Our Dugga is Coming Home

An artisan at the idol making hub in Kumartuli, Kolkata. (Source: Express photo by Partha Paul)

Every time I leave the house, my mother automatically says “Dugga, Dugga.” We are not a particularly religious family. Our Hinduism was always easygoing. As children, we got Easter eggs from Kolkata’s only Jewish bakery, but on Saraswati Puja we diligently sat down before the goddess while my great-grandmother chanted the mantras. Our fountain pens were eventually replaced by laptops but we still placed them before Saraswati. It was religion as a ritual of comfort — both familial and familiar. It’s in that tradition that my mother still says “Dugga, Dugga”, invoking the protection of the goddess, simply as one mother to another.

In Bengal, our Durga was always family. Growing up, it never struck us as odd that Ma Durga should be smiling so benignly as she drives a spear into the heart of Mahisasur, that in the midst of this blood and gore, she should be surrounded by her children, all cheerfully smiling as well, as if family outings are routinely disturbed by muscular buffalo demons.

Durga Puja, we understood, was about the slaying of Mahishasur. We knew that Durga was formed from the energies of all the gods — Shiva’s face, Vishnu’s arms, Agni’s eyes. We were told her weapons came from those gods as well — Shiva’s trident, Vishnu’s discus, Agni’s mace, Vishwakarma’s axe.

But more important than all that was the fact that Durga was coming home. Her children were coming to their mother’s home, their mamar bari, where mothers relaxed and children got a respite from homework.

The idols of the goddess being transported by boat from the artisans’ quarters in Kumartuli to Howrah. (Source: Express photo by Partha Paul)

It is no surprise that our Durga Puja reflected that licence, that refuge. Bengalis, often a whiny lot, prone to bouts of superciliousness and indigestion, somehow put all of it aside for a few days of unadulterated Durga Puja revelry. Dadas flirted with the neighbourhood boudis. Young men went to the Puja blockbuster movie at Basusree and Bina cinemas with their sisters’ giggling friends. The teenager dolled up in her new sari for the anjali, and her math tutor, a college student, suddenly looked at her with new eyes. The gay boys knew which park puja became their unofficial evening promenade. It all happened under the watchful gaze of the mother goddess herself. And if the local band swigged some Old Monk or the older bangla (the potent desi liquor) and staggered a bit on stage during the neighbourhood “cultural evening”, the mother goddess’s third eye discreetly looked away. Transgender Durga Puja? Sex-worker Durga Puja? Bring it on.

The city changed for those few days, shed its hochhey-hobey, cholchhey-cholbey, will-happen-what’s-the-rush indifference and found an urgency of purpose. “With some powerful magnetic force aligning all the iron filings scattered about, Kolkata becomes rearranged, paradoxically charged with Puja-filled derangement,” writes Indrajit Hazra in his book Grand Delusions (2014).

Once, crippling power cuts were routine. But during Durga Puja, the city would glitter, the buildings festooned with chains of little multicoloured tuni bulbs. All year long, taxi drivers grumbled about going anywhere after 10 at night. During Durga Puja, the city did not sleep at all. Stuffed with bad food, footsore and weary, we pandal-hopped with the doggedness of those who know good times are fleeting and had to be gulped down in a rush even at the risk of severe bellyache. Puja was not just about religion, it was about music albums by Salil Chowdhury, bumper Puja specials of local magazines and crackling loudspeaker announcements: “Mintu from Baranagar, please come to our information booth. Your father is waiting.”

Women play with sindoor at Baghbazar Sarbojanin puja pandal during Sindoor Khela in Kolkata. (Source: Express photo by Partha Paul)

Pandals mushroomed on every other street corner, temporary temples of tarpaulin and plywood, each a piece of installation art evoking faraway destinations — Ellora, the White House, Hogwarts castle. One Durga Puja in a congested lane of the city incorporated the doors of the houses crowding in on the pandal into its architecture. When the breeze ruffled the curtains on those doors, perhaps the goddess got a glimpse of the domestic life of her devotees — a woman in a nightie brushing her hair, a dog napping, a child watching television.

Some of us, upper middle-class and cosmopolitan, complained that the Pujas had become too commercial. We shuddered at the barrage of Puja sales, the jostling crowds. We complained about the hoardings that crowded the skyline. We shook our heads at the Puja drummers with traditional dhaaks strapped to their backs and shirts emblazoned with the logo of mobile phone companies.

Yet, Durga Puja has long been as much about religion as it’s about commerce. When Raja Nabakrishna Deb hosted a famous Durga Puja at the Shovabazar palace in the 18th century, a puja that continues to this day, he was propitiating the new English masters as much as the goddess. In one of the house pujas of the old families of north Kolkata, Kartik and Ganesh do not wear traditional dhotis. They still wear gaily coloured trousers, a nod towards the English gentlemen who ruled Bengal.

In it together: Revelry during an immersion procession in Kolkata. (Source: Express photo by Partha Paul)

The 19th century social commentator Kali Prasanna Sinha described the excess scathingly in his Hootum Pyanchar Naksha: “Candles made of tallow are lit before the idol, and the worshippers are allowed to walk around the sanctorum with their shoes on! The goddess is decorated with articles ordered from England; she now wears a bonnet instead of a crown, and as bhog she’s offered sandwiches!”

Zamindar tried to outdo zamindar. In her book, Durga Puja: Celebrating the Goddess Then and Now (2006), Sudeshna Banerjee writes that tradition had it that Durga wore her jewellery at Shib Krishna Dawn’s Jorasanko home, ate her meals at Abhaycharan Mitra’s Kumartuli mansion, where the sweets were piled so high they touched the ceiling, and then went to check out the nautches at the Sovabazar palace of the Debs. If these days she goes to a Jawed Habib salon for a facial, that’s just rolling with the times.

Yet, tradition is never lost not even in theme pujas with goddesses made out of biscuits and Jurassic Park dinosaurs running alongside her lion. The nabapatrika must be bathed. The sandhi puja must have 108 lamps. The goddess needs 18 types of soil for her mahasnan or great bath. One of those comes from a prostitute’s doorstep. Banerjee writes “the logic behind the choice is that men leave their virtues behind at the doorstep of a prostitute’s chamber.” But then she speculates that “this is also a way to recognise her place in a festival that encompasses all strata of society.”

A puja pandal all lit up in Kolkata. (Source: Express photo by Partha Paul)

That democracy, in the end, is ultimately what makes Pujas special. It’s, as if, suddenly the city becomes a great public commons, open to all, not cordoned off into air-conditioned spaces guarded by uniformed men waving security wands. And, at the end of the five days, all of us, irrespective of class, will suffer from the same indigestion that plague Bengali stomachs everywhere — the choa dhekur or that eggy burp, ambol or acidity, perhaps loose motions. Mothers will shake their heads and say reprovingly, “All that eating out, you know.” Durga might be Durgoti-nashini, destroyer of all evils, but once she leaves, Bengalis will return to their faithful digestive deities — Zintac, Pudinhara, Carmozyme.

But next year, Ma Durga will return and the cycle will begin again. As the chant goes during the immersion — Aaschey bochhor aabaar hobey. Next year once again, with a plate of biryani, please.

Sandip Roy is the author of Don’t Let Him Know.