Pujo Gyan
The Story of Durga Puja
Every Durga Puja retells three stories at once: a goddess born from the gods' combined power to defeat a demon, a prince who woke her out of season to win a war, and a daughter who comes home to her parents for four days a year.
1. Mahishasuramardini: the slayer of the buffalo demon
The oldest telling is the Devi Mahatmya (also called the Chandi or Durga Saptashati), a 700-verse text that forms part of the Markandeya Purana. In it, the demon Mahishasura, who could change between a man and a buffalo, won a boon that no man or god could kill him. Made bold by it, he drove the gods out of heaven.
The defeated gods went to Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Their anger blazed out as a great light, and the light of every other god joined it. From it rose a goddess with many arms, more radiant than all of them together: Durga. Each god gave her his own weapon, the mountain king Himavan gave her a lion to ride, and she rode out to war.
Mahishasura's armies fell one after another. The demon himself kept changing shape: buffalo, lion, a man with a sword, an elephant, and the buffalo again. As he began to rise out of the buffalo's body in his true form, Durga pinned him with her foot and pierced him with her trident. That moment, the demon half-emerged from the slain buffalo, is exactly the scene you see in every pandal.
Many retellings say the battle lasted nine days and nights, which is why the festival builds to the tenth day, Vijaya Dashami: the day of victory.
2. Akal Bodhon: why the goddess is woken in autumn
Durga's older festival was in spring, the Basanti Puja, still held in some homes. Autumn is when the gods are said to sleep, so worshipping Durga in autumn is an 'untimely awakening': akal bodhon. The story behind it comes from the Bengali Ramayana of the 15th-century poet Krittibas Ojha.
Before his final battle with Ravana, Rama worshipped Durga to win her blessing. He gathered 108 blue lotuses for the offering. To test him, the goddess hid one. Finding one missing, Rama, who was called 'lotus-eyed', took up an arrow to offer one of his own eyes instead. Durga stopped him, appeared before him and blessed him. Rama won the war on Dashami.
This is why Bodhon (the awakening) is the first rite of the Puja, and why 108 lotuses and 108 lamps are offered at Sandhi Puja on Ashtami.
3. Uma comes home
In Bengal, Durga is also Uma (or Gouri), the daughter of Giriraj Himalaya and Queen Menaka, married to Shiva and living far away on Mount Kailash. Durga Puja is her yearly visit home with her four children, and Bengalis welcome her exactly as they would a married daughter: with her favourite food, new clothes and endless chatter.
Old Bengali songs capture both moods. Agamani songs (of arrival) sing of Menaka waiting for her daughter; Bijoya songs grieve her leaving. On Dashami, women bid her farewell like a daughter returning to her in-laws, and everyone says the words that end every Pujo: 'Asche bochor abar hobe!' (It will happen again next year!)
4. Mahalaya: the day the countdown starts
Mahalaya falls on the new moon about a week before Shashthi. It ends Pitri Paksha, the fortnight for remembering ancestors, when people offer tarpan (water offerings) to their forefathers at the ghats at dawn, and it begins Devi Paksha, the goddess's fortnight. In many workshops, the idol's eyes are painted on this day (chokkhu daan).
For generations of Bengalis, Mahalaya means waking before 4 am to hear 'Mahishasuramardini' on All India Radio: a programme of hymns, songs and Birendra Krishna Bhadra's unforgettable recitation of the Chandi, broadcast every Mahalaya since the 1930s.