All Bengalis here love Durga, but only few realise that Bengal’s Durga is uniquely Bengali and her form, agenda and legend are quite different from the rest of India. First of all, Durga never comes anywhere in autumn with her whole family and secondly, she is not greeted in other regions as the loving daughter of a whole people, not just Menaka’s. To understand the riddles, we need to appreciate the dichotomous characteristics of why a benign mother arrives as an angry belligerent warrior goddess before her own mother. Let us also understand why her grown up children simply look the other way, when Durga is fighting her life-or-death battle.
History tells us that Durga Puja was started on a grand scale in medieval Bengal by the first batch of Hindu zamindars appointed by Jahangir and his Subahdars like Kansanarayan of Taherpur and Bhabananda Majumdar of Nadia, both Brahmans. This was in the second decade of the 17th century and the oldest pujas of this phase would be just four centuries old, if they survived. After Jahangir and Shah Jahan, the next Muslim ruler to entrust loyal Hindu upper caste Bengalis as collectors of revenues, was Murshid Quli Khan and his successors nawabs. This was in the early part of the 18th century, but many switched allegiance to the British after the Battle of Plassey. In fact, Raja Nabakrishna Deb celebrated Clive’s treacherous victory just three months later, by holding a grand Durga Puja with naach girls and flowing wine. The point is that these zamindars were encouraged by all three sets of masters to expand cultivable land at any cost and they needed to drive out buffalos from the wet lowlands and swamps where the best Aman paddy could grow. Durga’s slaying of the Mahishasura was invoked, which explains why the poor bleeding creature required to be dragged to her mother’s house. But as Brahmanism emphasised on the Puranic legend of her tireless battle against dark forces, she had also to be in her trademark warrior dress, with arms, even on her four days’ annual leave. Then, landlords needed Durga to demonstrate their own power to fickle peasants, who would desert their zamindaris if the terms did not suit them or they were starving during the frequent famines.
These contradictions were, however, noticed by the 19th century poet, Dasharathi Ray, whose Menaka screams:
“Oh, Giri! Where is my daughter, Uma?
Who have you brought into my courtyard?
Who is this ferocious female warrior?”
Rashikchandra Ray also echoes Menaka’s sentiment:
“Giri, who is this woman in my house?
She cannot be my darling Uma.”
The Bengali Durga had also to accommodate the pressure of the common folk who insisted on visualising her as a good ‘mother’ with a happy ‘family’. Incidentally, Kartik and Ganesh had emerged as independent gods with their long history of evolution from non-Aryan culture. The former arose from the Dravidian tradition of Murugan, Aramugam, Senthil or Subhramania, where he is a pre-puberty boy-god (not a virile adult), while Ganesh or gana-eesha, god of the short, ugly ganas surely emerged from indigenous roots. Both were converted into Durga’s sons by the Shiva Purana and the Skanda Purana. They made their first ‘guest appearance’ in Bengal, standing next to Durga, in the 12th century icons found at Nao-Gaon in Rajshahi and Comilla’s Dakshin Muhhamadpur. But Lakshmi and Saraswati were more problematic, because as Vishnu’s consort, Sri or Lakshmi is actually ‘older’ than Durga and Saraswati was already associated with Brahma. Eventually, under pressure from the Bengali masses, all four went through age reduction to qualify as Durga’s children, even without proper adoption certificates. Patriarchal Brahmanism was actually relieved to ‘domesticate‘ the warrior goddess, who could give women wrong notions of feminine independence and it was safer to bind her to her home, with four children. Now, we understand why they are looking away from the battle scene, as no fresh Puranic stories were composed in late medieval Bengal to legitimise their role in the deadly war over Asuras.
Let us remember that these nine days in autumn are observed as Navaratri all over India, to worship Ram’s battle not Durga’s, with proper fasting and sparse regimented diets. But Bengalis must always differ and they feast during this joyous period. The Ramayana connection with Durga was brought in by an enterprising Bengali, Krittivas Ojha, and while Dushera celebrates Ram’s victory over Ravan in India, our Dashami commemorates Ma Durga’s final victory. In reality however, pathos rules the Bengalis that day because their daughter Durga and her family must bid a tearful farewell. Fertility worship, that starts with Ganesh’s kola-bou (banana plant worship) now ends with sindoor-khela which has emerged as a new stylish motif of modern Bengali women.
We just cannot end without mentioning how the royal lion was invoked by the new class of zamindars, as a symbol of power, replacing the pan-Indian ‘Durga’ who rides a familiar tiger. The only problem was that no Bengali had ever seen a lion and therefore all traditional pujas invariably depicted Durga’s vahan as a horse or some other creature. It was only in the late 19th century that Bengali artisans could craft a lion that looked like one, because the Calcutta zoo imported two for display. But soon thereafter, nationalists replaced zamindars and started collective sarvajanin pujas to ensure public participation for their cause. This barowari phase continues, but Durga moved from zamindars to the new petit bourgeoisie and later became the ‘annual social mixing’ platform of the better-off but aloof professionals and business strata who occupied apartment buildings. In this century, Durga finally metamorphosed as the near-monopoly of the subaltern class that seized power.