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. Offices empty, debts are settled, new clothes are bought, and people who have left the delta for work elsewhere return to it, so that the calendar of the year bends toward these few days as toward a homecoming — which, in the festival’s own theology, is exactly what they are.

The Calendar of the Bright Fortnight

The festival’s spine is lunar. Ashvin’s waxing half — the shukla paksha, the fortnight of the growing moon — is kept across much of India as Navaratri, the nine nights of the Goddess, and the Bengali observance is one regional form of that wider keeping rather than a thing apart from it. What distinguishes the Bengali form is its concentration: where Navaratri elsewhere distributes nine nights of worship more evenly, Durga Puja loads almost all of its weight onto the closing days. Worship gathers from the sixth, Shashthi, when the goddess is held to arrive and her face is first unveiled, through the seventh, eighth, and ninth — Saptami, Ashtami, Navami — the high days on which the image is fully quickened and the great oblations made, to the tenth, Vijaya Dashami, the day of victory, on which the worship is formally dissolved and the image taken to the water. The eighth and ninth bear the heaviest charge; the juncture between them, the sandhi moment when one tithi gives way to the next, is reckoned the most potent instant of the whole span, the very hinge on which the demon was killed. A separate preliminary worship, the Mahalaya that opens the dark fortnight a week earlier, calls the ancestors and announces that the Goddess is on her way; from that pre-dawn it is held that she has set out.

The Scene the Image Holds

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. In the Bengali tableau she does not stand alone. The demon erupts in human shape from the severed neck of a buffalo at her feet, caught at the moment the disguise fails him; her lion mauls him; and ranged around the central group come four further deities, given to her in the Bengali convention as her children — so that the whole composition reads at once as a battlefield and as a family portrait. The myth she enacts is old, set down in the Sanskrit Devi Mahatmya, the “Glorification of the Goddess,” a work of perhaps the sixth century embedded in the larger Markandeya Purana, where the gods, unable to master the demon themselves, pour their combined power into a single woman who does what they could not. Each of the weapons in her many hands is a god’s own weapon, surrendered to her: the discus of Vishnu, the trident of Shiva, the thunderbolt, the bow, the noose, the conch. She is not the consort of any of them but the form their pooled radiance takes, and the text is read in full during the festival as its scripture, its roughly seven hundred verses chanted as the Chandi, the Durga Saptashati.

The theological reach of that scene runs past the figure to its ground. Shakta thought — the current of Hindu devotion that holds the divine feminine, shakti, to be the active power of the cosmos — reads Durga as that power itself, the energy without which the gods are inert, and so as the immediate face of Brahman, the single reality the gods are aspects of. Kali, in the Devi Mahatmya, springs from Durga’s own knitted brow in the heat of battle, the black and terrible aspect breaking out of the warrior’s wrath; the festival keeps both in view, the composed slayer above and, in the deep night of Ashtami, the darker power that drinks the demon’s blood. The Vedantin reading associated with Adi Shankara would gloss the whole as one undivided absolute behind its appearances — a doctrinal frame the Shakta tradition both shares and inflects, since for the Shakta the absolute is precisely the Mother and not a neuter ground behind her.

The Clay Body of the Goddess

Each year an image of this scene is built new. The artisan begins with a frame of bamboo lashed and tied to take the weight, packs it out with bound straw to rough the volumes of body and limb, and over that lays the clay — first a coarse, fibered earth for strength, then a fine river silt for the skin, dried and smoothed until the surface will take paint. The eyes are left for last. On the morning the goddess is held to arrive, the painter opens them in a separate observance, chokkhu daan, the giving of the eyes, the stroke that is felt to turn a modeled figure into a face that can look back. The finished image is painted, dressed in cloth and ornament, crowned, and installed in the pandal — a temporary pavilion, raised on a neighborhood’s streets, that in the great urban pujas has become an art form of its own, an enormous built environment of bamboo, cloth, and themed construction into which crowds move all night.

For the high days the clay figure is not a representation but a residence. The priests invoke the living presence of the goddess into the image through the rite of prana pratishtha, the establishing of breath, after which the figure is treated as the deity herself: bathed, robed, offered light and food and flowers and the recited word, served as an honored and divine guest in the full sequence of formal worship that the tradition calls puja, the rite of honoring a present god of which this festival is one great seasonal species. (This is not the older Vedic yajna, the fire-offering of oblation poured into flame; image-worship is a different architecture of approach, the god received as guest rather than fed through fire, though the festival folds smaller fire-oblations into its program.) What the rite does to the clay is the whole point of it: for a handful of days a thing made of straw and silt becomes the unassailable Goddess in person, and the intensity of the festival is the intensity of having her bodily at hand.

The Warrior and the Daughter

The festival carries a double theology, and the affection of it lives in the doubling. On one face Durga is the warrior of the myth, the deity whose name means the inaccessible, the fortress, the unassailable — the power that holds the world together and is armed. On the other she is the Mother who has come home. In the Bengali telling she is a married daughter who returns each autumn from her husband Shiva’s far mountain to her parents’ house, bringing her children, staying the few short days of the festival before she must go back. This is why the days are counted as a visit and the close is felt as a parting. The songs of the season are addressed to her as a daughter and sung in the voice of a mother receiving her; the laments of the final day are a mother’s at seeing her go. The combatant who pins the demon and the kinswoman whose stay is brief are not two goddesses reconciled but one presence held in both registers at once — the theology that makes the festival both a victory and a leave-taking.

On Vijaya Dashami, the worship is formally withdrawn. Married women smear the goddess’s face and one another’s with vermilion in the rite of sindur khela, a last intimacy before the departure; the breath that was established in the image is bid to rise from it; and the figure is carried in procession, with drums and dancing and the cry that the goddess will come again, to a river or a tank and immersed. The clay dissolves back into the water from which the silt was taken, and the bamboo-and-straw armature, stripped, can be kept toward the next year. The release is not a discarding but the completion of a logic: a presence invoked into earth for a span of days is given back to the element it was drawn from when the span ends.

The Civic Festival and Its Makers

The festival as a public, city-filling thing has a traceable history, and that history is largely modern. Scholarship locates the emergence of the grand, spectacular Durga Puja in Bengal under Company and British rule, when landed families — the zamindar and merchant households of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — mounted lavish bonedi bari celebrations in their own courtyards as displays of standing as much as of devotion, sometimes with British guests in attendance. The decisive turn came when the rite left the great houses for the street. The community puja, the sarbojanin or “for-everyone” puja organized by a neighborhood association and funded by subscription, is generally dated to the early twentieth century, with celebrations claiming the form from around 1910 onward; it democratized a festival that had been a privilege of wealth and made it the property of the locality. From that shift descends the modern landscape of competing neighborhood pandals, themed and judged and thronged, that now defines the season in Kolkata.

The images for all of it come, in large part, from one quarter. Kumartuli — the potters’ colony of north Kolkata, its name meaning the potters’ district — is the workshop of the festival, a warren of riverside studios where families of kumars, image-makers, build the goddesses through the monsoon for the autumn, turning out figures from the modest to the monumental and shipping them across the city and, increasingly, across the world to the Bengali diaspora. The craft is hereditary and the calendar is brutal; the year’s work compresses into the weeks before Ashvin. In 2021 the festival’s standing as a phenomenon in which devotion, public art, and communal life cannot be cleanly separated was recognized when UNESCO inscribed “Durga Puja in Kolkata” on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, at the committee’s sixteenth session in December of that year, naming it among the finest instances of the public performance of religion and art and a meeting-ground for collaborating artists and designers (UNESCO ICH 00703).

Texts and Scholarship

The festival’s scriptural core is the Devi Mahatmya, and the standard public-domain English access to it is through F. E. Pargiter’s translation of the whole Markandeya Purana, in which it sits as cantos 81–93 — Frederick Eden Pargiter, The Markandeya Purana, Translated with Notes (Bibliotheca Indica, Asiatic Society of Bengal, Calcutta, 1904), whose full text is freely available (wisdomlib). The modern critical study of that text is Thomas B. Coburn’s, in two stages: Devī-Māhātmya: The Crystallization of the Goddess Tradition (Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 1984), a philological reconstruction of how an anonymous Sanskrit work came to articulate ultimate reality as feminine, and Encountering the Goddess: A Translation of the Devī-Māhātmya and a Study of Its Interpretation (State University of New York Press, 1991), which traces how the text became the best-known Goddess-scripture in living Indian worship. The single fullest account of the festival’s own liturgy is Hillary Peter Rodrigues, Ritual Worship of the Great Goddess: The Liturgy of the Durga Puja with Interpretations (SUNY Press, 2003), a complete documentation of the Bengali-style Durga Puja as performed at Banaras. For the goddess in the wider tradition, David Kinsley’s Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1986) remains the standard survey. Among the older Orientalist apparatus, John Woodroffe’s Hymns to the Goddess (under the name Arthur Avalon, with Ellen Woodroffe, 1913) gathered Sanskrit hymns of the great Goddess into English — a sympathetic, apologetic, and partly collaborative presentation, shaped with the Bengali Śākta scholar Atal Bihari Ghose, to be read as a witness to the modern reception of Śākta devotion rather than as a transcription of the rite.

The Yearly Return of the Earth to the Water

The shape of the whole is the shape of a single sentence in earth. River silt is gathered and bound to bamboo; a face is opened in it; breath is called into it; the Goddess is bodily present for the few days of her visit, fought-for and welcomed and fed; and on the day of victory she is carried back to the river and let go, the clay loosening into the current as the drums fall behind. The Bengali season measures itself by that arc — the daughter’s arrival, the slaying re-enacted at the hinge of the nights, the parting at the water — and then waits a year for the silt to be drawn up and worked again. 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) · Mahānirvāna Tantra (Avalon, 1913)

→ Related: Sankara · Durga · Puja · Kali · Shiva · Vishnu · Brahman