"Durga Puja" or simply "Puja" remains to be the pivoting point for any Bengali life. The years are described as "Before Puja" and "After Puja" days. No Bengali can escape the effect of this Festival. As with everything in Bengali life, Durga Puja has also become the part of Bengali cultural celebration. Be it Art, Literature or Music.
Though we get a large amount of these literature and musics published every year during Puja time, they are not necessarily religious in nature(and mostly not). And over the years, it has become a strict practice for all the writers and artists to reserve their best works to be published during Puja. Thus we have genres which are called "Puja Literature" or "Puja Songs". HMV/EMI/GCI named them as "Sharad Arghya" or "Autumn Offerings", as the Puja is celebrated in the Autumn Season.
If one looks carefully, there used to be a small hand drawn logo HMV used to put on the record covers depicting them as Puja releases.
For easy reference, we can see that all the RD Burman, Asha Bhosle records posted above by Sourav are Puja releases. The cover of "Firey Elam"(
https://www.hifivision.com/attachments/phire-elam_lp_emi_front-jpg.60383/) has the logo on top right hand corner. The last Asha Bhosle LP cover reads "Puja Hits" (
https://www.hifivision.com/attachments/asha-bhosle-puja-hits_lp_emi_front-jpg.60385/) which is a compilation of songs released during previous puja times.
Even the Kishore Kumar Bengali LP (
https://www.hifivision.com/attachments/kk_bangla_amar-pujar-phool_megaphone-jpg.60620/)posted here, has compilation of 8 puja songs out of a total of 12 songs on the LP.
Rest other albums shared till now are Puja releases too besides maybe one that of Arati Mukherjee.
Thus we can see, how celebration of a festival hugely influenced basic, non-film Bengali Music.
Regards
