The yellow taxi gets a designer touch for 'pujas'

The wheezing cab might seem an odd vehicle to mark Durga Puja, but they once were part of celebrations, ferrying families to 'pandals'

- SANDIP ROY

I was not sure whether to be awestruck or bemused.

A yellow Kolkata taxi with interiors covered by Sabyasachi wallpapers and textiles! Sabyasachi Mukherjee, a designer famous for being lavish and ostentatious, and yellow Hindustan Ambassador taxis, infamous for wheezing and rattling, make for an odd couple. It could be seen as one Kolkata icon's salute to another. But it could also be seen as a delusion of grandeur.

The interior of a Kolkata taxi is special. There's no air-conditioning and on hot muggy days you can leave sweat stains on the seats. These days the seats look even sadder, sometimes ripped and patched together, the seams showing. But these taxis had rich Sabysachi wallpapers and furnishing fabrics with opulent names like "Jamshed Jamavar", recalling the prized shawls of the Bengali elite, or "Chowringhee", evoking the majestic central boulevard of colonial Calcutta.

These taxis are Durga Puja specials. Every year, like many other companies, Asian Paints gives out Sharad Samman awards to celebrate the best of Kolkata's Durga Pujas, and this year, to celebrate 40 years of the awards, they commissioned four artists to depict four decades of Durga Puja.

The canvas was the bodies of the yellow taxis. The artists filled that space with colourful drawings representing the changing face of Durga Puja—the woman in a white sari with red borders painting alpana or rangoli giving way to the razzmatazz of eye-popping lighting displays, traditional images turning into theme pujas. The rise of Bengali bands, celebrity theme artists and social media Reels all found place on the taxis' exteriors.

Yellow taxis have long been symbols of the city. When Chiranjeevi came to Kolkata to shoot the Telugu film Bhola Shankar in 2023, he shot a scene wearing the grey uniform of a Kolkata taxi driver, with 30 taxis and their real-life drivers as extras. Nothing says Kolkata like its trams and yellow taxis.