The autumn air is replete with the festive fervour of Durga Puja, Bengal’s biggest festival. Kolkata alone holds around 3000 pujo annually. While the big and famous venues  known as  barowari or community  pujas dominate the scene to pay obeisance to the Shakti Goddess, the old and historical venues too have continued to hold forth with their hundreds of years’s existence.  Lensman Avishek Mitra captures some pre-puja portraits of north Kolkata's aristocratic family pujas

Kolkata’s Hatibagan Nabin Pally is set to bring alive the world of eminent Bengali writer and poet Sukumar Ray’s ‘Abol Tabol’, which completes 100 years in 2023, in this Durga Puja.Images by Avishek Mitra/IBNS