How Kolkata's favourite Durga Puja app found a place in Germany AI debate
A digital project born out of Kolkata’s Durga Puja is now set to enter a global conversation on religion, technology and artificial intelligence (AI). ThePujaApp, which has been documenting Kolkata’s Puja installations through virtual tours since 2013, has been invited to the international conference ‘God, Human, Machine: Images and Imaginaries of Religion in the Age of AI’ at the esteemed University of Erfurt, Germany, from September 28 to 30.
The invitation is significant because the app is being treated not simply as a digital guide to Durga Puja, West Bengal’s biggest festival, but an example of how technology can preserve, reproduce and reshape religious experience.
“It is a moment of pride and gratitude for us,” said Soumyaditya Mukherjee, one of the two founders of the app. “We started off as a humble project purely out of curiosity and love for Pujo. This invitation gives a sense of achievement,” he said.
The invitation, according to Mukherjee, came after the organisers had closely watched the functioning of the app for several editions. There was no application for participation from the app’s end.
ThePujaApp began with a straightforward idea: create virtual tours of Durga Puja pandals for people who could not physically visit them, particularly Bengalis living outside Kolkata. Its first edition in 2013 featured just 10 pujas.More than a decade later, its archive contains over 500 installations, including several Kolkata pujas whose elaborate themes and artworks have long disappeared from the physical landscape.
The Covid pandemic gave the concept an unexpected boost. With physical visits restricted, virtual Puja viewership increased five to six times, helping the platform build a community of around 400,000 users.
Puja committees that collaborate with the app also receive individual QR codes, allowing visitors to access their digital archives. In effect, a festival whose installations are deliberately temporary gets a permanent digital memory.
The app has now moved beyond simply recording what exists. In 2025, its AI-powered selfie feature allowed users to upload a selfie or group photograph and digitally place themselves inside a chosen Puja pandal—without having to negotiate crowds or difficult lighting.
At Erfurt, ThePujaApp will participate in a special roundtable, ’Traversing Design, Art & Devotion’, alongside creators working with Islamic religious imagery. The following day, it will feature in a guided VR demonstration alongside Hajji VR and VR Karbala.
The larger question being explored is no longer merely whether technology can take people to a Puja pandal virtually. It is how digital technologies are changing the way people see, remember and imagine the sacred. And in that debate, Kolkata’s disappearing pandals have found an unlikely second life—inside the global conversation about religion and AI.
