On November 4, Kheyal, the Bengali students’ association at UChicago, brought an annual festival called Durgotsav to Ida Noyes. Offering a glimpse into Bengali culture, the event featured cultural performances such as dances and recitations, quintessential Bengali cuisine, and traditional art.
A recent addition to the University’s cultural landscape, Kheyal—meaning “imagination of the uninhibited mind” in Bengali—was founded in 2023 and has since organized a series of events, such as a celebration of the Bengali New Year in April and a tribute to renowned poet Rabindranath Tagore in June.
With Durgotsav, a festival on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, Kheyal claims to have “condensed the sense of what it means to be in Bengal during Durga Puja,” bringing the spirit of this 10-day festival to Hyde Park for the first time.
In an interview with The Maroon, Soumik Ghosh, the president of Kheyal and a fourth-year graduate student in Computer Science from Kolkata, said, “We realized that we were missing something…those elements of home that are central to who we are, such as these celebrations, and we just wanted to carve out a space for us here and involve everyone.”
The culinary portion of the Durgotsav celebration featured a selection of Bengali delicacies, including khichdi, a spiced rice and lentil dish; sandesh, a milk and sugar dessert; and payesh, a rice pudding.
The event also showcased poetry, music, and dance performances by and for the members of the broader community.
“Each element of our event’s decoration is reminiscent of a feature of Durgotsav in Bengal, such as the names of famous pandals [live art installations], kulo art native to rural Bengal, and our handmade goddess Durga made with our version of clay that volunteers and members of Kheyal have crafted over the last several months,” Soumik said.
The event fostered personal connections among both the attendees and the organizers. “Organizing this event brings me closer to home,” said Anchita Addhya, a Ph.D. candidate at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and a core member of Kheyal.
