The Economics of the Sacred: Religious Economy and Transformation of Kolkata's Durga Puja.

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The iconic Goddess celebration of the Hindu pantheon, the magnum opus of Durga Puja in Kolkata, is much more than a religious performance and social practice. Acknowledged by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (2021), Durga Puja, with its wide cultural diaspora, has evolved into an economic juggernaut. Possibly the world’s largest public arts festival, the deity worship has attained the stature of a ‘meta-festival’ involving digital and virtual platforms. Ancient rituals, customs, traditions, and collective memory are thereby sculpted into new folds of market and digital economy.

Set within shifting conditions of governance, capital, and social change, the paper examines how religious festivals become spaces for economic possibilities, while critically assessing the productivity, sustainability, and universality of the festival economy. It asks how the festival’s magnitude impacts Bengal’s economy and GSDP; how the religious historicity of Puja navigates, contests, and transforms itself while sustaining traditional crafts and labour; and whether its economy is consumption-based, urban-centric, sporadic, and short-term. Drawing on a meta-analysis of empirical and epistemic secondary literature, the paper maps the crossover between faith and festivity, tradition and artistic expression, ritual and secular spectatorship, and religious historicity and political economy.