Lost in translation: KMC cleans up Durga Puja slogan after Mamata attack

• KMC revises mixed Bengali-Hindi Durga Puja slogan after the TMC alleges Hindi imposition.

• Mamata and Abhishek Banerjee and Kunal Ghosh attack the original wording, turning a cleanliness campaign into a language row.

• Bengali sentence is corrected, but original Hindi slogan remains at the top of the poster.

The Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) set out to welcome Goddess Durga to a clean city. Instead, it found itself cleaning up a political mess of its own making — one involving a Bengali-Hindi mash-up, an angry Trinamool Congress (TMC) and a slogan that apparently needed a language lesson before it could pass muster.

The civic body had publicised a cleanliness drive running from 10 to 21 October during the Durga Puja festivities with the slogan ‘Mayer korbo Swacchata Se Swagat’. The sentence combined Bengali and Hindi in a linguistic experiment that seems to have pleased neither language nor the TMC.

The opposition party promptly accused the BJP government of imposing Hindi on Bengal. The KMC, which is currently run by an administrator, subsequently revised the wording. The new slogan read ‘Swachhatar sathe Maa ke swagata janai’ — a Bengali sentence conveying the message of welcoming the goddess with cleanliness.

There was, however, a small complication. While the civic body cleaned up the main sentence, the original Hindi phrase ‘Swachhata Se Swagat’ remained at the top of the revised poster. The language had been corrected, but the evidence had not quite been removed from the scene.

The poster, bearing the logos of both the KMC and the state government, was shared on social media by the civic body. With elections to Kolkata’s municipal corporation likely later this year, the episode has offered the TMC an opportunity to turn a cleanliness campaign into a debate over linguistic identity — a subject on which Bengal’s political parties rarely need much encouragement.

“No amount of proofreading goes into anything posted by @kmc_kolkata, apparently. As long as OUR BEAUTIFUL LANGUAGE IS BEING BUTCHERED, it gets a go-ahead from @BJP4Bengal government! Stop forcing Hindi down Bengal's throat to appease your masters in Delhi. STOP HINDI IMPOSITION. NOW,” the TMC said in a social media post.

Sharing the poster, party national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee wondered whether he had learnt Bengali incorrectly as a child or whether the language had changed without anyone bothering to inform him.

Party MLA and spokesperson Kunal Ghosh was less inclined to treat the matter as a linguistic puzzle.

“What is this? Is this Bengali? Are you joking? How much more bad culture will the BJP impose on West Bengal? How much more will it distort Bengali? Delete all this immediately. Change it. Write proper Bengali. The current state of the corporation is just as bad as this piece of writing,” Ghosh, the Beleghata MLA, said.

Following the criticism, the KMC changed the main slogan, replacing the Bengali-Hindi hybrid with a Bengali sentence. But ‘Swachhata Se Swagat’ continued to occupy its place at the top of the poster — a reminder that, in municipal publicity as in politics, a correction does not always mean a complete clean-up.

The campaign urges Kolkata residents to keep the city clean during the festive season and welcome Goddess Durga into a cleaner metropolis. That is a worthy message. The civic body might now consider extending the same principle to its copywriting: a little attention to detail can prevent a routine cleanliness drive from becoming an exercise in political damage control.

For now, the streets are meant to be cleaned, the Bengali has been tidied up, and the Hindi slogan remains. In Kolkata, it seems, even a poster can end up with a foot in two languages — and both parties ready to pull.

With PTI inputs