1Pūjā Origins and Elite Politics

The extravagance of Durgā Pūjā as it can be experienced today in the cities and towns of Bengal, with elaborately decorated pandals, expensive images, creative entertainments, and audience-catching gimmicks, is not so very different in grandeur and marvel from the Pūjā as it could have been encountered in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Consider the very appreciative British description from 1825 of the house of “Baboo Pron Kissen Holdor” in Chinsurah, said to look like a European mansion. Pūjā guests were entertained in a huge salon, with beautiful furniture, a carpet imported from Brussels, sparkling lights, tables spread with meats and wines, excellent singing and dancing girls, and even jesters and jugglers.¹ Aristocracy, real or aspired; opulence; the desire to impress; the use of a festival to demarcate and solidify one’s sense of identity and prestige: these are enduring characteristics of the Durgā Pūjā festival that have been true of its various forms nearly since its inception. In this chapter we look at the history of the Pūjā, investigating its contexts, its patrons, the meanings they attached to it, and the legacy they bequeathed to their modern-day heirs.

Who Gets the Credit for Durgā? Pūjā Polemics, Festival Fortunes

The worship of Durgā has been associated with royalty and success in battle since the Mahābhārata: both Yudhiṣṭhīra and Arjuna pray to her before clashing with their enemies (MBh IV.6 and VI.23), and much later, in Kṛttibās’s Bengali Rāmāyaṇa, Rāma entreats her for victory over Rāvaṇa.² Textual evidence for an autumnal festival in honor of Durgā or Caṇḍikā is as old as the sixth-century “Devī-Māhātmya” section of the Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa, where King Suratha and his merchant friend Samādhi are exhorted by the Goddess to worship her for blessings, specifically agricultural prosperity and freedom from troubles (12.1–29). The festival is also described and explained in a number of Śākta Purāṇas, most deriving from regions of eastern India: Bhaviṣya Purāṇa 138; Brahmavaivarta Purāṇa 1.16.60; Bṛhaddharma Purāṇa 22; Devī Purāṇa 22.1–24; Devībhāgavata Purāṇa 3.24.19–20; Kālikā Purāṇa 60.1–44; and Mahābhāgavata Purāṇa 36.71–72, 45.33–42, 48.15.³ These make grandiose claims for the Pūjā, asserting that it is obligatory (nitya) but may be performed for the obtaining of desires specific to the sponsor (kāmya), that it is open to people of any caste or sex, including mlecchas (outcaste foreigners) and even demons,⁴ and that it is the most important of all conceivable forms of worship. The Devī Purāṇa 22.23 equates Durgā’s Pūjā with a royal aśvamedha, and the Bhaviṣya Purāṇa avers that “rites like Agnihotra, solemn sacrifices described in the Vedas and completed with dakṣiṇā are not equal even to one hundred-thousandth part of the worship of Caṇḍikā.”⁵

The earliest reference to the festival as practiced in Bengal appears to be the twelfth-century Rāmacarita by Sandhyākaranandin, which speaks of the festivities in Varendri, present-day northern Bengal.⁶ Furthermore, at least since the fourteenth century, Pūjā digests have been written specifically on the Durgā festival—famous examples include the Kālaviveka of Jīmūtavāhana (eleventh to twelfth centuries), the Durgotsavaviveka, Vāsantaviveka, and Durgotsava Prayoga of Śūlapāṇi (twelfth century), the Durgābhaktitaraṅginī of Vidyāpati (written ca. 1440–1460), and the Durgotsavatattva and Durgāpūjātattva of Raghunandana (mid-sixteenth to early seventeenth century). The most systematic treatment (by Rāmtoṣaṇ Tarkabāgīś, in his Prāṇatoṣiṇī, from 1821) cites the earlier Purāṇas and Vidyāpati as authorities. Modern-day Pūjā manuals advertise themselves as following guidelines derived from the Devī Purāṇa, the Kālikā Purāṇa, or the Bṛhannandikeśvara Purāṇa, the last being the most elaborate.⁷ Through a detailed comparison of these medieval Bengali ritual texts with similar ones on Navarātrī from South and North India, R. C. Hazra has identified the beginnings of a specific Durgā Pūjā regional tradition in Bengal: other digests from elsewhere in India do not prescribe the awakening of Durgā under a bel tree on the sixth night of the festival, do not include the worship of the nine plants trussed up to Durgā’s right on the pandal dias, and do not encourage raucous songs and dances on the tenth day, a custom known as Śabarotsab, after the Śabara tribal peoples who apparently initiated it.

Clues regarding actual Pūjā performances in Bengal can be found in a number of texts, including the late medieval Maṅgalakāvyas, or epic poems in praise of specific, often local, gods and goddesses. According to the Viṣṇuyamalā of the fifteenth century, the worship of Durgā is done in “every house” (gṛhe gṛhe),⁸ and Bṛndāvandās, author of a Caitanyamaṅgal from 1538–1550, writes that “mṛdanga drums, cymbals, and conch shells are kept in all houses for playing instrumental music at Durgotsab time” (23.90).⁹ In a catalogue of festivals, month by month, as found in Mukundarām Cakrabartī’s Caṇḍīmaṅgal, Durgā Pūjā features prominently for the month of Aśvin.¹⁰ The ballads discovered by Dineshchandra Sen in eastern Bengal also make mention of the Pūjā: it is said to occur in September–October, to be performed in every house, and to represent a time of intense anticipation for family reunions.¹¹ But as we shall see, the exact precedent for the Pūjā as we see it today may not predate the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century.

Texts from the Mahābhārata and the “Devī-Māhātmya” onward indicate that the worship of Durgā confers strength, rejuvenation, deliverance from evil or trouble, riches, grain, and children.¹² She is also consistently linked with tribal peoples—for instance, Śabaras, Barbaras, and Pulindas—from whom she gains her Sanskritized epithets Śabarī and Parṇaśabarī, and she is said to live among tigers and lions in mountains (Vindhyas or Himalayas), inaccessible forests, and caves. It is a curious feature of goddess worship in eastern India that while scholars are nearly unanimous in claiming that Durgā, Kālī, and other devīs probably derive from a non-Brahmanical, indigenous stratum,¹³ not only does her worship, from the seventeenth century on, not betray much evidence of this influence,¹⁴ but Durgā’s festival in contemporary tribal religious life either has a totally different meaning, as the conclusion to a month-long training session in traditional medicinal arts, or appears to be a non-indigenous, Hindu import.¹⁵ Old Bengali smṛti writings, such as Jīmūtavāhana’s Kālaviveka, Raghunandana’s Aṣṭāviṁśatitattva, and Śūlapāṇi’s Durgotsavaviveka, provide evidence that tribal culture was once more intrinsic to the worship of the Goddess; she was described as being angry if there were no engagement with tribal enemies or sexual orgies. Indeed, until recently ribald post-Daśamī dances were common practice in rural Pūjā celebrations,¹⁶ and since the late 1990s it has been fashionable for urban sarbajanīn Pūjā committees to invite Santals to perform their hereditary tribal dances in cultural shows aimed at reclaiming lost tradition. One must conclude that the process of Brahmanization, which occurred quite late in Bengal, from the eight to ninth centuries CE, has so assimilated and transformed goddesses like Durgā that, invested with new concerns for royalty and riches, they have lost their once-ubiquitous tribal associations.¹⁷ The same is true of Kālī; if she had ever “originally” been a tribal goddess or a deity of the lower classes, those origins are now quite obscured. Tribal peoples today who celebrate her festival are those who are influenced by Hinduism or who live in close proximity to major Bengali cities—such as the Munda and Murma tribes inhabiting the Ayodhya hill region of Purulia district. They are not seen as indigenous Kālī bhaktas.¹⁸

English and Bengali sources consistently present contradictory explanations for the rising popularity and success of the Pūjā, first in the late sixteenth century, but later and more prominently in the eighteenth century, which witnessed an explosion of interest in the Śākta deities Durgā, Jagaddhātrī, and Kālī. Some authors are specific and attribute the first public Durgā Pūjās to particular figures: candidates include Kaṁsanārāyaṇ, zamindar of Taherpur, Rajshahi district, now in Bangladesh, who sponsored the festivity as a substitute for an aśvamedha ceremony upon his succession to the zamindari in 1583;¹⁹ the head of the Sābarṇa Rāy Caudhurī family, which ceded the East India Company the lands that became Calcutta and which has been celebrating the Pūjā since 1610;²⁰ Gobindarām Mitra (d. 1766?), founder of the Mitra family of Kumartuli and one of the earliest “Bābus” of the city, who celebrated a sumptuous Pūjā in his house from the year he became deputy zamindar in 1720;²¹ Rājā Nabakṛṣṇa Deb (1733–1797), founder of the Shovabazar Rāj family, who is said to have presided over an impressive Pūjā in 1757 to felicitate the British in their victory at Plassey; and, perhaps most often cited, Rājā Kṛṣṇacandra Rāy, zamindar of the Nadia district from 1728 to 1782, who instituted the public worship of Durgā on a grand scale, exhorting those tenants in his district who were rich enough to do likewise.²²

In spite of the early dates of some of these Pūjās, none of my sources disputes the fact that it was during the 1700s that interest in Durgā was greatest.²³ What is unclear from the reports, however, are the reasons behind this great upsurge of attention to the public worship of the Goddess, especially as these reasons relate to shifting power configurations in the region. Some historians argue that the lavish Durgā Pūjās were attributable to a new climate of stability and opportunity under the British, after or in anticipation of 1757, when—in contrast with the earlier period of governorship by local Mughal representatives, or nawābs—the zamindars dared show off their wealth and assert their prestige.²⁴ Others believe that the Pūjās became popular during the period prior to the Battle of Plassey and the transfer of power from the nawābs to the East India Company in 1765,²⁵ when the nawābs’ lenient rule allowed for the amassing of great wealth among Hindu zamindars. At stake in these competing arguments are reconstructions of the relationships between zamindars, nawābs, and the British, as well as judgments concerning the relative values of so-called Muslim and Christian rulership.

According to the first view, conditions in the rural areas under nawāb rule were harsh and not conducive to such demonstrations of pomp and prestige as the Pūjās would necessitate. Only when it was clear that the control of the nawābs was waning could people like Rājā Kṛṣṇacandra feel free to engage in traditional acts of patronage. I quote from a representative English-language newspaper published in Calcutta in 1820:²⁶

[T]o the bigoted Mussalmans, the worship of the Hindoo gods was ever viewed with feelings of jealousy, if not of extreme hostility … [T]he English government … has allowed for general diffusion of wealth and security of property. Formerly, such a display of wealth would have subjected the patron to the rapacious exactions of his petty sovereign. Under the present system, the government makes no inquiry into the private wealth of its subjects. In consequence of this security, the natives have given themselves up to unlimited extravagance in all that relates to their public festivals.

This same point was repeatedly noted and written about by English Company servants in Bengal; the soldier-historian Robert Orme, for instance, commented that under the nawābs everyone in the property hierarchy, from the ryots, village heads, and zamindars up to the nawābs themselves, looked with fear upon the jealousy of their immediate superiors. “The nawab fixes his eye on every portion of wealth which appears in his province,” said Orme.²⁷ Another indication that the zamindars feared to demonstrate to the nawābs the true degree of their resources comes from a story about Kṛṣṇacandra’s grand-uncle, Rājā Rāmakṛṣṇa (ruled on and off from 1694 to 1715), who impressed the Mughal prince Asim-us-Shāh as being the only zamindar who dared come to court at Murshidabad with a stately retinue. All the rest “came attended with only a few followers, not daring to show their wealth.”²⁸ Some contemporary Bengalis see in the custom of creating disposable images a vestige of the fear that gripped Hindus during Muslim rulership of Bengal: did the practice of immersions derive from people wanting to worship quickly and then destroy the evidence?²⁹

According to other sources of this same persuasion, the trouble was not simply fears of Muslim greed, but actual experiences of oppression. Aparna Bhattacharya, a modern-day historian, writes that the worship of the powerful goddess Durgā attracted the Hindu rājās as a means of overcoming their inferiority complexes vis-à-vis the nawābs; further, they hoped to imbibe some of Durgā’s strength, which could be used for political purposes.³⁰ This sense of subjugation was apparently not entirely fictitious; there are indications that Hindu zamindars were not on the best terms with their nawāb rulers, who were displeased with the zamindars’ rebelliousness and, later, increasing attachments to the British in the region. Murshid Qūlī Khān (r. 1704–1725) was a notoriously strict revenue collector, punishing those who failed to comply; even under the more tolerant ‘Alīvardī Khān (r. 1740–1756), the Bengali economy began to be impoverished, with the rājās’ assets increasingly squeezed. The Burdwan rājā, Tilakcānd, wrote to the Company in 1757, on the eve of Plassey,

By the rapaciousness of the government nothing is left to me. These three years I have no power left me in my country, and my own servants refused to obey me. But by the blessing of God by your coming the country shall flourish, and all men have their hearts at ease. I hope in God your power will be as great as I could wish it, that you may be good to every one. On this depends my own welfare.³¹

Even after Plassey, the puppet nawāb, Mīr Qāsim (r. 1760–1763), had several prominent zamindars jailed, tortured, and killed in the mid-eighteenth century.³²

This view attributes large-scale celebrations of Durgā Pūjā to British tolerance and governing policies, particularly Cornwallis’ Permanent Settlement of 1793, according to which taxes were determined by fixed land holdings, not personal wealth.³³ Indeed, in the rural areas where the landed gentry managed to stay financially viable after 1757 and in the urban streets of Calcutta from the 1790s, we find much evidence of Hindu nouveaux riches sponsoring Pūjās in grand style as a means to confirm, and enhance, their growing social status. The Bengali Samācār Darpaṇ newspaper commented in 1829: “Gradually those who became rich under British rule, in order to show off their wealth to those they ruled, cast aside their former fear and spent a lot of money on the Pūjās.”³⁴

But there is a second explanation for the rise of Durgā Pūjā. Here, it is the Mughal representatives and later the semi-independent nawābs who, prior to Plassey, bring sufficient prosperity and stability to the region to allow the flourishing of zamindari interests. There is much to commend this argument.

The rise of several of the zamindari houses in Bengal occurs in the context of the seventeenth-century Mughal need for loyalty and nonthreatening allies in Bengal who could help bring the newly conquered territory under imperial government control. Prior to 1700, the Mughals in Delhi had a very laissez-faire attitude toward Bengal; their rule was conducted through rājās, chiefs, and other landowners, leading to autonomy and stability. The Burdwan zamindari, for instance, by 1702 the premier estate west of the Hooghly, grew in fortune and prestige from the beginning of Jahāngīr’s reign through that of Muḥammad Shāh. Murshid Qūlī Khān, the first nawāb to rule Bengal with some independence from the arm of Mughal control in Delhi, consciously attempted to support and even aggrandize the large zamindaris, such as Burdwan, Birbhum, Bishnupur, Nadia, Dinajpur, and Natore. These increasingly wealthy zamindars modeled themselves after the nawābs and their courts, patronizing indigenous crafts, industries, and religious institutions, to indicate social position. Although there are very few references to Durgā Pūjā before the mid-eighteenth century in the rural areas, the patronage by these Hindu landowners in other religious spheres is well documented: from the early eighteenth century they spent lavishly at marriages and funerals, went on pilgrimages, built mosques, temples, and charitable institutions, and supported Brahmans, pandits, and Muslim holy men (pīrs) with land and cash donations. Such modeling after nawābs, coupled with increasing inter-zamindar rivalries for local prestige, certainly predate the British victory at Plassey.

Moreover, this second perspective on the history of Durgā Pūjā asserts that after the coming of the British the ability of the zamindars to patronize religious functions was severely hampered. Again, there is much merit to this contention. In symbolic terms, the Company reforms of the late eighteenth century curtailed opportunities for Bengalis to establish political and ritual relationships of loyalty and fealty, upon which public events like the Pūjās depended. As noted by historian John R. McLane, the abandonment by the British, and hence perforce by the zamindars, of the court ceremony at which dependents brought their revenues to the landlord and received robes of honor in return “signaled a retreat from symbolic to more purely contractual relations with [their] principal subjects.” And this “diminution of the [zamindars’] ability to make gifts and distribute patronage struck at the currency of political bonding.”³⁵ Moreover, it is a well-known fact that after Plassey the British bled Bengal, squeezing the rural landowners, breaking up their estates for arrears of revenue, demilitarizing their lands, and making no allowance for reduced revenue payments during the devastating famine of 1769–1770. Almost all the major houses of Bengal suffered during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, their zamindars struggling—some successfully and others not—to keep a grip on their estates. In 1758 Rājā Kṛṣṇacandra, who had apparently helped the British to victory at Plassey, defaulted on Company payments. Under his grandson and great grandson, Ῑśvarcandra and Girīścandra, respectively, much of his Nadia property was sold, due to revenue debts. The Burdwan zamindari under Tilakcānd (1744–1770), who as we have seen above had welcomed the British in 1757, sank to its lowest levels ever by the time of his death in 1770 during the Bengal famine, when he and his family were reduced to indigence.

Some British observers were astute and candid in their assignation of blame for the country’s ruin. Richard Becker, Resident of Murshidabad from 1769, attributed the degeneration of the economy to overassessments, and specifically compared the British system with that of the nawābs, showing how the latter was more favorable to the zamindars.³⁶ The connection between poverty under the British and the inability to perform Durgā Pūjā is explicitly stated in the case of the Dinajpur Rāj, a family that had risen to success and wealth prior to 1760 under the patronage of Nawāb ‘Alīvardī Khān; the zamindari plummeted in fortune during the tenure of Rājā Baidyanāth (1760–1780). I quote below a letter which he sent to the East India Company’s Board of Revenue in 1773:³⁷

As I consider the discharge of my debts to Government as prior even to the provision of my food and raiments, I readily submit to this. But since the ‘Poojah Dessehra’ is near at hand and this festival supersedes amongst those of my caste all religious and worldly affairs, God forbid that the customs which have been kept up of old [should be compromised,] seeing the same would reflect greatly on me in the opinions of men in general. I therefore hope that you will grant me some allowance to support the charge of the Poojah and that I may in a becoming manner be thereby entitled to keep up my reputation.

Perhaps the most telling argument in favor of this second view of the history of the Pūjās is the change wrought in the Pūjās themselves by the collapse of traditional patronage systems. The Permanent Settlement Act of 1793, while regularizing taxable rates on land divisions, abolished the mechanisms whereby zamindars might exact timely payment from their own tenants, effectively ensuring their powerlessness in meeting their financial commitments.³⁸ It was in this context that the bāroiyāri Pūjā, or Pūjā sponsored by twelve (friends), was first introduced in 1790. Instead of the expenses of the festival being defrayed by one zamindar family alone, the Pūjā was democratized, its costs spread out and shared among people not necessarily of the hereditary aristocracy.³⁹ The sarbajanīn (or public) Pūjā of Kolkata today is heir to this intermediate, bāroiyāri, type; now, instead of twelve or so friends, the Pūjās are sponsored by neighborhood groups and civic associations that vie with each other to produce the best, most opulent, and most beautiful displays.

Adjudicating between these two perspectives on the origins of the Pūjās may not require an absolute choice. First, it seems likely that some of the rhetoric on both sides is colored by political considerations. One can detect in the early-nineteenth-century English newspaper reports about the benefits for Durgā Pūjā of British rule a desire to justify the wresting of power from the nawābs by the Company. Likewise, quotes about the oppression of Hindu zamindars by British greed often come from sources authored by Muslims.

Second, it is perhaps wiser to combine than to juxtapose the two viewpoints. Following the arguments of the second perspective, it is clear that the zamindar-sponsored worship of Durgā did originate in pre-British times and was to a certain extent facilitated by the nawābs’ consolidation of large zamindari estates, which made their job of governing easier. For those six or so zamindaris, such as Nadia, Burdwan, Natore, Dinajpur, Birbhum, and Bishnupur, which were consciously patronized by the nawābs, conditions prior to the British were, at least to some degree, conducive to the amassing and displaying of wealth; that Durgā Pūjā was already an accepted means to such status is perhaps best indicated by the fact that new claimants to power in the region (such as the Mārāṭhas in 1742 and even the British in 1765) attempted to use the festival as a self-authenticating measure.⁴⁰ Likewise, it seems clear that the fifty to sixty years after Plassey were difficult economically for the large landed estates of Bengal; the eroding of their wealth and autonomy rendered traditional acts of patronage burdensome. As a historian of the Rajshahi zamindar in modern-day Bangladesh relates,

Until 1757, the Rani and her officials operated within a system which they clearly understood. Relations with the Nawabs of Murshidabad seem to have been good; the revenue bargain was made on lines indicated by custom, and made less onerous by a certain flexibility and by the readiness of the great bankers of Murshidabad to lend their assistance in difficult years…. Then, from 1757 to 1765 there must have been a difficult period, as Mir Jafar attempted to raise the revenues necessary to liquidate his debts to the Company, and as Mir Qasim pushed up the demand to unheard of heights in his attempt to gather the resources with which to resist the Company’s encroachment upon his authority.⁴¹

Nevertheless, following the first argument, life under the nawābs was not entirely easy, and accounts of the harshness of Murshid Qūlī Khān, for instance, even in relation to the zamindaris he was consolidating, must be considered.⁴² Brijen Gupta, in a fascinating aside, mentions that such persecution by Murshid Qūlī and his successor, Shujā^˓-ud-dīn Khān (1725–1739), led directly to revivals of “Hindu feeling” and of “court rivalries which had been dormant for over half a century.”⁴³ If this is true, then, in a surprising twist on the two arguments surveyed above, one might say that the Pūjās were given their impetus during the time of Mughal rule, not because conditions were particularly easy, but as a means to assert zamindari power in politically uncomfortable times. Finally, I am also convinced, again by the first argument, that new opportunities for Pūjā sponsorship did open up under British rule, particularly in the urban context of Calcutta, but also through the innovations introduced by the bāroiyāri Pūjās, which were necessitated, ironically, by the demise of zamindari fortunes.

Although there is thus controversy as to when and under what specific conditions Durgā Pūjā was first celebrated in Bengal, no one doubts that it arose among a class of newly affluent landowners who used the festival as a self-authenticating ritual for the conferral of new status, as an opportunity for conspicuous displays of wealth, and as a visible show of strength and power. Commensurate with their wealth and sense of importance, many of the nouveaux riches built themselves large houses—their outside facades in the earlier period imitative of Mughal court architecture and in the growing city of Calcutta replicating Doric, Ionic, Late Renaissance, or Palladian building styles.⁴⁴ Still today in north Kolkata, where most of the old families have their ancestral residences, one can see houses with large courtyards, big pillars and verandahs, wrought iron balconies, imported furniture, prized gifts from foreign trading contacts,⁴⁵ chandeliers, mirrors, and a large hall attached to the house, called the ṭhākurdālān, built specifically for the annual worship of Durgā and other deities (fig. 1.1).

While “Pūjā” used on its own almost always refers to Durgā Pūjā, it is worth remembering that Jagaddhātrī Pūjā arose under similar circumstances, probably trailing on the sari fabric, so to speak, of Durgā Pūjā, of which it is a multiform. It is likely that Jagaddhātrī as a goddess was once more popular than she is at present, for the very first recorded bāroiyārī Pūjā was performed to her, not Durgā, in 1790. Jagaddhātrī has become a particularly regional goddess; that is, she is worshiped especially in the areas around Chandannagar and Krishnanagar, both north of Kolkata and once under the jurisdiction of Rājā Kṛṣṇacandra Rāy, the eighteenth-century Śākta patron of the arts. All three accounts of the inception of Jagaddhātrī’s Pūjā involve him. According to the most popular, in 1757 the rājā was in Mongir Fort, imprisoned there by Nawāb Mīr Ja‘far because of his part in the British victory at Plassey. He was released just too late to be home in time for Durgā Pūjā, which distressed him greatly. On his way, however, he had a dream of an armed goddess sitting on a lion. She told him not to worry that he had been unable to worship her, but to do so exactly one month later in the form that she was now assuming. Other origin stories credit Indranārāyaṇ Caudhurī, Kṛṣṇacandra’s friend and the dewān of French Chandannagar, with introducing the Pūjā in the Chaulpatti section of the city in 1780–1781. This Pūjā and the one nearby at Tetutala in Bhadreshwar, founded in 1793, remain the most famous of all local Jagaddhātrī Pūjās. A third explanation focuses on a Brahman logician named Candracūḍacintāmaṇi, who under the patronage of Kṛṣṇacandra’s grandson, Mahārājā Girīścandra, was the first to do the Pūjā.⁴⁶

FIGURE 1.1.    Inside the ṭhākurdālān at the Shovabazar Rāj house (minor branch); family members prostrating in front of Durgā and her children. Kolkata, October 2001. Photo by Jayanta Roy

Indeed, Jagaddhātrī is not very old, at least in the form we find her in Bengal. Jagaddhātrī does not appear as an epithet of the Goddess until the Purāṇas, where it occurs infrequently and is not accompanied by any specific iconographic description or mention of a separate cult.⁴⁷ Several Tantric texts also mention her name tangentially; for example, she occurs in Kāmākhya Tantra 10.8, Kubjikā Tantra 3.65, and Kālikā Purāṇa 37.24–27,⁴⁸ but in none of these is there any iconographic description, and the specific festival in the month of Kārtik is not detailed. The first extant reference to an annual public worship occurs in Śūlapāṇi’s fifteenth-century Kālaviveka, where one is instructed to worship Jagaddhātrī, depicted seated on the back of a lion, three times on the ninth day of the bright half of Kārtik.⁴⁹ Similar instructions are provided in fifteenth-century works by Bṛhaspati Rāy and Śrīnātha Ācārya Cuḍāmaṇi, the Smṛtiratnahāra and the Krityatattvārṇava, respectively.⁵⁰

Given this steady if lightly trickling stream of references to Jagaddhātrī Pūjā since the fifteenth century, it is surprising that neither the Bengali poet Bhāratcandra Rāy (1712–1760), a beneficiary of Kṛṣṇacandra Rāy, who in his Annadāmaṅgal lists the yearly religious holidays current in his day, nor Raghunandana, the famed seventeenth-century Bengali author of the law book Aṣṭāviṁśatitattva, mentions Jagaddhātrī in his work.⁵¹ Perhaps the most one can infer from the origin stories and the scant textual evidence is that Kṛṣṇacandra Rāy, an avid Śākta patron, incorporated Jagaddhātrī into his larger program of popularizing Śākta traditions. He had already been credited with the spreading of Kālī Pūjā (see chapter 7), and he was also a devotee of the goddess Durgā. It makes sense therefore to assume—even if one does not accept the specifics of the prison story—that this Nadia zamindar used his prestige and financial capital to revive the worship of a goddess whose ritual prescriptions, though evidenced in earlier texts, had by the mid-eighteenth century fallen into disuse.⁵² Such a supposition has merit whether the initial popularizer was Kṛṣṇacandra or his friend Indranārāyaṇ Caudhurī, in Chandannagar: no matter who was first, the festival was a renewal of an older rite, and occurred in the context of aggressive Śākta patronage in regions of West Bengal fairly close to Calcutta that were experiencing power struggles under the nawābs.⁵³

Initiating an annual Durgā Pūjā tradition was not the only way families entered public life or exhibited their wealth and honor. There were lineage associations, or dals, formed to lobby for the influence and prestige of particular families,⁵⁴ and the monied classes used marriages, funerals, and various forms of philanthropy to curry favor with their peers. Rāmdulāl De, who started his family’s Pūjā between 1770 and 1780, apparently donated one-quarter of his total fortune to fund thirteen temples in Varanasi, had his wife weighed and the equivalent in gold donated to Brahmans, and fed eight thousand Brahmans and ten thousand poor people at his funeral.⁵⁵

Durgā Pūjā was especially important to these aspiring families for three reasons. First, while the Pūjā necessitated wealth, it was not at all bound by caste prohibitions; as we have seen above, even Śūdras, mlecchas, and women have been claimed to gain rewards from its sponsorship. Since most of the newly rich were not Brahmans, but Kāyasthas, such ritual leniency was a great boon. Second, it provided occasions for showing off social standing, often amid “preposterous luxury, ostentation, and waste—a nouveau riche adaptation of feudal pomp and arrogance.”⁵⁶ Bhaviṣya Purāṇa 138 indicates that the Pūjā is to be performed in every house, especially royal palaces, and that the worshiper should spend the eighth evening listening to singing and watching theater, offer a large number of animals and wine, and immerse the image at the conclusion of the festival in the presence of the king, with his army. Such directives assume, if not actual royalty, wealth and status. Indeed, Bengali and English sources indicate that once a man rose in social standing or financial worth, one of the first acts he undertook was his own family celebration of the Pūjā. Prominent examples include the famed early-eighteenth-century zamindar Gobindarām Mitra; Akrūr Datta, an East India Company employee who owned the first shipping line in Bengal; Rādhānāth Basumallik, the moving spirit behind the construction of the Hooghly Dockyard in 1842; the family of Gurucaraṇ Prāmāṇik, whose business sheathed the bottoms of ships with brass; and the Kailās Boses of Hatkhola, who pioneered steam communication on the Hooghly.⁵⁷

Third, in spite of the fact that “rājā” in Bengal was an honorific title and did not connote true royalty, the rich and powerful appreciated Durgā’s long history of involvement with kings. In their essay “Kings, Power, and the Goddess,” Sanjukta Gupta and Richard Gombrich detail the association between Durgā and royalty, noting in particular her importance to the Gupta, Pallava, and Vijayanagara dynasties, who used Navarātrī—the equivalent of Durgā Pūjā in the rest of India—as a political occasion to reestablish their power and overlordship vis-à-vis their tributary chiefs.⁵⁸ Aspects of the Pūjā make this royal overtone particularly compelling: the Devī Purāṇa’s equation of the festival with an aśvamedha, mentioned earlier; the expectation, expressed in Manu and Kauṭilya, that right after the harvest, which is the Pūjā season, kings were to take digvijayas, or expeditions for gaining and consolidating territory;⁵⁹ and the form of Mahiṣamardinī herself. “From early times Durgā in this form is often shown with a lion, emblem of royalty. A king’s throne is a ‘lion throne’ (siṁhāsana), its feet being carved with lions; when the king ascends it (first at his consecration) he is joining the Goddess there and making her ‘his’ śakti.”⁶⁰ C. J. Fuller adds more flesh to this argument, noting that Navarātrī celebrates the victories of both Durgā and Rāma over demonic chaos, activities tied explicitly to the kingly, warrior class.⁶¹ That ordinary zamindars were aware of this link between their temporal authority and the worship of the Goddess is indicated by family stories: in 1863 the widow of a zamindar in Malabar celebrated her victorious court case against another claimant to her land by choosing to be consecrated on the final day of Navarātrī; and the sixteenth-century son of Śaṅkar Caṭṭopādhyāy, the great Bengali general of Mahārājā Pratāpāditya, started celebrating a yearly Pūjā so that his father would beat the armies of the Mughal emperor.⁶² Whether or not these up-and-coming lineages really enjoyed the status and power they claimed through their sponsorship of the Pūjās—Gupta and Gombrich speculate that in reality the zamindars had less and less autonomy over time, such that their patronage of magical means to maintain it was just a “substitution of fantasy for reality”⁶³—one cannot gainsay the symbolic value of these festivals to those who sought to express their identities and aspirations through them.

In this vein, one might profitably utilize Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “symbolic capital” to interpret the zamindars’ thirst for status through their showy patronage of public ritual. Capital, for Bourdieu, does not simply refer to economic wealth but to social prestige and special knowledge, derived—in this case—from occupational privilege, social status, interpersonal networks, and group solidarity. Even the refinement of aesthetic “taste” tends to be determined by one’s social class, with the dominant classes jealously guarding their version of culture and the subordinate classes being obliged to define their aesthetic in relation to it. Numerous scholars have found this theoretical lens to be illuminating: to give just three examples, Jun Jing has written about the symbolic capital of Confucius to emerging royal cults in rural China; Sanjay Subrahmanyam argues that the symbolic capital associated with the legend of Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese explorer to India, not only helped Gama’s career trajectory in his own lifetime but also facilitated his emergent identity as a Portuguese national treasure; and Hugh B. Urban understands the popularity to the lower social orders of the Kartābhajā sect in Bengal from the perspective of the new prestige and symbolic capital they gained from its community and teachings. While it is not my interest here to present such a Bourdieu-inspired analysis in detail, I think it obvious that in the context of the Pūjā-sponsoring nouveaux riches whom we have been considering, the race for recognition with those above and below reveals that perceptions of taste, cultivation, and social position are every bit as valuable to the ambitious as the harder currencies of bank accounts, land holdings, and actual power.⁶⁴

“All the Rich Celebrate a Festival of this Kind in their own Houses”⁶⁵

European residents, visitors, and Company personnel of the early nineteenth century all commented on the extravagant displays of wealth among Hindu “Bābus” during the autumnal holiday season. De Grandpre, a French traveler to Calcutta in 1789–90, noted that all the affluent families of the city “are ambitious of displaying the greatest luxury, lighting up their apartments in the most splendid manner.”⁶⁶ The Calcutta Journal of 1819 went further, describing the competitive aspects of the Pūjā: “The approach of the Great Hindoo festival of the Doorgah Poojah has once more called forth into action that feeling of emulative rivalry so conspicuously displayed at the season, by the wealthy Natives in the splendid preparations for the Nautches.”⁶⁷

Although the theme of rivalry will be discussed from a more theoretical and comparative perspective in chapter 5, here we look at the many practical ways a family could show off its purse and its social standing. Families constructed and then lavishly decorated large ṭhākurdālāns for receiving the Goddess and her nightly guests. They also maintained their reputations at Pūjā time by the novelty and beauty of their entertainments. The most memorable, at the least to British journalists and memoir-writers, appear to have been the dancing girls, or nautch performers, with their musician accompanists, who danced and sang before the host and his assembled company. We hear repeatedly in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century of “Neekhee and Ushoorun,” who dazzled by their beauty and bewitching movements.⁶⁸ Some entertainments were more traditional, with the introduction of new Bengali musical forms or the staging of traditional theater, or yātrās,⁶⁹ whereas others were clearly influenced by or attempting to cater to an English audience. One reads, for instance, of foreign bagpipe troupes, English bands, and even renditions of “God Save the King”!⁷⁰ Other amusements consisted of pantomimes; ventriloquists; masquerades (where sometimes the British were imitated); buffoons (one set of performers dressed as cows and ate grass⁷¹); and feats of daring, such as “a native chewing and eating bits of glass” (including an English bottle, which he ate in chunks of 3–4 inches), and a man perched “on a wooden horse on two 10’–12’ stilts; he preserved his balance and displayed sword maneuvers, while so seated.”⁷² Even in the 1860s, long after the British had begun officially to frown on these Pūjā extravaganzas, a “native contributor” to the Bengal Harkaru and India Gazette noted that at the three favored houses, those of “Radhakanto Deb,” “Kali Krishna Bahadur,” and “Baboo Heera Lall Seal,” the entertainments included European acrobats, a farce entitled “Babes in the Wood” performed by the Amateurs of H. M. S. 54^th Regiment, and “native melodies” by the Indian members of the same regiment.⁷³

Food and refreshments were another important element of the Pūjās. British guests remarked approvingly of the sweetmeats, fruits, and liquors, laid out on gold and silver dishes, that were offered them in separate refreshment rooms, and in their attempt to woo Company guests, Hindu hosts even prepared meats. Indeed, the number of Englishmen one attracted was considered the seal of prestige, the crowning touch of honor—especially if those who came were of higher standing than those who went to a rival house. Invitations were sent out early in the season, and the newspapers also advertised the events, including what entertainments and foods could be had where.⁷⁴ Early governor-generals, from Lord Clive, who arrived on an elephant, to Lord Bentinck, were regular guests,⁷⁵ and judging from reports and letters, they and their compatriots looked forward to the Pūjās with anticipation.

However, showy externals serving to attract foreign notice were only one aspect of the three-day event, one avenue through which the monied classes expressed their symbolic status in the festivals. Others were more Hindu, more traditional, more associated with religion, and most of these were never written up in the English press of the period. For example, although one occasionally reads of a British guest viewing “the goddess Doorgah,”⁷⁶ little British attention was paid to the temporary clay images prepared and worshiped on the occasion, and one has to consult Bengali sources to learn about the aṣṭadhātu figures (permanent images made from eight metals) that wealthy families also commissioned, often at the founding of their first Pūjā.⁷⁷ Heads of important lineages also made their mark in society by their lavish giving to Brahmans or to the poor, the latter known as Daridra-Nārāyaṇ-sebā, or the service of Viṣṇu in the form of the poor. Rājā Rājkṛṣṇa of the Shovabazar Rāj house in Calcutta gave gold coins to 108 Brahmans, who each recited the “Devī-Māhātmya” (known as Caṇḍīpāṭh), and Gobindarām Mitra has gone down in folk history for his lavish patronage of the festival, offering 30–50 mounds of rice to the Goddess, for eventual distribution to the poor, and feeding one thousand Brahmans.⁷⁸

Ritual practice is a further arena for self-expression. From the first days of preparation to the last days of mournful conclusion, the worship of the Goddess provides numerous opportunities for solidifying and articulating the aspiring “royal” status of its sponsors. The first ritual step is the sanctification of the kāṭhāmo, or wooden frame handed down through the generations, on which the clay images of the Goddess and her children are to be affixed.⁷⁹ This is typically done by most traditional families on the Rath Din or Ulṭo Rath Din, three months before Durgā Pūjā, on the days, respectively, that commemorate Lord Jagannātha’s exit on his chariot (ratha) from his Puri temple and his return seven days later. The king in Puri, who is the Lord’s viceroy or servant, is supposed to clean the road on which the chariot comes with a golden broomstick, and then pull the rope once the chariot arrives. Consecrating the kāṭhāmo on these days, therefore, is evocative of wood (Lord Jagannātha), of the “royal idiom” of service to the deity, and of the elaborate canopied processions, especially on the tenth day, that used to characterize the conclusion of the Goddess’ festivities.⁸⁰

Associations between ritual practice and the claim to royalty are even more visible in the treatment of the nabapatrikā—the nine plants trussed up together, adorned with a sari, placed next to Gaṇeśa on the dias, and referred to affectionately as the kalā bau, or banana-plant-wife—which is bathed and consecrated on the morning of Saptamī, the seventh day. Nineteenth-century Bengali newspapers and histories tell us that eminent families like the Shovabazar Debs would escort their nabapatrikā to the family ghāṭ, or bathing spot, under silver umbrellas, cooling her with silver fans and sometimes even entertaining her with a Scottish highlander bagpipe band. Other rituals are similarly marked: sandhi pūjā, or the auspicious conjunction of the eighth and ninth days, was heralded with cannon-firing and rifle shots from the estate house⁸¹; and the procession to the river at Daśamī, when the Goddess is consigned to the waters, was accompanied by processions, elephants, drummers, bands, the blowing of conch-shells, and foot-soldiers carrying the family flag.⁸² Among the Malla rājās in Bishnupur it was customary for the rājā, after immersing the Goddess, to come home, get dressed in his weaponry, and have a mock battle with his army.⁸³ It is also noteworthy that the majority of the old family goddess images depict Durgā riding on a horse-faced lion. To some interpreters this is reminiscent of royalty and of British coats of arms, which up-and-coming Bengali families were trying to imitate.

Wealth, royalty, and now devotion: another set of Pūjā customs religiously and proudly followed by the nouveaux riches expressed their niṣṭhā, or faith, as well as the specialness and uniqueness of their worship. For instance, those families who could afford it paid to have Brahmans come daily, from Mahālayā through the conclusion of the Pūjā, to chant the “Devī-Māhātmya.” Except for Vaiṣṇava families, many of whom sponsored the Pūjā but in a non-Śākta, vegetarian fashion, most of the traditional monied houses also offered numerous blood sacrifices, or balis, typically of goats but also of buffaloes and other unusual animals if desired. As we shall see in greater depth in chapter 8, the more goats offered, the more notoriety the family was perceived to gain. Another ritual, not obligatory in the texts and therefore prized by those who performed it, was kumārī pūjā, the worship of a small Brahman girl as the Goddess, which can be done on all three days but is especially common on Saptamī.⁸⁴ A third optional custom was called dhuno or dhunā and involved the women of the family, who sat in the ṭhākurdālān facing the Goddess and holding on their palms and on their heads shallow clay dishes filled nine times with burning incense. Particularly endearing customs of this sort—necessitating wealth and expressing care, but not compulsory ritually—concern Daśamī. Affluent families used to buy two blue-throated birds, nīlkaṇṭha pākhīs, or Indian Rollers, and set them free—one when Durgā was setting out to the river from the ṭhākurdālān and the other when she had been immersed—with instructions to fly to the Himalayas to inform Śiva that his wife was beginning the journey home. Unlike the practices of today, where images are manually immersed by crowds at the riverbank, rich families would hire two boats and balance their image of the Goddess on bamboo stilts between them. When they got to the middle of the river they would pull out the stilts and let her fall. Jagaddhātrī also had her traditional farewell rituals; Chandannagar was known for its night-time śobhāyātrās, or processions, in which almost one hundred bearers would carry the biggest images, surrounded by parallel lines of bystanders holding kerosene torches.

Old Bengali Pūjās thus became synonymous with traditionalism, or banediyānā, and even among foreigners their reputation was encapsulated in the expression “the three blues”: 108 blue lotuses (nīlpadma) offered during the worship; blue-throated birds (nīlkaṇṭha pākhī) released on the tenth day; and blue blood (nīlrakta) of aristocratic families.⁸⁵ The saying “The Caṇḍī [reciting the ‘Devī-Māhātmya’ at the Pūjā], piṇḍi [elaborate funeral arrangements], and kuśaṇḍī [sacrifices to be performed at a wedding]: these three make up a Brahman”⁸⁶ also hints at the class of religious acts into which most people placed Durgā’s festival.

It is important however not to homogenize or stereotype the group of people for whom Pūjā sponsorship was an important status marker. Nearly all were bhadralok, to be sure, either hereditary gentry or newly wealthy businessmen who came from the middle to upper classes. The majority were also in contact with the British, through employment, trade, or inherited status. Many endeared themselves to the British by their civic-minded behavior, especially when they built English schools, repaired roads in their districts, or distributed food and clothing to the poor.⁸⁷ The Shovabazar Debs, the Tagores of Pathuriaghata, and the rājās of Burdwan all held powerful positions in the managing committees of Hindu College from the time of its inception. In 1844 Rājā Kālīkṛṣṇa of Shovabazar even wrote an ode to Queen Victoria, which she formally acknowledged.⁸⁸ But not all of the gentry liked or benefited from the British, and many of them were strident opponents of British meddling in Hindu custom. Nandakumār Rāy, the goddess-devotee dewān of Bengal, Orissa, and Bihar, was hanged in 1775 by Lord Hastings for his alleged part in a conspiracy against the Company, and Prāṇkṛṣṇa Hāldār, the man whose entertainments were described in the first paragraph of this chapter, was transported for forgery in 1829.

Rādhākānta Deb (1783–1867), son of Gopīmohan Deb and grandson of Nabakṛṣṇa Deb of the Shovabazar estates, is perhaps the best example of this combination of modern and conservative traits that characterized most of the influential members of Hindu society in the early to mid nineteenth century. He knew English no less well than Ram Mohan Roy, sat on the Executive Committee of Hindu College, helped establish the Calcutta School Society to spread education, was a special friend of David Hare, acted as president for sixteen years of the pro-zamindar British Indian Association, and encouraged his women to loosen purdah restrictions. However, he was a staunch supporter of the Dharma Sabhā,⁸⁹ which opposed the Widow Remarriage Act, and he attacked the abolition of sati, petitioned against the anti-polygamy bill, persuaded the Chief Magistrate to lift the ban on religious processions in the Calcutta streets, and tried to abrogate the Lex Loci bill, which gave Christian converts the right of inheritance. Although he was decorated by the British with a Knight Commander of the Star of India medal, in the obituary that appeared in the Calcutta Review, his religious “shortcomings” were noted: the “superstitious element which had been mild in his father, Rajah Gopeemohan, and torpid in his uncle, Rajah Rajkissen, assumed in him an aggressive development.”⁹⁰ One is reminded of the complex and sometimes uneasy relationship between the British and the native elite in the song still sung by members of the prestigious Hatkhola Datta family as they return to the house from the immersion of the Goddess on the tenth day: “Banga āmār jananī āmār” (“My Bengal is my mother”), probably a nationalist holdover from the colonial period.⁹¹

But what about the vast majority of Bengali Hindus, those not wealthy enough to worship the Goddess in this flashy manner? In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries such people could “go to their neighbors’ houses; there are at least one of these celebrations in every quarter of town, so that everyone can pay their devotions.”⁹² Balthazar Solvyns’ painting of Durgā Pūjā from 1808–1812 reflects this passive, almost voyeuristic posture of the poor, who stand meekly to one side of the picture, watching the scene. Scope for Bengalis of few means to participate actively, as sponsors, in the Pūjā did not widen until the early twentieth century, with the sarbajanīn Pūjās; the earlier bāroiyārī Pūjā from 1790, while enlarging the base of festival patronage, did so only among friends already from the middle to upper classes. Throughout all such changes—one might say especially because of such changes—however, the monied families continued to maintain and champion their traditional customs. The nationalist politician Bipin Chandra Pal recalled proudly of his childhood in the 1860s that only five families in his village had the means to conduct the Pūjā in its full form—although he added that his family always fed Muslims and Untouchables, in addition to Brahmans.⁹³ Haimabatī Sen, a child widow who rose to become a doctor, wrote of her marriage at the age of ten to a forty-five-year-old man in 1876 that her family chose the groom because he was a deputy magistrate, two of his brothers were police officers, they had a brick house, and they were wealthy enough to celebrate the worship of Durgā at home.⁹⁴ For an elderly gentleman reminiscing about his youth in the 1880s, Pūjās were “primarily individualistic and proprietary. No Bengali family acquired respectability even in its own eyes until it had its private Puja. Going to the Barwari or collective function was decidedly plebeian,”⁹⁵ and certainly not in conformity with the scriptures.⁹⁶ In spite of this dominance of the monied classes, one can glean a hint of the way in which the not-so-well-off may have tried to manipulate the wealthy to their own advantage: one finds, in the early- and mid-nineteenth-century sources, references to people thrusting goddess images into each others’ houses, to force them to perform a Pūjā.⁹⁷

That Durgā was not primarily a deity of the common people—at least not in her form as the demon-slayer during Pūjā time—is further demonstrated by popular rhymes, songs, and sayings, in most of which Durgā and her festival are ciphers for pretension. Bikāśkānti Midyā has made a study of these sayings, and all of the examples he provides poke sarcastic fun at people who, by aspiring to the performance of the Pūjā, show a misguided judgment of their social station: “At their birth they didn’t even have a small pūjā, and now they’re worshipping the ten-armed Goddess?!” (they are overstepping their bounds; they are conceited); “There’s no corn or hemp in the house, but the name of the boy is Durgārām” (he has a highfalutin’ name, but not the wealth to match); “At Durgā Pūjā you are only ringing the bell, and at Ṣaṣṭī Pūjā you are playing the drums” (you are doing too little when you should be doing more, and too much when you should be doing less); “Durgā’s festival should not wait for betel nut and betel leaf” (do not be concerned with inessentials); and he has done everything “from sewing shoes to reading the Caṇḍī” (all kinds of jobs, from the lowest to the highest). Even the Goddess herself in these rhymes and aphorisms is symbolic of arrogance or selfishness: “The girl is extravagant, like Durgā” (someone who throws what she has to the winds); and “O Gopāl’s grandson! You have brought home a girl as beautiful as Durgā, but she’ll act like Durgā too” (i.e., as a belligerent daughter-in-law). “A popular story explains why Gaṇeśa never married. It is said that he once planned to marry, but came home one day and found that his two-armed mother had sprouted ten arms. ‘Why, mother?’ he asked. ‘If your wife [bau] doesn’t feed me, I am going to store up food for myself with my ten hands.’ What son could hear that and still want to marry?”⁹⁸

These sayings help to confirm the point of this chapter: Durgā Pūjā was initiated, built up, and enthusiastically promulgated by upper-class families who used the festivities as occasions to express and if possible to raise their social status.

Still the Three Blues: Old Family Pūjās Today

Almost no one can maintain the same standards as in the bygone days, although most old families have a common bond in their desperate clinging to a nostalgic past.⁹⁹ They are a “generation of caretakers” who “exalt [sic] in being the privileged custodians of a legacy that has seen the city through all its heights and lows, since the transient 19th century.”¹⁰⁰ Rājās are gone, their processions and royal elephants have disappeared, and the fabulous wealth that enabled such opulent displays is part of a lamented past. Nevertheless, as far as possible aristocratic families keep up the old traditions, jealously guarding their reputations for affluence, their figurative status of royalty, and their devotion to the Goddess, who is typically Durgā but sometimes also Jagaddhātrī.¹⁰¹ Nowadays Pūjās celebrated in the homes of the wealthy (or once wealthy) are called banedi bāḍīr Pūjās, or traditional family Pūjās; this differentiates them from the community, or sarbajanīn, Pūjās.¹⁰² Bāsantī Mitra, born into the Hatkhola Datta family but married into the Darjipara Mitra family, says—proudly—that in all her sixty years of doing the family Pūjā, she has never once been outside the house to see the street festivities.¹⁰³

One can see the concern to project an image of prosperity in the renovations and repaintings or redecoratings of family ṭhākurdālāns; in the gold jewelry, precious stones, and silk clothes that adorn their images of Durgā or Jagaddhātrī; and in the many types of traditional food offered to the Goddess and her devotees during the three main days of the festival. Families whom I interviewed during the course of my research were always eager to explain their traditions regarding naibedya (uncooked rice, fruits, ghee, and sweets placed on large platters before the Goddess), bhog (cooked food, including vegetables, luchis (deep fried bread), fish, and even meat, depending on the family, but not generally rice, all of which is offered to the Goddess and then consumed by the family), and other foods prepared for the public. All such cooking is done either by the women of the household, if they are Brahmans, or by hired male Brahmans.¹⁰⁴ This ensures the purity of the food and the ability of all, from low-caste family host to high-caste outside guest, to partake of it.¹⁰⁵

These celebrations are costly, even for those families whose ancestors had the foresight to establish a trust for the defraying of expenses or who divide up the costs among lines or branches of the family by turns (pālās). I interviewed all the famed Pūjā-sponsoring houses in Kolkata in 2000, and their annual festival costs ranged from Rs. 5,000 to Rs. 1 lakh. The Thanthania Dattas, Shovabazar Debs, Rāmdulāl Des, and Janbazar Hājrās appear to spend the most, although, interestingly, some lesser-known families, such as the Malliks of Darpanarayan Tagore Street and the Dawns in Darjipara, also expend Rs. 60,000–80,000 per year. Several of the senior family members with whom I spoke evinced pride in the financial burdens they and their relatives shoulder; they are not, they said, like the organizers of the big-budget sarbajanīn Pūjā committees, whose purses are filled through public subscription or corporate advertising.¹⁰⁶

Most families told me that although they have had to dispense with many customs, like theatrical or dance entertainments, they still try to maintain, even in diminished form, the important—and I would add, symbolically significant—rites or niyams. The kāṭhāmo is still consecrated on Rath or Ulṭo Rath Din; those who can, make the bathing of the kalā bau as elaborate as possible at the river steps (fig. 1.2); some families still fire rifles at sandhi pūjā;¹⁰⁷ almost all interviewees said that their priests adhere to the ritual prescriptions of the Bṛhannandikeśvara Purāṇa, which are more complicated than those used by priests hired for the community Pūjās; as a whole these families are much more scrupulous in engaging priests for ritualized readings of texts such as the “Devī-Māhātmya,” the Rāmāyaṇa, and the Vedas, after which there is occasionally a formal Paṇḍit Bidāy, or Felicitation of the Scholars, in which Brahmans are given cash gifts; many families continue to sacrifice animals in their house courtyards; a number do kumārī pūjā;¹⁰⁸ a smaller number perform dhuno pūjā; and still fewer release blue-throated birds (fig. 1.3). Because of strict environmental protection laws, it is now illegal to buy or sell wild birds, so those families who want to alert Śiva in the traditional way that his wife is on her way home must buy the birds from the black market, at Rs. 800–1,000 per bird.¹⁰⁹

FIGURE 1.2.    Bathing the kalā bau. Kolkata, October 2000. Photo by Jayanta Roy.

Almost none of these niyams can be practiced by the leaders of the community Pūjās, a fact of which the scions of the old family Pūjās are proudly aware. When I asked them how their worship of the Goddess differed from that done in the public arena, they mentioned other juxtapositions as well: the image of Durgā in the sarbajanīn Pūjā pandals looks like a film star, whereas “ours inspires reverence and even awe”¹¹⁰ (see chapter 4); there is always noise, microphones blaring film songs in the streets, whereas “our celebrations are more somber and conservative”;¹¹¹ and while the community Pūjā organizers are influenced by a desire for prizes (see chapter 5), the banedi bāḍīr Pūjās are not.¹¹² Indeed, utsāha, or ardor, and niṣṭhā, or devotion to the ritual and its true religious meaning, were consistent themes in the self-descriptions of the people with whom I spoke. Two of the women in the major line of the Shovabazar Rāj family said that they consider their ṭhākurdālān a pīṭhasthān, or a holy seat of the Goddess, and told me quite clearly, “We have more niṣṭhā than anyone else.”¹¹³ There is a further expression of satisfaction in the careful adherence to ritual purity laws, even if they are exclusionary. Mr. Alok Kṛṣṇa Deb, of the Shovabazar Rāj estate, said, referring to the Goddess, “We don’t touch her; we’re not Brahmans.”¹¹⁴

Looking back over the four hundred years for which we have definite evidence of Durgā Pūjā sponsorship in Bengal, the number of home Pūjās of the banedi variety is undoubtedly decreasing, relative to the total number of celebrations.¹¹⁵ This has been due both to the break-up of joint families and to a steady decline in zamindari fortunes since 1793, up through and including the zamindari abolition acts of the 1950s and 1960s¹¹⁶ and the Communist attempts to redistribute land since the mid-1960s. The traditional family Pūjās once acted as adhesives for the community; local artisans and various dependents would work for the zamindar’s Pūjā in return for payment taken from the Goddess’s naibedya,¹¹⁷ and neighborhood folk would come to watch and participate in some of the rituals. Now these are more private, and it is the community Pūjās that generally cater to public demands.¹¹⁸

FIGURE 1.3.    Releasing the nīlkaṇṭha pākhī. Kolkata, Daśamī day, October 1999. Photo by Jayanta Roy.

But there is a role for the old family Pūjās in Bengal today, a role clearly visible to everyone, zamindari descendant and “average” Bengali alike. There is tremendous public nostalgia for and pride in these once-illustrious houses, for they are envisaged to perpetuate the past and to embody the essence of traditional values. Moreover, they function as cultural mascots, markers of national Bengali identity, and reminders of a special heritage. The West Bengal Tourist Office recognizes these cultural valences and organizes a very popular seasonal banedi bāḍīr bus tour, which takes darśan-seekers through eight to ten of the most prestigious Pūjās houses on each of the main days of the festival. One of these is the residence of the venerable Sābarṇa Rāy Caudhurīs.¹¹⁹ They have so little money that their ṭhākurdālān is in a completely dilapidated state (bhagnadaśā), with only the outside columns still standing. Nevertheless, people flock to this site. Families so honored enjoy the status this affords, with newcomers to the bus tour list especially pleased by their inclusion. For instance, Mr. Bhaskar Chunder, whose house has been included on the itinerary since 1999, has prepared a special leaflet for tourists that explains the venerable history of his lineage. In fact, the more people wandering through one’s premises at Pūjā time, the better. Mr. Priya Gopāl Hājrā told me proudly that two to three thousand people visit the Rāṇī Rasmaṇī house every day during Durgā Pūjā.¹²⁰ In the office of the Rāmdulāl De estate, which boasts by far the most impressive of the ṭhākurdālāns I saw in Kolkata, in terms of upkeep and grandeur, the senior member of the family, Mr. Kalyāṇkumār Deb, enunciated the reasons for the popularity of his and other traditional celebrations: “There’s a craze now to see these old family Pūjās—a sentimental desire.”¹²¹ A BBC television documentary on Lord Robert Clive was filmed in 2001 in the Shovabazar Rāj estate, with Mr. Alok Kṛṣṇa Deb playing the part of his illustrious forebear and Clive’s contemporary, Nabakṛṣṇa Deb; pride in this heritage overshadows censure of the unprincipled British adventurer who extorted so much from Bengal.¹²²

For it is not just the families themselves who gain from their traditions. The public yearns for them, feels pride in them, and rewards their sponsors with conferred status. Newspapers always feature numerous stories about the banedi bāḍīr Pūjās, complete with photographs and interviews, and the reporters inevitably compose paeans about their significance and importance to community history. These traditional Pūjās are “not only ancient, but also Bengal’s heritage (aitihya) and the fountain of our glory (gauraber dhārāk).” They “are now very elite, and a matter of pride, especially if they stick to their inherited traditions.”¹²³ A few years ago the newspapers even reported public attempts by the citizens of Bishnupur to resuscitate, via subscription, the Durgā Pūjā to Devī Mṛnmayī that the Malla rājas once so lavishly celebrated. Why? The traditional Pūjā is Bishnupur’s “pride and glory (garimā).”¹²⁴ As David Lowenthal argues in The Past Is a Foreign Country, reviving—or manufacturing—events from our past and putting our own stamp on them makes us feel more at home with our heritage and is integral to our sense of identity.¹²⁵

Another expression of this craze for the past is evident in the pandal themes chosen by the leaders of the community Pūjās. Since the mid-1990s one can see a burgeoning of interest in zamindari-house look-alikes, with traditional images of the Goddess and her children displayed inside. Some Pūjā organizers even hire artisans to recreate homes that are dilapidated and falling apart, mimicking the feel of the fading aristocratic glory most Bengalis see around them.¹²⁶ If ordinary people cannot be zamindars themselves, then they can, with their neighborhood, imaginatively reconstruct that lifestyle for the five days of the Pūjā season.

As chapter 3 will argue more fully, one can interpret the Bengali feeling for Pūjā traditionalism through the lens of cultural nostalgia. If nostalgia is defined as a romanticized “orientation toward the past as a time of value and meaning,” where “what is authentic … is what is past,”¹²⁷ then the present mania among the Bengali public for honoring and finding pride in the aristocratic family Pūjās of their cities and towns, as well as their efforts to recreate zamindari homes in their own community pandals, can be understood as a nostalgic longing. Durgā becomes synonymous with cultural identity, an icon from the past that can come to stand for one’s entire lost self.¹²⁸ Just as in Britain, where the heritage preservation movement began in the 1970s with the wealthy upper classes, whose country houses and estate lands were threatened by Labor government laws and heavy taxation, but was supported by the middle-class, country-house-visiting public for whom the allure of a fading national grandeur was worth paying money to preserve,¹²⁹ so also in Bengal: the vast majority of the people being ferried around by the West Bengal Tourist buses to the opened ṭhākurdālāns of this or that renowned Pūjā-sponsoring family have no link to the lifestyle of those whose traditions they admire. One could even say that they have no personal “memories” of such grandeur in their family backgrounds. And yet, as the work of Christian Novetzke, following Jan Assmann and others, has shown, memories, whether historically viable or not, are socially bonding and constitutive of community identity. Memory “gives back; it restores the connection severed by the lapse of time and returns the observer to the immediacy of an event. Memory is the site of continuity.”¹³⁰ In the words of Svetlana Boym, this is a “restorative nostalgia,” which “proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps, … [manifesting] itself in total reconstructions of monuments of the past.”¹³¹ Hence even though very few members of the middle class in Bengal would want to return to a world of overt feudalism, what is admired as a part of aristocratic zamindari culture is the sense of family cohesiveness, leisure, devotion, and community caring that their Pūjās supposedly engendered, and to which the middle class also aspires. Even fifty years ago, people were ruing the passing of these old customs. Nirad C. Chaudhuri, writing in 1953 about his young days, reminisced that the old-style Pūjās were more social, were more expressive of their links to agricultural cycles, and, because of their slower pace, drew out human sentiments more.¹³² “Sanjay,” in the Sunday Statesman Magazine for September 1954, agreed: because the Pūjās are now community efforts, they are shorn of human emotion; entertainment becomes the chief motive. These elements represent “symptoms of a coarsening of sensibility and an acceptance of vulgarity.”¹³³ Whether or not these memories represent true experiences, their currency today guarantees health for the aristocratic-prestige market, the tourism business, and artisans who excel in constructing pandals in the shape of old mansions. For nostalgia is profitable, and reflects vested interests.

There is therefore a self-perpetuating feedback loop between elite families and the public. The niṣṭhā that is reportedly characteristic of the banedi bāḍīr Pūjās may certainly be genuine; I have met some extremely earnest devotees of the Goddess among the families whom I interviewed. But such faith is also, if visible and recognized by a public that longs to be made proud by means of the traditionalism of its cultural guardians, a symbolic asset to be protected and aggrandized. In this, niṣṭhā also constrains. Community Pūjās may be as novel and as modern as the imaginations of their organizers can manage, but the public demands, as an anchor amid the frenzied changes of the streets, traditional homes in which the Goddess still represents their own desired pasts.