Durgā Pūjā

The story behind the day

Durgā Pūjā is the autumn festival of the goddess Durgā, kept above all in Bengal and most famously in Kolkata. It is also called Durgotsava and Navarātri. For about ten days in the bright fortnight of Āśvina, in September or October, her clay image is worshipped, visited by crowds and at the end given to the water. The calendar here counts the festival from the sixth lunar day of that fortnight. The goddess at its centre is the one who, in Hindu scripture, slew the buffalo demon Mahiṣa.^[1–2]

Origins

the Pala-era stone Durga — The Pala-era stone DurgaIllustration · AI-generated

The story behind the festival is told in the Devīmāhātmya, the Glory of the Goddess, a Sanskrit text of 700 verses that was set into the older Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa. It recounts the goddess's victories over several demons. In its third chapter the demon Mahiṣa, who fights in several shapes including that of a buffalo, is finally slain by the goddess after a great battle. She is the Durgā of the festival, the killer of the buffalo demon.^{[2, 4–5]}

What it marks

For Bengali Hindus the festival has become the sign of their religious culture and identity, whatever a person's caste, region or means. Kolkata in particular has come to be identified with this grand autumn festival of the goddess. Its pavilions draw very large crowds, and UNESCO describes how the divides of class, religion and ethnicity fall away as people walk round to admire them. Alongside the worship it is a public event, and UNESCO describes it as a public performance of religion and art.^[6–8]

How it came to be

Durgā Pūjā was a popular village festival in Bengal before colonial rule. Landowning zamindars sponsored its public worship in their courts and households, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it became a showpiece of the townhouses of merchants and landlords in Calcutta. The first community pujas followed in 1910 or 1911, depending on the account, and were called sarbojanin, a word meaning that the puja belongs to all. Their organisers were middle-class neighbourhood residents who had grown tired of the limits that elite patronage placed on who could take part, and they moved the worship from private houses to the neighbourhood, open to people of every class, caste and religion.^[9–11]

How it is kept

Kolkata pandal with dhak drummers, sindoor khelaIllustration · AI-generated

Artisans model the images of Durgā and her family in clay, and temporary pavilions called pandals are built to house them, most of them organised by local clubs and neighbourhood associations. Visitors walk from one pavilion to the next to admire them, in crowds that run to hundreds of thousands a day in Kolkata. On the tenth day, Vijayādaśamī, the images are borne in a procession to a river or a tank and given to the water.^{[3, 7, 12]}

Sources

Each statement above was checked against published sources; the verdict says whether it stood as written, was corrected or was hedged.