When Did Durga Become
Bengali ?
Jawhar Sircar
Ananda Bazar Patrika 27 Sept ‘19
English version
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.
