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Kolkata’s iconic yellow taxis have always been more than just another means of urban transport. For decades, these mighty vehicles have ferried pandal-hoppers from the city’s traditional North to the modern South; carried last-minute Durga pujo hauls from the Gariahat market to family homes; and squeezed through the narrowest lanes of North Kolkata’s paras to take Kolkatans home at the end of a night-long pandal-hopping. Now, as their numbers dwindle and the iconic yellow taxis slowly fade out from Kolkata’s streets, Asian Paints, in collaboration with XXL Collective, has given these beloved mascots of Kolkata a second life — as moving time capsules of the city’s most celebrated festival.
In celebration of 40 years of the Asian Paints Sharad Shamman, the Cholte Cholte 40 campaign has transformed forty yellow taxis into immersive moving artworks. Contemporary artists Bikramjit Paul, Meenakshi Sengupta, Sayan Mukherjee, and Srishti Guptaroy have reimagined each cab, showcasing a decade of Durga Pujo’s art history through painted exteriors and interiors featuring wallpapers, textiles, and Asian Paints finishes.
From the nostalgia of 1985 transistor radios and the first Sharad Shamman advert to the 1990s Chandannagar lights, the spectacle-driven pandals of the 2000s, and today’s projection-mapped, Instagrammed goddess, the taxis trace Durga Pujo’s evolution from a neighbourhood ritual to a global phenomenon. The taxi project builds on Asian Paints’ 2023 initiative, which marked 150 years of Kolkata’s tramways by turning a bogie into a moving artwork.
Durga Pujo has always been more than a religious festival in Kolkata — more akin to the Venice Biennale than the North Indian Dussehra. In 2021, UNESCO recognised it as an intangible cultural heritage precisely because it is also a cosmopolitan carnival, a theatre of contemporary art, design, and collective imagination. In 1985, Sharad Shamman was the first to frame Pujo through this lens, awarding creativity and craftsmanship rather than religious devotion. Over four decades, it has chronicled how pandals became elaborate installations, artisans became celebrated creators, and Pujo became Kolkata’s biggest stage.
But Cholte Cholte 40 is not only about celebrating Durga Pujo’s cultural memory — it is also about corporate branding. By placing its crown atop the city’s most beloved but endangered symbol, Asian Paints has, perhaps inadvertently, reminded us that corporate sponsorship now underwrites much of Durga Pujo’s spectacle. What was once a neighbourhood-led, community-driven celebration is today entangled with marketing, consumer aesthetics, and urban gentrification. Even as para pandals struggle with rising costs and shrinking spaces, Durga Pujo imagery has become a prime site for corporate storytelling.
By merging this history with the yellow taxi — another iconic but now endangered emblem of the city — the project strikes a deep chord with Kolkatans, but also provokes questions. It acknowledges that Kolkata’s Pujo culture is not only sustained by thought-provoking idols and pandals, but also by all the peripheral machinery that connects them, that we often take for granted, like the taxis that once moved — and still move — people, materials, and memories across the city.
Watch the Cholte Cholte 40 campaign film below:
