Durga Puja – Bengal’s Cultural Magna Carta
By Jawhar
Sircar
(The Wire,
18th October, 2018)
During Durga Puja, the
indomitable spirit and irrepressible energies of Bengalis literally burst
forth, holding normal life to ransom. The spirit of festivity surrounds us as
hundreds and thousands of gaily-decorated pandals – those magnificent creations
made of bamboo, cloth, plywood and imagination – come up everywhere. They house
the mammoth but exquisitely sculpted figures of Durga and her family, and the
whole neighbourhood is transformed into a wonderland of lights, animation and
music that the organisers conjure.
This is, incidentally, when
the rest of India observes Navaratri, the nine holy nights and days of piety,
restraint, fasts and vegetarianism. Bengalis, on the other hand, led by their
Brahmanical class, revel in strict non-vegetarianism, gorging voraciously on
mutton, chicken and fish in enormous quantities.
But why did the Bengalis
splurge on Durga when they had 33 crore deities to choose from? Here is the
story most miss out on. We need to view broad-spectrum ‘state deities’ like
Bengal’s Durga or Odisha’s Jagannath not so much as gods but as platforms that
offered recognition to aspirational classes for having ‘arrived’. While the
basic character of the deity remains apparently unchanged over centuries, its
innate flexibility permits contending socio-political groups to take turns in
sharing power, without painful breaks. Since the deity itself is the
fountainhead of ‘legitimacy’, the very association with its worship confers on
the ‘new class’ that celebrates it, social or political ‘legitimacy’. Above
all, it ensures a smooth linkage with the rest of the populace. In other words,
the deity is itself a ‘grand treaty’ or a ‘Magna Carta’ of that state or region
that everyone respects.
Where Bengal’s Durga is
concerned, we need to go back in time, but not too much, as nothing that is
truly ‘Bengali’ can boast of history beyond six-and-a-half-centuries or so. The
Bengali language got its act together in the 15th century, with most of its
present alphabets and its grammar and syntax in position. Its very signature
accent must also have come up by then. The first batch of literature produced
by Brahmans and the comprador Vaidyas and Kayasthas were actually verses on
Krishna, not on Durga or Kali.
We get the first ‘net
practice’ played by three ‘upper castes’ during this phase and this trio of
castes were the ones that emerged a couple of centuries later, as the powerful
bhadralok or Hindu gentry. What is more significant in the history of
literature is that the first major genre, the Mangal-Kavyas, were downright
anti-Puranic. These balladic poems were composed mainly by impoverished rural
Brahmans, who must surely have panicked as large numbers of common people
preferred the Sufi variety of Islam.
These Mangal-Kavyas were
sung by professional kavis to goggle-eyed villagers over several evenings (18,
24 or 36 of them) about how their local non-Aryan, non-Brahmanic gods and
goddesses like Dharma (a Sanskritised Austric name), Manasa and Chandi
defeated, yes defeated, the mighty Puranic deities like Durga and Shiva. The
Hindu elite must have squirmed as Durga 1.0 lost out, but it worked, as large
numbers of subaltern castes moved to this new user-friendly brand of Hinduism.
Chaitanya’s caste-less Vaishnava faith also appealed to the masses but soon
after his death in 1533, the six Goswamis of Vrindavan who took over the
movement, practically ‘re-introduced’ casteism in medieval Bengal.
Incidentally, the present position is that of the 25 to 27 crore
Bengali-speaking people who live in Bangladesh and India, two-thirds are
Muslims – a fact that is hardly mentioned.
Durga version 2.0
It is in this background
that we need to understand the installation of Durga version 2.0 – which
blipped on the screen during Jehangir’s rule from 1605. It is he, more than
Akbar, who was really successful in occupying the Eastern core of Bangladesh,
and it is he who employed local Hindu Brahmins for the first time since Muslim
rule in Bengal began in 1202. This empowered a few Hindu zamindars in economic
terms and it was one of them, Raja Kansa Narayan of Taherpur who is reported to
have celebrated Durga Pujas in 1610 – as a public token of gratitude and a show
of his power and pomp. Bhabananda Majumdar of Nadia followed, as did other
Brahman zamindars who had enough earnings to make their presence felt.
What was critical to the
first Hindu ‘nobility’ was the patronage of Jehangir and Shah Jahan, who were a
bit fed up with deadly intra-Muslim rivalries in their courts and in Bangla
Subah as well. After all, the first four centuries under the Muslim sultans of
Bengal had ‘dried’ up wealth and power from Hindu landlords and hence, we get
not a single temple of consequence being built in Bengal in this period of 400
years.
A new wave of Durga Pujas
Aurangzeb was, however, made
of different stuff but he relied heavily on his Muslim Dewan of Bangla, Murshid
Quli Khan, to provide him with endless funds to finance his perennial wars in
the Deccan. As soon as he died in 1707, Mushid Quli declared his independence,
from Murshidabad. What is interesting is that he encouraged Hindu zamindars
like Lakshmi Kanta Majumdar, leading to a new wave of Durga Pujas in Bengal.
The first two phases of pujas in the 17th and 18th century were definitely
expressions of elitism – with a lot of imaginative social engineering built
into it.
The Bengali Durga
accommodated the pressure from the folk that insisted on visualising her as a
good ‘mother’ with a happy ‘family’. Kartik and Ganesh had been created as
Durga’s sons much earlier by the Shiva Purana and the Skanda Purana and had
already made their ‘guest appearance’ in Bengal. This is evident in the
11th-12th-century icons found at Naogaon in Rajshahi and Comilla’s Dakshin
Muhhamadpur, where they stand next to Durga. But Lakshmi and Saraswati were a
bit problematic as Lakshmi is actually ‘older’ than Durga in the troubled
linear history of Brahmanism. Additionally, Saraswati was already Brahma’s
daughter, but the Bengalis made her Durga’s without the formality of an
adoption certificate. They got away with it, as there were neither the
‘Succession Act’ nor hassles like Aadhaar cards.
But even when conceding to
mass demands, the zamindars would insist on their warrior goddess – as her
power is what they prayed for – and she had been in full battle regalia. And
then came the next very-Bengali variation, which is in pursuance of the genetically-induced
principle of ‘differing with Hindustan’. Surprising as it sounds, up-country
Indians of the Ganga-Yamuna belt were always referred to by Bengalis as
‘Hindustanis’, just as all who are from the south are surely ‘Madrasis’.
Bengalis take their urge to
be different very seriously and for the last 51 years, they have invariably
voted governments to power that were opposed vehemently to whoever ruled the
Centre. The only exception was in the 1970s, when Siddhartha Sankar Ray ruled,
with healthy musclemen and trigger-happy policemen. Differ they must – thus
when India celebrates Diwali as ‘the festival of lights’, Bengalis pray to the
black goddess of darkness, Kali. There are many more, but let us get back to
the odd situation thus created by Durga’s ‘family’, affectionately called the
Saparivarey Durga – that is not seen anywhere else in India.
The oddities have,
mercifully, not been noticed by the loudly argumentative people, but many often
wonder why Kartik, the warrior-god, looks away while his mother fights her life
and death battle. The other children are also blissfully detached in their
mother’s battle with that terrible Mahishasura, aren’t they? The reason is that
these four were very ‘local’ extrapolations that have not been assigned any
role by the Puranas, but had to be there or else Durga 2.0 may also have
flopped. The patriarchy of the Brahmans and zamindars also needed to introduce
their own anomaly, to display their ‘Bengali genius’ and we land into another
mess. A belligerent goddess is all right for zamindars to draw their strength
and social legitimacy from – but she may give wrong ideas of ‘supremacy’ and
‘autonomy’ to womankind. Durga’s ‘family paradigm’ suited Bengal’s patriarchy,
which ‘permitted’ images of Bengal’s Durga to be crafted with her indifferent
children by her side – because children were constant reminders that
‘motherhood’ is more important to women than the beastly and dangerous business
of war.
Post-Plassey Durga
Then came the Battle of
Plassey where Muslim rule ended for all practical purposes and many
‘far-sighted’ upper caste Bengalis switched to Lord Clive. The next hundred and
fifty years from 1757 were a dream run for the ‘loyal’ Bengali babus and Durga
became their mascot. Ambitious bhadraloks like Nabakrishna Deb and
Krishnachandra Ray made their fabulous fortunes and this post-Plassey Durga 3.0
ensured that several of the regulations that the new British rulers made went
in their favour. All the way to the Permanent Settlement of 1793 and well
beyond. Families rose and fell but the institution of zamindari was at its peak
and their pomp and splendour were reflected through ostentatious Durga Puja
celebrations. ‘Nautch girls’ from Delhi-Agra-Lucknow were brought in to
entertain their British guests who graced the palaces of the fawning, nouveau
riche babus, where wines flowed freely and dance ‘numbers’ and mountains of
food were heaped on the tables. Commoners gaped in sheer awe at all the
splendour.
The choice of the imperial
lion for Durga was problematic in Bengal as no sculptor or artist had even seen
one. A sherawali mata or a vyaghra–vahini devi would have been easier as this
Durga rides a tiger – and Bengalis knew what this beast looked like. The result
was that the ‘lion’ beneath the classic Bengali Durga actually turned out to be
an animal that was a caricature between a horse and other quadrupeds, but
certainly not a lion.
It was only when the first
lion arrived in the Calcutta zoo in 1886 that the lion-looking lion first
appeared. Aristocratic families who have worshipped Durga on the strange
horse-like character, however, insist that tradition is more important and
still refuse to bring in a lion-like creature. A word about the buffalo as
well. These swarthy creatures occupied the lowest swampy regions and it became
essential to drive them away and, where required, kill them, so that wet paddy
could grow better – and give more rent to the zamindars. This explains why of
all gods, it was Mahishasura-Mardini Durga, she who killed the buffalo-demon,
who was invoked.
Let us return to the
post-Plassey Durga-worshipping Bengali elite that kept strengthening its new
hegemony, both economic and political. This class practically drove away from
the previously-powerful indigenous gods and goddess, but on reviewing their own
Durga 3.0, they felt it needed to be more feminine and more Sanskritic. This is
when more Sanskritic themes like vatsalya or love and affection (for one’s
children and juniors) entered the scene. The mighty Durga was then visualised
as the ‘daughter’ of Menaka and Giriraj and the last four days of Navaratri
became the annual homecoming of daughter Durga.
This clicked at the box
office of faith as nothing before or after and to the Bengalis, she is still
their daughter, so full of madhurya (tenderness). It is in her honour that the
best of food is ‘served’ and eaten, as Durga’s children frolic to their nana
nani. But Shiva is nowhere in sight, which is nothing to worry about – this
happens with many an Indian son-in-law. The irony of how Durga dragged the
carcass of the buffalo-demon to her mother’s home is, however, not missed out
by a 19th-century poet like Dasarathi Ray, whose Menaka screams:
“Oh, Giri! Where is my
daughter, Uma?
Who have you brought into my
courtyard?
Who is this ferocious female
warrior?”
Rishi Chandra Ray also
echoes Menaka’s sentiment:
“Giri, who is this woman in
my house?
She cannot be my darling
Uma,
This terrifying ten-armed
woman!”
But, by then, Hegelian
anti-theses were also in action as a new bourgeoisie had quietly grown under
the patronage of the British. It was a quirk of fate that British traders had
to install a nouveau feudalism in Bengal even after the French Revolution had
spelt the end of the ancien regime in Europe. From the 1830s, we get reports
from contemporary newspapers like the Samachar Darpan and the Calcutta Courier
that several traders associations and groups of commoners had also started
organising their own brand of Durga Pujas, through public collections.
Durga 4.0 of the new middle
class
Here, piety mattered more
than pomp, but then politics could hardly miss this chance. The success of Bal
Gangadhar Tilak’s public celebration of Ganesh Chaturthi – converting a private
puja into an event that drew masses closer to his politics of nationalism was
not missed out by Bengalis. Thus, when the Congress session was held in Kolkata
in 1910, a full-fledged public or sarvojanin celebration of Durga Puja was also
organised. Durga 4.0 had arrived. This is when the Tagore-inspired rite of
kola-kuli (hugging friends, relations and even strangers) was introduced, and
the colourful ritual of sindoor-khela (married women smearing each other’s
faces with red vermillion) came in. The new middle-class built its own model and
never looked back – as soon community worship and feasts brought in more
solidarity among them.
Since then, thousands of
such sarvojanin pujas cropped up all over the state in the 20th century –
overshadowing the zamindari pujas that were limping as fates changed. For a
hundred years, these celebrations encouraged the flowering of numerous cultural
activities, from the best of modern literature that was made available through
many highly-affordable ‘puja magazines’ to scintillating music that was
specially produced for the season, with many others in between. As competition
for attention and honour drove the organisers, novelty and experimentation
reached a new frenzy. Images of Durga were crafted in every medium possible –
from betel-nuts and glass bangles to nuts and bolts – in fact, anything.
Kolkatans have thus seen every wonder of the world as huge pandals were
skilfully designed to look like the Taj Mahal or the Statue of Liberty or the
Eiffel Tower. Even the Titanic has featured as a puja pandal, as have the Twin
Towers.
Mamata Banerjee brings in
Durga 5.0
At the turn of the century,
however, a new battle gripped Bengal. Mamata Banerjee was desperately looking
for ‘fighting power’ at the grassroots or trinamool level, to take on the
mighty Marxists. The latter’s grip was visible everywhere for three long
decades and more and this was most felt at the ‘locality level’ where powerful
local committees ruled quite unchallenged. She fraternised intensely with local
clubs that slowly gravitated to her, as she spoke their language in their
accent. The Left’s binary ‘haves versus have-nots’ soon became the new
desperate subaltern’s ‘haves versus must-haves’ – with no holds barred. This
Durga 5.0 helped bring the ‘lowest denominators’ to power in 2011 –
demonstrating convincingly to the Left Front that their ‘working class’ was
actually very middle class, limited to the better-off organised factory workers
and government clerks.
This phase also brought in
unabashed commercialisation into the celebrations, along with unheard-of money
power and political patronage. Local councillors of urban bodies and panchayat
functionaries in the rural areas strengthened their ‘rule’ by patronising
almost every Durga Puja in their ‘raj’ and by ‘inaugurating’ every pandal
possible. The chief minister personally has inaugurated a very large number of
puja venues, spread over several days. Even a five-minute halt at a venue can
surely send the ‘right signals’ to local policemen and officials ‘to
cooperate’. It is no wonder that advertising companies have ‘bought’ up
everything that is visible, except garbage. Billboards as high as two to three
storeys are erected along every prominent road and lane, blocking out light and
air for weeks, and the countless ad-filled gates, banners, festoons and
standees only enhance Kolkata’s claustrophobia. In the face of this
politically-backed Durga 5.0, the Durga 4.0 of the better educated middle class
has quietly vacated the arena and moved to apartment buildings and ‘housing
estates’. Here, warmth and social bonding are still valued over ostentation and
display of political might.
The state government of
‘Bangla’ has stepped in with ‘legitimacy’ in the form of ‘assistance’ to local
clubs and some 700 crore rupees have reportedly been spent from its coffers.
This year, another 28 crore is being doled out to some 28,000 puja clubs at a
flat rate of 10,00 rupees per club. This is rather interesting, as the puja
budget of some of these wealthy clubs run into dozens of crores of rupees. One
pandal has displayed a chariot made of 20 tons of silver, that is 60 feet high
and 40 feet wide. It is, perhaps, this chariot that Banerjee hopes may finally
take her to Delhi next year, in her true grand theatrical style.
