Kolkata festival guide

নিজের শহর, নিজের পথে

Kolkata, at your pace.

Your calm companion for a very lively city. Find the pandals worth seeing, build a route that feels right, and leave more room for the Pujo itself.

Explore pandals Plan my evening

Also on Android.
Free on Google Play.

Free to use In your browser or on Android Works offline

A Durga Puja idol: Maa Durga on her lion with Mahishasura at her feet, Ganesh, Lakshmi, Saraswati and Kartik beside her, beneath a carved chalchitra arch.

Your Pujo walk

Bagbazar to Kumartuli

4 stops

Live city guide

Metro-aware routes

Ready to walk

111 curated routes

671
pandals mapped: 8
districts covered: 55
metro stations: 6
festivals covered

A better way to move through Pujo

Less backtracking. More of the good part.

Everything here is built around one evening on foot, in a city that does not slow down for you.

An illustrated map of Kolkata at dusk: the Hooghly and Howrah Bridge on one side, pandal pins clustered across the city, and a dotted walk from your location to the nearest metro and a highlighted pandal.

Find

Every pandal, on one map

671 pandals across 8 districts, grouped so the busiest lanes stay readable. Search for one, then open it to see what you are walking into.

Search pandals, metro stations and public toilets from a single field
Markers gather together where pandals sit close, so nothing hides behind a pin
Each pandal shows its nearest metro, the walk from it, and one-tap directions
Turn on location and the nearest pandals are listed in order of distance

Open the map

A phone showing a dotted walking route between pandals on a map, beside a stack of stop cards being reordered by hand.

Plan

A route that makes sense on foot

Give it your area, your starting point and the hours you actually have. You get stops in a sensible order with arrival times, not a list you still have to solve yourself.

Or build it by hand: add pandals from the map and reorder them in a tap
Shorten the walking once your stops are chosen, without losing any of them
Save plans to your account and reopen them exactly as you left them
Export the evening as a PDF, or share it as a message

Plan a route

A long queue of visitors outside a lit pandal at dusk, with a crowd meter and a rain cloud above it and a circle on the ground marking the reporting radius.

Decide

See the queue before you join it

The people already standing there tell you what it is like. Crowd level and rain, reported by visitors at the pandal rather than guessed at.

Crowd rated from one to ten, with the current rain status beside it
Reports stay valid for thirty minutes, then quietly expire
A report can only be sent from within 500 metres, so it reflects the real queue
Your name is never attached to anything you report

Check live conditions

Friends looking over a city map where each of them is a coloured pin linked to the group, with a phone showing a QR code to join.

Together

Stay together when you split up

Pandal hopping rarely stays one neat group. Share a live map with the people you came with, for exactly as long as you want to.

Groups of up to 8, joined with a short code or a QR
Everyone sees each other while the group map is open
Choose how long you share for, pause it, or clear your last position
Battery and speed stay hidden if you would rather not show them

Explore groups

Visitor photos of lit pandals and Maa Durga laid out like prints, one marked approved, beside a phone camera and a crossed-out location pin.

Look

See what you are choosing between

This is the most photographed fortnight in the city. Photos from visitors show you the pandal as it is this year, not a stock picture of a different one.

The newest approved photo becomes that pandal's cover on the map and lists
Every photo is checked by a moderator before anyone else sees it
Location details are stripped from the file on your phone before it uploads
Report anything that does not belong, and delete your own photos at any time

Browse pandals

A phone in a packed night-time crowd near a pandal, still showing a saved route map while the signal icon is crossed out.

Offline

Works when the network does not

At nine at night, in a crowd of thousands, the network is the first thing to go. The map you saved keeps working anyway.

Save the map along your route to the phone before you set off
Saved plans, your route and your preferences stay readable with no signal
Anything you change offline syncs by itself once you are back

Save a route

Made for the day you actually have

One good route can change the whole night.

Make three choices and the planner orders your stops for walking, with an arrival time for each.

Build a route

Step 01
Pick your area
Start from where you are, or choose the Kolkata neighbourhood you want to explore.
Step 02
Shape the evening
Set the time you have and the pandals you do not want to miss.
Step 03
Walk with confidence
Follow a practical route with distances, stops and nearby metro information.

Mahalaya to Dashami

Pujo, day by day.

From the radio before dawn on Mahalaya to the last look in the mirror on Dashami, here is what each day is for. The panjika has every rite, offering and bhog, timed.

Dates and times follow Bisuddhasiddhanta. By Surya Siddhanta, which Gupta Press follows, Saptami falls on 17 Oct and Sandhi Puja begins at 7:25 AM.

Open the panjika

Teen chala তিন চালা

The whole family comes home.

A traditional Kolkata pratima stands beneath a three-arched chalchitra. Durga takes the tall centre arch, with Lakshmi and Ganesh on her right and Saraswati and Kartik on her left, and each of them arrives with a vahana.