Durga Puja

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Durga Puja is the principal autumn festival of the goddess Durga, observed above all in Bengal and across the wider Bengali world. It falls in the lunar month of Ashvin, in September or October, in the bright half that elsewhere in India is kept as Navaratri; its decisive days run from the sixth of that fortnight to the tenth, Vijaya Dashami, on which the worship is concluded and the image released. For the weeks around it, ordinary life in Kolkata and the towns of the delta rearranges itself around the festival.

At the center stands the goddess herself, shown in the form the tradition gives her: many-armed, mounted on a lion, driving a trident into the chest of the buffalo-demon Mahishasura at the instant of his defeat. The myth she enacts is old, set down in the Sanskrit Devi Mahatmya, where the gods, unable to master the demon themselves, pour their combined power into a single woman who does what they could not. Each year an image of this scene is built new — modeled in clay over a straw and bamboo frame, painted, dressed, and installed in a temporary pavilion, the pandal, raised on a neighborhood’s streets. For the high days the clay figure is treated as the living presence of the goddess, invoked into it by the priests and served with the offerings, recitations, and lamps of formal worship.

What practitioners hold is that Durga is not only the warrior of the myth but the Mother, come home for the festival as a daughter returns to her parents’ house, and the affection of the observance is shaped by that double sense — the combatant who slays the demon and the kinswoman whose visit is brief. On the final day the image is carried in procession to a river or tank and immersed, its clay dissolving back into the water from which the earth was taken. The departure is mourned and marked: the deity is asked to come again the following year.

Scholarship traces the festival’s public, civic form to Bengal under the British, where landed families mounted lavish household celebrations and, in time, neighborhood associations took the rite into the streets as the community pujas that now define it; the artisans’ quarter of Kumartuli in north Kolkata remains the place where the images are made. UNESCO added Durga Puja in Kolkata to its list of intangible cultural heritage in 2021, citing the festival as an occasion where religious devotion, public art, and communal life are not easily separated. The clay is shaped, honored for a few days, and returned to the river; the frame is kept for the next year.

→ In the library: Hymns to the Goddess (Avalon, 1913)

→ Related: Sankara