Fifteen centuries, and the parts that got lost

The text every Bengali household still reads at Mahalaya is not an independent scripture. The Devi Mahatmya is chapters 81 to 93 of the Markandeya Purana, inserted into a much older work somewhere between 400 and 600 CE. It is the first Sanskrit text to argue that the Goddess is not a consort or an attendant but the ground of reality itself, and it makes the argument through three battle narratives rather than through philosophy.

The buffalo demon is older than the text. Terracottas from Nagar in Rajasthan show a goddess killing a buffalo in the first century BCE or thereabouts, and a dated inscription places a Mahishasuramardini image at Udayagiri Cave 6 in 401 CE. What the Devi Mahatmya adds is the theology, each god surrenders his weapon, and out of that collective disarmament a single figure is assembled who can do what none of them could.

Bengal's own oldest Durgas are Pala and Sena stone, and they are not the goddess Bengalis now picture. The family group, the painted arch, the clay, the five-day calendar, all of that is still centuries away.

In eighteenth-century Calcutta the Puja turned into the chief instrument of social competition among the new Bengali merchant elite. Households hired nautch troupes, laid on English food and drink, and invited Company officials. The story that Robert Clive attended Nabakrishna Deb's Puja in 1757 is repeated everywhere and rests on almost nothing, Deb became Clive's munshi after the battle, and the evidence is a single anonymous painting. The other thing everybody repeats is that by 1840 the Company had forbidden its own servants to attend. No such order exists. What exists for 1840 is a hostile column in the Bengal Hurkaru of 7 October, and Europeans were still going in 1855. Official unease is real and datable, the 1833 despatch, the Lords debating idolatry in August 1840, the order of March 1841 pulling troops and gun salutes out of Hindu festivals. A newspaper campaign has been promoted into a prohibition.

The scale was industrial. By 1839 Calcutta was producing something in the order of seven thousand idols a year. The lion beneath the goddess had a horse's face for most of this period, because the artisans making it had never seen a lion; the face changed only after real lions reached the Calcutta zoo in the 1880s.

Then the money democratised, and here the familiar story needs handling with tongs. Twelve men of Guptipara in Hooghly, shut out of a household Puja, raised a subscription and ran their own; baro plus yaar gives baroyari, the word that still means community Puja. Tapati Guha-Thakurta, who recounts it, hedges every clause of it and gives no firmer date than the end of the eighteenth century. Rachel Fell McDermott adds the detail nobody quotes: the first recorded baroyari was to Jagaddhatri, not to Durga. And the cause was fiscal rather than democratic. The Permanent Settlement of 1793 left zamindars unable to collect from their own tenants, and the subscription Puja is what the collapse of that patronage produced. The best-documented case is not Guptipara but Bankura in 1793, where people of all castes applied to the East India Company for permission to raise money and hold one.

Not everyone approved. Debendranath Tagore abolished Durga Puja at Jorasanko on Brahmo principle, which is why the most famous Bengali family of the century kept no idol.

The turn came when pandals stopped imitating temples and started commissioning artists. Meera Mukherjee's 1990 Durga for Bakul Bagan, dressed in a Santhal sari, is the serious precedent; Bosepukur Sitala Mandir's breakthrough around the turn of the millennium is when the idea became a citywide competition. A pandal may now be built of jute, terracotta, bicycle parts or discarded plastic, and the bamboo scaffolding underneath is unchanged from a century ago.

The economics are not a side effect. A British Council study with Queen Mary University of London and IIT Kharagpur, from 2019 fieldwork, valued the creative economy around Durga Puja at ₹32,377 crore, about 2.58 per cent of West Bengal's gross domestic product.

In December 2021 UNESCO inscribed the festival on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The title is Durga Puja in Kolkata, not of India, because the nominating team argued that the specific civic form of the city was what deserved recognition.

And the rite keeps moving. In 2021 a Kolkata Puja was conducted start to finish by a team of women priests. Sindoor Khela has opened at many pandals to widows, single and transgender women. The festival has always been argued about; that argument is the tradition.

A local footnote, and not a small one. Bengaluru's first Sarbojanin Durga Puja was held in 1950, and the Bengalee Association's own history records that it took place under the initiative and tutelage of a few professors of the Indian Institute of Science. The association itself was registered nine years later, in 1959. The Puja on this campus is three years old. The Puja that came out of this campus is seventy-six.