditional Christian symbols and Bengali folk art.

In an era when ‘orthodox’ translates to ‘blindly bigoted’, this devout Gujarati Muslim is teaming up with Bengali Hindus to decorate Christian places of worship with traditional Hindu motifs, or at least perceived as such. 

But the point Patherya is making – and he insists that he is making a point – is that the alpona is a cultural motif, not a religious one. Indeed, the religious angle has been thrust upon this essentially folk art form over the centuries, so that anyone wishing to decorate a place of worship – even a home – belonging to another religious community with alpona risks lighting a veritable communal fire. 

“It’s ridiculous,” says Patherya. “We should have alpona on all special occasions…Netaji’s birthday, for example, or Vivekananda’s birthday, or Christmas. Otherwise, it will just keep getting communalised.” So he has no trouble “jazzing off to church 45 minutes after my morning prayers” for the alpona project, or decorating his own home with alpona stars and crescents for Eid. 

The fruit of his labours is not just an aesthetically pleasing space, as Greek Orthodox Church parish priest Father Raphael enthusiastically attests to, but also a way of paying back to the city he loves. “If the crowdfunding is smartly done and I’m sustainable, then my projects are sustainable,” he says simply. 

Perhaps more importantly, Patherya’s citizens’ initiatives are his tribute to the multicultural, inclusive space he so proudly occupies. And the artistic heritage he wants everyone to celebrate. 

If one Mudar Patherya can become a veritable one-man army, what stops his fellow citizens from following in his footsteps?