This book is dedicated to two extraordinary individuals, without whose help, intellectual curiosity, and long-suffering kindness it would never have come to fruition in its present form. Keshab Chandra Sarkar was my first Bengali teacher in Calcutta. He started teaching me the moment I saw him, at the desk of the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, where I had come hoping to meet him in 1986. I said, in my best fledgling Bengali, “So you are Keshab Chandra Sarkar! Āpni bikhyāta! (You are famous!).” He smiled at me, shook my hand, and immediately corrected my pronunciation of the Bengali conjunct consonant in bikhyāta. The friendship was born. I studied with him nearly daily for two years, 1988–1990, and then daily for the four months I was in Calcutta in 2000. He read Bengali newspaper clippings with me, answered my questions about his Pūjā experiences and reminiscences, shared his voluminous learning, and welcomed me into his family. I count myself blessed to have been his student.
Hena Basu, of the Basu Research and Documentation Service, is a scholar’s dream. She is able to find documents in inaccessible archives, she locates and makes contact with people whom one needs to meet, and, best of all, she is willing to go on adventures. She accompanied me on all my interviews of the traditional families of Calcutta in 2000, we took train trips together as far as Krishnanagar, and she even conducted interviews in my absence. The faded illustration from the 1930s that appears in chapter 4 (fig. 4.4) was given to me by the renowned Kumartuli artist Siddheśvar Pāl because he trusted Hena. During the years when I was unable to come personally to Bengal, she painstakingly clipped Bengali and English newspaper articles during the Pūjā season and sent them to me in huge wrapped packages. Many a scholar of Bengali culture has been guided by Hena’s acumen. She too has been a real gift.
Many other artisans, scholars, Pūjā sponsors, and friends helped me in Kolkata, particularly Mahārājādhirāj Sadaycānd Māhtāb Bāhādur, Abhijit Ghosh, Minati Kar, Aditi Sen, and the late Narendra Nath Bhattacharyya. Others whom I met and interviewed, and whom I thank for their kindness, are the Kumartuli artisans Pārtha Pāl, Pradīp Pāl, the late Siddheśvar Pāl, and the late Alok Sen; Kolkata scholars of Bengali culture Nṛsiṃhaprasād Bhāḍuri and Sanatkumār Mitra; activists Debāśis Cakrabartī, Subhās Datta, Asit Mukherjee, and Purnima Toolsidass; and members of the elite families of the city who shared with me their ancestral Pūjā customs: Śephāli Bose, Bhaskar Chunder, Śubhamay and Amarnāth Dawn, Gītā Datta, Milan Datta, Kalyāṇkumār Deb, Ārati Deb, Alok Kṛṣṇa Deb, Sujay Ganguli, Priya Gopāl Hājrā, Śiśir Mallik, Chāmeli Mitra, and Maṇimohan Rāy Caudhurī. I also thank Pūrbā Mukhopādhyāy for allowing me to use her published poem in chapter 8.
I am also especially grateful to Jayanta Roy, an outstanding photographer in Kolkata who did a superb job, over many years, of documenting the Pūjās for me. Many of his photographs grace this book. For my sake he and his camera were nearly crushed by the crowds in February 2001 at Shalkia, Howrah, where he had gone to cover Śītālā’s bathing festival.
I feel grateful also to Kolkata artisan Swaroop Mukerji, whose paintings of the Pūjās so charmed me in 2000 that I bought one for the cover of this book.
I very much miss the late Mohit Roy, historian extraordinaire of the Nadia district, who welcomed me into his Krishnanagar home on several occasions and personally conducted my husband Scott and me on a hairraising trip into the West Bengal night on Kālī Pūjā of 1999. Future scholars of Nadia are impoverished by his absence.
In London, where I conducted for many summers in a row the backbone of the newspaper archival work for this book, I met, and benefited from the knowledge of, many kind friends and scholars: Laura Bear, T. Richard Blurton, Henrike Donner, Lynn Foulston, Christopher Fuller, Sanjukta Gupta and Richard Gombrich, Jacqueline Suthren Hirst, Dermot Killingly, Anna King, Julius Lipner, Partha and Swasti Mitter, and John Shepherd. I am also grateful to the staff at the India Office Library, where I spent many happy hours squinting over newspaper microfilms.
In the United States and Canada, I have benefited enormously from the advice and support of numerous colleagues in the fields of Bengal studies and, more generally, religion: Susan Bean, John Carman, David Curly, Richard Davis, Elinor Gaden, Brian Hatcher, Jyotindra Jain, Jeffrey Kripal, Philip Lutendorf, John McLane, Malcolm McLean (when he was visiting from New Zealand), Joseph O’Connell, Kimberley Patton, Laurie Patton, Indira Peterson, Clinton Seely, Hugh Urban, Judith Walsh, and Christian Wedemeyer. To Ralph Nicholas, who amazingly sent me his near completed manuscript, Night of the Gods: Durga Puja and Authority in Rural Bengal (Calcutta: Chronicle Books, 2012), just as I was correcting the proofs of this book, I express abundant thanks. Night of the Gods makes many insightful arguments about Durga Puja that I had not thought of, and I look forward to our books being read together.
To all the kind people in New York and New Jersey who welcomed my family and me into their Pūjā celebrations over the past seven years—a heartfelt “thank you.” Among those to whom I feel a special gratitude are Nirmal Cakrabarty, Ashis Sengupta, and the members of the Adyapeath Temple.
Three institutions contributed to this work financially: the American Institute of Indian Studies, which funded the four months in Calcutta in 2000; the National Endowment for the Humanities, which gave me a writing grant in the spring of 2001; and Barnard College, whose rich collection of wonderful administrators and colleagues has helped my work flourish. Thanks especially, at Barnard and Columbia, to Dwijen Bhattacharjya, Irene Bloom, Elizabeth Boylan, Lucy Bulliet, Karen Dobrusky, Jack Hawley, Mary Missirian, and Gary Tubb.
Wendy Lochner and the staff at Columbia University Press—Leslie Kriesel, Christine Mortlock, Anne Lovering Rounds, Do Mi Stauber, and Kerri Cox Sullivan—have had the patience of Job. They are wonderful to work with, and I thank them all. Two (formerly) anonymous readers, Brian Hatcher and Jeffrey Kripal, pushed me to greater theoretical acumen, for which I am also extremely grateful.
I would also like to thank my husband, Scott, who has made all things possible, and our son, James, whose coming into our lives in 2004 ensured that I would write chapter 9. At the age of two he was beating the drum for Durgā in New Jersey.
New York, New York