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Hardly into my “study leave,” I notice the frail bamboo outlines for the Puja pandals begin to appear in street corners. Their context, in the intersection, is so urban; regulations permit these apparitions to hold up or divert traffic during the Pujas. But, in this phase of their construction, when they’re intricate husks, their fragility visible to the public eye, they’re reminders of an ancient Bengal — which may not exist anywhere at all today except in these fleeting cameos.
There’s little doubt Durga Puja began as a harvest festival. One story has it that the first time it became an urban event was when Raja Nabakrishna Deb of the Shobhabazar Rajbari (or the princely family of Shobhabazar) in North Calcutta organised a Puja for Lord Clive in 1757, to celebrate the British victory at Plassey — to mark, as it were, the passage of power from Siraj-ud-daula to the East India Company. The Rajbari has recently issued an official rebuttal of this account. Anyway, as Kaliprasanna Sinha’s anarchic verbal record from 1860, Hutom Pyanchaar Naksha (The Night-Owl’s Sketches), shows, most of the powerful Calcutta families had appropriated the Pujas by the middle of the nineteenth century, making them an occasion for boisterous, often competitive, celebration. At some point, the Pujas passed from the domain of the families to the paras, or neighbourhoods — often, stifling, cloistered, ten-foot-wide lanes lasting no more than a quarter of a mile. It was at this time that the Pujas — despite their name, which means “worship”—must have become secular, roughly four or five days of pretending to pay obeisance to the goddess, of wearing one’s most uncomfortably new clothes, of commingling, communal eating, flirting with cousins, followed by more communal eating. For the middle class, there’s no withdrawal from the Pujas — it permeates the interior and the exterior, the apartment and the street, equally. It must have been in the late seventies and early eighties, after the Left Front had come to power to begin what surely no one thought would be a near-interminable tenure, and Bengal began to grow increasingly isolated, culturally and economically, that the Pujas started truly to prosper. By the early eighties, without anyone quite noticing or certain of what had happened, they’d become the world’s most extraordinary festival, holding absolute, even tyrannical, sway over the city for as long as they lasted. By the early nineties, the noise and crowds were forcing what remained of the middle class in Calcutta to leave their homes, and check into a guest house or hotel in Ooty or Puri — in other words, to spend the Pujas elsewhere. Some of the elements of today’s Pujas must be immemorial — the sound of the dhak or drums in the morning approaching the apartment block; the actual worship performed (I use that word literally) by the priest, and his exhilarated dhunuchi dance later. Others may have emerged in the fifties or the sixties — the spectacular pandals in different parts of the city; the excursions undertaken to admire the goddess, whose likeness may be made on traditional lines, or to resemble a contemporary movie actress. (This year, I believe I spotted a Durga modelled on one of the blue people of Avatar.) But it’s in the early eighties, probably, that the attention shifted from the mother goddess and her family in the pandal — which is a marquee of variable size made of bamboo, papier mâché, cloth, and other material — to the pandal itself. The pandals have, in the last twenty-five years, been made to look like the Titanic; the General Post Office; the Fountain of Trevi at Rome; the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg; the Tagore house in Jorasanko; the Egyptian pyramids; old, disused theatres, houses, or temples — in fact, anything that catches the pandal-maker’s fancy that year. The intention is not so much to entertain as to disorient and astonish; to tap into the Bengali’s appetite for the bizarre, the uncanny.
The lighting, done by “the men from Chandannagar,” a town about thirty miles away from Calcutta, also contributes to this realm of astonishment. They follow no convention of “beautiful lighting”; the counterpart of the Puja lights are not the Christmas lights hung on Regent Street, but the patterns created by the plastic spiral stencils sold on streets, going round and round with your pen in different ellipses; the shards of colour that rearrange themselves within a kaleidoscope; covers of exercise books; pictures blazoned in the local tabloid; “breaking news” messages and TV bulletins. Sometimes they swirl and form patterns; sometimes they depict the treasures contained in a child’s textbook, even something like the secrets of the inner ear, with the eardrum, the anvil, and the cochlea; often, they will represent — in repeated, moving sequences — an event that’s recently captured the imagination: rumours, in 1990, of a plague in Calcutta; Satyajit Ray receiving an Oscar for lifetime achievement; Princess Diana’s sudden death in a car crash; Amitabh Bachchan hosting the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?; the two aircraft flying straight into the doomed Twin Towers. They flash; they swiftly enact an episode; they begin again immediately. They’re meant to tell those stories until dawn, even when there’s no one in their proximity; just as, in some secret reflex, you’ll think of them after that year is over.
The myth of the Pujas is a simple one — full of rural sweetness. Durga, the mother, comes to our world from her world in the Himalayas, usually in early October, to slay the moustached asura who’s sprung out of the body of a buffalo and is now oppressing us all. Some such episode involving a bully must have occurred in our childhood, and we’d called upon our mother then to set it right. The Pujas are, in part, an ever-returning homage to that magical sense of being rescued, so indispensable to children. But we’re mostly grown up now, as we mill around the pandals, and we know that asuras aren’t easily disposed of, that mothers aren’t all-powerful; and it has to be admitted that it’s this sense of irony about the mother, and our stubborn denial of reality, that gives the Pujas their tenderness, and makes Durga, paradoxically, so strong. For she’s infinitely empowered by our need.
She arrives on a lion. Her ten arms are as familiar as some other physical deformity might be in someone you’ve long known. She’s also called mahishasuramardini, “she-slayer of the buffalo-asura.” Arrayed on both sides are her children, Saraswati, Lakshmi, Kartik, Ganesh. According to the ordaining of the almanac, Durga may use a canoe or an elephant for transport. But she’s always depicted upon a lion. By the end of the Pujas, the myth moves into its second phase — of valediction, reminiscent, once more, of the sweet, powerful yearnings of rural life. By now, Durga has become our daughter; it’s time for her to go back to her husband, Shiva, in the Himalayas; her holidays — not just ours — are done. We’ve become her father; and, like every father, we know it’s futile to want to keep back a married daughter — she’s not ours to keep. In the Pujas’ ten days, we’ve somehow aged and spanned a lifetime, from being child to parent, as characters often do in the course of a novel.