The annual festive worship of Durgā is so comfortably settled in the Bengali imagination that her apparent anomalies and contradictions are hardly examined. The first issue is that popular demand in Bengal mandates that she has to be seen with her four 'children' — which is most unlike other parts of India. The second is derived from this as these four `children' appear quite disinterested in Durgā's ferocious battle with Mahiṣāsura, nor do they play any role in it. The third anomaly lies in the fact that Durgā in Bengal appears resplendent in her best dress with a lot of jewellery, even as she is engaged in a mortal combat. There are others, like the lion in old traditional images that hardly looked like a lion. In fact, the warrior goddess who is worshipped in other parts of India during the autumnal Navaratri is seated on a tiger, the Royal Bengal one, but Bengal insists on the lion which is quite `foreign' to these parts. But, as we get down to examining these characteristics, we begin to understand more clearly the social contract of the Bengali Hindus with pan-Indian Brahmanism.
The oldest iconographic representation of Durgā or Mahiṣāsuramardinī, we find is a terracotta image from the 1st century CE discovered at Nagaur in Rajasthan. It has the buffalo, the lion and the triśula but this Durgā has just four hands, not ten as prescribed. The six Kuṣāṇa period sculptures of the 2nd century in the Mathura Museum also have the Devī with the triśula and the buffalo, but no lion, as is the case with the 4th century image found Bhumara in Madhya Pradesh. We see a 5th century ten-armed Daśabhujā fighting a buffalo in Udayagiri, without the lion as her vahana and JN Banerjea has described in detail the evolved images of Mahiṣāsuramardinī of the Gupta period. We will also touch upon the Bengal sculptures a little later. What is interesting is that while stray references to this deity appear in the middle of the first millennium BCE, the first major and complete text on Durgā arrived only at the close of the Gupta period. We refer to the Devīmāhātmya or Durgāsaptaśatī that is the first puranic text dedicated to the Devī that would determine or influence her subsequent iconography. It is a section of the Mārkargleyapurāna, which is usually assigned to the sixth or seventh century, though certain parts appear more archaic. The treatise describes the Devī in different battle attire and essentially as Daśabhujā. We may note that this first proper narrative outlining her form and the story of her battles appeared well after her early icons or representations had already been sculpted.
This may indicate that Brahmanism took its own time to grant formal recognition through scriptural compositions. It is my submission that the epics and purāṇas were quite like project-funded university schools and were collective efforts of groups of scholars, located in specific broad regions, to expound upon and promote specific deities. Different assertions made in each purāṇa were most probably debated threadbare within the school in true academic tradition before being added. Unresolved issues, compromises reached and later interpolations may explain the disjointed nature of sectional arrangement. As experts have bracketed each purāṇa in different bands of centuries, it may be fair to assume that individual 'projects' lasted for a few centuries, depending on patronage. Though the maha-purānas dwelt on male deities, a few also tackled (quite secondarily) female divinities as well. The fact that Durgā materialised in so many strikingly-different forms appears to have facilitated the absorption of a wide range of goddesses into Hindu sacred literature and the pantheon. Similarly, Radha appears to have been legitimised in the Bhāgavatapurāṇa of the 9th century.
When discussing Durgā's mention in literature, let us proceed along the incorrigible tradition of going back to the Vedas for everything. Scholars have referred to hymns like 4.28, 5.34, 8.27 and some others in the ŖgVeda, but any close reading of them will reveal their ambiguity. The Devīśukta (10.125) is oft repeated to establish her in the ŖgVeda, but this does not mention her name or her appellations, and it does not bear any of her signature motifs or talk of her battle with asuras. In fact, scholars like Ralph TH Griffith have translated it as a veneration directed to Vak or 'speech personified'. We get the same amorphous feeling in the couple of hymns attributed to Durgā that are located in the Atharva Veda. Monier-Williams mentions a deity named Durgi in 10.1.7 of the Taittirīya Āaṇyaka but this is not our standard Mahiṣāsuramardinī.
However, the very fact that both Yākṣa and Paṇini mention the term 'Durgā' leads one to speculate that the kernel of her legend was probably floating around in northern India by the 4th and 5th centuries BCE. The epics, that assumed their final form in the 2nd or 3rd century of the Current Era, also mention her name — though not as a central or even secondary part of their themes. The Bhīṣmaparvan describes how Arjuna worshipped Durgā while there are references to the slaying of Mahiṣāsura, but it is by Skanda-Kārtikeya. These pithy side references and some wisps in the early purāṇas do not, however, elaborate on the gripping story of the ten-armed warrior goddess that the Mārkaṇḍeyapurāṇa School narrated in dramatic detail in its Devīmāhatmya section. Though occasional references kept surfacing for hundreds of years, it was this 6th/7th purāṇa that really comprehensively expanded on the concept. This is really the first occasion when the text finally caught up with the context or narrative that had been appearing in images. Within a century or two, we come across the magnificent sculptures of Mahiṣāsuramardinī in Aihole, Elloraand Mamallapuram.
But neither text nor context in India emphasised on Durgā being accompanied by her four family members that Bengal insists upon. A 12th century image from Dakshin Muhammadpur in erstwhile Comilla shows Gaṇeśa and Kārtikeya next to Durgā, but the 'daughters' are not there. In fact, the sons are mentioned in the purāṇas, but not these daughters. Lakṣmī is a form of the Devī but also the wife of Viṣṇu, just as Durgā is married to Śiva. Sarasvatī is always associated with Brahmā. According to the Padmapurāṇa, it is Aśokasundarī who is the daughter of Śiva and Pārvatī. We do not find any ancient image of Durgā with all her four 'children' even after ploughing through the icons mentioned in the works of RD Bandyopadhyay, NK Bhattasali, JN Banerjea, S K Saraswati and Enamul Hague. It emerges, therefore, that Saparibare Durgā (Devī with her family) is a very Bengali invention and seems to have risen from folk tradition, articulated in a Caṇḍīmaṇgal kāvya in medieval Bengal, in the 16th century or so.
We may recall that this very indigenous genre of Maṇgalkāvyas valorised autochthonous deities who invariably defeated imported Puranic gods and goddesses like Durgā and Śiva. But, when Śiva left his regal splendour of Kailāśa and joined the impoverished peasantry of Bengal as one of them in the Śivāyan ballads, he became instantly popular. Durgā also went through this plebeianisation and the great Devī was transformed into essentially a commoner's daughter who dutifully visited her parents once every year. It was then that the masses of Bengal showered her with tender Vātsalya. On the other hand, Bengalis viewed Kali as their fiercely protective mother who endowed her children with strength. This is why Durgā appears in her vijayarūpa in deference to puranic tradition, but is also dressed rather gorgeously, as she is headed for her parents' abode, with children in tow. The Navaratri tradition of fasting and its restrained vegetarian diet is vigorously rejected in Bengal where the best of meat and fish dishes are consumed in honour of the visiting daughter. It is interesting that Bengal 'domesticated' the fierce warrior goddess with sheer love. Brahmanical patriarchy may, however, have found its perfect solution as it could remind the belligerent female that her maternal obligations were more important. Yet, since the children are obviously later insertions, without adequate scriptural or iconographic sanction, they could not be harmonised with the central plot and look rather disinterested.
A problem appeared in depicting the lion as Bengalis had hardly ever seen this animal of western India. As a result, the early images installed by zamindars depicted a very peculiar 'lion' who looks more like a horse or a donkey, and this visualisation is often still continued by their descendants. It was only after a zoo was established in Kolkata and real lions arrived in the 1880s, that the local clay sculptors learnt to craft a lion that looked like one.
The warrior goddess, Durgā of pan-Indian Brahmanical tradition was thus adopted with local interpretations by a new class of wealthy Hindu zamindars, almost a millennium after Devīmāhātmya. This group popularised the worship of Śakti in Bengal in the late Mughal period and during the reign of the Nawabs. To it, Durgā's power and grandeur were extensions of its own pomp and glory to overwhelm the peasants. The mass were quite dazzled by this remarkable and unprecedented display of a Hindu festival in Muslim-ruled Bengal. The composite image of this region appears, therefore, to represent a compromise between elements drawn from the traditional Hindu ethos of north India and the overwhelming cultural demands of the Bengali folk.