Clay Pulse — a poetic sequence with accompanying photographs

Clay Pulse is the opening movement of Ma Durga Asche, a photobook tracing Ma Durga's annual cycle across four pulses: Clay Pulse (birth in Kumartuli workshops), Pandal Pulse (five-night celebration), River Pulse (Hooghly immersion), and Horizon Pulse (atmospheric return).

‍

"Clay Pulse" documents Kumartuli and Durga Idol Making, North Kolkata's artisan quarter,

where male sculptors shape Hooghly River clay into Durga idols for the annual Puja.

The poems are voiced by the emerging goddess herself—speaking from clay, straw,

and anticipation—as she witnesses her own becoming through the city's hands, sounds, and infrastructures.

This is not documentation of festivals but enactment of theological process:
birth, embodiment, and the productive tension between mass
production and singular divine presence.
‍

The sequence employs what I call ethnopoetic practice—where poetry functions not as illustration but as a
compressed phenomenological proposition.

Each line attempts what ethnographic prose cannot: to articulate what clay knows as it becomes goddess,

what the city says through trams and bridges and steel lattices writing themselves onto sacred form.

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍