If Holi is the festival where India lets its hair down, Kolkata does it in its own peculiar way, something you won’t believe until you see it.
Holi is known as Dol or Doljatra in West Bengal and marks the arrival of spring. The famous Rolls-Royce Holi of Kolkata feels straight out of a magical realist novel. A century-old British car, a 1921 Rolls-Royce, was acquired in 1927 by the Bagla family becomes a mobile shrine for Radha and Krishna.
Legend has it that the vintage Rolls-Royce which is paraded every year in Kolkata, once belonged to the famous authour Rudyard Kipling who sold it to Kumar Ganga Dhar Bagla in 1927. Since then, the car acts as a sort of a moving shrine the idols of Radha and Krishna during the Holi procession
The Baglas are a prominent business family of the Burrabazar area and long-time patrons of the Satyanarayan Ji Temple. Instead of treating the automobile as a symbol of wealth, the family dedicated it to religious use. Over time, it became the ceremonial vehicle for the annual Dol procession.
For decades, this remained a local tradition within Burrabazar’s Marwari mercantile community. Only recently did videos of a flower-covered Rolls-Royce moving through clouds of colour go viral, turning a neighbourhood ritual into a citywide curiosity. Devotees and others walk along with the car and sing kirtans, dance, and play with abir.
In 2026, Holi falls on Wednesday, March 4. The procession usually begins around midday and continues for several hours through the lanes of Burrabazar and central Kolkata, and stretch towards Howrah.
Holi in India has many faces. From the riotous energy of Mathura, the royal pageantry of Rajasthan, to the flower showers of Vrindavan. Kolkata’s version is much more colourful, full of bhakti and occasionally eccentric. Here, colour is applied with love, music replaces chaos, and sometimes, if you are in the right lane at the right hour, Krishna arrives not on a wooden chariot but in a vintage Rolls-Royce.
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