About the town:

Vishnupur is a (famous) festival town (in West Bengal). The Bengalis say there are thirteen festivals in the twelve months of the year. Thirteen festivals in twelve days, is more accurate. There are hundreds of temples in the town and household deities are regularly fed, bathed, and feasted. Neighborhood communities, castes, lines, and households offer annual and seasonal celebrations to the gods. Marvels of artistic accomplishment, the temples, images of deities, objects of offering, patterns of procession and celebration are all in honor of the gods. Finally, Vishnupur is a town where itihas collectively signifies the town reflecting on itself, the self-awareness of the town as society.

Vishnupur is (also) the seat of regional administration, municipal governance, and offices of the union and state government bodies. It is a multiplicity of towns: an administrative town with civil service posts, courts, magistrates, police headquarters and a jail; a bazaar town with trade in agricultural procedure, handicrafts and cottage industrial products, and imports from and exports to Calcutta and nearby towns; an educational town with three colleges, many high schools and dozens of elementary schools; a service town with banks, a railway station, bus lines, innumerable tea stalls and a hospital; a civic town with clubs, public service, organizations, relief works, literary societies, sports associations, and a municipality, a political town with offices of the Marxist, Communist, Congress, and Hindu revivalist parties.*

* From time to time the townspeople set up an unaffiliated, non-political: ‘people’s party’ in opposition to all other parties for local government elections. The People’s Party does very well indeed on these occasions.