Mullick Ghat Flower Market, or the Cost of Beauty

If you are a resident of the City of Joy, you likely already know where the shelter home of Asia’s one of the largest flower markets is located. Situated under the iconic Howrah Bridge, the market takes its name from the adjacent Mullick Ghat, built by Rammohan Mullick in 1855 in memory of his father, Nimai Charan Mullick. It is believed that in its early days, the market first spread its petals around religious needs, by serving pilgrims heading to Puri from the ghat. Gradually, the fragrance of its flowers seeped into the everyday lives of Kolkata’s people.

Sunrise stored in a plastic bag

Serving birthday parties and funerals alike, the flowers of Mullick Ghat Flower Market have travelled across every corner of the city, and even beyond, for more than a century now. Flowers, even when they are the central characters, remain bound to their fate. By the end of each day, the market hums lullabies to the unsold, trashed, and trampled petals, quietly ignoring their brief existence.

To this day, it remains the wholesale hub for flower sellers across the city. The place awakens long before sunrise, as vendors from at least twenty surrounding districts arrive and unload their flower bundles. Slowly, Mullick Ghat Flower Market begins to mirror the colours of dawn, with heaps of orange and yellow marigold garlands. Piles of lotus, lilies, orchids, roses, sunflowers —the list refuses to end.

Every day, the market witnesses an overwhelming human tide, swarming amidst scattered pixels of colour formed by flowers. From dawn onward, the space pulses relentlessly.

Scattered pixels of colour

But after more than a century of supplying flowers and decorations to the city, the market has also earned another tag: one of Kolkata’s most photogenic spaces for street and wedding photographers. Today, the lanes bustle with people carrying extraordinarily expensive photography and videography gear, chasing carefully curated frames. With nothing more than a bunch of cheerful sunflowers or roses, photographers flock to the ghat area, where the Howrah Bridge arches over the Ganga, offering the perfect backdrop for a “Kolkata-themed” pre-wedding shoot. Their subjects carefully pull the edges of their sarees aside to keep them from being soiled as they step over decades-old, rotting flower remnants.

Street photographers also move through the market with restless urgency, stopping suddenly in narrow, clogged passages to frame their perfect shot. Expensive lenses hover inches away from baskets of flowers, from hands that have been working since before dawn. The vendors rarely protest. They simply look away—out of courtesy, fatigue, or a long-practised understanding that this space no longer belongs entirely to them. For a moment, they are reduced to background texture in someone else’s carefully curated story of Kolkata.

This photography craze cuts both ways. It brings recognition to the place, so much so that even foreign photographers add it to their checklist. But it also draws in crowds largely uninterested in contributing to the livelihoods of those who depend on flowers for daily survival, further intensifying the already overwhelming congestion of the space.

Ignorance of sellers with a hint of distress

While some vendors turn away in quiet disgust at these interruptions, others remain remarkably warm. These otherwise strictly professional flower sellers smile in awe at the costly equipment, offer directions to navigate the maze-like market, and even suggest ways to protect cameras from sudden rain.

Mullick Ghat Flower Market, then, is not merely a space where countless flowers find temporary shelter; it is an amalgamation of lives, intentions, and urgencies. Chaos runs through its veins, and the place thrives on it. Yet it could still be kinder to those who sustain it—with better road surfaces, regular cleaning, and a basic food facility for vendors who quite literally keep the market alive.

It is a space where softness and strength coexist without ceremony. Rugged masculine hands, cracked by years of lifting and tying, pause to catch a single drop of water trembling on a lotus leaf. Nearby, a frail old woman with her face etched with countless intersecting lines carries thousands of hibiscus flowers as though they weigh nothing at all. These bodies return here every morning, long before the city stirs, asking for no witness and no applause. Perhaps Mahadev and Parvati do not need to be imagined here at all; perhaps they already exist in these quiet, unacknowledged acts of endurance, blooming briefly before being carried away.

Softness and strength coexist without ceremony