Notes

Preface

1. Along the way I have published two other essays that derive from this same material: “A Festival for Jagaddhātrī and the Power of Localized Religion in West Bengal,” in Breaking Boundaries with the Goddess: New Directions in the Study of Śāktism. Essays in Honor of Narendra Nath Bhatacharyya, ed. Cynthia Ann Humes and Rachel Fell McDermott (New Delhi: Manohar, 2009), pp. 201–222; and “Playing with Durgā: Ritual Levity in Bengal,” in Sacred Play: Ritual Levity and Humor in South Asian Religions, ed. Selva J. Raj and Corinne G. Dempsey (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), pp. 143–159.

Introduction

1. Each year Bengali almanacs predict by what conveyance Umā will return home from Kailasa: if she chooses either a boat or an elephant, the following year will enjoy plentiful rain and harvest; but if it is a palanquin (dolā) or a horse, there will be pestilence, disorder, and anarchy. Nowadays, of course, she also comes on a lorry! See Bimalcandra Datta, Durgā Pūjā: Sekāl theke Ekāl (Calcutta: Ramakrishna Vivekananda Institute of Research and Culture, 1986), p. 140.

2. Rājās were titled landowners, not literally “kings,” but wealthy estate landowners, or zamindars, who were granted by the Mughals and later by the British hereditary jurisdiction over revenue collection in their properties.

3. Some years, due to the variations of the lunar calendar, Durgā Pūjā extends over five solar days.

4. The springtime worship of Durgā, Bāsantī Pūjā, probably predates the autumn festival, as the latter is always called “untimely” and as there is nothing about the autumn in the “Devī-Māhātmya” ’s instructions for the worship of the Goddess. For references to the Rāma tradition, see Datta, Durgā Pūjā: Sekāl theke Ekāl, chapter 2, “Pūjā Prasanga.” Some Bengali families still celebrate Durgā Pūjā in spring, without the akāl bodhan; Telegraph, 13 April 2008, Metro section, p. 1.

5. Refer to Joguth Chunder Gangooly, Life and Religion of the Hindoos, with a Sketch of My Life and Experience (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, Lee, and Co., 1860); S. C. Bose, The Hindoos as They Are (A Description of the Manners, Customs, and Inner life of Hindoo Society in Bengal (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, and Co., 1883); Pratap Chandra Ghosha, Durga Puja, with Note and Illustrations (Calcutta: Hindoo Patriot Press, 1871); Pandurang Vaman Kane, History of Dharmasastra, 6 vols., 2nd ed., vol. V, pt. 1 (Poona: Bhandarkar Research Institute, 1974); Shiṅgo Einoo, “The Autumn Goddess Festival: Described in the Purāṇas,” in Living with Śakti: Gender, Sexuality, and Religion in South Asia, ed. Masakazu Tanaka and Musashi Tachikawa (Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, 1999), pp. 33–70; Hillary Peter Rodrigues, Ritual Worship of the Great Goddess: The Liturgy of the Durgā Pūjā with Interpretations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003); Madhu Khanna, “The Ritual Capsule of Durgā Pūjā: An Ecological Perspective,” in Hinduism and Ecology: The Intersection of Earth, Sky, and Water, ed. Christopher Key Chapple and Mary Evelyn Tucker (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 479–485; and Ralph W. Nicholas, Night of the Gods: Durga Puja and Authority in Rural Bengal (Calcutta: Chronicle Books, 2012).

6. Durgā Pūjā is not generally Tantric, although there are old family traditions that do incorporate Tantric elements—for instance, the Mallas of Biṣṇupur, as discussed in Nancy Auer Falk, “Mata, Land, and Line: Female Divinity and the Forging of Community in India,” in Invoking Goddesses: Gender Politics in Indian Religion, ed. Nilima Chitgopekar (Delhi: Shakti Books, 2002), pp. 161–162.

7. See Roger Caillois, Men, Play, and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (1958; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001); Tom E. Driver, The Magic of Ritual: Our Need for Liberating Rites That Transform Our Lives and Our Communities (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991); and Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1938; Boston: Beacon Press, 1955). See also my “Playing with Durgā: Ritual Levity in Bengal,” in Sacred Play: Ritual Levity and Humor in South Asian Religions, ed. Selva J. Raj and Corinne G. Dempsey (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), pp. 143–159.

1. Pūjā Origins and Elite Politics

1. Bengal Hurkaru, 10 Oct. 1825, p. 2.

2. On the two hymns to Durgā in the Mahābhārata, see Kunal Chakrabarti, Religious Process: The Purāṇas and the Making of a Regional Tradition (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 216 n. 27. For Kṛttibās’s Bengali text, see Rāmāyaṇ Kṛttibās Biracita, ed. Harakṛṣṇa Mukhopādhyāy (Calcutta: Sāhitya Saṁsad, 1957), pp. 384–385.

3. For many of these references, see Chakrabarti, Religious Process, p. 334 n. 72, and vol. 2 of Rajendra Chandra Hazra, Studies in the Upapurāṇas, 2 vols. (Calcutta: Sanskrit College, 1963).

4. See the Devī and Bhaviṣya Purāṇas, as discussed in Pratap Chandra Ghosha, Durga Puja, With Notes and Illustrations (Calcutta: Hindoo Patriot Press, 1871), pp. 15–16, and Pandurang Vaman Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, 6 vols., 2nd ed. (Poona: Bhandarkar Research Institute, 1974), vol. V, pt. 1, p. 157.

5. Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, vol. V, pt. 1, p. 157 n. 401.

6. Rāmacarita III.25; see Rāmacaritam of Sandhyākaranandin, ed. Haraprasad Sastri, revised with an English translation and notes by Radhagovinda Basak (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1969), p. 70.

7. For discussion of these digests and their contents, see Bimalcandra Datta, Durgā Pūjā: Sekāl theke Ekāl (Calcutta: Ramakrishna Vivekananda Institute of Research and Culture, 1986), pp. 43–46; and Hazra, Studies in the Upapurāṇas. Note that Śūlapāṇi, Vidyāpati, and Raghunandana mention various earlier exponents of Durgā Pūjā, some from as far back as the eleventh or twelfth centuries during the Pāla period, but none of their texts have come down to us. In spite of the veneration accorded the Bṛhannandikeśvara Purāṇa, the text itself is not extant, but is inferred from various quotations preserved in the Pūjā digests of Vidyāpati, Raghunandana, and others. See ibid., pp. 466–469.

8. Pratapaditya Pal, Hindu Religion and Iconology According to the Tantrasāra (Los Angeles: Vichitra Press, 1981), p. 11.

9. Vṛndāvanadāsa, Śrīśrīcaitanyabhāgavata, Bengali text in Devanagari script, 3 vols. (Vṛndāvana: Śrīcaitanya Gauḍīya Maṭha, 1997–2003), 2:608.

10. See Kabikañkaṇ Caṇḍī (Calcutta: Basumatī-Sāhitya-Saṁsad, 1963), section called “Phullanār Bilāp,” p. 114.

11. From the nineteenth-century ballad entitled “Santi”: “In every house the divine mother Durga is worshipped.” “The merchant brought from his treasures the best jewels, precious stones, and gold ornaments and with great taste, adorned the girls, just as people adorn the figure of the goddess Durga during the month of October” (Dineshchandra Sen, Eastern Bengal Ballads, Mymensing, 4 vols. [Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1923–1932], vol. 2 [1926], pp. 127 and 175). See also “Malua” and “Kamala” in vol. 1 (1923), pp. 67 and 134.

12. See B. N. Mukherjee, “Foreign Elements in Iconography of Mahishāsuramardinī—The War Goddess of India,” in Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1985), suppl. 6, pp. 402–414.

13. Hazra, Studies in the Upapurāṇas, pp. 17–26, has an excellent discussion of the evidence for Devī’s association with tribal peoples and customs. Kunal Chakrabarti, in his Religious Process, pp. 173–185, examines Risley’s nineteenth-century overview of Bengali tribes and castes and finds the overwhelming presence of goddesses in their worship. He also demonstrates that the Purāṇas acknowledged Bengal’s association with such goddesses before the process of Brahmanization began.

14. Studies of Santals (Sāotāls in Bengali) living in West Bengal (these comprise half of the tribal people in the state) indicate that Hindu deities such as Kālī, Dibi (Durgā), Mahādeva (Śiva), and Gaṅgā find a place among household spirits (orak bongas in Santali), ojhas’ tutelary spirits (saket bongas), and the Santal pantheon of deities (deku bongas). See A. B. Chaudhuri, Witch-Killings Amongst Santals (New Delhi: Ashish Publishing House, 1984), pp. 107 and 141; M. K. Raha, “Religious Beliefs and Practices Among the Santals,” in To Be with Santals, ed. Ujjwal Kanti Ray, Amal Kumar Das, and Sunil Kumar Basu (Calcutta: Government of West Bengal: Cultural Research Institute, Scheduled Castes and Tribes Welfare Department, 1982), pp. 49–58; and J. Troisi, Tribal Religion: Religious Beliefs and Practices Among the Santals (New Delhi: Manohar, 1978), pp. 79 and 91. But these are widely held to be nontribal additions to the spiritual realm; some scholars see the sponsorship of Durgā Pūjā in particular to be a direct result of the movement into tribal areas of Bengali and Oriya officials after 1857; they celebrated the festivals to “ingratiate themselves with the locals.” See Gauri Charan Banerjee, “Durga Puja in the Aboriginal Tracts,” in Amrita Bazar Patrika, 3 Oct. 1926, p. 30.

15. Called the Dasae Festival, this three-day ritual culminates in a special dance for village men who have passed the training to become ojhas, or medicine men. The interface between this tribal celebration and Durgā Pūjā is visible both in the fact that men dance from village to village, stopping at any house or pandal where caste Hindus are worshiping Durgā, and in the legends told to explain the origin of the dance: a great Santal warrior named Hodor-Durga was killed under a bel tree by a white-complexioned woman from another tribe, who took the name of her vanquished foe. Then she started attacking Santal villages, and the men dressed as women to avoid being killed by her. Tribal peoples who worship Dibi as their household deity may also go visit Durgā pandals for darśan. See S. K. Basu, “Santal Festivals,” in To Be with Santals, pp. 73–80; S. Chakraborti, “The Dansaey Festival of the Santals,” in To Be with Santals, pp. 81–89; and Troisi, Tribal Religion, pp. 214–216.

16. Amita Ray, “The Cult and Ritual of Durgā Pūjā in Bengal,” in Shastric Traditions in Indian Arts, ed. Anna Libera Dallapiccola in collaboration with Christine Walter-Mendy and Stephanie Zingel-Avé Lallemant (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GMBH, 1989), p. 140; and Śyāmalkānti Cakrabartī, “Durgā: Anya o Banya,” in Lok Saṁskṛti Gabeṣaṇā, ed. Sanatkumār Mitra, vol. 13, no. 2 (July–Aug. 2000): 308–313.

17. Traditionally the advent of Brahmanism is traced in Bengal to the post-Gupta period with the invitation by King Ādisura to five Brahmans from Kanauj between 732 and 1017. For further discussion, see Ray, “The Cult and Ritual of Durgā Pūjā in Bengal,” p. 133. For an excellent survey of the way in which local goddesses were appropriated for the purpose of achieving Brahmanical social dominance in Bengal, consult Chakrabarti, Religious Process, pp. 165–233. A possible hint of Durgā’s older, mountainous, and potentially tribal origins may be found in the earlier presence of the tiger in two venerable zamindar families of north Bengal: the bloodred Kuch Bihar goddess has both a lion and a tiger mount, and the Jalpaiguri Durgā sat on a tiger, although over time the lion replaced it; Mohit Roy, Rūpe Rūpe Durgā (Calcutta: Adhīr Pāl, 1985), pp. 30–34 and 59–63.

18. See Sumita Mukherjee and Dr. Robin D. Tribhuwan, “Influences of Kali Puja Festival on Tribals of West Bengal,” in Fairs and Festivals of Indian Tribes, ed. Robin David Tribhuwan (New Delhi: Discovery Publishing House, 2003), p. 119.

19. John R. McLane, Land and Local Kingship in Eighteenth-Century Bengal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 109, and Kāliprasanna Sinha, Hutom Pyāncār Nakśa, 2nd ed., with commentary (1868; Calcutta: Subarṇarekhā, 1991), p. 235 n. 549.

20. Datta, Durgā Pūjā: Sekāl theke Ekāl, p. 111.

21. Sudhīndranāth Bhaṭṭācārya, “Bāṅgālīr Durgotsab,” Śāradīya Utsab (1406), p. 38, quoted in Ābdur Rauph, “Durgā: Bāṅgāli Musulmān,” in Lok Saṁskṛti Gabeṣaṇā, ed. Sanatkumār Mitra, vol. 13, no. 2 (July–Aug. 2000): 284–285. “Bābu” is both an honorific title attached to a gentleman’s first name and a satirical label for a foppish dandy who—as he was caricatured in the nineteenth century—spent his time and money attempting to imitate the English.

22. This claim for Rājā Kṛṣṇacandra Rāy is made by the Calcutta Journal, 7 Oct. 1820, pp. 366–367; the Samācār Darpaṇ newspaper of 17 Oct. 1829; and Sinha, Hutom Pyāncār Nakśa, p. 235 n. 1. It is possible that Kṛṣṇacandra saw himself in continuity with Kaṁsanārāyaṇ, as he had his own court pandits make the Durgā Pūjā ritual prescriptions, as originally devised by Rameś Śāstrī, the court pandit of Udaynārāyaṇ, the grandson of Kaṁsanārāyaṇ, easier to follow. Bhāratcandra, Kṛṣṇacandra’s famous court poet, says of his patron in the introductory section to the first part of his Annadāmaṅgal poem, written in 1752–53, that “all the people call Kṛṣṇacandra ‘devīputra,’ or ‘the son of the Goddess’”; Bhāratcandra’s editor notes that this is because he used to celebrate the Pūjās with such pomp. See Bhāratcandrer Annadāmaṅgal, ed. Nirmalendu Mukhopādhyāy (Calcutta: Modern Book Agency, 1986), p. 15 n. 2. William Ward, while not asserting that Kṛṣṇacandra was the first to initiate this Pūjā, notes that his grandson, Rājā Īśvarcandra, offered 65,535 goats during the course of one three-day festival during the late eighteenth century; William Ward, A View of the the History, Literature, and Mythology of the Hindoos, 4 vols., 3rd ed. (1817; Delhi: Low Price Publications, 1990) 3:116 n.

23. One can find numerous references to the celebration of Durgā Pūjā in the eighteenth century. Bimalcandra Datta, for example, devotes a whole chapter of his Durgā Pūjā: Sekāl theke Ekāl to early Pūjās in Calcutta (pp. 109–137), and quotes a travel report from James Mitchell, a British clerk, to a sea captain, who describes the Pūjās as he saw them in 1748 (pp. 261–262). J. Z. Holwell’s travel account also testifies to the popularity of the festival in the 1760s; see Événemens historique interéssans, relatifs aux provinces de Bengale, & à l’empire de l’Indostan, trans. from the English (Amsterdam: Arkstée & Merkus, 1768), pp. 151–154.

24. A nawāb was a viceroy or governor of a province who was responsible for law and order.

25. It was the Treaty of Allahabad, concluded in 1765 between Clive and Emperor Shāh ‘Ālām II, that gave the British the power to introduce truly drastic changes in the administration of Bengal. Under this agreement the Emperor made the Company the dewān of Bengal, Orissa, and Bihar, in exchange for 2,600,000 rupees a year in tribute. The Muslim nawābs were to retain the responsibility for defense and law, but in actual fact they were chosen by the Company and were stripped of revenue and military power.

26. Calcutta Journal, 7 Oct. 1820, pp. 366–367. A different twist on this argument is presented by other nineteenth-century newspapers, which blame Muslim religious feeling less than the conditions of lawlessness that pertained under their rule. For example, “[I]n days when spoilation and plunder were practiced with impunity, when robbery and theft were committed in the broad daylight of the sun, or in other words, when the security of property was unprovided by any form of government, it was generally unsafe for the people to make a show of their wealth either by adopting a pleasant and comfortable mode of living, or laying it out in some commercial speculation” (from “An Account of the Denajpoor Raj Family,” 2 April 1857, from the Hindoo Patriot, cited in Benoy Ghosh, Selections from English Periodicals of Nineteenth-Century Bengal, vol. 4: 1857 [Calcutta: Papyrus, 1979], p. 28).

27. Robert Orme, Historical Fragments of Mogul Empire (1781; London: F. Wingrave, 1805), pp. 450–451, quoted by Shirin Akhtar in The Role of the Zamindars in Bengal, 1707–1772 (Dacca: Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 1982), p. 33. Luke Scrafton also described the “Mahometan governors” looking upon the riches of their subjects “as a boy does on a bird’s nest; he eyes their progress with impatience, then comes with a spoiler’s hand, and ravishes the fruit of their labour. To counter-act this, the Gentoos bury their money under ground” (Luke Scrafton, Reflections on the Government of Indostan, with a Short Sketch of the History of Bengal, from 1739 to 1756, and An Account of the English Affairs to 1758 [London, 1763; reprinted London: W. Strahan Ivb., 1770], letter 1, p. 16).

28. “The Territorial Aristocracy of Bengal—The Nadiya Raj,” in Calcutta Review 55, no. 109 (1872), pp. 93–94.

29. Kesab Chandra Sarkar, interview, 2 Oct. 2000.

30. Aparna Bhattacharya, Religious Movements of Bengal (1800–1850) (Patna: Aparna Bhattacharya, 1981), pp. 98–99.

31. Records of Government, June 27, 1757, H.H.S. 193, 170–171, quoted in Akhtar, The Role of the Zamindars, p. 107.

32. Mīr Qāsim imprisoned Rājā Baidyanāth, Rājā Rāmnārāyaṇ, Rājā Rājballabh, and the Hindu financier Jagat Seṭh in Mongir Fort, Bihar. He had Rāmnārāyaṇ drowned with a sack tied around his neck, Jagat Seṭh was rolled into the river from the ramparts of the fort, and Rājballabh was flayed alive. Baidyanāth bribed the prison guard, however, and escaped. See Hindoo Patriot, 9 April 1857, cited in Ghosh, Selections from English Periodicals, p. 31.

33. Nirad C. Chaudhuri makes this point about the benefits of the Permanent Settlement in the Statesman, 4 Oct. 1953, Puja Supplement, p. 1. For more information on the Permanent Settlement, see: Sirajul Islam, Permanent Settlement in Bengal: A Study of Its Operation, 1790–1819 (Dacca: Bangla Academy, 1979); J. R. McLane, “Revenue Farming and the Zamindari System in Eighteenth Century Bengal,” in Land Tenure and Peasant in South Asia, ed. R. E. Frykenberg (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1979); Ratnalekha Roy, Change in Bengal Agrarian Society, c. 1760–1850 (Delhi: Manohar, 1979), pp. 73–88; N. K. Sinha, Economic History of Bengal, 2 vols. (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1962), 2:147–182; and N. K. Sinha, “Administrative, Economic, and Social History, 1757–1793,” in his History of Bengal (1757–1905) (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1967), pp. 96–105.

34. 17 Oct. 1829, quoted in Datta, Durgā Pūjā: Sekāl theke Ekāl, p. 192 n. 1.

35. McLane, Land and Local Kingship, p. 119. In the second quotation he is citing a statement by C. A. Bayly.

36. See A. B. Mahmood, The Revenue Administration of Northern Bengal, 1765–1793 (Dacca: National Institute of Public Administration, 1970), p. 36.

37. Rājā Baidyanāth of Dinajpur [Board of Revenue Consultations, 17 Sept. 1773, R49/41, 3088–3089], in Akhtar, The Role of the Zamindars, p. 188 n. 6. Baidyanāth’s adopted son, Rādhānāth, died at age 24, a virtual prisoner in his own house. The British at the time claimed that he was so profligate a spender that they had to sell off half his estates to meet his revenue arrears, but a later commentator writes that “it is probable that the increase of strictness with which the collections were made [after 1772] was the true cause of the decline in which the family had lived under its Mahomedan masters.” See E. V. Westmacott, “The Territorial Aristocracy of Bengal—The Dinagepoor Raj,” in Calcutta Review 55, no. 109 (1872): 217. A similar letter of protest to the Company was received from the Rājā of Jessore, who asked for an advance on his allowance to defray the expenses of Durgā Pūjā and expressed anxiety for the preservation of the dignity of his family; S. Charter to Bengal Revenue Consultation [13 Sept. 1773, BRC Sept. 17, 1773, R49/41, 3087], in Akhtar, The Role of the Zamindars, p. 189 n. 1.

38. Tejascānd, zamindar of Burdwan from 1770 to 1832, wrote to the collector of Burdwan, S. Davis, whom he succeeded in winning over to his cause, the following: “It must have proceeded from the oversight, rather than from any just and avowed principle, that there should be established two methods of judicial process under the same government, the one summary and efficient for the satisfaction of its own claims, the other tardy and uncertain in regard to the satisfaction of claims due to its subjects, more especially in a case like the present, where ability to discharge the one demand necessarily depends on the other demand being previously realized” (quoted by S. Islam, Permanent Settlement in Bengal, p. 52). The rājās of Nadia and Bishnupur made similar objections.

39. This change had to be vetted by the British. In Bankura in 1793, after the Malla rājās could no longer afford to keep up the Pūjās, people belonging to all castes and strata of society apparently applied to the East India Company bosses to allow then to collect money and do a Pūjā. See Pradīpkumār Ghoṣ, “Durgā: Mallabhūmer,” in Lok Saṁskṛti Gabeṣaṇā, ed. Sanatkumār Mitra, vol. 13, no. 2 (July–Aug. 2000): 347–355.

40. Bhāskara, the leader of the Mārāṭhas, attempted to celebrate the festival with the help of the local zamindars. He was routed by the nawāb’s army after the eighth day of the Pūjā, however. See Edward C. Dimock Jr., and Pratul Chandra Gupta, trans., The Mahārāshṭa Purāṇa: An Eighteenth-Century Historical Text (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 40. Regarding the British, “the most amazing act of worship was performed by the East India Company itself: in 1765 it offered a thanksgiving pūjā, no doubt as a politic act to appease its Hindu subjects, on obtaining the Diwani of Bengal (including Bihar and Orissa). The sum spent is cited variously as having been between Rs. 5,000 and Rs. 30,000” (see Kalyani Dutta, “Kalighat,” in Calcutta, the Living City, ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri, vol. 1: The Past [Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1990], p. 25).

41. Mahmood, Revenue Administration, p. 219.

42. As an example of the changing styles of leadership under the nawābs, consider the case of the Dinajpur Rāj. As Westmacott tells it (in the late nineteenth century), in the initial stages of the Mughal reign over Bengal (i.e., until the end of Akbar’s reign in 1657), and even until the beginning of Dinajpur Rājā Prāṇnāth’s reign in 1682, the Hindus had plenty of opportunity to make themselves wealthy and powerful, because no one was watching very carefully. As long as the zamindar paid a certain portion of his rents, he was left alone. But it was in the reign of Prāṇnāth in 1702 that things changed, with the coming of Mīr Ja‘far, who “bestowed great attention on the affairs of the province of which he was governor” (see E. V. Westmacott, “The Dinagepoor Raj,” p. 214).

43. Brijen K. Gupta, Sirajuddaullah and the East India Company, 1756–1757: Background to the Foundation of British Power in India (Leiden: Brill, 1966), p. 30.

44. Note that no matter what the outside structures, the insides of these homes were typically modeled after an Indian palace as influenced by the Mughal court, with separate living quarters for men and women, offices, drawing rooms, servants’ quarters, and stables.

45. American silk traders were so pleased with the products furnished them by the trader Rāmdulāl De that they presented his family with a full-sized portrait of George Washington, which was in the house for eighty-five years before being purchased by Warner Brothers. At present it hangs at Washington and Lee University. See Manish Chakraborti, “Beadon Ballads,” Times of India, “Calcutta Times” section, 6 March 2001, p. 4.

46. See Apūrba Caṭṭopādhyāy, “Ālor Banyāy Bhāsbe Jagaddhātrīr Candannagar,” and Premtoṣ De, “Candanagarer Jagaddhātrī Pujo,” both in Sāptahik Bartamān 12, no. 25 (13 Nov. 1999), pp. 11–12 and 8–10; and Yugāntar, 1 Nov. 1995, p. 7.

47. In the “Devī-Māhātmya” section of the Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa, the Goddess is called Jagaddhātrī twice (1.53, 13.10), Jagatam Dhātrī once (4.27), and Dhātrī once (5.8). See Thomas B. Coburn, The Devī-Māhātmya: Crystallization of the Goddess Tradition (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1985), pp. 205–206. In Devī-Bhāgavata Purāṇa 6.6, Jagaddhātrī is one of several epithets used for the deluding goddess to whom the gods go in supplication for help against the demon Vṛtra. See The Srimad Devi Bhagawatam, ed. and trans. Swami Vijñanananda, 2 pts., 2nd ed. (New Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint, 1977), pp. 495–499.

48. See Kāmākhyā Tantram, Sanskrit text edited with a Bengali translation by Jyotirlāl Dās (Calcutta: Nababhārat, 1978), p. 78; Kubjikā Tantram, Sanskrit text edited with a Bengali translation by Jyotirlāl Dās (Calcutta: Nababhārat, 1978), p. 33; and Kālikā Purāṇam, Sanskrit text edited with an English translation by Biswanarayan Shastri, 3 vols. (Delhi: Nag Publishers, 1991), 2:466–467.

49. For the original Sanskrit, see Hamsanārāyaṇ Bhaṭṭācārya, Hinduder Debadebī: Udbhav o Kramabikāś (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1986), 3:308, and Pal, Hindu Religion and Iconology, p. 42.

50. Narendra Nath Bhattacharyya, History of Śākta Religion (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1973), p. 135; and Ajit Kumar Mukhopadhay and Kalyan Chakrabortty, Discover Chandernagore (Chandannagar, Hooghly: Kumar Printers, 1999), accessed online 11/01/03.

51. Bhaṭṭācārya, Hinduder Debadebī: Udbhav o Kramabikāś, pp. 308–311.

52. For corroborating opinions, see Mahendranāth Datta, Kalikātār Purātan Kāhinī o Prarthā, 2nd ed. (1973; Kalikata: Mahendra Publishing Committee, 1975), pp. 130–131, and Yugāntar, 1 Nov. 1995, p. 7.

53. For a more detailed discussion of Jagaddhātrī Pūjā, see my “A Festival for Jagaddhātrī and the Power of Localized Religion in West Bengal,” in Breaking Boundaries with the Goddess: New Directions in the Study of Śāktism. Essays in Honor of Narendra Nath Bhattacharyya, ed. Cynthia Ann Humes and Rachel Fell McDermott (New Delhi: Manohar, 2009), pp. 201–222.

54. Rajat Sanyal, Voluntary Associations and the Urban Public Life in Bengal (1815–1876): An Aspect of Social History (Calcutta: Riddhi-India, 1980), pp. 42–65.

55. Chitra Deb, “The ‘Great Houses’ of Old Calcutta,” in Calcutta, the Living City, vol. I: The Past, ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 61.

56. Ibid., p. 58.

57. See Soumitra Das, “Memories of Our Past Splendour,” Statesman, 15 Oct. 1983, p. 13.

58. South Asia Research 6, no. 2 (Nov. 1986): 123–138. See also Mukherjee, “Foreign Elements in Iconography of Mahishāsuramardinī,” pp. 404–415.

59. Sanjukta Gupta, pers. comm., August 2001.

60. Gupta and Gombrich, “Kings, Power, and the Goddess,” p. 132.

61. C. J. Fuller, The Camphour Flame: Popular Hinduism and Society in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 108–127.

62. See Gupta and Gombrich, “Kings, Power, and the Goddess,” p. 134; and Bartamān, 22 Oct. 2001, p. 11.

63. Gupta and Gombrich, “Kings, Power, and the Goddess,” pp. 134–135.

64. See Pierre Bourdieu’s classic La distinction: Critique sociale du jugement (1979), translated by Richard Nice as Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Jun Jing, “Knowledge, Organization, and Symbolic Capital: Two Temples to Confucius in Gansu,” in On Sacred Grounds: Culture, Society, Politics, and the Formation of the Cult of Confucius, ed. Thomas A. Wilson (Harvard East Asian Monographs 217) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 335–375; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Hugh B. Urban, The Economics of Ecstasy: Tantra, Secrecy, and Power in Colonial Bengal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

65. L. de Grandpre, A Voyage in the Indian Ocean and to Bengal Undertaken in the Years 1789 and 1790, 2 vols. (Paris, 1801, and London, 1803), cited in P. T. Nair, ed., Calcutta in the Eighteenth Century: Impressions of Travelers (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1984), p. 254.

66. Ibid.

67. Calcutta Journal, 22 Sept. 1819, p. 183.

68. Lady Maria Nugent reports on a nautch performance in 1812 at the home of “Rajah Raj Kissen,” where “Neekhee and Ushoorun” surpassed her expectations; A Journal from the Year 1811 til the Year 1815, including a Voyage to and Residence in India, 2 vols. (London, 1839), cited in P. T. Nair, ed., Calcutta in the Nineteenth Century: Company’s Days (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1989), pp. 191–192. This love for nautch girls was not confined to the British in Calcutta; as William Dalrymple shows for late-eighteenth to early-nineteenth-century Lucknow, monied European gentlemen would spend their leisure time lying on carpets, smoking hubble-bubbles, and delightedly watching nautch girls; White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 211. Dalrymple calls this period the age of the great courtesans and dancing girls (p. 135), citing it as “a libertarian moment in the country’s recent history” (p. 173).

69. Some of the nouveaux riches wanted to display their cultured tastes through the patronage of new musical forms. Rājā Nabakṛṣṇa Deb, for example, was one of the first to showcase the kabioyālās, or traveling stand-up singers, in his home. See Rachel Fell McDermott, Mother of My Heart, Daughter of My Dreams: Kālī and Umā in the Devotional Poetry of Bengal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 133; and Rāmratna Pāṭhak, Durgotsab (Calcutta: Nūtan Bhārata Yantre, 1281/1874), pp. 20–22. For a yātrā performed in 1821 in Chinsurah, see Sambādpatre Sekāler Kathā, ed. Brajendranāth Bandyopādhyāy, 3 vols. (Calcutta: Baṅgīya Sāhitya Pariṣad), vol. 1 (1818–1830), 2nd ed. (1339/1932; 1344/1937), p. 138.

70. For references to the early nineteenth century, see Statesman, 19 Oct. 1991, p. 3; Statesman, 29 Sept. 1995, p. 7; and The Good Old Days of Honorable John Company, compiled by William H. Carey (1882; Calcutta: Quins Book Co., 1964), p. 76.

71. This was one of the amusements provided on 11 Dec. 1820 in the home of Dwaraknath Tagore; Bandyopādhyāy, Sambādpatre Sekāler Kathā, vol. 1, pp. 138–139.

72. These were reported from “Baboo Gopee Mohun Deb’s mansion”; Bengal Hurkaru, 11 Oct. 1826, p. 2.

73. Bengal Harkaru and India Gazette, 3 Oct. 1865, p. 3.

74. For descriptions of “Natives” trying to tempt Europeans with nautches, suppers, wine, and bands of music, see Carey, ed., The Good Old Days of Honorable John Company, pp. 258 and 418–419.

75. Soumitra Das, “Puja Arcades of Calcutta,” Statesman, 26 Oct. 1982, p. 3.

76. See Bengal Hurkaru, 12 Oct. 1829, p. 2, and Bengal Hurkaru, 28 Sept. 1830, p. 2.

77. These aṣṭadhātu images were made of gold, silver, brass, copper, crystal, stone, and other types of mixed metals. Famed families from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who were reputed to have had them include Mahārājā Bāhādur Jaynārāyaṇ Ghoṣāl, an important official under Hastings who established a Pūjā to an aṣṭadhātu image in 1782; the Gobindarām Mitra family; and the Lāhās of Cornwallis Street. See Śibśaṅkar Bhāratī, “Kalkātār Durgā Pūjā, 1586–1951,” in Bartamān Rabibār, 10 Oct. 1999, p. 10.

78. Bhattacharya, Religious Movements of Bengal, pp. 107–114; and Deb, “The ‘Great Houses’ of Old Calcutta,” pp. 58–59.

79. For a clear description of this sanctification process, see Ghosha, Durga Puja, pp. 1–2.

80. I am indebted for this explanation to Minati Kar, pers. comm., 24 July 2001; see also Herman Kulke, “Rathas and Rajas: The Car Festival at Puri,” in Car Festival of Lord Jagannath, Puri, ed. Sarat Chandra Mahapatra (Puri: Sri Jagannath Research Centre, 1994), p. 87.

81. Sandhi pūjā lasts from the last 24 minutes of Aṣṭamī to the first 24 minutes of Nabamī. During this period Durgā is worshiped in her Cāmuṇḍā form. In old families, a special bronze bowl with a tiny hole in it was placed in a bucket full of water. It took 24 minutes for the bowl to be totally submerged. The moment it sank, the cannon balls were fired.

82. For a description of these practices by the Nadia Rāj family in Krishnanagar, see Mohit Rāy, Rūpe Rūpe Durgā (Calcutta: Adhīr Pāl, 1985), pp. 1–7.

83. Ibid., p. 49.

84. She must be younger than nine years old, and is placed on a carpet, where she is offered lights, water, oil and turmeric, incense, cosmetics, sweetmeats, ornaments, and clothes. See Ghosha, Durga Puja, p. 74.

85. Indralāl Bandyopādhyāy, “Bibarṇa Kyānbhāse Sābarṇa Śāradā,” Sāptahik Bartamān, 16 Oct. 1999, p. 31.

86. “Caṇḍī, sapiṇḍī, kuśaṇḍī, tine niye bāmunḍi”; from Bikāśkānti Midyā, “Durgā: Bāṅglā Lokasāhitye,” in Lok Saṁskṛti Gabeṣaṇā, ed. Sanatkumār Mitra, vol. 13, no. 2 (July–Aug. 2000): 340.

87. The Calcutta Review, for example, devoted three entire articles in 1900–1901 to the “Religious and Charitable Endowments of Bengal Zemindars”: vol. 111, nos. 221 and 222 (July and Oct. 1900): 79–100, 223–249, and vol. 112, no. 223 (Jan. 1901): 50–77. A cursory glance at the papers throughout the nineteenth century reveals the extent to which the British praised the elite for their charity. See, for example, Englishman and Military Chronicle, 17 Oct. 1844, p. 5; Statesman and Friend of India, 15 Sept. 1880, p. 3; and Statesman and Friend of India, 14 Oct. 1885, p. 3.

88. See The Monthly Overland Englishman and Military Chronicle of Calcutta, 17 Sept. 1844, p. 2.

89. Other members of the Dharma Sabhā include Kālīkṛṣṇa Deb (1808–1874), the second son of Rājkṛṣṇa Deb, son of Nabakṛṣṇa; the Sābarṇabānik Mallik families of Barabajar and Pathuriaghata; the Dattas of Hatkhola (social rivals of the Shovabazar Debs); and Rāmdulāl De’s family—all of whom were avid Pūjā patrons. See Sanyal, Voluntary Associations and the Urban Public Life in Bengal (1815–1876). Note that the Brāhmo Samāj and the Dharma Sabhā had the same social base, and both were equally politically loyal to British rule.

90. Anon., “Article III.—Radhakant Deb,” Calcutta Review 44, no. 90 (Aug. 1867): 323.

91. Reported by Samrāṭ Basu for Bartamān, 21 Sept. 2002, p. 5.

92. Grandpre, A Voyage in the Indian Ocean, pp. 254–255.

93. Bipin Chandra Pal, Memories of My Life and Times (Calcutta: Bipinchandra Pal Institute, 1973), pp. 101, 104–105. The book covers Pal’s life from 1857 to 1900.

94. The Memoirs of Dr. Haimabati Sen: From Child Widow to Lady Doctor, trans. Tapan Raychaudhuri, ed. Geraldine Forbes and Tapan Raychaudhuri (New Delhi: Lotus Collection, 2000), p. 70.

95. Statesman, 4 Oct. 1953, Puja Supplement, p. 1.

96. As early as 1820, a writer in the Calcutta Journal noted that the new bāroiyārī celebrations were not sanctioned by the śāstras; 7 Oct. 1820, pp. 366–367.

97. These were called cāpāno Pūjās, or those that were “loaded upon” their sponsors. See the Bengal Spectator for Oct. 15, quoted in The Englishman and Military Chronicle, 18 Oct. 1842, p. 2, and Nirmal Kar, “Cāpāno Pūjā,” in Ānanda Bājār Patrikā, 27 Sept. 1998, p. 16. Mr. Maṇimohan Rāy Caudhurī, the senior member of one of the minor lines of the Sābarṇa Rāy Caudhurī family in Kolkata, told me that his grandfather had sponsored Jagaddhātrī Pūjā for four years following such an incident, but had afterward discontinued it. Interview, 14 Sept. 2000.

98. The Bengali originals for these sayings are: “Janme hayni ghẽṭupūjo, ekebāre daśbhujo”; “Ghare nei bhujā bhāṅg, chõḍār nām Durgārām”; “Durgāpūjāy śākh bāje nā, Ṣaṣṭi Pūjāy ḍhāk”; “Guyāpāner janye Durgotsab bāki thāke nā”; “juṭā selāi theke caṇḍī-pāṭh”; “meye yeno āupātāli Duggā”; and “Āre O Gopāler nāti! Enechile Durgāmūrti, karbei to ei kīrti!.” For the story about Gaṇeśa, see Midyā, “Durgā: Bāṅglā Lokasāhitye,” p. 345.

99. Families whom I interviewed, always accompanied by Hena Basu, were Mr. Bhaskar Chunder, of Bowbazar, descendant of Pratap Chandra Chunder, whose family has been sponsoring the Pūjā since 1877; Mr. Śubhamay Dawn (D) and Mr. Amarnāth Dawn, both of Darjipara, spice merchants by caste (Gandhibaṇiks), one of whose ancestors initiated the Pūjā in 1760; Mrs. Gītā Datta, from one of the junior lines in the Hatkhola Datta family, which has worshiped Durgā since 1794; Mr. Milan Datta of the Thanthania Datta family, whose Pūjā was started in 1855 by Dvāraknāth Datta, a banian (merchant) of the export-import company Jardine, Skinner, and Co.; Mr. Kalyāṇkumār Deb, senior member of the family of Rāmdulāl De (alias Deb, alias Sarkār; also known as the Chātu-Bābu Lātu-Bābu family, after the Rāmdulāl’s two famous sons), who started the Pūjā some time in the decade 1770–1780; Mrs. Ārati Deb and Mrs. Śephāli Bose, of the major line of the Shovabazar Rāj family, descended from Gopīmohan Deb, adopted son of Nabakṛṣṇa Deb (1733–1797), the tutor and secretary to Warren Hastings, who started his Pūjā in 1757 to celebrate Clive’s victory at Plassey; Mr. Alok Kṛṣṇa Deb, senior member of the minor Shovabazar line, descended from Nabakṛṣṇa’s natural son, Rājkṛṣṇa Deb, whose Pūjā has been celebrated yearly since 1790; Mr. Sujay Ganguli and his family, rice merchants settled in Chetla, who have been doing Durgā Pūjā since 1899; the office managers of the Pathuriaghata Street estate belonging to the family descended from Khelātcandra Ghoṣ, a noted zamindar and honorary justice of the peace, who founded the Pūjā in about 1840; Mr. Priya Gopāl Hājrā, of Janbazar, descendent of Śrī Rāmakṛṣṇa’s patron, Rāṇī Rāsmaṇī, who continued the village Pūjā of her parents-in-law when she and her husband moved to Calcutta; Mr. Śiśir Mallik of Darpanarayan Tagore Street, whose Pūjā was started by a gold jeweler in the family approximately two hundred years ago; Mrs. Chāmeli Mitra, of the Nilmaṇi Mitras of Beadon Street, whose Pūjā was started by the successful businessman Durgācaraṇ Mitra more than two hundred years ago; and Mr. Maṇimohan Rāy Caudhurī, senior member of one of the junior lines of the famed Sābarṇa Rāy Caudhurī family, which claims to have been celebrating the Pūjā since 1610.

100. Swagata Bhattacharya, “Pride and Prejudice,” Statesman, 25 Sept. 1998, Downtown section, p. 1.

101. Many elite families perform Jagaddhātrī Pūjā. Of the twelve representatives from the “old families” whom I interviewed in Kolkata, six (Mr. Priya Gopāl Hājrā, Mrs. Chāmeli Mitra, Mr. Kalyāṇkumār Deb, managers of the Khelātcandra Ghoṣ estate, Mr. Śubhamay Dawn, and Mr. Amarnāth Dawn), said that they worship Jagaddhātrī, but no one considered her a replacement for Durgā. The same is not true in Chandannagar and Krishnanagar, where many families esteem Jagaddhātrī Pūjā as the premier holiday of the year, and bypass Durgā Pūjā altogether.

102. Banedi (baniyādi, traditional, aristocratic) Pūjās were also referred to as ekak Pūjās, or those performed alone, without external financial help.

103. Reported by Samrāṭ Basu for Bartamān, 21 Sept. 2002, p. 5.

104. The Chetla Gangulis and Behala Sābarṇa Rāy Caudhurīs, Brahman families, told me that initiated women of their households do the cooking. By contrast, both houses of the Shovabazar Rāj, some would say the premier Pūjās of the city, hire up to fifty Brahman cooks each for the festival season. For a culinary overview, see Trina Mukherjee, “Eating Religiously,” Telegraph, 28 Sept. 1998, section 3, p. 1.

105. See Ghosha, Durgā Pūjā, appendix, p. xxxix n. 25, on prescriptive leniency for Śūdras.

106. Interviews with Mr. Śiśir Mallik, 30 Sept. 2000, and Mr. Śubhamay Dawn, 5 Oct. 2000.

107. The Pataldanga Basumalliks are reputed to do so; see Bartamān, 22 Oct. 2001, p. 9.

108. Kumārī pūjā is a hallowed tradition in some quarters. The monks at Belur Maṭh, the headquarters of the Rāmakṛṣṇa Maṭh, have been doing it since 1901; the kumārī of the year is invariably photographed for the Kolkata newspapers in the act of being worshiped. Some families take pride in the fact that a Brahman girl is worshiped in their non-Brahman houses, and others differentiate themselves from their peers by performing the rite on all three days of the festival.

109. Ānandabājār Patrikā, Kolkata section, 26 Oct. 2001, p. 1.

110. Mrs. Chāmeli Mitra, of the Durgācaraṇ Mitra house (interview, 22 Sept. 2000).

111. The same point was expressed by three interviewees: Mr. Bhaskar Chunder (13 Dec. 2000), Mr. Śubhamay Dawn (5 Oct. 2000), and Mr. Milan Datta (30 Sept. 2000).

112. Mr. Kalyāṇkumār Deb (interview, 22 Sept. 2000). But the very next year, in 2001, the Times of India gave a prize for the best home Pūjā.

113. Mrs. Śephāli Bose and Mrs. Ārati Deb (interview, 29 Sept. 2000).

114. Interview, 20 Sept. 2000.

115. A survey in 1995 and 1996 demonstrated the decline through the seventeen districts of West Bengal. In 1995 there were 5,698 home Pūjās, whereas in 1996 there were only 4,605. This was in contrast to the increase in sarbajanīn Pūjās, which were 14,809 in 1995 and 14,888 in 1996. See Ājkāl, 16 Oct. 1996, pp. 1 and 5.

116. On the West Bengal Estates Acquisition Act for the Abolition of Zamindars, passed in 1954 and subsequently amended, see Nirmal Kumar Roy, The West Bengal Estates Acquisition Act, 1953 (West Bengal Act 1 of 1954), 2nd rev. ed. (Calcutta: Eastern Law House, 1965), and A. N. Saha, The West Bengal Land Reforms Act (West Bengal Act 10 of 1956) (Calcutta: S. C. Sarkar and Sons, 1966).

117. For discussion of the traditional relationship between craftsman and zamindar at the festival season, see “The Lie of the Land,” Telegraph, 30 Sept. 1995, section III, p. 1.

118. Sometimes, in lean economic times, the family Pūjās can still step in to provide public cohesiveness and solace for the poor. For instance, in 2001 in the town of Uluberia, in Howrah, a cash crunch, closed mills, and a depressed farmers’ market prevented many from being able to sponsor their customary sarbajanīn Pūjās. However, the seventy-two renowned family Pūjās still carried on, and were visited by the public. Hindustan Times, Kolkata edition, 24 Oct. 2001, p. 4.

119. In a landmark decision by the Calcutta High Court in May 2003, the Sābarṇa Rāy Caudhurī family won their public interest litigation, with the effect that government textbooks are to be rewritten to indicate that the Rāy Caudhurīs, and not Job Charnock, were the actual founders of the city. See Hindusthan Times, Kolkata edition, 17 May 2003, p. 1. But Kolkata historian P. T. Nair avers it was not the Sābarṇa Rāy Caudhurī family but Charnock who made the city what it became. All the local zamindars did was to allow the English to settle there, in order to get more rent from them; see Times of India, “Calcutta Times” section, 24 Aug. 2001, p. 4, and Pratidin, 17 Sept. 2001, p. 3.

120. Interview, 16 Sept. 2000.

121. Interview, 22 Sept. 2000.

122. See Times of India, “Calcutta Times” section, 24 May 2001, p. 6.

123. Bartamān, 11 Oct. 2001, p. 5, and Pratidin, 28 Sept. 1995, p. 6, respectively.

124. Ājkāl, 28 Sept. 1998, p. 6.

125. David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

126. Debashish Bose, in a lecture at the Baṅgīya Sāhitya Pariṣad, said that he has counted 154 ṭhākurdālāns in Kolkata. But now many are being walled off, because their owners cannot afford to keep them up, or are being turned into godowns (warehouses). Telegraph, Calcutta section, 16 July 2003, p. 1.

127. Jane Marie Law, Puppets of Nostalgia: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of the Japanese Awaji Nongyō Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 207.

128. Ibid., p. 219.

129. See Howard L. Malchow, “Nostalgia, ‘Heritage,’ and the London Antiques Trade: Selling the Past in Thatcher’s Britain,” in Singular Continuities: Tradition, Nostalgia, and Identity in Modern British Culture, ed. George K. Behler and Fred M. Leventhal (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 196–214.

130. Christian Lee Novetzke, Religion and Public Memory: A Cultural History of Saint Namdev in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p. 73; see also pp. 23–31 and 35–41. The reference is to Jan Assman, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).

131. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 41.

132. Statesman, 4 Oct. 1953, Puja supplement, p. 1.

133. “The Puja Festival: A Transformation,” in Sunday Statesman Magazine, 26 Sept. 1954, pp. 1 and 3.

2. The Goddess in Colonial and Postcolonial History

1. For an overview of the newspapers that were consulted for this project, see the bibliography.

2. An ad from the early 1920s for the auction house Taylor & Company, cited without original reference in J. P. Losty, Calcutta: City of Palaces: A Survey of the City in the Days of the East India Company, 1690–1858 (London: Arnold Publishers, 1990), pp. 86–87.

3. David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); and Sumanta Banerjee, The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth-Century Calcutta (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1989).

4. India Gazette, 22 Oct. 1831, from Benoy Ghose, Selections from English Periodicals of Nineteenth-Century Bengal, vol. 1: 1815–1833 (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1978), pp. 67–68.

5. Bartamān, 11 Oct. 2001, p. 5.

6. Jagaddhātrī Pūjā was apparently much more popular in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in Calcutta and outlying areas than it is today. William Ward, for instance, in his History, Literature, and Mythology of the Hindoos from 1817–1820, describes “Juguddhatree” ’s iconography and the large sums spent on illuminations, songs, dances, the entertainment of Brahmans, and priests employed to read the Caṇḍī; Ward, The History, Literature, and Mythology of the Hindoos, 4 vols. (1817–1820: Delhi: Low Price Publications, 1990), 3:130. In the early Calcutta newspapers one finds invitations to and descriptions of this festival in a manner parallel to that for Durgā. See, for example, Calcutta Gazette, 17 Nov. 1825, in The Days of John Company: Selections from the Calcutta Gazette, 1824–1832, compiled and edited by Anil Chandra Das Gupta (Calcutta: Government Printing, 1959), p. 107; Bengal Hurkaru, 14 Nov. 1833, p. 2; Bengal Hurkaru, 30 Oct. 1838, p. 422; and Bengal Hurkaru, 5 Nov. 1849, p. 507. Up to the last decade of the eighteenth century, Jagaddhātrī Pūjā used to be performed for three days, although “Jugutdhatree Poojah” officially got only one day’s holiday; Bengal Hurkaru, 17 Sept. 1847, p. 54.

7. J. Z. Holwell, Interesting Historical Events, Relative to the Provinces of Bengal, and the Empire of Indostan, 3 parts (London: T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt, 1767), 3:128.

8. Calcutta Journal, 22 Sept. 1819, p. 183.

9. The mansion being described here belonged to Bābu Prāṇkṛṣṇa Hāldār of Chinsurah. See Bengal Hurkaru, 9 Oct. 1826, p. 2.

10. See her Journal of a Residence in India (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable & Co., 1812), excerpted in Calcutta in the Nineteenth Century: Company’s Days, ed. P. T. Nair (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1989), pp. 88–90.

11. Bengal Hurkaru, 10 Oct. 1825, p. 2.

12. L. de Grandpre, A Voyage in the Indian Ocean and to Bengal Undertaken in the Years 1789 and 1790, 2 vols. (Paris 1801 and London 1803), excerpted in Calcutta in the Eighteenth Century: Impressions of Travelers, ed. P. T. Nair (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1984), pp. 254–255; and Maria Graham’s journal (1812), cited without reference in Losty, Calcutta: City of Palaces, pp. 111–112. For other early mentions of Durgā, see Lady Maria Nugent, A Journal from the Year 1811 til the Year 1815, Including a Voyage to and Residence in India, 2 vols. (London, 1839), in Nair, Calcutta in the Nineteenth Century, p. 159; and Calcutta Gazette, 5 Oct. 1829, in Das Gupta, ed., The Days of John Company, p. 420; and the Calcutta Review 18, no. 35 (July–Dec. 1852), article 5, pp. 49–71.

13. Excerpted from “Doorgah Poojah,” a poem printed in the Bengal Hurkaru, 12 Oct. 1829, p. 3.

14. All rituals, customs, and endowments were not to be tampered with. See Sir H. Verney Lovett, “Social Policy to 1858,” in The Cambridge History of India, vol. VI: The Indian Empire, 1858–1918, with Chapters on the Development of Administration, 1818–1858, ed. H. H. Dodwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), pp. 124–127.

15. The Baptists came to India one year after the founding of their world missionary society. Congregationalist missionaries, mostly sponsored by the London Missionary Society, only sent appreciable numbers to Bengal after 1812. Likewise, the Anglican Church Missionary Society sent people to India only in 1814, with the founding of the Calcutta diocese. As for the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, Alexander Duff was their first missionary, from 1830. See Kenneth Ingham, Reformers in India, 1793–1833: An Account of the Work of Christian Missionaries on Behalf of Social Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956).

16. On the pilgrim tax controversy, consult Ingham, “Idolatrous Festivals and the Practice of ‘Sati,’” in Reformers in India, pp. 33–43.

17. John Rosselli, Lord William Bentinck: The Making of a Liberal Imperialist, 1774–1839 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 211–212.

18. See the Bengal Hurkaru, 12 Oct. 1829, p. 2, and 28 Sept. 1830, p. 2.

19. On the Dispatch of 1838 [C.R.O.Mss. “Bengal Despatches,” vol. 121, fol. 1135], see Calcutta Review 17, no. 33, article 5 (Jan.–June, 1852): 114–177; and Lovett, “Social Policy to 1858,” pp. 121–143.

20. Calcutta Journal, 7 Oct. 1820, pp. 366–367.

21. The Bengal Spectator for 15 Oct. 1842, quoted in the Englishman and Military Chronicle, 19 Oct. 1842, p. 2.

22. Englishman, 25 Sept. 1835, pp. 1828–1829, and Friend of India, 4 Oct. 1838, p. 565.

23. See Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India, and “The Mystics East” (London: Routledge, 1999); David N. Lorenzen, Who Invented Hinduism? Essays on Religion in History (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2006); Arvind-Pal Mandair, Religion and the Spectre of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (The New Cambridge History of India III.4) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Brian K. Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Reconstruction of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); and wonderful overview essay on the issues, Sharada Sugirtharajah, “Colonialism,” in Studying Hinduism: Key Concepts and Methods, ed. Sushil Mittal and Gene Thursby (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 75–83.

24. For a number of excellent quotations on this point, see Friend of India, 6 Oct. 1836, p. 314; and Englishman, 7 Oct. 1836, p. 1927.

25. Friend of India, 14 April 1836, p. 115.

26. Bengal Hurkaru, 7 Feb. 1831, cited in Das Gupta, ed., The Days of John Company, p. 626.

27. Friend of India, 8 Oct. 1835, p. 322.

28. For an example of such critiques, see the Calcutta Gazette for 5 Oct. 1829, in Das Gupta, ed., The Days of John Company, pp. 418–420; and Bengal Hurkaru, 7 Oct. 1840, p. 355.

29. Excerpted from “Doorgah Poojah,” in Bengal Hurkaru, 12 Oct. 1829, p. 3.

30. Friend of India, 8 Oct. 1835, p. 322.

31. Englishman, 1 Oct. 1835, p. 1869.

32. All arguments are summarized in Friend of India, 21 Nov. 1839, pp. 739–740.

33. Tattvabodhinī Patrikā, 4, no. 38 (1846): 344.

34. Sivanath Sastri, in his History of the Brahmo Samaj (1911–1912; Calcutta: Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, 1974), appendix B, p. 558.

35. See various editorials from the mid to late 1920s in Mukul Gupta, “Early Editorials on the Puja,” in Statesman Sunday Magazine, Oct. 11, 1964, p. 10. Other examples may be found in Bengal Hurkaru, 13 Oct. 1826, p. 2; 10 Oct. 1829, p. 337; 28 Oct. 1836, p. 419; 20 Oct. 1837, p. 383; and 1 Oct. 1838, p. 322.

36. Bengal Hurkaru, 1 Oct. 1846, p. 371.

37. Bengal Hurkaru, 17 Oct. 1850, p. 485.

38. Bengal Hurkaru, 15 Oct.1855, supplementary sheet, p. 365. For other notices of British guests at Pūjā entertainments, see Bengal Hurkaru, 20 Oct. 1847, p. 447; 27 Sept. 1849, p. 350; 20 Nov. 1850, p. 571; and 17 Oct. 1853, p. 371.

39. Friend of India, 19 Oct. 1837, p. 330; and Bengal Hurkaru, 1 Oct. 1838, p. 322.

40. See Brajendranāth Bandyopādhyāy, ed., Sambādpatre Sekāler Kathā, vol. 1: 1818–1830, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (1932; Calcutta: Bangīya Sāhitya Pariṣad, 1937), pp. 137–138.

41. To read about Pūjās dependent upon British patronage that were forced to close down, consult Nirmal Kar, “Cāpāno Pūjo,” Ānanda Bājār Patrikā, 27 Sept. 1998, p. 6, and Ṣibśaṅkar Bhāratī, “Kalkātār Durgā Pūjā, 1586–1951,” in Bartamān Rabibār, 10 Oct. 1999, p. 10.

42. As reported in the Bengal Hurkaru, 30 Oct. 1833, p. 2. Such liberality on the part of Cornwallis is frequently quoted in the debates of 1834 and after.

43. The proposal from the Bank of Bengal is repeated in Bengal Hurkaru, 18 Sept. 1834, p. 2.

44. Bengal Hurkaru, 15 Aug. 1834, p. 158; 15 Sept. 1834, p. 2; 18 Sept. 1834, p. 2; 1 Oct. 1834, p. 2; and 20 Oct. 1834, p. 2.

45. For these arguments, respectively, see Bengal Hurkaru, 25 Aug. 1834, p. 190; 26 Aug. 1834, p. 194; 6 Sept. 1834, p. 2; and 31 Oct. 1834, p. 2.

46. As enunciated, for the government, by H. T. Prinsep. See Englishman, 14 Nov. 1834, p. 517.

47. This included the ten days of the Durgā Pūjā, and extended two days further, to include Lakṣmī Pūjā.

48. Bengalee, 15 Nov. 1879, p. 524, and Bengalee Supplement, Sept. 26, 1900.

49. Reported in the Bengal Hurkaru, 6 Oct. 1840, p. 350, and 23 Oct. 1860, p. 3.

50. Friend of India, 6 Oct. 1870, p. 7B.

51. See, respectively, n.a., Durgā Debīr Bṛttānta (Midnapur Mission Press, 1867), a sixteen-page missionary description of Durgā Pūjā, with exhortations to turn instead to Jesus; and Bengal Hurkaru, 14 Oct. 1861, p. 3, and 3 Oct. 1865, p. 2.

52. Bengal Hurkaru, 23 Sept. 1865, p. 2.

53. Friend of India, 6 Oct. 1870, p. 7B.

54. Friend of India, 9 Oct. 1875, p. 920.

55. This is not to say that banks and businesses did not still agitate for fewer holidays. Proposals to shorten them surfaced in the news in 1879, 1889, 1890, and 1900, and were repeatedly resisted by leaders in the Indian community, who were eventually backed by the government.

56. Bengal Hurkaru, 3 Oct. 1861, p. 2.

57. Bankimcandra Chatterji, Ānandamaṭh; or, The Sacred Brotherhood, translated with an introduction and critical apparatus by Julius J. Lipner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 149.

58. The idea for the melās was apparently taken from Rajnarain Basu’s Prospects for the Promotion of National Feeling Among the Educated Natives of Bengal (1866), but it was organized by Nabagopāl Mitra, the Tagore family, and Manmohan Basu. See Rosinka Chaudhuri, “Hemchandra’s Bharata Sangeet (1870) and the Politics of Poetry: A Pre-history of Hindu Nationalism in Bengal?” in Indian Economic and Social History Review 42 (2005): 213–247; Indira Chowdhury, The Frail Hero and Virile History: Gender and the Politics of Cultures in Colonial Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Rajat Sanyal, Voluntary Associations and the Urban Public Life in Bengal (1815–1876): An Aspect of Social History (Calcutta: Riddhi-India, 1980).

59. Indian Mirror, 25 Sept. 1887, p. 2.

60. Leonard Gordon, Bengal: The Nationalist Movement, 1876–1940 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), p. 22.

61. The Brāhmo Samāj, which can be traced back to Ram Mohan Roy in 1828, split twice: first, in 1866, with the Brāhmo Samāj of India breaking off from the parent body; and second, in 1878, when the latter split to form the New Dispensation and the Sādharan Brāhmo Samāj. Sastri himself has this to complain about Durgā Pūjā: “[T]he Hindus of this province throw themselves body and soul into the national celebration, and say and do many things that are, in many cases, morally objectionable. Such practices, for instance, as the slaying of kids and buffaloes, the dancing of public women, the open indulgence in bhang and wine, have made the name of Durga Puja or the worship of the ten-handed goddesses of Bengal, otherwise so solemn and sacred in the popular mind, a thing to be dreaded by all lovers of true religion. So long the Brahmos had been decrying, in their speeches and their writings, the worship of the idol deity with its attendant abuses” (Sastri, History of the Brahmo Samaj, p. 197). Note, however, that even the famed Bengali nationalist Bipin Chandra Pal, when coming under the sway of Debendranath Tagore and the Brāhmo Samāj, still prayed to Kālī and Durgā and enjoyed the Pūjā festivities; see Bipin Chandra Pal, Memories of My Life and Times (Calcutta: Bipinchandra Pal Institute, 1973), p. 113.

62. For some of Sen’s comments on the Mother, see Keshub Chunder Sen, Jeevan Veda: Being Sixteen Discourses in Bengali on Life—Its Divine Dispensation, trans. Jamini Kanta Koar, 3rd ed. (Calcutta: Nababidhan Trust, 1969), pp. 22, 65. Sen does champion independence, but as a lack of dependence upon sin, not a political freedom from the British; see pp. 35–44. Refer also to David Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 249–286.

63. For literary and thematic antecedents to Chatterjee’s glorification of the patriotic sannyasi, see Chaudhuri, “Hemchandra’s Bharata Sangeet,” pp. 213–247.

64. Two stanzas from “Bande Mātāram,” as translated by Lipner in Ānandamaṭh, or The Sacred Brotherhood, p. 145.

65. Bankim Rachanavali, ed. Jogesh Chandra Bagal (Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 1969), pp. 200–201.

66. In its obituary of Chatterjee the Statesman did not even mention “Bande Mātāram.” The first Muslims to critique Ānandamaṭh did not express themselves until 1912; nothing was voiced when the novel was published, or even during the partition agitations. See S. N. Mukherjee, “Introduction,” Bankimchandra Chatterjee: Sociological Essays: Utilitarianism and Positivism in Bengal, trans. and ed. S. N. Mukherjee and Marian Maddern (Calcutta: Rddhi-India, 1986), pp. 1–3, 9–12.

67. Sir Surendranath Banerjea, A Nation in Making: Being the Reminiscences of Fifty Years of Public Life (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1925), pp. 147–148.

68. Bengal Hurkaru, 23 Oct. 1860, p. 3.

69. Bengal Hurkaru, 7 Oct. 1862, p. 2; and Bengalee, 18 Oct. 1879, pp. 498–499; Bengalee, 6 Oct. 1883, p. 474; Bengalee, 13 Oct. 1888, p. 485; and Pal, Memories of My Life and Times, pp. 104–105.

70. This was first read before the Bengal Social Science Association in January 1869. See Bagal, Bankim Rachanavali, pp. 91–96.

71. See, in chronological order: Kāliprasanna Sinha, Hutom Pyāncār Nakśa, with commentary, 2nd ed. (1862; Calcutta: Subarṇarekhā, 1991); Pratap Chandra Ghosha, Durga Puja, with Notes and Illustrations (Calcutta: Hindoo Patriot Press, 1871); Rāmratna Pāṭhak, Durgotsab (Calcutta: Nūtan Bhārat Yantre, 1874); Gangādhar Kabirāj, Durgotsab Bidhi Bijñānam (Murshidabad: Nabīncandra Caudhurī, 1875); Airābat Candra Pakhirāj, Durgā Pūjā (Calcutta: n.p., 1876); Haricaran Bandyopādhyāy, Durgā Pūjā (Calcutta: Bānārji & Co., 1877); and Kṛṣṇacandra Pāl, Durgā Pujā Mahādhūm (Calcutta: K. C. Pāl, 1882). Bankim Chandra also wrote a satirical piece called “Bābu.” “He who in appearance is Karttik’s younger brother, in virtue is worthless, in action, inert, and in speech Saraswati, he is a Babu. He who performs Durga-puja for the sake of a festival, Lakshmi-puja at the request of his wife, Saraswati-puja at the request of his mistress, and Ganga-puja in the lust for goat-meat, he is a Babu” (see Mukherjee and Maddern, Bankimchandra Chatterjee: Sociological Essays, p. 28).

72. Discussed in Chowdhury, The Frail Hero and Virile History, pp. 102–107.

73. Indian Mirror, 5 Oct. 1889, p. 2.

74. Excerpted from a poem called “The Auspicious Time for Worship,” which appeared in the second issue of Suprabhat Magazine, in 1907. Quoted in James Campbell Ker, Political Trouble in India, 1907–1917 (1917; Delhi: Oriental Publishers, 1973), pp. 88–89.

75. Bengalee, 28 Sept. 1903, p. 3. See also Mrinilanini Sinha’s classic Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).

76. Bharati Roy, Early Feminists of Colonial India: Sarala Devi Chaudharani and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 10–12. In addition to Śaralādebī’s Bengali transcreations of Tilak’s Maharashtrian festivals, actual enactments of the Shivaji Utsav were organized in Calcutta as well, from 1902. Rabindranath Tagore wrote a famous poem for the occasion in 1904 called “Shivaji Utsav.” See Chaudhuri, “Hemchandra’s Bharata Sangeet,” p. 224.

77. Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908 (Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973).

78. See Clinton B. Seely, “Raja Pratapaditya: Problematic Hero,” in Barisal and Beyond: Essays on Bangla Literature (New Delhi: Chronicle Books, 2008), pp. 208–230; Ker, Political Trouble in India, pp. 7–8, 10–11; and Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement, pp. 304–305. The recourse to Pratāpāditya did not endear Śaralādebī to her uncle Rabindranath, who countered that the Rājā had not been a man of exemplary moral character.

79. Quoted by Jogesh C. Bagal in “Women in India’s Freedom Movement,” Modern Review 93, no. 6 (June 1953): 469.

80. Radha Kumar, The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women’s Rights and Feminism in India, 1800–1990 (London: Verso, 1993), p. 39.

81. She claims that this recourse to Śāktism indicated their mainly upper-class backgrounds, as lower-class Bengalis tended to be Vaiṣṇavas or Muslims. See Barbara Southard, “The Political Strategy of Aurobindo Ghosh: The Utilization of Hindu Religious Symbolism and the Problem of Political Mobilization in Bengal,” Modern Asian Studies 14, no. 3 (1980): 353–376.

82. For further discussion of his theme of the victimized Motherland, see Chowdhury, The Frail Hero and Virile History, pp. 86–97, 102–107, 154–159.

83. Sri Aurobindo, “Bhawani Mandir,” in Bande Mataram: Early Political Writings (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1973), p. 65.

84. The Speeches of Aurobindo, pp. 33–34, quoted in Hari Hara Das, Subhas Chandra Bose and the Indian National Movement (Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1983), p. 38.

85. Articles and editorials from the Bengalee from 1909–1911 do not criticize the British as much as they seek to reconstruct Bengal; Durgā Pūjā, when mentioned, is seen as a foretaste of brotherhood. See 15 Oct. 1910, p. 5; 29 Sept. 1911, p. 4; and 5 Oct. 1911, p. 4.

86. Jogesh Chandra Chatterji, In Search of Freedom (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1967), pp. 7–8.

87. It is ironic that the illustration accompanying this ad is of an English lady in a high lacy blouse, with her hair done up in a bun! Bengalee, 3 Oct. 1909, p. 10.

88. The speech is quoted in Ker, Political Trouble in India, pp. 43–48.

89. Ibid., p. 162. The young Samiti cadres were also encouraged to make offerings to Kālī to gain strength; Chatterji, In Search of Freedom, pp. 26–27.

90. Ker, Political Trouble in India, p. 78.

91. Yugāntar, 3 March 1907, p. 383, quoted in Chaudhuri, “Hemchandra’s Bharata Sangeet,” p. 231.

92. For reports of forced participation in the swadeshi movement, see the Englishman, 26 Sept. 1906, p. 8.

93. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Communal Riots and Labour: Bengal’s Jute Mill-Hands in the 1890s,” in Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots, and Survivors in South Asia, ed. Veena Das (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 146–184. Christopher Pinney provides a fascinating detail about cow protection outside Bengal and its intersection with iconography in his “Photos of the Gods”: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India (London: Reaktion Books, 2004). In December 1911 the Bombay Government invoked section 12(1) of the Indian Press Act of 1910 to proscribe a Ravi Varma Press image titled “Ashtabhuja Devi,” as she was depicted decapitating two Muslim butchers who had just killed a cow. The Press was eventually persuaded to take the blood of the cow’s neck off the butchers’ knives and to change the cow to a buffalo (pp. 110–112, including fig. 80).

94. See John R. McLane, “Partition of Bengal, 1905: A Political Analysis,” in The History of Bangladesh, 1704–1971, ed. Sirajul Islam, 2nd ed., vol. 1: Political History (Dhaka: Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 1997): 304–348.

95. Nandini Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 6, 35–36, 41.

96. Lead editorial in the Bengalee, 29 Sept. 1906, p. 3.

97. See the Hindoo Patriot for 15 Oct. 1904, p. 2; and 15 Oct. 1905, p. 2, right on the eve of partition.

98. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 18 Oct. 1917, p. 8.

99. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 13 Oct. 1913, p. 6.

100. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 22 Oct. 1915, p. 6.

101. From the cover of Māsik Basumatī 23, no. 6 (Aśvin 1944).

102. Subhas Chandra Bose, from a letter to Haricharan Bagchi from Mandalay jail, in Netaji: Collected Works, ed. Sisir K. Bose, 11 vols. (Calcutta: Netaji Research Bureau, 1982), vol. 4: Correspondence, January 1926–January 1932, p. 140.

103. Thomas Blom Hansen, The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 56.

104. From the lead editorial called “Bijayā,” Ānanda Bājār Patrikā, 4 Oct. 1922, p. 2.

105. “Eso Mā Ānandamayi!” in Ānanda Bājār Patrikā, 14 Oct. 1923, p. 2.

106. For an excellent illustration, see Ānanda Bājār Patrikā, 5 Oct. 1924, p. 7.

107. See Amrita Bazar Patrika, 19 Oct. 1926, p. 4; and Bengalee, 20 Oct. 1926, pp. 4 and 6.

108. Bengalee, 30 Sept. 1927, p. 3.

109. From a letter written on 25 Sept. 1925; Netaji: Collected Works, vol. III: Correspondence, May 1923–July 1926, ed. Sisir K. Bose (Calcutta: Netaji Research Bureau, 1981), p. 127. For another example of a jailed nationalist petitioning for the right to celebrate the Pūjās, see the memoirs of Jogesh Chandra Chatterji, who did so in Rajshahi jail in 1919. He and his comrades sacrificed a white goat, “symbolic of the white man with whom the Indians identified the British” (Chatterji, In Search of Freedom, p. 118).

110. Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 191–199; quoted sentence from p. 194.

111. Ibid., p. 210.

112. Mahatma Gandhi, The Collected Works, vol. 24: May–August 1924 (New Delhi: Government of India: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1967), pp. 138–141, 150–151.

113. Ānanda Bājār Patrikā, 18 Oct. 1926, p. 9, and 19 Oct. 1926, p. 3. See also Amrita Bazar Patrika, 9 Oct. 1926, p. 6; and Statesman, 16 Oct. 1926, p. 8. The 9 Oct. paper describes a resolution from the Baṅgīya Brāhman Sabhā to the chief secretary to the Government of Bengal, quoting scriptural evidence for the necessity of drum-playing during processions and asking for protection for the same. Recall how uncommunalized the Pūjās had been at their inception; Muslim dancing girls were all the rage, and when the Pūjās happened to coincide with Muharram, the result was simply that there were fewer nautches. Even in 1849 one reads of the government’s refusal of the “natives” ’ request to have sepoys attend their nautches, since there is no need to protect the peace; Friend of India, 4 Oct. 1849, p. 628.

114. Joya Chatterjee gives many examples of such communal fracases in her Bengal Divided, pp. 191–219. So does Dipesh Chakrabarty, in Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), esp. chapter 6, “Class and Commmunity,” pp. 186–218.

115. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 5 Oct. 1943. p. 2.

116. Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor, p. 8.

117. Ibid., pp. 230–234.

118. Ibid., p. 221.

119. Ibid., pp. 189–191, 236–243.

120. Anne Hardgrove, Community and Public Culture: The Marwaris in Calcutta (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 20–21.

121. Marwari industrialists, whether Vaiṣṇava or Jain, are influenced by the values of nonviolence, thrift, asceticism, animal protection, and vegetarianism. Diwali, not Kālī Pūjā, is of prime importance to them, as it is the occasion for the opening of new account books. Their aesthetic taste tends toward the type of temple established in Calcutta in 1996 by the Birlas, not toward the Śākta temples already in existence in the city. See Hardgrove, Community and Public Culture, pp. 66–67.

122. Bengali newspapers were monitored and their editors sometimes arrested; from 1905 until 1947 the Sedition Committee appointed to investigate revolutionary conspiracies in India was acutely aware of the dangers of Śākta ideology. For collections, in English, from anti-government Indian papers, see, for example, Ker, Political Trouble in India, and Sir Valentine Chirol, Indian Unrest (London: Macmillan, 1910).

123. From 1924 one sees newspaper advertisements aimed at Indians who want to spend their holidays in Calcutta: recommended sites include cinemas, the Alipore zoo, the Indian Museum, the Victoria Memorial, Eden Gardens, and the Kālīghāṭ Temple.

124. Englishman, 20 Oct. 1920, p. 6. For Jagaddhātrī, see a special “Jagadhatri Poojah” announcement of a holiday return fare on the Bengal–Nagpur Railway to visit Sinhachalam, which has one of the oldest hill temples in India; Statesman, 26 Oct. 1930, p. 1.

125. Māsik Basumatī 22, no. 6 (Asvin number, 1943): 469–472.

126. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 30 Sept. 1946, p. 1.

127. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 14 Oct. 1980, p. 1.

128. Ānanda Bājār Patrikā, 22 Oct. 1950, p. 4.

129. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 11 Oct. 1948, p. 9.

130. Ānanda Bājār Patrikā, 1 Nov. 1951, p. 4.

131. Early in his tenure as chief minister (1977–2000), Jyoti Basu (1914–2010) used the Pūjās to announce a one-month Pūjā parole for political prisoners. Mention of Communists and even Naxalites organizing and patronizing Pūjā pandals may be found from the early 1950s onward. Newspaper editors enjoy ridiculing such behavior. Concluded Tārāśankar Bandyopādhyāy in 1952, although “Indian Communists travel a crooked path, … no matter what philosophy one adheres to—Buddhist, Marxist, or materialist—one can’t disregard the Puja’s attraction” (Ānanda Bājār Patrikā, 27 Sept. 1952, pp. 1 and 5).

132. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 18 Oct. 1964, p. 6.

133. See Amrita Bazar Patrika for 30 Sept. 1965, pp. 1 and 12; 2 Oct. 1965, p. 1; and 4 Oct. 1965, p. 1.

134. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 12 Oct. 1989, p. 1.

135. “The Doomed Holidays,” Indian Mirror, 18 Oct. 1879, p. 2.

136. “In the pre-modern state, in Europe as elsewhere, power was made visible though theatrical displays, in the form of processions, progresses, royal entries, coronations, funerals, and other rituals that guaranteed the well-being and continued power of the rulers over the ruled” (Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, p. 3).

137. Letter to the editor on “The Doorga Vacation,” written 16 Oct. 1844 by B. D. and published in Englishman and Military Chronicle, 17 Oct. 1844, p. 2.

138. Statesman, 9 Oct. 1921, p. 7.

139. During the height of the Partition unrest, the Shovabazar rājās opened their houses to European guests, who, if the Englishman’s accounts are accurate, enjoyed themselves thoroughly.

140. See Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism, and the History of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

3. Durgā the Daughter: Folk and Familial Traditions

1. There is textual and archaeological evidence for the existence of Pārvatī as the wife of Śiva by the time of the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa. For discussion and specific references, see Thomas B. Coburn, Devī Māhātmya: The Crystallization of the Goddess Tradition (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1985), p. 179 and notes, and Rachel Fell McDermott, Mother of My Heart, Daughter of My Dreams: Kālī and Umā in the Devotional Poetry of Bengal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 164–165.

2. Āgamanī literally means “coming,” and refers to the goddess Umā on her way home to Bengal from her married life in Kailasa. Bijayā, which means “victory,” is less easily correlated than āgamanī to the content of the poems that bear its name. Most likely bijayā refers to the day on which these songs are sung—the last day of the festival, called Bijayā Daśamī, or Victory Tenth, which celebrates both the victory of Durgā over the buffalo demon, Mahiṣa, and the victory of Rāma over Rāvaṇa.

3. See the second part of the Caṇḍīmaṅgalakāvya, the best versions of which date from the late sixteenth century.

4. For a short overview of the contents of the Śivāyana, see Dīneścandra Sen, Bangabhāṣā o Sāhitya, ed. Asit Kumār Bandyopādhyāy, 2 vols. (Calcutta: West Bengal State Book Board, 1986), 2:465–467. More details on the agriculturalist Śiva of the rice-growing regions of eastern India may be found in William L. Smith, “Śiva, Lord of the Plough,” in Essays on Middle Bengali Literature: Studies by David L. Curley, Rahul Peter Das, Mazharul Isam, Amzad Hossain Mian, Asim Roy, and William L. Smith, ed. Rahul Peter Das (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1999), pp. 208–228.

5. Apart from Rāmprasād, the principal composers of āgamanī and bijayā songs appear to have been kabioyālās, or stand-up musicians who performed extemporaneously in urban contexts for entertainment. Of the most famous early kabioyālās of the late eighteenth century, anthologists have preserved the Umā-saṅgīt of Rām Basu (1786–1828) and Haru Ṭhākur (1738–1824).

6. This is reminiscent of Rajasthani retellings of the Pārvatī–Śiva story cycle in which the divine couple are said to reside on Mount Abu.

7. Kamalākānta Bhaṭṭācārya, “O he Girirāj, Gaurī abhimān kareche,” in Śyāmā Saṅgīt (Calcutta: Barddhamān Mahārājādhirāj Māhtāb Bāhādur, 1857), poem 216. The dhuturā fruit is the white thorn apple, which yields a powerful narcotic. Suradhunī, or Divine River, is an epithet for the Ganges. This translation appeared previously in Rachel Fell McDermott, Singing to the Goddess: Poems to Kālī and Umā from Bengal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 126–127.

8. Kamalākānta Bhaṭṭācārya, “Balo āmi ki karibo,” in Śyāmā Saṅgīt, poem 219. See McDermott, Singing to the Goddess, pp. 129–130.

9. Kamalākānta Bhaṭṭācarya, “O he Hara Gaṅgaādhar,” in Śyāmā Saṅgīt, poem 225. The female cātakī bird, a type of cuckoo, is said in poetic literature to subsist on raindrops. Hence it stares at the clouds, hoping for rain. See McDermott, Singing to the Goddess, pp. 132–133.

10. Excerpt from Rām Basu, “Kao dekhi Umā, keman chile Mā,” in Saṅgīt-Sār-Saṅgraha, ed. Harimohan Mukhopādhyāy, 2 vols. (Calcutta: Aruṇoday Rāy, 1899), 2:247. Mṛtyuñjaya, or Conqueror of Death, is an epithet for Śiva.

11. Kamalākānta Bhaṭṭācārya, “Ki halo nabamī niśi hailo abasān go,” in Śyāmā Saṅgīt, poem 241. See McDermott, Singing to the Goddess, pp. 146–147.

12. In the Purāṇas, the story of Śiva and Pārvatī typically starts with the Satī, the daughter of Dakṣa, who marries Śiva. Dakṣa, not being pleased with his new son-in-law, does not invite him to a sacrifice he is sponsoring, and Satī is so humiliated on her husband’s behalf that she throws herself into the sacrificial flames and dies. Śiva grieves for a long time, but eventually returns to his premarital lifestyle of ascetic meditation. Meanwhile, a demon named Tāraka has unseated the gods, and Brahmā promises them that Tāraka will be slain by a son of Śiva. Satī is then born again, as the daughter of the mountain Himālaya and his wife, Menā; as a little girl, Pārvatī undertakes terrible austerities in order to win Śiva’s notice, and his hand in marriage. Although her parents are slightly dubious about accepting this ascetic, skull-carrying, snake-ornamented, naked god into their family, the wedding occurs, and eventually a son, Skanda, is born who kills the demon Tāraka. For more on the dual nature of Śiva, see Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, Śiva, the Erotic Ascetic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).

13. In many poems Menakā and Girirāj do not live in a wealthy city, but in a poor rural home. This is a clear departure from the Sanskrit heritage, in which Girirāj is always rich.

14. Compare with the Purāṇic stories, where Śiva is an eccentric, with antisocial behavior and bizarre looks, or an enjoyer of erotic delights with Pārvatī, or a sedate family man with his wife and two sons. As Wendy Doniger has shown, however, the tradition seems to delight in censuring Śiva; his penchant for mendicancy disrupts normal married life, and Pārvatī, as well as her parents, complains (see Skanda Purāṇa 7.7.9.24 and Bhāgavata Purāṇa 4.2.11–16). In some Purāṇic accounts Menā threatens to take poison or to drown herself if the marriage goes through (Śiva Purāṇa 2.3.44.1–102), faints at Śiva’s outlandish appearance at the wedding ceremony (Śiva Purāṇa 2.3.43.1–65; for opposite reactions by Menā see Vāmana Purāṇa 27.1–62 and Kumārasambhava, sarga 7), and after she sees how he acts as a husband, criticizes him for not providing her daughter with a proper place to live (Skanda Purāṇa 2.2.12.22–43; Vāyu Purāṇa 2.30.29–58; and Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa 3.67.32–36), and for making love to her constantly (Vāyu Purāṇa 2.30.38; Kūrma Purāṇa 1.14.4–97; Vāmana Purāṇa 26.52–53; Śiva Purāṇa 2.2.16.41–42, 2.3.27.32, 2.3.36.12; and Skanda Purāṇa 1.1.22.67–81, 1.1.35.27–34, 2.25.59–66). Though Pārvatī herself often joins in the complaints (Brahmavaivarta Purāṇa 3.2.19–24; Matsya Purāṇa 155.5–9; Padma Purāṇa 5.41.5–9; and Skanda Purāṇa 1.2.27.63–68), in many myths she defends her husband, and it is obvious that they are happy.

15. The poetry mentions an older brother, also a mountain like his father, whose death by drowning in the sea is a source of continuing grief for Menakā. The Harivaṁśa (18.13) calls Maināka the son of Himālaya and the father of Krauṭca. The typical Sanskrit myth told about him is that when Indra decided to lop off the wings of all mountains, to prevent them from moving about and landing wherever they chose, disrupting settled human life, Maināka took refuge with his friend, the sea, who has hidden him ever since (Kumārasambhava, sarga 1, v. 20). Though the Umāsaṅgīt never mentions any other siblings, some Sanskrit stories give Umā two older sisters, Kuṭilā and Rāgiṇī, as well as another brother, Sunābha (see Vāmana Purāṇa 25.1–75). Yet another tradition makes Gaṅgā her older sister (Bṛhaddharma Purāṇa 2.12–22).

16. In the Sanskrit stories (see Kumārasambhava, sarga 6, and Vāmana Purāṇa 26.1–71), Nārada never performs the function of matchmaker, though he does predict when Pārvatī is a baby that she will marry Śiva (Kumārasambhava, sarga 1, v. 50; Śiva Purāṇa 2.3.8.8–11, 2.3.9.5; and Skanda Purāṇa 1.2.23.1–59). One can see a foreshadowing of the function Nārada plays in the Umā-saṅgīt in the medieval Bengali Manasāmaṅgalakāvya of Manakar; see O’Flaherty, Śiva, the Erotic Ascetic, p. 363 n. 97.

17. This story of Kāma developed late, reaching its final form only in Matsya Purāṇa 154.227–255. Its most beautiful rendition is in Kālidāsa’s Kumārasambhava, sarga 3. Another favorite Śaiva myth is that of the Triple City. The Ṛg Veda knows of a demonic triple city, destroyed by the gods, but it is not until the Mahābhārata that Śiva plays a part in its destruction (8.24.1–124).

18. See Mahendranāth Bhaṭṭācārya, in Śākta Padābalī, ed. Amarendranāth Rāy (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1942), poem 172.

19. Dagmar Engels calls this “truncated legacy of the Kulinist extreme” in Beyond Purdah? Women in Bengal, 1890–1939 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 81; see also p. 116 n. 51.

20. The best parallelism between Umā’s life and that of a Kulīn bride is that elucidated by Śaśibhūṣaṇ Dāśgupta in Bhārater Śakti-sādhanā o Śākta Sāhitya (Calcutta: Sāhitya Saṁsad, 1960), pp. 235–247. On Kulīnism generally, see Meredith Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal, 1849–1905 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Engels, Beyond Purdah?; and Malavika Karlekar, Reflections on Kulin Polygamy: Nistarini Debi’s Sekeley Katha, Occasional Paper no. 23 (New Delhi: Centre for Women’s Development Studies, 1995).

21. See Shahanara Husain, The Social Life of Women in Early Medieval Bengal (Dhaka: Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 1985), p. 44. The Kulīn system even allowed prepubescent girls to be married to sixty-year-old men. Rāmcandra Mukhopādhyāy received Rs. 250 from the father of his thirty-third wife. The marriage was arranged by one of his sons to pay for Rāmcandra’s incipient funeral expenses. Engels, Beyond Purdah?, pp. 44, 49, 67 n. 14.

22. Margaret M. Urquhart, Women of Bengal (1925; Delhi: Gian Publishing House, 1987), pp. 38–39.

23. By the mid-nineteenth century, even these “nautch girls” were in decline, due to Western critiques, Indian alienation from their own art traditions, and the association of female singers with prostitutes, or devadāsīs, considered to be of low repute. See Pran Nevile, “Echoes of a Lost Tradition,” India Today (15 Aug. 1996): 106–111.

24. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, in her Śiva, the Erotic Ascetic, often mentions tribal variations on the Śiva-Pārvatī myths, which she takes from Verrier Elwin, Myths of Middle India (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1949) and Tribal Myths of Orissa (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1954); P. Thomas, Epics, Myths, and Legends of India (Bombay: D. B. Taraporevala Sons, 1942); and W. J. Wilkins, Hindu Mythology, Vedic and Puranic (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1882). For additional examples from outside Bengal, see William Archer, Songs for the Bride: Wedding Rites of Rural India, ed. Barbara Stoler Miller and Mildred Archer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 63–69; Lynn Bennett, Dangerous Wives and Sacred Sisters: Social and Symbolic Roles of High-Caste Women in Nepal (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 281–286; and Brigitte Luchesi, “‘It Should Last a Hundred Thousand Years’: Rali Worship and Brother–Sister Bond in Kangra,” Manushi, no. 130 (May–June 2002): 20–25. For a general discussion of the sadness of the bride’s leave-taking, see Gloria Goodwin Rahejia, “‘Crying When She’s Born, and Crying When She Goes Away’: Marriage and the Idiom of the Gift in Pahansu Song Performance,” in From the Margins of Hindu Marriage: Essays on Gender, Religion, and Culture, ed. Lindsey Harlan and Paul B. Courtright (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 19–59.

25. Bikāśkānti Midyā, “Durgā: Bāṅglā Lokasāhitye,” in Lok Saṁskṛti Gabeṣaṇā, ed. Sanatkumār Mitra, vol. 13, no. 2 (July–Aug. 2000): 341. The wedding rituals referred to here are the rubbing of the newly married girl’s hair parting with vermillion, or sindūr, and the feeding of rice and milk.

26. “Biyālliśer hāte Gaurīdān, Ṭhākur mantra paḍe balidān,” quoted in ibid., p. 339.

27. Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal, p. 238.

28. The Bhūtbāḍīr Pūjā, off Creek Road in Kolkata, is said to have been started a century ago by a nine-year-old girl, a daughter-in-law of the house; Sohini Sarkar, “Keeping the Faith,” in the “Downtown” section of the Statesman, 15 Oct. 1999, pp. 1–2. The same is claimed of the golden image of Durgā on display at the Durgābāḍī, Behala, south Kolkata, which was commissioned in response to a daughter’s request of her father around 1770; Mohit Rāy, Rūpe Rūpe Durgā (Calcutta: Adhīr Pāl, 1985), pp. 84–85.

29. Biśvasingha, one of the progenitors of the Kuchbihar Rāj family in northern Bengal, had a dream of Umā flanked by her two childhood friends, Jayā and Bijayā, so this is how the family has depicted the Goddess ever since; Pratidin, 28 Sept. 1995, p. 6. Similarly, Dvāraknāth Datta (1829–1889), the founder of Kolkata’s famed Thanthania Datta family, dreamed of Hara-Gaurī—Śiva and Gaurī seated together, without any sign of the buffalo-slayer—which remains to this day as the image worshiped at the Pūjās; pamphlet on the family history given to me by Mr. Milan Datta, 30 Sept. 2000.

30. Interview, Mr. Bhāskar Chunder, 13 Dec. 2000.

31. The image is Abhayā (She who Offers Fearlessness), with only two hands; she is supposed to be five years old. Interview, Mr. Subhamay Dawn, 5 Oct. 2000.

32. See Tanmay Ghosh, “Meaningless Mahalaya,” Times of India, “Calcutta Times” section, 17 Sept. 2001, p. 1.

33. The originator of this tradition, Baikuṇṭhanāth Sānyāl, a disciple of Śrī Rāmakṛṣṇa, thought that Mā would like what the average person does; Bartamān, 22 Oct. 2001, p. 12.

34. Rāy, Rūpe Rūpe Durgā, p. 2.

35. Most Hara-Gaurī images in Kolkata depict Umā sitting on Śiva’s lap: see those at the Chunders of Bechu Chatterjee Street; the Dattas of Thanthania (see the image on the cover of this book); the Lāhās of Cornwallis Street; the Malliks of Shyambazar; and the Malliks of Darpanarayan Tagore Street. Note that at the mansion of the Pathuriaghata Malliks, in addition to the Goddess on Śiva’s lap, her four children are all seated on Nandī’s back. In the Baranagar Datta family, Durgā sits at the feet of Śiva, who is astride an ox, and the goddess of the Pañcānan Pāl family in Nather Bagan is depicted as Kātyāyanī, mother of the infant Krishna (see fig. 4.2 below).

36. The most famous private image of this type occurs in the various West Bengali families descended from Kāśīnāth Dhar, originally from Dhaka, whose Pūjā is approximately 250 years old. Dhar had a dream in which the Goddess appeared to him and forbade animal sacrifice; ever after, his image has been Gaṇeśa-Jananī. The Goddess has two hands only, one held up in blessing and the other cradling her baby on her lap, and there is no buffalo or any other signs of battle. For a photo, see Asian Age, 20 Oct. 2001, p. 9. Some community Pūjās have taken to this type of image as well; at the Hatibagan Sarbajanīn Pūjā in 1998, Durgā was seated cross-legged with Gaṇeśa on her lap, she was dressed in a Bengali sari, and Mahiṣa was depicted kneeling in front of her in supplication. Asian Age, 27 Sept. 1998, p. 11.

37. Ājkāl, 6 Oct. 2000, p. 7.

38. This is the Pūjā at Bonerpukur Danga, Bolpur, which has been organized only since 2002. Hindustan Times, Kolkata, 7 Oct. 2004, Puja Parikrama section, p. 1.

39. R. K. Dasgupta, “Durga—the Mother and the Motherland,” in Amrita Bazar Patrika, 17 Oct. 1980, p. 5.

40. See Times of India, Kolkata, 29 Aug. 2006, p. 2; and Hindustan Times Live, Kolkata, 13 Sept. 2008, p. 2, respectively.

41. For another example of a daughter-Goddess tradition, this one popular among tribal and village folk in the southwest frontier of Bengal, eastern Bihar, and Orissa, consider the goddess Tuṣu, who is believed to return only once a year to visit her parents. Her songs share many features with the āgamanī and bijayā songs for Umā: apart from the longing of her family for her return, we see emphasized the conditions of women, such as their economic and caste situations, political problems, and unrequited love. See June McDaniel, Making Virtuous Daughters and Wives: An Introduction to Women’s Brata Rituals in Bengali Folk Religion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), pp. 11–28.

42. William Sax, Mountain Goddess: Gender and Politics in a Himalayan Pilgrimage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

43. See discussion of this point in Bimalcandra Datta, Durgā Pūjā: Sekāl theke Ekāl (Calcutta: Ramakrishna Vivekananda Institute of Research and Culture, 1986), pp. 63–64, and Pratapchandra Ghosha, Durga Puja, with Notes and Illustrations (Calcutta: Hindoo Patriot Press, 1871), appendix, pp. ix–x n. 3.

44. References to Durgā’s children are at least as old as Mukundarām’s Caṇḍīmaṅgal; see the section called “Gaurīr Khed,” lines 14–16, in Kabikañkaṇ Caṇḍī (Calcutta: Basumatī-Sāhitya-Mandir, 1963), p. 24. Other scholars claim a longer pedigree for the tradition: Amita Ray, in “The Cult and Ritual of Durgā Pūjā in Bengal,” from Shastric Traditions in Indian Arts, ed. Anna Libera Dallapicolla (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GMBH, 1989), p. 138, and Haṁsanārāyaṇ Bhaṭṭācārya, in Hinduder Debadebī: Udbhab o Kramabikāś, 3 vols. (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopādhyāy, 1986), 3:246, all assert that Vidyāpati’s Durgābhaktitaraṅginī is the first to mention Durgā’s children in the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries. Pratapaditya Pal makes the astute point that if these texts were familiar with a daughter tradition, then Āgamavāgīśa’s decision not to include this element in his Tantric digest, the Tantrasāra, may have derived from his desire to emphasize the martial and not householder side of the Goddess. See Pratapaditya Pal, Hindu Religion and Iconology According to the Tantrasāra (Los Angeles: Vichitra Press, 1981), p. 11. For a reference to Raghunandana, see Bimalcandra Datta, who quotes his Durgāpūjātattva to show that by this time rituals for consecrating the four children were in vogue; Durgā Pūjā: Sekāl theke Ekāl, p. 46. On the other hand, the ritual manuals described by Pratapchandra Ghosha in Durga Puja, p. xi n. 3, mention nothing about the children.

45. The earliest Bengali Mahiṣamardinī image is from Murshidabad, in the seventh century. She is so early that she is not even associated with the lion mount, but stands on the demon and spears him herself. For this and other, later samples, see Ray, “The Cult and Ritual of Durgā Pūjā in Bengal,” pp. 131–141.

46. None of the image slabs of Mahiṣamardinī on the surface of West Bengali temples from the sixteenth century and few thereafter depict her with her sons or daughters. For examples, see the Narasiṁha Temple in Gokarna village in Murshidabad (1580), the Raghunāth Temple in Gurisa in Birbhum (1633), the Joḍbāṅglā Kṛṣṇarāy Temple in Bishnupur (1655), the five-steepled (pañca-ratna) temple in Bhattbati village in Murshidabad (mid-eighteenth century), the Rādhāgovinda Temple in Gopalpur in Midnapur (1744), the Jhaḍeśvarnāth Temple in Kanasol in Midnapur (1837), the five-steepled temple in Khorda in Midnapur (1849), the Rādhādāmodar Temple in Midnapur (1856), the Śītalā Temple in Kalmijor, also in Midnapur (1879), and the Dāmodar Tample in Kalyanpur village in Howrah (1883).

47. A fine representative copper Śiva and Pārvatī with a small Gaṇeśa, from Pāla-period Chittagong in the ninth century, may be seen at the Victoria and Albert Museum (854 [IS]). For two additional examples, see B. N. Mukherjee, “Foreign Elements in Iconographiy of Mahishāsuramardinī—The War Goddess of India,” in Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1985), supplement VI, p. 405 n. 8. Consult also Pratapaditya Pal, Durga: Avenging Goddess (Pasadena, CA: Norton Simon Museum, 2005), pp. 22–24; and Ray, “The Cult and Ritual of Durgā Pūjā in Bengal,” pp. 134–136.

48. Examples may be seen at the Byām Rāy Temple in Bishnupur (1643), the Dakṣiṇākālī Temple at Malanca village in Midnapur (1712), the Gaganeśvar Temple at Gopalpur (1795), the Śiva Temple at Jotmudi (1828), and the Śiva temple at Surul (1831). See Tārāpad Sāntrā, “Durgā: On Terracotta/Clay Temple Slabs,” in Lok Saṁskṛti Gabeṣaṇā, ed. Sanatkumār Mitra, vol. 13, no. 2 (July–Aug. 2000): 221–227; and Kalyan Kumar Sarkar, “Terra-cotta Art of Some Temples of Birbhum: Iconographic Observations,” in Calcutta, Bangladesh, and Bengal Studies, South Asia Series Occasional Paper No. 40, 1990 Bengal Studies Conference Proceedings, ed. Clinton B. Seely (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1991), pp. 259–262.

49. See Mohit Roy, Rūpe Rūpe Durgā (Calcutta: Adhīr Pāl, 1985), p. 61.

50. Richard M. Eaton points out that the Sultans in Bengal did not favor upper-caste Brahmans and Kāyasthas, most of whom were Śaiva or Śākta, but patronized instead the largely Vaiṣṇava middle castes of cultivators and artisans; The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 67.

51. David J. McCutchion, Late Medieval Temples of Bengal (Calcutta: The Asiatic Society, 1972), p. 14.

52. Many such examples may be seen in the collections of the Asutosh Museum at the University of Calcutta.

53. See Binaybhūṣaṇ Rāy, “Durgā in Lakṣmīsarāis,” in Lok Saṁskṛti Gabeṣaṇā, ed. Sanatkumār Mitra, vol. 13, no. 2 (July–Aug. 2000): 228–237.

54. Sāntrā, “Durgā: On Terracotta/Clay Temple Slabs,” pp. 221–227.

55. Malavika Karlekar, “Woman’s Nature and the Access in Education,” in Socialisation, Education, and Women: Explorations in Gender Identity, ed. Karuna Channa (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1988), p. 131. I am indebted to Judith Walsh for directing me to this essay.

56. “It remains an unsolved question as to why the temples to [Durgā] as mentioned in these records are so limited in number while the number of Durgā images available in stone from the early Pāla periods down to the late medieval ages are so numerous” (A. K. Bhattacharyya, A Corpus of Dedicatory Inscriptions from Temples of West Bengal [c. 1500 A.D. to C. 1800 A.D.] [Calcutta: Shri K. K. Roy, 1982], p. 30).

57. I am grateful to Dr. Sanatkumār Mitra, who helped me think through some of these links in an interview on 6 Dec. 2000.

58. Figure 3.3 is an excellent example from the nineteenth or early twentieth century in which Himālaya, dressed like a rāja, is portrayed joyously receiving Umā, who is arriving on her lion and holding Gaṇeśa on her lap. Behind Girirāj, rushing out of a Westernized house with green shutters, come Menakā and other ladies. The whole scene is set in the mountains, and the three other children are visible in the distance, flying toward the house on their bird mounts. Śiva, very ugly, dark, and almost naked, follows behind Umā. I am grateful to T. Richard Blurton for showing me this painting.

59. Rāja Mahendralāl Khān, zamindar of Narajole, Midnapur, wrote a play in six acts on the Menakā/Umā theme: Śāradotsab (Gītināṭya) (Calcutta: Īśvarcandra Basu, 1288/1881).

60. “Durga Puja in the Villages of Old,” Statesman Puja Supplement, 16 Sept. 1952, pp. 1 and 4.

61. This sentiment was expressed concerning the Shovabazar Rāj family, but can be extended to other traditional celebrations; Statesman, 29 Sept. 1995, p. 7.

62. See Ānanda Bājār Patrikā, 23 Oct. 2001, pp. 1 and 5. Some artisans express less the nostalgia for the daughter than the relief of having given her away, as a father who has been freed of responsibility (bhārmukta) for the future of his kanyā; Bartamān, 28 Sept. 2006, p. 4.

63. A number of Purāṇic accounts state that in order to disguise the Goddess’s real identity from the demon Tāraka, Brahmā causes the embryo inside Menā’s womb to become black. After the dark Pārvatī grows up and marries Śiva, he teases her about her color so much that she vows to do austerities until Brahmā lightens her complexion. When her wish is granted, her dark skin peels off and becomes a separate goddess, who is worshiped in the Vindhya mountains (Matsya Purāṇa 154). In another version, Pārvatī is turned black, into Kālī, so as to provoke a quarrel between Pārvatī and Śiva, which will necessitate her doing more austerities, so as to induce Śiva to produce Skanda (Kumārasambhava 8.9.18, 87). Other examples occur in the specific context of battle. In the Liṅga Purāṇa (2.100), Śiva asks Pārvatī for help in defeating a demon named Dāruka. She enters the blue, poisoned throat of her husband, emerges as Kālī, and slays the demon. In the Skanda Purāṇa (2.83), Śiva again requests Pārvatī’s aid in killing a male demon, Durga. After assuming the form of a warrior goddess and dispatching him, she gains the name Durgā. Certainly the most famous account of such transformation occurs in the “Devī Māhātmya” section of the Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa. At the beginning of the third episode (5.38), the gods pray to Pārvatī for aid against two new demons, Śumbha and Niśumbha. Stepping out of her bath, Pārvatī asks why the gods are praising her. A light-colored goddess named Ambikā emerges from Pārvatī’s body in order to answer the question and fight the demons. The dark side of Pārvatī, on the other hand, departs for the Himalayas. Soon after, Ambikā emits the fierce and ugly Kālī from the concentrated wrath in her forehead, and directs Kālī to join the Goddess’s dread team against the demon armies (7.4ff; see also Vāmana Purāṇa 28.6–25).

64. Girīścandra Ghoṣ, “Kusvapan dekhechi Giri,” in Śākta Padābalī, ed. Rāy, poem 13. A similar poem by Hariścandra Mitra may be found in ibid., poem 12.

65. Īśvarcandra Gupta, “Kailās-sambād śune,” in ibid., poem 17. See McDermott, Singing to the Goddess, p. 128.

66. Rasikcandra Rāy, “Giri, kār kaṇṭhahār ānile Giri-pure?” in Śākta Padābalī, ed. Rāy, poem 41. See McDermott, Singing to the Goddess, pp. 142–143. For more examples, see poems by Dāśarathi Rāy (Śākta Padābalī, ed. Rāy, poem 40), Rāmcandra Bhaṭṭācārya (ibid., poem 43), and Brajmohan Rāy (ibid., poem 44).

67. Anonymous, in ibid., poem 72.

68. Lakṣmīkānta Biśvās, quoted in Īśvarcandra Gupta, Sambād Prabhākar 13 Jan. 1855. See Īśvar Gupter Racanābalī, ed. Śāntikumār Dāśgupta and Haribandhu Mukhṭi, 2 vols. (Calcutta: Dattacaudhurī and Sons, 1974), 1:207–210.

69. This comes from Dāśarathi’s second pāncālī on the āgamanī and bijayā theme; see Dāśarathi Rāyer Pāncālī, ed. Haripad Cakrabartī (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1962), pp. 590–597.

70. For instance, see a poem by Rājā Mahendralāl Khān (Śākta Padābalī, ed. Rāy, poem 59).

71. This text has never been translated into English, and is not considered of very good poetic quality by Bengali commentators—partially because the modeling of Umā on Kṛṣṇa is so apparent. For the Bengali, see Satyanārāyaṇ Bhaṭṭācārya, Rāmprasād: Jībanī o Racanāsamagra, 2 parts (Calcutta: Granthamelā, 1975), 1:5–17.

72. For a discussion of these explanations, see McDermott, Mother of My Heart, pp. 284–285.

73. Sadhan Kumar Ghosh, in Statesman Puja Supplement, 4 Oct. 1953, p. 1.

74. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 22 Oct. 1950, pp. 1 and 5; Ānanda Bājār Patrikā, 29 Sept. 1949, pp. 9 and 11.

75. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 10 Oct. 1948, p. 12.

76. See Telegraph, 19 Oct. 2001, p. 23; Telegraph, 28 Oct. 2001, p. III of the “Women” section; Asian Age, 6 Oct. 2001, pp. 9–10; and Ājkāl, 8 Oct. 2001, p. 4.

77. A classic treatment of nostalgia is that by Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia (New York: Free Press, 1979). He describes three types of nostalgia: (1) simple, a feeling that things were once better, healthier, happier (pp. 17–21); (2) reflexive, as one begins to wonder whether the past was really as happy as one thought (pp. 21–24); and (3) interpreted, when one puts the nostalgic feeling itself under scrutiny (pp. 24–26).

78. Roberta Rubenstein, Home Matters: Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and Mourning in Women’s Fiction (New York: Palgrave, 2000), p. 5.

79. See Davis, Yearning for Yesterday, pp. 34–35 and 49.

80. Jean Starobinski, “The Idea of Nostalgia,” Diogenes 54 (1966): 81–103.

81. Rubenstein, Home Matters, pp. 4 and 87.

82. Jane Marie Law, Puppets of Nostalgia: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of the Japanese Awaji Nongyō Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 206.

83. For a similar glorification of rural life, see Chris Waters, “Autobiography, Nostalgia, and the Changing Practices of Working-Class Selfhood,” in Singular Continuities: Tradition, Nostalgia, and Identity in Modern British Culture, ed. George K. Behler and Fred M. Leventhal (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 178–195.

84. Rubenstein, Home Matters, pp. 6 and 164.

85. Leo Spitzer, in his discussion of Nazi refugees, catalogues various Marxist critiques of nostalgia for being escapism, a betrayal of history, a tool of the heritage industry, and an opiate with dysfunctional consequences; “Back Through the Future: Nostalgic Memory and Critical Memory in a Refuge from Nazism,” in Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, ed. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer (Hanover: Dartmouth College, 1999), p. 91. See also Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, 2nd ed. (1992; New York, Basic Books, 2000), pp. 12 and 15. People living in those romanticized “periods were seldom as enamored of their family arrangements as modern nostalgia might suggest” (p. 12). David Lowenthal, in The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), however, champions the elasticity of the past. We do not need a fixed past, he says, but a “heritage with which we continually interact, one which fuses past with present” (p. 410). The danger arises when we do not admit that the feeling of emancipation we derive from the cult of nostalgia rests on our creative transformation, not the recovery of a “true” history.

86. Ibid., p. 4.

87. Law, Puppets of Nostalgia, p. 263.

88. Spitzer, “Back Through the Future,” p. 92.

89. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), p. 143.

4. The Artistry of Durgā and Jagaddhātrī

1. I am grateful to the members of the Spalding Symposium, Oxford University, 23 March 2002, who gave me valuable feedback on an initial version of this chapter.

2. According to famed Bengali historian Haraprasād Śāstrī, Durgā Pūjā was originally an agricultural nabapatrikā festival: “Durgā-devī, all adorned, came later to sit in the midst of that garden”; cited by Suhṛdkumār Bhaumik, “Durgā: Bāṅgālīr Ādibāsī,” in Lok Saṁskṛti Gabeṣaṇā, ed. Sanatkumār Mitra, vol. 13, no. 2 (July–Aug. 2000): 294–295.

3. The full pot (ghaṭ or pūrṇa-kumbha) is placed on a yantra; decorated with an abstract figure of a human being made of vermillion paste; and covered with a mango branch, on top of which are placed rice, betel nut, and a vermillion-smeared green coconut. See Amita Ray, “The Cult and Ritual of Durgā Pūjā in Bengal,” in Shastric Traditions in Indian Arts, ed. Anna Libera Dallpicolla (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GMBH, 1989), esp. p. 139.

4. These are kadalī (banana), kacī (mango), haridrā (turmeric), jayantī (nutmeg), bilva (maremelos), dāḍimba (pomegranate), aśoka (Saraca asoca), māna (arum), and dhānya (rice). For a good description of the plants, plus illustrations, see Madhu Khanna, “The Ritual Capsule of Durgā Pūjā: An Ecological Perspective,” in Hinduism and Ecology: The Intersection of Earth, Sky, and Water, ed. Christopher Key Chapple and Mary Evelyn Tucker (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 476–478.

5. The nabapatrikā is also called the kalā bau, signaling that she is Gaṇeśa’s banana plant wife and Durgā’s banana-plant daughter-in-law.

6. R. P. Chandra, The Indo-Aryan Races: A Study of the Origins of Indo-Aryan People and Institutions (1916; New Delhi: Indological Book Corp., 1976), p. 131, cited in Jitendranāth Bandyopādhyāy, Pañcopāsanā (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopādhyāy, 1960), p. 282. See also p. 283.

7. See Bimalcandra Datta, Durgā Pūjā: Sekāl theke Ekāl (Calcutta: Ramakrishna Vivekananda Institute of Research and Culture, 1986), p. 52.

8. To give an example, the goddess Poḍāmā, whose image is presently established at the root of a big banyan tree in Navadvip, is said to have been “discovered” by a Tantrik sādhaka who did pūjā to her with a ghaṭ in a forest. In the fifteenth century the famous Pandit Bāsudeb Sārbabhauma brought the ghaṭ to Navadvip. In 1804 a permanent mūrti was donated by Kṛṣṇacandra Rāy’s son, Girīścandra. See Śibsaṅkar Bhārati, “Kālī-kathā,” in Sāptahik Bartamān 16, no. 324 (29 Oct. 2000): 10. No one in the entire village of Kshirgram in Burdwan installs a mūrti; all ritual actions are done for nabapatrikās alone; see Mohit Rāy, Rūpe Rūpe Durgā (Calcutta: Adhīr Pāl, 1985), pp. 38–42.

9. See Atanu Ghoṣ, “Mukhārjider Sonār Durgā,” in Ājkāl, 20 Sept. 1998, p. 14; and Śrīkānta Gauḍ, “Durgā: Kāṭhkodāi-e,” in Lok Saṁskṛti Gabeṣaṇā, ed. Sanatkumār Mitra, vol. 13, no. 2 (July–Aug. 2000): 256–264.

10. In other words, the artisan and his patron are responsible together for the change. Interview, Dr. Sanatkumār Mitra, 6 Dec. 2000.

11. Jyotindra Jain, Kalighat Painting: Images from a Changing World (Ahmedabad: Mapin, 1999), p. 35.

12. See Śibśaṅkar Bhārati, “Durgāpujo Jelāy Jelāy,” in Bartamān, 8 Oct. 2000, p. 11; Times of India, 6 Oct. 2000, p. 6; and Roy, Rūpe Rūpe Durgā, pp. 25–27.

13. Pratidin, 20 Oct. 2000, p. 12; and Hindustan Times, Kolkata, 24 Oct. 2001, p. 2. For more details about the customs of the Malla rājās of Mallabhum, see Roy, Rūpe Rūpe Durgā, pp. 43–50.

14. Datta, Durgā Pūjā: Sekāl theke Ekāl, p. 71.

15. See Kṣetra Gupta, “Durgā: Lokabhāskaryer Pahelā Pāṭh,” in Lok Saṁskṛti Gabeṣaṇā, ed. Sanatkumār Mitra, vol. 13, no. 2 (July–Aug. 2000): 191–197.

16. Pratapchandra Ghosha, Durga Puja, with Notes and Illustrations (Calcutta: Hindoo Patriot Press, 1871), p. 5.

17. According to Śrīkṛṣṇa Pāl, secretary, Kumartuli Mṛtśilpī Sangathan, the following are the stages of image construction, as performed in Kolkata: (1) In April, śāl wood is shaped by a carpenter to prepare the frame; (2) in autumn hay padding for the deities is made; (3) the hay is joined to the frame; (4) one layer of clay soil, brought from Diamond Harbor or Uluberia, is applied to the hay; (5) a second layer of sandy soil is applied; (6) the fingers and toes of hands and feet are molded, and the whole image is dried (this takes fifteen days in good weather, more in bad); (7) cracks that appeared during drying are fixed; (8) coats of paint are applied (first white clay, then paint, then red lac-dye for the hands and feet); (9) the images are dressed with clothes and jewelry; (10) they are transported to their pandals; and (11) once they are in place, the Goddess’s weapons are fitted in her hands. Heard and transcribed by Hena Basu from “Ālāpan (Dialogue),” broadcast on All India Radio, Kolkata, 5 p.m., 21 Sept. 2000.

18. Apūrba Caṭṭopādhyāy, “Kumorṭulir Kathā,” in Bartamān, 27 Sept. 2000, p. 12.

19. One rare example of a permanent Durgā temple in Kolkata is the eighteenth-century Citteśvarī Sarvamaṅgalā Temple near Ciria Mor. Here the lion has a horse’s head. For an overview of the many cases of horse-headed lions on West Bengal’s terracotta temple slabs, see Tārāpad Sāntrā, “Durgā: On Terracotta/Clay Temple Slabs, in Lok Saṁskṛti Gabeṣaṇā, ed. Sanatkumār Mitra, vol. 13, no. 2 (July–Aug. 2000): 221–227. Families who trace their tradition of Durgā Pūjā back at least into the eighteenth century, who still follow the iconographic conventions of their forebears, and whose Durgās stand upon horse-faced lions include the Hatkhola Dattas, the Khelātcandra Ghoṣes, the Rāmdulāl Sarkār Debs, and the major line of the Shovabazar Rāj family. Note that the rival minor Shovabazar line has changed its horse’s head back into a lion’s head. The Nadia Rāj at Krishnanagar also has a horse-faced lion.

20. See Adip Datta, “The Three Eyes, the Ten Arms, and the Lie of the Land,” in Telegraph, 30 Sept. 1995, Section III: Arts and Ideas, p. 1.

21. See “Bāṅgāl Durgāi Jitlen,” in Ānanda Bājār Patrikā, 4 Oct. 2000, p. 4.

22. Historic families that still commission the rarer second type include: the Sābarṇa Rāy Caudhurīs of Behala, the Singhis of Paddapukur, and the Chātu-Bābu Lātu-Bābu family and Khelātcandra Ghoṣes, both of north Kolkata. There are other minor variations on these old-style backdrops. For example, the cāl at the Thanthania Ghoṣ family Pūjā is triangular; Sohini Sarkar, “Keeping the Faith,” in Statesman, 15 Oct. 1999, “Downtown” section, pp. 1–2. For an exhaustive account of all possible cāl types, see Jayanta Dās, “Kumorṭulir Cārśo Bacharer Bibartan,” Deś 64, no. 24 (19 Sept. 1998): 63–70.

23. Interview, 22 Sept. 2000.

24. Susan S. Bean, “The Art of Exchange: Circulation of Visual Culture in Colonial India,” talk given at Columbia University, 28 Oct. 2006.

25. Susan S. Bean, in “Mud and Divinity: Changing Shapes of Patronage in Nineteenth-Century Bengal” (draft paper, 1998), p. 19, cites Christopher Pinney on this point: “Colonial Anthropology in the ‘Laboratory of Mankind,’” in The Raj: India and the British, 1600–1900, ed. Christopher Bayly (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1990), pp. 252–263.

26. Pāl grew up in the house of his maternal grandfather in Krishnanagar. At around the age of twenty he took employment with the Potter Works of Burn and Co. in Ranigunge. Within a few days he bewildered everyone by creating an image of the Goddess. Resigning after a few years from Burns, he built himself a workshop, where, from about 1919 to 1924, he started making goddess images. Later, with the help of a Marwari industrialist, he set up a studio in Calcutta. Shortly after this he went to London. See Añjali Basu, ed., Saṁsad Bāṇali Caritabhidhān (Kolkata: Sāhitya Saṁsad, 1994), p. 141. Although accounts differ as to the means by which Pāl’s work came to the notice of the British (Dās, below, has Pāl meeting Lord Carmichael in Krishnanagar in 1915, whereas Siddheśvar Pāl claims that it was Lord Bentley [interview with Hena Basu, on my behalf, 5 March 2002]), it is clear that at a young age Gopeśvar impressed a British civil servant enough to be remembered—and invited to compete for a position at the Wembley exhibition. See Dās, “Kumorṭulir Cārśo Bacharer Bibartan.” For a description of Wembley and all the Indian artists present there, see Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922–1947 (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), pp. 191–194.

27. Daily Telegraph, London, 7 July 1924, p. 13.

28. Interview with Gopeśvar Pāl’s son, Siddheśvar Pāl, 16 Oct. 1998.

29. Susan Bean thinks that the application of naturalism spread from humans to deities around the end of the nineteenth century, probably starting with the figure of Kārtik; “The Art of Exchange.”

30. Both quotations are from the Amrita Bazar Patrika newspaper from 1932: 2 Oct., p. 5, and 12 Oct., p. 7. Siddheśvar Pāl avers that his father was self-consciously attempting to revert to the spirit of the dhyānas (interview with Hena Basu, 5 March 2002).

31. See “Bāṅgāl Durgāi Jitlen.” This Muslim bearer was killed in the 1946 Calcutta riots for the sin of carrying a Hindu image.

32. Some artisans still follow this method; Ānanda Bājār Patrikā, 11 July 2002, p. 1, features a photo of Jātīn Pāl modeling his demons after real gymnasts.

33. See “New Orientation in Clay-Modelling,” in Amrita Bazar Patrika, 15 Oct. 1936, p. 10.

34. “From the point of view of the image, the place of honour should go to the Kumartuli celebration where the renowned artist Mr. G. Pal has constructed a most impressive image of Mother Durga which in conception and working out of details marks a departure from the traditional style” (Amrita Bazar Patrika, 1 Oct. 1938, p. 7). For encomia about N. C.’s Bagbazar image, which by 1936 was the highest in the city, at 16’6”, see Amrita Bazar Patrika, 18 Oct. 1936, p. 7.

35. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 5 Oct. 1932, p. 3.

36. Ājkāl, 22 Sept. 1998, pp. 1 and 5.

37. For these critiques, see “Bāṅgāl Durgāi Jitlen.”

38. Jayanta Dās writes that Gopeśvar Pāl’s images caught on among immigrant artisans from East Bengal after the 1950s, because the practice of humanizing the Goddess in East Bengal actually predated Pāl’s innovation. Rameścandra Pāl, an artisan from East Bengal whom Dās interviews, agrees: the West Bengali artisans did most of the images for home Pūjās, and since the sarbajanīn Pūjās were increasing, that left a lot of work for the East Bengali artists. Dās, “Kumorṭulir Cārśo Bacharer Bibartan,” 63–70.

39. “Busy Spell for Image Makers,” Statesman, 27 Sept. 1957, p. 10.

40. One Pūjā committee in Bhowanipur, south Kolkata, dressed their Durgā as Śāradādebī (1853–1920), Rāmakṛṣṇa’s famous wife. Absent were Mahiṣamardinī and Durgā’s four children.

41. In 2004 this trend was said to be a “new phenomenon”; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 10 Oct. 2004, p. 17.

42. Times of India, 3 Oct. 2002, p. 2.

43. B. Datta, Durgā Pūjā: Sekāl theke Ekāl, p. 141.

44. Ānanda Bājār Patrikā, 11 Nov. 2000, p. 4.

45. In 2000 I surveyed 146 Durgā images in Pratidin newspaper photo spreads; of these, 68 were completely humanized, 65 were of the hybrid variety, and only 13 had the old bodies and old faces. In 1999 the same paper printed 109 different images: of these, 53 were humanized, 44 had sweet faces, and 12 were of the traditional style.

46. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 29 Sept. 1968, p. 1.

47. According to Jagaddhātrī’s dhyāna mantra in Kṛṣṇānanda Āgambāgīś’s sixteenth-century Tantrasāra, she is described as follows: “Seated on a lion’s back, adorned with various ornaments,/ With four hands, the Great Goddess, a snake for a sacred thread,/ In her two left hands a conch and a bow,/ In her two right hands a discus and five arrows,/ Wearing a red garment, her young body outshining the sun,/ Served by Narada and other sages, the Beauteous wife of Bhava,/ The three folds of her navel shine like a clump of lotuses./ She is seated on a blooming lotus on top of a lion on a gem-encrusted island.” See Bṛhat Tantrasāra, ed. Rasikmohan Caṭṭopādhyāy and translated into Bengali by Candrakumār Tarkālaṅkar (Calcutta: Nababhārat, 1982), section called “Atha Durgā Mantrāḥ,” p. 488. In most modern images the Goddess holds one arrow, not five, and she wears white, not red.

48. Although I can find no explicit equation of Jagaddhātrī’s elephant-demon with Durgā’s adversary Mahiṣa, who in the “Devī-Māhātmya” temporarily changes from a buffalo into an elephant, it seems fairly clear that the elephant is a variant of the buffalo. Both demons are killed by the Goddess, and in both cases the Goddess’s lion is actively engaged in the struggle.

49. Of the 121 freestanding temples to single goddesses (not male gods with their female consorts) described by David McCutchion in his exhaustive survey of Bengali temples, 33 are dedicated to Kālī (the oldest dated is from 1712), 15 to Śītalā (oldest dated from 1811), 14 to Caṇḍī (oldest dated from 1649), 11 to Durgā (oldest dated from 1705), and 10 to Simhavāhinī (oldest dated from 1490). See Brick Temples of Bengal: From the Archives of David McCutchion, ed. George Michell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).

50. The Asutosh Museum at the University of Calcutta has an eighth-century image from Barisal and an eighteenth-century image from Jessore, both in present-day Bangladesh. These scant museum holdings may indicate that Jagaddhātrī was popular earlier and further east than other sources can corroborate at present.

51. Famous old-style Jagaddhātrī images can be seen at Kumartuli Friends Circle and Prabhat Smriti Sangha in Kolkata; Chaulpatti in Chandannagar; Baubazar and Malopara in Krishnanagar; Kagram in Murshidabad; and Shorbhujbazar Sutragar in Shantipur.

52. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 16 Oct. 1980, p. 7.

53. Statesman Puja Supplement, 4 Oct. 1953, p. 1.

54. Statesman, 5 Oct. 1961, p. 1.

55. Telegraph, 26 Sept. 2006, p. 1.

56. Interview, 23 Sept. 1998.

57. Sunday Times of India, Kolkata, 3 Sept. 2006, p. 2.

58. Statesman, 14 Oct. 1983, p. 16.

59. See Hindustan Times, Kolkata, 21 Oct. 2004, p. 1, for the before and after photos.

60. Soumitra Das, “Swingback to Tradition,” in Statesman, 19 Oct. 1988.

61. The Bagbazar Pūjā committee apparently never gets involved in the “ratrace (idũrdauḍe) for wowing people with their pujas,” but nevertheless they nearly always win prizes for their old-style images; Pratidin, 22 Sept. 2000, p. 5.

62. See Meredith Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal, 1849–1905 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Partha Chatterjee, “The Nation and Its Women” and “Women and the Nation,” in The Nation and Its Fragments (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 116–157; Rajat Kanta Ray, “Man, Woman, and the Novel: The Rise of a New Consciousness in Bengal,” in Exploring Emotional History: Gender, Mentality, and Literature in the Indian Awakening (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 67–117; and Judith E. Walsh, “What Women Learned When Men Gave Them Advice: Rewriting Patriarchy in Late-Nineteenth-Century Bengal,” Journal of Asian Studies 56.3 (August 1997): 641–677, and Domesticity in Colonial India: What Women Learned When Men Gave Them Advice (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004).

63. Although this was primarily a male ideal, as Judith Walsh demonstrates in “What Women Learned,” it was taken up and championed by women who saw in companionate marriage a way to break free of the constraints of the mother-in-law.

64. From the Introduction by S. N. Mukherjee to The Poison Tree: Three Novellas by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (New Delhi: Penguin, 1996), p. xxxi. For more on the rise of individualism, see Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 120–136.

65. Bankim’s six domestic novels are: Rajmohan’s Wife (1864, in English), Biṣabṛkṣa (1873), Rajanī (1877), Kṛṣṇakānter Uil (1878), Rādhārāṇī (1886), and Indirā (1873, 1893). For further discussion, see Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), chaps. 4 and 5, pp. 134–190.

66. According to Ray’s persuasive study, other indigenous ideas conveyed in the novels are the relationships between men and women, as framed by conceptions of puruṣa and prakṛti, and the particular type of pouting love known as māna or abhimāna. See “Man, Woman, and the Novel.”

67. For an overview of these early genres, see Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 3–25; and Tapati Guha-Thakurta, “Art in Old Calcutta: The Melting Pot of Western Styles,” and R. P. Gupta, “Art in Old Calcutta: Indian Style,” in Calcutta: The Living City, vol. 1: The Past, ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 137–138 and 146–148, respectively.

68. Mitter, Art and Nationalism, p. 271. In an extraordinary statement, Bankim opines, “Our idols are hideous, they say. True, we wait for our sculptors. It is a question of art only. The Hindu pantheon has never been adequately represented in stone or clay, because India has produced no sculptors…. The images we worship in Bengal are, as works of art, a disgrace to the nation. Wealthy Hindus should get their Krishnas and Radhas made in Europe”; from one of his letters to Hastie, published in the Statesman for 28 Oct. 1882, reproduced in The English Writings of Bankimchandra, ed. Sudin Chattopadhyay (Kolkata: Deep Prakashan, 2003), p. 280. I am grateful to Dermot Killingley for alerting me to this passage.

69. The first printing press reached Calcutta in 1777–1778; by the end of the century there were seventeen printing presses, all owned by Europeans. The first Indian-owned press was established in 1807 in Khidirpur; within a few years Bengalis operated presses all over Calcutta. The first illustrated Bengali book was the Annadāmaṅgal, from 1816, and the first illustrated Bengali periodical was from 1818.

70. The definitive work on these is Ashit Paul’s edited volume, Woodcut Prints of Nineteenth-Century Calcutta (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1983). Although Bat-tala woodcuts begin to appear in the 1820s, their golden age is 1860–1900. By the end of this period, they went from being book illustrations to loose prints, colored by hand. In this, and the themes they covered, they were parallel to the Kalighat paṭs, which slightly outlived them.

71. The best, most recent study of the paṭs is Jyotindra Jain’s Kalighat Painting; his bibliography contains a comprehensive list of older works on the subject. The paṭ genre lasted from approximately 1830 to 1930.

72. See Purnendu Pattrea, “The Continuity of the Battala Tradition: An Aesthetic Reevaluation,” in Paul, Woodcut Prints, pp. 70–71.

73. Jain, Kalighat Painting, p. 123.

74. Ibid., pp. 26–34.

75. Mitter, Art and Nationalism, p. 55. Also see his discussion of the first major academic sculptor, Ganpatrao Mhatre (1876–1947), from Pune, who absorbed the Greco-Roman style and produced several masterpieces—“To the Temple,” “Saraswai,” and “Parvati”—that are voluptuous and sensual (pp. 103–107).

76. Jain, Kalighat Painting, p. 37.

77. B. N. Mukherjee, “Pictures from Woodcut Blocks: An Iconological Analysis,” in Paul, Woodcut Prints, p. 108.

78. Mitter, Art and Nationalism, p. 178.

79. For an example of Greek sculpture entering his paintings, see Tapati Guha-Thakurta, “Clothing the Goddess: The Modern Contest Over Representation of Devi,” in Devi: The Great Goddess: Female Divinity in South Asian Art, ed. Vidya Dehejia (Washington, D.C.: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 1999), p. 171.

80. Sandria Freitag discusses this juxtaposition of the religious and the domestic in calendar art in “Visions of the Nation: Theorizing the Nexus Between Creation, Consumption, and Participation in the Public Sphere,” in Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics, and Consumption of Public Cultures in India, ed. Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 53–59. See also Erwin Neumayer and Christine Schelberger, Popular Indian Art: Raja Ravi Varma and the Printed Gods of India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

81. For overviews of these critiques, see Guha-Thakurta, “Clothing the Goddess,” pp. 157–180; Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 221–266; and Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, pp. 29–122.

82. See Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, pp. 132–140, and especially the comparison of paintings by C. Raja Raja Varma, Ravi Varma’s brother, and Hemendranāth Majumdār on pp. 134–135.

83. Guha-Thakurta, “Clothing the Goddess,” p. 173.

84. Guha-Thakurta, “Art in Old Calcutta,” p. 155.

85. For more on the nationalistic feminization of women, see Partha Chatterjee, “Colonialism, Nationalism, and Colonialized Women: The Contest in India,” American Ethnologist 16.4 (Nov. 1989): 622–633, as cited in Annapurna Garimela, “Engendering Indian Art,” in Representing the Body: Gender Issues in Indian Art, ed. Vidya Dehejia (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1997), p. 33; Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation, p. 266; and Patricia Uberoi, “Feminine Identity and National Ethos in Indian Calendar Art,” Economic and Political Weekly (28 April 1990): 43. For further reading on calendar art and goddesses, see Gerald Larson, Pratapaditya Pal, and H. Daniel Smith, Changing Myths and Images: Twentieth-Century Popular Art in India (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1997), especially essay and associated prints by Pal, “The Printed Image: An Iconographic Excursus,” pp. 33–35, pls. 27–48.

86. Richard Davis, “Introduction,” in idem, ed., Picturing the Nation: Iconographies of Modern India (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2007), p. 5. The same point is made by Christopher Pinney, in “Photos of the Gods”: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), p. 8.

87. Neumayer and Schelberger, Popular Indian Art, p. 56, pl. 36. Earlier, in 1898, Ravi Varma had already depicted Durgā as a four-armed, red sari–clad maiden standing in front of two reclining lions, but this did not become as famous as the Tagore piece. See ibid., p. 61, pl. 39.

88. Sumathi Ramaswamy, “Body Politic(s): Maps and Mother Goddesses in Modern India,” in Picturing the Nation: Iconographies of Modern India, ed. Richard H. Davis (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2007), p. 34.

89. The image was stationed at Bijaygarh Colony, Calcutta. Ānanda Bājār Patrikā, 29 Sept. 1952, p. 8.

90. Pratidin, 24 Oct. 2001, p. 6.

91. See chapter 2, nn. 83, 84.

92. Ānanda Bājār Patrikā, 22 Oct. 1950, p. 4.

93. A marvelous collection of such prints is collected in Erwin Neumayer and Christina Schelberger, Bharat Mata: India’s Freedom Movement in Popular Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

94. R. P. Gupta, “Pujas Then and Now,” in Sunday Statesman Miscellany, 20 Oct. 1985, pp. 1 and 2.

95. Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere, 1920–1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

96. Statesman, 1 Oct. 1922, p. 10.

97. The Durgā in Bangar at North 24 Parganas is called Biṛālhāṭ Durgā because eight of her ten hands look like caw’s paws; see Bartaman, 22 Oct. 2001, p. 11. The face of the stone image of Mahāmāyā at Garhraipur in Bankura is like that of a fox (kokmukhī). The attribution of a fox’s face to the Goddess is as old as the Mahābhārata (Bhīṣma Pārva 23). See Debjyoti Chattopadhyay, “Durga in Rarhanchal,” in Statesman, 26 Sept. 1990, p. 12. The Durgā image at the Kuchbihar zamindars’ house is sculpted as Cāmuṇḍā.

98. Thomas B. Coburn, Encountering the Goddess: A Translation of the Devī-Māhātmya and a Study of Its Interpretation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 4.11, p. 49.

5. Durgā on the Titanic: Politics and Religion in the Pūjā

1. I am grateful to participants in the symposium “Experiencing Devi: Hindu Goddesses in Indian Popular Art,” held at the University of Iowa in Feb. 2001; to the members of the Indology Seminar at Oxford University in May 2001; and to C. J. Fuller, Henrike Donner, and Laura Bear, of the London School of Economics, all of whom gave valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter.

2. Calcutta Journal, 7 Oct. 1820, p. 367. The article goes on to comment that of any 100 Rs. collected, only 20 are spent on the “idol,” and the rest on the entertainments.

3. See Rev. Alexander Duff, India and Indian Missions: Including Sketches of the Gigantic System of Hinduism Both in Theory and in Practice (Edinburgh, 1839; Delhi: Swati Publications, 1988), pp. 243–264.

4. Evidence for this claim is overwhelming in the papers of 1926 through the late 1950s, in all news coverage at all Pūjā seasons. One precedent for the present-day illuminations of the public Pūjās derives from zamindari festivals of the mid-nineteenth century: the wealthy landowning houses sometimes entertained their guests by festooning their houses with oil lamps placed to effect the shape of figures; Englishman and Military Chronicle, 7 Oct. 1851, p. 3.

5. Ānanda Bājār Patrikā, 27 Sept. 1952, p. 1. The Hindu Mahasabha’s accompanying exhibition at Girish Park in 1953 was more controversial: its models ridiculed the Hindu Code Bill, death duties, widow remarriage, and the Partition of India; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 15 Oct. 1953, pp. 1 and 5.

6. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 15 Oct. 1953, pp. 1 and 5.

7. For example, see Amrita Bazar Patrika, 18 Oct. 1953, p. 1; and 6 Oct. 1954, p. 1.

8. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 8 Oct. 1962, pp. 1 and 7. “Pandal-hopping” is also referred to in the Statesman, 10 Oct. 1970, p. 1.

9. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 18 Oct. 1969, p. 1.

10. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 20 Oct. 1966, pp. 1 and 7.

11. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 19 Oct. 1969, p. 7.

12. One finds this first from the early 1980s, and what is mentioned is the sacrifice of animals and the application of oil and vermilion to weaponry, which is then laid down in front of Durgā. See Statesman, 6 Oct. 1981, pp. 1 and 3.

13. A photograph of one such pandal can be seen in Amrita Bazar Patrika, 3 Nov. 1984, p. 36.

14. These six structures are mentioned in Bartamān, 9 Oct. 2001, p. 2; Ājkāl, 20 Oct. 2001, p. 6; Asian Age, 24 Oct. 2001, p. 10; and Ājkāl, 25 Oct. 2001, p. 1.

15. See Ānanda Bājār Patrikā, 28 Sept. 2006, Pūjā insert, p. 1.

16. Pratidin, 24 Oct. 2001, p. 1.

17. Kalyāṇ Singh, chair of a committee in Halishahar. See Bartamān, 22 Sept. 2006, p. 3.

18. This pandal belonged to Baruipur Madarhat Dakshinpara. Telegraph, 26 Aug. 2006, p. 23. Another pandal of this ilk was erected at Palta Netaji Sangha, where the pandal was a copy of the Munich football stadium, decorated inside as if for the final match between Italy and France. The Devī was depicted giving a trophy to Italy’s captain, Fabio Canabarok. Bartamān, 22 Sept. 2006, p. 3.

19. Times of India, Kolkata, 11 Oct. 2004, p. 3.

20. Telegraph, Kolkata, 19 Oct. 2004, p. 14.

21. This was the theme at Ladies’ Park. Times of India, Kolkata, 15 Oct. 2007, City section, p. 1.

22. Hindustan Times Live, Kolkata, 4 Sept. 2008, p. 4.

23. This was the theme of the Selimpur Palli committee. Hindustan Times Live, Kolkata, 19 Sept. 2008, p. 2.

24. 41 Palli, Haridevpur, was the site of this Sundarbans theme. Hindustan Times Live, Kolkata, 17 Sept. 2008, p. 2.

25. Absar Sarbojanin, on Townshend Road, and Putiary Club, in the south. Telegraph, 17 Sept. 2006, Metro section, p. 1.

26. See, respectively, Dainik Basumatī, 26 Oct. 1968, p. 3; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 18 Nov. 1977, p. 5; www.giridoot.com/puja2.htm (accessed 3 Nov. 2003); and www.calcuttaweb.com/picture/jagaddhatripuja (accessed 27 Dec. 2008).

27. On the ghaṭ bisarjan, see Pratidin, 27 Oct. 2000, p. 12.

28. Quoted from the Englishman, 15 Feb. 1849, cited in Rajat Sanyal, Voluntary Associations and the Urban Public Life in Bengal (1815–1876): An Aspect of Social History (Calcutta: Riddhi-India, 1980), p. 62 n. 9.

29. One reads of this particularly in the early years of CPI(M) power in the state. For instance, in 1967, in Bhatpara, 24 Parganas, there was a clash over which procession should be allowed to cross the road first. Seven people were killed and 50 injured, including 15 policemen. In Bhadreshwar that same year, one group carried swords, lathis, and torches soaked in kerosene. The area through which they traveled objected, so the police disarmed them and had them process through a different route; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 15 Oct. 1967, p. 3. In 1969 the newspapers reported stabbings and deaths over the right of passage between two different processions, both in Calcutta and in Tribeni, Hooghly district; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 22 Oct. 1969, p. 7.

30. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 16 Oct. 1969, p. 14, and 20 Oct. 1969, p. 1.

31. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 17 Oct. 1975, p. 7.

32. This attention to priests is recent, and is mostly attributable to the efforts of the Vaidic Pandit o Purohit Mahamilan Kendra and the Paścimbanga Vaidic Academy, local affiliates of the All India Pracchovidya Academy, organizations committed to priestly authenticity and welfare. These institutions provide training camps for priests and issue certifications for graduates. For representative articles, see the Kolkata editions of Hindustan Times, 12 Oct. 2002, p. 1; Times of India, 12 Sept. 2006, p. 1; Telegraph, Sunday Metro, 17 Sept. 2006, p. 1; and Hindustan Times, 6 Sept. 2008, p. 2.

33. The organizer is Prayasam, a city NGO working for underprivileged children. Hindustan Times, Kolkata edition, 6 Oct. 2002; http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/24303374.cms (accessed 7 July 2009).

34. This prize was sponsored by the Indian UTI Bank. Times of India, 20 Oct. 2004, p. 1.

35. Telegraph, Kolkata, 28 Sept. 2006, p. 22.

36. The police forbid pandals from encroaching too far into public thoroughfares, artisans from making images higher than ten feet, and committee members from blaring loud music from microphones, forcibly collecting subscriptions, or stealing electricity.

37. Hindustan Times, 8 Oct. 2001, p. 3.

38. In an article called “The Goddess Comes to Harijans,” the first Harijan-sponsored Pūjā, from 1946, is described as continuing to flourish, without discrimination; Statesman, 14 Oct. 1983, p. 16. But other news items report social ostracism of low-caste fishermen and lepers who wish to organize their own Pūjās. They are not prevented, but no one else visits. Times of India, Kolkata, 24 Oct. 2001, p. 5; and Ānanda Bājār Patrikā, 9 Oct. 2006, p. 1.

39. For example, fearing that the attraction of the Trinamul in Midnapur would cost them elected seats, in 2000 CPI(M) cadres physically harassed Midnapuri villagers and their property. Reacting to what she termed this “red terror,” Mamatā directed her Trinamul workers to aid homeless victims of the Communist backlash by sponsoring Pūjās. In order to give the appearance that all was back to normal, CPI(M) workers apparently “forced” villages under their control to hold Pūjā celebrations. See Bartamān, 14 Sept. 2000, p. 3, and Ānanda Bājār Patrikā, 7 Oct. 2000, p. 7.

40. Arun Shourie, in his Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud (New Delhi: ASA, 1998), surveys Bengali public school textbooks expressing the Communist opinion of religion as an instrument of the ruling class to perpetuate its hegemony. For example, on p. 73 he cites Itihās o Bhūgal, pt. II (West Bengal: Bidyālay Śikṣā Adhikār, 1975), pp. 25–26, meant for class IV students, where Pūjās are criticized for their inception by kings and landlords; and on p. 157 he quotes D. N. Jha, Ancient India, An Introductory Outline (1977; New Delhi: Manohar, 1997), p. xviii, who says, “Bhakti is just the reflection of the complete dependence of the serfs or tenants on the landowners in the context of Indian feudal society.”

41. Times of India, Utsav Special, Oct. 2001, p. 38.

42. Telegraph, 24 Sept. 2006, Insight section, p. 9.

43. See Ānanda Bājār Patrikā, 3 Oct. 1995, pp. 1 and 3; Statesman, 30 Sept. 1998, p. 3; and Ānanda Bājār Patrikā, 11 Oct. 2001, p. 1, and 23 Oct. 2001, p. 2.

44. Indian Express, Newsline section, 28 Sept. 2006, p. 1.

45. For three sarcastic and plaintive laments on the departure of current Communist ideology from its origins, refer to Tārāśankar Bandyopādhyāy in an article for Ānanda Bājār Patrikā, 27 Sept. 1952, pp. 1 and 5; Rāghab Bandyopādhyāy, “Bāṅglā Mahiṣamardinī Banām Mārks-bāhinī,” in Deś 65, no. 24 (19 Sept. 1998): 59–62; and Pārtha Mukhopādhyāy in an article for Pratidin, 27 Oct. 2000, p. 3.

46. So says Anil Bhandari, managing director of Travel House. Times of India, Kolkata, 31 Aug. 2002, p. 3.

47. Arjun Appadurai, “Consumption, Duration, and History,” chap. 4 of his Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 84.

48. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 3 Oct. 1954, Sunday magazine, pp. I and IV.

49. Bengalee, 5 Oct. 1924, p. 6.

50. The following newspaper reports contain accounts and photographs of various Titanic models, at both Durgā and Kālī Pūjās, and in areas all over Bengal. “Jelā-Śaharer Pūjo,” in Sāptahik Bartamān, 26 Sept. 1998, pp. 16–19; Statesman, 30 Sept. 1998, p. 3; Ājkāl, 18 Oct. 1998, p. 5; and Ānanda Bājār Patrikā, 3 Oct. 2000, p. 12.

51. Such creative borrowing of “other people’s” cultural productions can lead to trouble. In 2007 the FD Block Pūjā Committee in Salt Lake was threatened with a lawsuit when the publisher of Harry Potter in India, Penguin India, sued it over its pandal shaped like Hogwarts Castle, complete with Harry inside, next to Durgā. The suit claimed Rs. 20 million, but was thrown out by the Delhi High Court.

52. One lighting display I saw in more than one city during the 2000 Pūjā season depicted a little girl whose father married her to a dog earlier in the year, for fear of the bad luck in her destiny. For additional examples, in 1991, the Ramakrishna Sebak Committee bound its image of Durgā in chains to symbolize the exploitation of women, and the Hari Ghosh Street Pūjā members organized an exhibition on “Take No Dowry, Give No Dowry.” See Statesman, 17 Oct. 1991, p. 11, for descriptions of both.

53. In 1994, Gaṇeśa’s rat was often absent from the divine tableau, because of the association of rats with the recent plague in Surat; Laxmi Parasuram (pers. comm., 11 Oct. 1994).

54. See India Today, 12 Oct. 1998, pp. 66–68.

55. As stated in Ānanda Bājā Patrikā, 4 Oct. 2000, p. 4.

56. As exceptions, see critiques of the Kamdahari pandal and its demonization of Clinton and Blair (Ājkāl, 18 Sept. 2000, pp. 1 and 5; and Ānanda Bājār Patrikā, 1 Oct. 2000, p. 1); a Durgā who has doves, not weapons, in her hands (Yugāntar, 3 Oct. 1995, p. 3); and a depiction of Durgā in front of a nuclear explosion. The demon she is killing is a politician (Telegraph, 15 Oct. 1999, p. 17). There are also other ways of promoting peace. The Calcutta–Dhaka bus, a sign of new friendship, has been shown through colored lights since 1999 (Bartamān, 7 Nov. 1999, p. 5).

57. For a perceptive discussion of this issue, see Sambad Pratidin, 20 Sept. 2001, p. 2.

58. From an article by Somini Sengupta for the New York Times for 22 Oct. 2007. Accessed online 8 Nov. 2007.

59. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 7 Oct. 1962, p. 7; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 1 Oct. 1984, p. 1; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 27 Sept. 1987, p. 2; and India Today International, 18 Dec. 2001, p. 24s.

60. See chapter 1, pp. 14 and 24. The holiest, most auspicious part of the festival, which occurs at the conjunction, or sandhi, of the eighth and ninth days, is supposed to confer divinity upon the sponsor; this is another reason that the elite, always searching for symbols of their sovereignty, were eager to promulgate the Pūjā. See C. J. Fuller, The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Society in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 106–127.

61. Calcutta Journal, 7 Oct. 1820, pp. 366–367.

62. Kālīprasanna Siṃha, “Durgotsab,” in his Hutom Pyāṁcār Nakśā, with commentary, 2nd ed. (1862; Calcutta: Subarṇarekhā, 1991), p. 247.

63. Dr. Jadunath Sarkar, “Durga Puja in the Villages of Old,” Statesman, 16 Sept. 1952, Puja Supplement, pp. 1 and 4.

64. See Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), pp. 161–172; Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 3–30; Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialism of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1982), pp. 9–33; Chandra Mukerji, From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 2–29; and Rosalind H. Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 19–51.

65. For an argument to this effect from Stuart England, refer to Leah S. Marcus, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvel, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

66. Williams, Dream Worlds, p. 56.

67. Campbell, Romantic Ethic, pp. 77–95 and 153–154. For an alternative explanation of the same enthusiasm for novelty, see McCracken, Culture and Consumption, pp. 40–41.

68. Chris A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), esp. pp. 57–63 and 369–393.

69. Sandria B. Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

70. Ibid., pp. 42, 35, and 135–136.

71. Lawrence Alan Babb, “Mirrored Warriors: On the Cultural Identity of Rajasthani Traders,” International Journal of Hindu Studies 3.1 (April 1999): esp. pp. 15–17.

72. Joanne Punzo Waghorne, “The Diaspora of the Gods: Hindu Temples in the New World System, 1640–1800,” Journal of Asian Studies 58.3 (Aug. 1999): 653. A fuller treatment of this topic may be found in her book, Diaspora of the Gods: Modern Hindu Temples in an Urban Middle-Class World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

73. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, edited with an introduction by Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968), pp. 219–253.

74. Of course, sudden wealth does not always precipitate conspicuous consumption, which depends in large part upon the meaning of consumer goods to the community in which one lives. For an Indian example of an upwardly mobile caste who hid rather than displayed their wealth, see Alfred Gell, “Newcomers to the World of Goods: Consumption Among the Muria Gonds,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 110–138.

75. At the end of the “Māhātmya,” the Goddess gives worldly fame and enjoyment to King Suratha and spiritual emancipation to the merchant Samādhi—as each had requested. See Thomas B. Coburn, Encountering the Goddess: A Translation of the Devī-Māhātmya and a Study of Its Interpretation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), pp. 82–84.

76. Thomas Blom Hansen, The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 54.

77. Pamela Shurmer-Smith, India: Globalization and Change (London: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 35.

78. There are many examples of this type of paṭ. For one, see Pratapaditya Pal, “Kali, Calcutta, and Kalighat Pictures,” in his Changing Visions, Lasting Images: Calcutta Through Three Hundred Years, ed. Pratapaditya Pal (Bombay: Marg, 1990), p. 121.

79. From “Basantak,” edited by Prāṇnāth Datta, reproduced in Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pl. 104.

80. Summarized by Jayanta Gosvāmī in his Samājcitre Unaviṁśa Śatābdīr Bāṅglā Prahasan (Calcutta: Sāhityaśrī, 1974), section called “Pūjā-Pārbaṇ o Anācār,” pp. 1167–1181.

81. See Christopher Pinney, “Photos of the Gods”: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India (London: Reaktion Books, 2004); Ajay Sinha, “Against Allegory: Binode Bihari Mukherjee’s Medieval Saints at Shantinitekan,” in Picturing the Nation: Iconographies of Modern India, ed. Richard H. Davis (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2007), pp. 66–91; and Joanne Punzo Waghorne, Diaspora of the Gods, esp. chapter 3, “The Gentrification of the Goddess,” pp. 129–170.

82. Susan S. Bean, “The Art of Exchange: Circulation of Visual Culture in Colonial India,” talk presented at Columbia University, 28 Oct. 2006.

83. Frank J. Korom, Village of Painters: Narrative Scrolls from West Bengal, photography by Paul J. Smutko (Santa Fe, N.M.: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2006), pp. 17, 18, 80, 83, 95, 101, and 84, respectively.

84. Hena Basu (pers. comm., 16 Aug. 1995).

85. Hansen, The Saffron Wave, p. 12.

86. Cited by Shurmer-Smith, India: Globalization and Change, p. 23.

87. I am indebted to Henrike Donner, of the London School of Economics, for this insight (pers. comm., 6 June 2001).

88. Telegraph, 16 Sept. 2006, p. 10.

89. Richard Schechner, “A Maharajah’s Festival for Body and Soul,” New York Times, 26 Nov. 2000, pp. 1 and 37. Classic treatments of this multiday outside theater may be found in Linda Hess, “An Open-air Ramayana: Ramlila, the Audience Experience,” in Bhakti in Current Research, 1979–1982, ed. Monika Thiel-Horstmann (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1983), pp. 171–194; and Anuradha Kapur, Actors, Pilgrims, Kings, and Gods: The Ramlila of Ramnagar (London: Seagull, 2006).

90. Stephen P. Huyler, Meeting God: Elements of Hindu Devotion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 200.

91. Hansen, The Saffron Wave, p. 263 n. 58. Further detail on the Maharashtrian Gaṇapati Utsav may be found in: V. Barnauw, “The Changing Character of a Hindu Festival,” American Anthropologist 56 (1954): 74–86; R. I. Cashman, The Myth of the Lokamanya: Tilak and Mass Politics in Maharashtra (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), chap. 4; Paul Courtright, Ganesha: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), chap. 8; C. Jaffrelot, “Processions hindoues, stratégies politiques and émeutes entre Hindous et Musulmans,” Purusartha 16 (1994): 261–287; and Raminder Kaur, “Performative Politics: Artworks, Festival Praxis, and Nationalism with Reference to the Ganapati Utsava in Western India” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1998). I am grateful to Chris Fuller for alerting me to many of these sources.

92. The following presentation of Fuller’s work derives from his public talk entitled, “The Vinayaka Chaturthi Festival and the Spread of Hindu Nationalism in Tamilnadu,” delivered on 10 April 2000 at Columbia University in New York, and from his published article, “The ‘Vinayaka Chaturthi’ Festival and Hindutva in Tamil Nadu,” Economic and Political Weekly 36, no. 19 (12–18 May 2001): 1607–1616.

93. Ibid., p. 1608.

94. Pers. comm., 23 May 2001.

95. Raminder Kaur argues that it was not Tilak who was the first to pioneer the public politicized festival, but rather Bhausaheb Lakshman Javale, a Maratha ayurvedic doctor and cloth-dyer, in 1892. See Raminder Kaur, “Fire in the Belly: The Mobilization of the Ganapati Festival in Maharashtra,” in The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India, ed. John Zavos, Andrew Wyatt, and Vernon Hewitt (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 44–45. See also Raminder Kaur, “Spectacles of Nationalism in the Ganapati Utsav of Maharasthra,” in Picturing the Nation: Iconographies of Modern India, ed. Richard H. Davis (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2007), pp. 207–241.

96. Gérard Heuzé, “Cultural Populism: The Appeal of the Shiv Sena,” in Bombay: Metaphor for Modern India, ed. Sujata Patel and Alice Thorner (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 241.

97. Ibid., p. 242.

98. Kaur, “Fire in the Belly,” p. 55. For a detailed overview of such politicizing, see pp. 58–66.

99. Fuller, “The ‘Vinayaka Chaturthi’ Festival and Hindutva in Tamil Nadu,” pp. 1608, 1614.

100. Kaur, “Spectacles of Nationalism in the Ganapati Utsav of Maharasthra,” p. 231.

101. Sandria Freitag comments, “Given that competition quickened most public arena activity, the identity or label attached to the ‘Other’ proved highly significant in conveying legitimacy” (Collective Action and Community, p. 284).

102. The Taj Mahal was modeled in 1994 and the Ayodhya temple in 1990.

103. Jyotindra Jain, “Introduction: Image Mobility in India’s Popular Cultures” and “India’s Republic Day Parade: Restoring Identities, Constructing the Nation,” in India’s Popular Culture: Iconic Spaces and Fluid Images, ed. Jyotindra Jain (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2007), pp. 16 and 67; see also splendid photographs on pp. 64–66, 68–69.

104. Paul Younger, Playing Host to Deity: Festival Religion in the South Indian Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

105. Peter Mason, Bacchanal! The Carnival Culture of Trinidad (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999).

106. Ibid., p. 62.

107. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 14.

108. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Baasic Books, 2001), pp. xv–xvi.

109. In 2001, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh decided to open stalls at pandals to try to put its message across. But they admitted that in spite of strenuous efforts, the organization had units in only 8,000 villages of the 38,000 in the state: they made little headway. Times of India, 13 Oct. 2001, Kolkata section, p. 3.

110. The criticism that each year Pūjā patterns become increasingly innovative and hence regrettably depart from an original reverence may be seen in newspaper editorials (Calcutta Journal, 7 Oct. 1820, pp. 366–367; and Statesman and Friend of India, 9 Oct. 1883, p. 3), as well as in satirical plays (Kali Hāṭ, by Atulkṛṣṇa Mitra [1892), as summarized in Jayanta Gosvāmī, Samājcitre Unaviṁśa Śatābdīr Bāṅglā Prahasan [Calcutta: Sāhityaśrī, 1974], section called “Pūjā-Pārbaṇ o Anācār,” pp. 1167–1181).

111. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 13 Oct. 1964, p. 6. The term “Fast Bābus” was coined by Kiśorīcānd Mitra; see Bela Dutt Gupta, “Festivals of the Hindus,” in Sociology in India (Calcutta, 1972), p. 95, cited by Rajat Sanyal, Voluntary Associations and the Urban Public Life in Bengal (1815–1876): An Aspect of Social History (Calcutta: Riddhi-India, 1980), pp. 44 and 64 n.11.

112. Nirmal Brahmachari, “Some Puja Thoughts,” Amrita Bazar Patrika, 20 Oct. 1974, Sunday magazine, p. 1.

113. The article is called “Bijaya,” and was published in Bande Mataram, 15 Ashwin, 1313 (1906), p. 4.

114. Richard A. Horsley, “Religion and Other Products of Empire,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71.1 (March 2003), p. 3, citing Kathleen Sands, “Still Dreaming: War, Memory, and Nostalgia in the American Christmas,” in Christmas Unwrapped: Consumerism, Christ, and Culture, ed. Richard Horsley and James Tracy (Harrisburg, Penn.: Trinity Press International, 2001), pp. 57–58.

6. The “Orientalist” Kālī: A Tantric Icon Comes Alive

1. I am indebted to the participants in the South Asia Seminars at Columbia University and the University of Virginia, where I gave versions of this paper in October 1999.

2. The best studies known to me on the history of Dakṣiṇākālī’s Bengali iconography are: Nṛsimhaprasād Bhāḍuri, Śyāmāmāyer Caritkathā Śyāmāmāyer Gān (Calcutta: Antaraṅga Prakāśanā, 1993); Chintaharan Chakravarti, The Tantras: Studies on Their Religion and Literature (Calcutta: Punthi Pustak, 1963), pp. 89–93; Bratīndranāth Mukhopādhāy, Śaktir Rūp Bhārate o Madhye Eśiyāy (Calcutta: Ānanda Publications, 1990), pp. 47–57; and Pratapaditya Pal, Hindu Religion and Iconology According to the Tantrasara (Los Angeles: Vichitra Press, 1981). None of these, however, compares the details of modern Pūjā images with Tantric textual prescriptions in an attempt to discern evolutionary history.

3. For a readable overview of this literary history, see David R. Kinsley, The Sword and the Flute: Kālī and Kṛṣṇa, Visions of the Terrible and the Sublime in Hindu Mythology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), pp. 81–149.

4. Note that I am concentrating on the Dakṣiṇākālī, or south-facing, form of the Goddess. There are other forms—such as Bhadrakālī, Guhyakālī, Mahākālī, Rakṣākālī, and Śmaśānakālī—who hold, stand on, and are ornamented with different things, but they are not nearly as important to current Bengali devotionalism and are rarely sculpted for Kālī Pūjā. For descriptions of these other Kālīs, see: C. Chakravarti, The Tantras, pp. 90–91; and P. Pal, Hindu Religion and Iconology, pp. 60–63.

5. Mahābhāgavata Purāṇa 23.13–28 and 77.2–25; Devībhāgavata Purāṇa 5:26–29 and 10:10–11; and Bṛhaddharma Purāṇa 23.6–17. For usable editions, consult: The Mahābhāgavata Purāṇa (Ancient Treatise on Śakti Cult), ed. and intro. Pushpendra Kumar (Delhi: Eastern Book Linkers, 1983); The Srimad Devi Bhagawatam, ed. and trans. Swami Vijnanananda, 2 parts., 2nd ed. (New Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corporation, 1977); and Bṛhaddharma Purāṇam, ed. Haraprasād Śāstrī, 2nd ed. (1897; Varanasi: Chaukhambha Amarabharati Prakashan, 1974). In notes to follow, notations for such Purāṇas refer to these editions.

6. Bratīndranāth Mukhopādhyāy also cites material evidence from as far back as the eighth century. See his Śaktir Rūp Bhārate o Madhye Eśiyāy, pp. 49–51.

7. Teun Goudriaan and Sanjukta Gupta, Hindu Tantric and Śākta Literature, vol. II, fasc. 2 of A History of Indian Literature, ed. Jan Gonda (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1981), pp. 76–78.

8. Works by these authors most relevant to Kālī sādhanā include: Sarvānandanāth’s Sarvollāsa Tantra; Brahmānanda Giri’s Śāktānandataraṅgiṇī and Tārārahasya; Pūrṇānanda Giri’s Śāktakrama, Śrītattvacintāmaṇi, and Śyāmārahasya; Kṛṣṇānanda Āgambāgīś’s Tantrasāra; Raghunāth Tarkabāgīś Bhaṭṭācārya’s Āgamatattvavilāsa; and Rāmtoṣaṇ Tarkabāgīś’s Prāṇatoṣiṇī. Some of these are available in Sanskrit, Hindi, or Bengali: Sarvvollāsatantram, ed. Kṛṣṇānanda Sagara (Varanasi: Pratyabhijñā-Prakāśanā, 1987); Śāktānandataraṅgī, translated into Hindi by Rāmkumār Rāy (Varanasi: Prācya Prakāśanā, 1993); Tārārahasya, translated into Bengali by Tārānanda Giritīrthābadhūt (Calcutta: Nababhārat, 1977); Śyāmārahasya, translated into Bengali by Śyāmānanda Tīrthanāth (Calcutta: Nababhārat, 1982); Bṛhat Tantrasāra, edited by Rasikmohan Caṭṭopādhyāy and translated into Bengali by Candrakumār Tarkālaṅkar (Calcutta: Nababhārat, 1982); Āgamatattvavilāsa, translated into Bengali by Pañcānan Śāstrī (Calcutta: Nababhārat, 1985); and Prāṇatoṣiṇī (Varanasi: Chowkhambha Vidyabhawan, 1992). In notes to follow, page references for such Tantras come from these editions.

9. Hindu Religion and Iconology, p. 65.

10. The most famous is “Karālavadanāṃ ghorāṃ muktakeśīṃ caturbhujāṃ,” from the Kālī Tantra; it is quoted by Kṛṣṇānanda Āgambāgīś in the Tantrasāra (pp. 387–388). Other Tantric dhyānas include: “Añjanādrinibhāṃ Devīṃ Karālavadanāṃ Śivāṃ,” from the Svatantra Tantra, also quoted in the Tantrasāra, p. 389; “Dhāyet Kālīṃ karālāsyāṃ daṃṣṭrābhīṃ vilocanāṃ,” from the Kulacūḍāmaṇi Tantra, quoted in Pūrṇānanda Giri’s Śyāmārahasya, pp. 250–251; “Virūpākṣakṛta-dhyāna,” from the Āgamatattvavilāsa, pp. 1020–1021; “Śavārūḍhāṃ mahābhīmāṃ,” from the Siddheśvara Tantra, quoted in Tantrasāra, p. 397; and “Sadyaśchinnaśiraḥ kṛpāṇamabhayaṃ,” from the Mantramahodadhiḥ 3.9–29 (see Mahidhara’s Mantra Mahodadhiḥ, ed. and trans. Ram Kumar Rai [Varanasi: Prachya Prakashan, 1992], pp. 133–145). The Purāṇic descriptions are: “Ityuktā sā Himasutā Śambhunā munisattama” and “Kāmākhyā Kālikā Devī svayamādyā sanātanā,” from the Mahābhāgavata 23.16–28 and 77.3–25 (pp. 111–112 and 321–322), and “Rātrāu niśithavyāptāyāmamāvāsthāmihāiva tu,” from the Bṛhaddharma 23.6–17 (pp. 251–252).

11. For further details on this point, consult Sanjukta Gupta, “Tantric Sādhanā: Pūjā,” in Sanjukta Gupta, Dirk Jan Hoens, and Teun Goudriaan, Hindu Tantrism (Leiden: Brill, 1979), pp. 121–162; and K. R. van Kooij, Worship of the Goddess According to the Kāliīkā Purāṇa (Leiden: Brill, 1972), pp. 18–19.

12. The writings of Teun Goudriaan and Sanjukta Gupta are a good example of the former view (see Hindu Tantric and Śākta Literature, pp. 82–84, 179–180, 199–201, and 208). Two authors who see antagonism where Goudriaan and Gupta find rapprochement are Dīneścandra Sen, Baṅgabhāṣā o Sāhitya, ed. Asit Kumār Bandyopādhyāy, 9th ed., 2 vols. (Calcutta: West Bengal State Book Board, 1986): 2:594–595, and Malcolm McLean, Devoted to the Goddess: The Life and Work of Ramprasad (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), pp. 43–45.

13. See T. Goudriaan, Hindu Tantric and Śākta Literature, pp. 82–85, for a list of such Tantras, with dates and contents.

14. P. Pal, Hindu Religion and Iconology, pp. 4–6.

15. S. C. Banerji, Tantra in Bengal: A Study in Its Origins, Development, and Influence, 2nd rev. ed. (New Delhi: Manohar, 1992), pp. 255–272.

16. See my Mother of My Heart, Daughter of My Dreams: Kālī and Umā in the Devotional Poetry of Bengal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 28–30.

17. See: Edward C. Dimock Jr., “The Goddess of Snakes in Medieval Bengali Literature, Part I,” in The Sound of Silent Guns and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 150–151; T. Goudriaan and S. Gupta, Hindu Tantric and Śākta Literature, pp. 185–186; and Carol Goldberg Salomon, “Govindadāsa’s ‘Kālikāmaṅgal’ (The Vikramāditya and Vidyāsundara Sections): An Edition and Translation” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1983), pp. 31–37.

18. Ibid., pp. 120–128.

19. Ibid., pp. 271–273.

20. The songs of the Bāuls, Nāths, and Sahajiyās are similar in form and imagery to the Śākta padas, but since they are not often centered on Kālī, they are not included here.

21. For a summary of his Vidyā-Sundara section, see C. Salomon, “Govindadāsa’s ‘Kālikāmaṅgal,’” pp. 142–143.

22. For a representative sample of such opinions, refer to Aruṇkumār Basu, Śaktigīti Padābalī (Calcutta: Orient Book Co., 1964), pp. 7–21 and 63–66; and Śaśibhūṣaṇ Dāśgupta, Bhārater Śakti-Sādhanā o Śākta Sāhitya (Calcutta: Sāhitya Saṁsad, 1960), pp. 206–226.

23. Prabhas Sen, in Crafts of West Bengal (Ahmadabad: Mapin Publishing, 1994), p. 164, says that Kṛṣṇacandra brought talented clay modelers to Ghurni, a suburb of his capital, and supplied them with the iconographic details of deities codified by his court scholars. Sen also credits him with instituting the idea of bisarjan, immersing the temporary images in water after their use.

24. The best source from which to get a sense for the temple-building fever among Bengali landed families during this period is A. K. Bhattacharyya, A Corpus of Dedicatory Inscriptions from Temples of West Bengal (c. 1500 A.D. to C. 1800 A.D.) (Calcutta: Shri K. K. Ray, 1982). David McCutchion cites the 1712 Dakṣiṇākālī Temple at Malanca in Medinipur as the oldest terracotta Kālī temple in Bengal; see his Late Medieval Temples of Bengal (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1972), pp. 32, 34.

25. Selected references to the voluminous literature on Kālīghāṭ include: Abadhūt, “Kālītīrtha Kālīghāṭ,” in Sādhak Jīban Samagra (Calcutta: Mitra and Ghoṣ Publishers, 1982), pp. 355–485; Subhendugopal Bagchi, “Kālīghāṭā,” in Eminent Indian Śākta Centres in Eastern India (Calcutta: Punthi Pustak, 1980), pp. 14–72; Sūryakumār Caṭṭopādhyāy, Kālīkṣetra Dīpikā (1891; Calcutta: Pustak Bipaṇi, 1986); Sanjukta Gupta, “The Domestication of a Goddess: Caraṇa-tīrtha Kālīghāṭ, the Mahāpīṭha of Kālī,” in Encountering Kālī: At the Margins, at the Center, in the West, ed. Rachel Fell McDermott and Jeffrey J. Kripal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 60–79; Upendranāth Mukhopādhyāy, Kālīghāṭ Itibṛtta (Calcutta: Jagannāth Mukhopādhyāy, 1925); Dīptimay Rāy, “Kālītīrtha Kālīghāṭ o Debī Kālikā,” in Paścimbaṅger Kālī o Kālīkṣetra (Calcutta: Maṇḍal Book House, 1984), pp. 38–54; P. C. Roy Choudhury, “The Kalighat Temple of Calcutta,” chap. 1 of Temples and Legends of Bengal (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1967); Surajit Sinha, “Kali Temple at Kalighat and the City of Calcutta,” in idem, ed., Cultural Profile of Calcutta (Calcutta: Indian Anthropological Society, 1972), pp. 61–72; and Nagendra Nath Vasu and Upendra Chandra Vasu, “Kalighat and Calcutta,” Calcutta Review 92, no. 184 (April 1891): 305–327.

26. With the exception of the Dakṣiṇeśvar Temple, most of the temples to follow are much less well documented than Kālīghāṭ. However, Kālī Pūjā time in Bengal usually elicits magazine and newspaper articles on the various famous Kālī temples in the city; from these one can gain information about all of the sites to be mentioned here. Dīptimay Rāy’s Paścimbaṅger Kālī o Kālīkṣetra also has individual chapters on many Bengali Kālī temples.

27. Aside from the voluminous publications by the Rāmakṛṣṇa Mission, see: Praṇabeś Cakrabartī, “Śrī Rāmakṛṣṇer Mahāsādhanpīṭh Dakṣiṇeśvar Mandir,” in Nabakallol, vol. 30 (Kārtik 1396): 73–78; Elizabeth U. Harding, Kali: The Black Goddess of Dakshineswar (York Beach, Maine: Nicholas-Hays, 1993); and Sumit Sarkar, “Calcutta and the ‘Bengal Renaissance,’” in Calcutta, the Living City, ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri, vol. 1: The Past (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 95–105. See also note 26 above.

28. Other iconographically similar though less famous images in the Kolkata city limits include: Kumartuli’s Ḍomkālī; Brahmamayī Mā at Pramanik Ghat and Siddheśvarīkālī at Kuthighat, both in Baranagar; and Bhavatāriṇī of Syampukur. All of these date from the nineteenth century. Three outstanding images of this fierce type, also nineteenth century but from outside Kolkata, include the Guhyakālī image in Bhadrapur, Birbhum, who sports a row of teeth and enormous eyes and who sits on a high altar among a circle of serpents; Devī Nistāriṇī at the temple in Seoraphuli, Hooghly, who has large eyes, prominent teeth, and jackals on the altar; and Devī Āgameśvarī at the temple in Shantipur, Nadia, whose bared teeth, outstretched tongue, and skeletal frame make her truly awe-inspiring.

29. Rāy, Paścimbaṅger Kālī o Kālīkṣetra, p. 72. The Uluberiya temple was constructed only in 1920.

30. Tantric sādhakas traditionally meditated on a seat placed over the skulls of five unclean beings (a jackal, a snake, a dog, a bull, and a Śūdra), as conquering their distaste for these gave them special power. See S. C. Banerji, Tantra in Bengal, p. 336.

31. Ibid., p. 188.

32. Solvyns was in Calcutta from 1791 to 1804. This painting comes from Les Hindous (1808), vol. 1, sec. 9, pl. 1, and is reproduced as fig. 13 in Robert L. Hardgrave Jr., “A Portrait of Black Town: Baltazard Solvyns in Calcutta, 1791–1804,” in Changing Visions, Lasting Images: Calcutta Through Three Hundred Years, ed. Pratapaditya Pal (Bombay: Marg Publications, 1990), p. 45. For similar figures, see: Charles Coleman, The Mythology of the Hindus (London: Parbury, Allen, 1832), fig. 1, reproduced in Hugh Urban, “India’s Darkest Heart: Kālī in the British Colonial Imagination,” in Encountering Kālī: Cultural Understanding at the Extremes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), ed. Jeffrey K. Kripal and Rachel Fell McDermott, p. 176; and fig. 17 of Pratapaditya Pal, “Indian Artists and British Patrons in Calcutta,” in Changing Visions, Lasting Images, p. 139.

33. This painting is reproduced in Pratapaditya Pal, “Kali, Calcutta, and Kalighat Pictures,” in Changing Visions, Lasting Images, p. 113.

34. Recall Valentine Chirol, who, in his collection of “subversive” writings from Indian newspapers, Indian Unrest (London: Macmillan, 1910), quotes a Bengali author from Yugāntar exhorting his countrymen to sacrifice white goats to Kālī (pp. 345–346 n. 10).

35. Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), color pl. XII.

36. This theme has been argued in numerous publications since the mid-1980s. For two seminal early contributions, see Partha Chatterjee, “The Nation and Its Women” and “Women and the Nation,” in his The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 116–157; and Lata Mani, “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,” in Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989), pp. 88–126.

37. The first sarbajanīn Kālī Pūjās were done at Kālī Bābur Maṭh, on the corner of Patuyatola and Harrison Roads, at Baubazar’s Daymanda Boarding House, and at the Vivekananda Society. See Ānanda Bājār Patrikā, 13 Nov. 1993, advertisement page; and Sunīl Dās, “Kālī Parikrama,” in Ānanda Bājār Patrikā, 23 Oct. 1995, p. 9, cols. 5–6.

38. The following account derives from an extensive review of contemporary Bengali and English newspapers, and an interview with Pradīp Pāl, the grand-nephew of G. Pāl, on 23 Oct. 1995.

39. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

40. For a photograph of the 1934 pratimā, see Amrita Bazar Patrika, 8 Nov. 1934, p. 5. The caption reads, “[O]ne of the finest specimens of anthropomorphized art that one has seen of late.” Since the microfilm copy is extremely poor, I have reproduced a similar image, from 1937.

41. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 6 Nov. 1934, p. 7.

42. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 27 Oct. 1935, p. 6.

43. “Shri Dakshina Kalika: The Divine Black Mother,” in Amrita Bazar Patrika, 3 Nov. 1936, pp. 13 and 15.

44. For examples from the late 1930s, see Amrita Bazar Patrika, 2 Nov. 1937, p. 6; 22 Oct. 1938, p. 6; and 10 Nov. 1939, p. 14. Spot-checking into the early 1960s yields the same result: it is the humanized Kālī who continues to be photographed almost exclusively.

45. Both may be seen in Statesman, 15 Nov. 1963, p. 1.

46. I am grateful to Dr. Ghosh for undertaking this survey project for me and for accomplishing it so meticulously.

47. Ānanda Bājār Patrikā, 13 Nov. 1993, advertisement page.

48. In an article called “Kālī, the Mother Terrible,” Haridas Chatterji states: “One noticeable feature of the forms and images of most of these deities is that they are both pleasing to the eye and appealing to the heart, and that in their execution the artist tries to introduce as much as possible the beauty and grace which one discerns in one’s own mother’s face” (Amrita Bazar Patrika, 18 Oct. 1952, pp. 3 and 7).

49. Satish Bahadur, “The Context of Indian Film Culture,” in Film Miscellany 1 (Dec. 1976): 96.

50. Yugāntar, 22 Oct. 1995, p. 5; and Asian Age, 23 Oct. 1995, p. 9.

51. Pārtha Pāl told me that an average modern Kālī costs about Rs. 5,000 to buy. The older variety costs more because of her more elaborate crown, clothes, and decorations.

52. Kajri Jain, “The Efficacious Image: Pictures and Power in Indian Mass Culture,” in Picturing the Nation: Iconographies of Modern India, ed. Richard H. Davis (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2007), p. 149. It should be noted that Ravi Varma himself, the father of modern calendar art, depicted a variety of Kālīs, some frightening and some sweet; see Erwin Neumayer and Christine Schelberger, Popular Indian Art: Raja Ravi Varma and the Printed Gods of India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pls. 124 and 126.

53. This pandal was erected by the Matalibagan Alley Club. Remarked the newspaper reporter covering the event, “The search for novelty may lead to the ridiculous” (Telegraph, Metro section, 12 Nov. 2004, p. 24).

54. See Statesman, 29 Oct. 1970, p. 1.

55. See chapter 7, p. 189.

56. Interview, 27 Oct. 1995. I am grateful to Hena Basu for introducing me to him and accompanying me to Professor Bhāḍuri’s house.

57. Selected stanzas from the poem “And Let Shyama Dance There,” in Swami Vivekananda’s Collected Works, 8 vols., 7th impression (Mayavati: Advaita Ashrama, 1959) 4:506–510. See also his poem “Kali the Mother,” which speaks in a similar vein; ibid. 4:384.

58. “Killing the Feringhee, we say, is no murder”—the slogan quoted by Chirol in his collection of terrorist newspaper writers (see Indian Unrest, p. 346, n. 10)—is lifted directly from Kālī’s ritual prescriptions: in the Kālīkā Purāṇa 57.10–11 (p. 53 of van Kooij’s translation), the ritual specialist assures the donor of the goat that because Kālī is thirsty for its blood the sacrificial act is not a crime. “For the sake of the sacrifice the animals have been created by Brahmā himself; I shall put thee to death now; because of this, murder is no-murder in sacrifice.”

59. The most popular story about Dakṣiṇākālī’s image relates that after slaying a host of demons, Kālī became so inebriated that she ran amok, charging over the battlefield and threatening to destroy the world with her stomping feet. In a panic the gods approached Śiva, who agreed to pacify his wife. He lay down in front of her path, and when she stepped on him she realized the impropriety of her act, stopped her mad frenzy, and stuck out her tongue in obedient, wifely shame. This story is no older than the eighteenth century, and has no Sanskrit textual origin. See Jeffrey J. Kripal, “Kālī’s Tongue and Ramakrishna: ‘Biting the Tongue’ of the Tantric Tradition,” in History of Religions 34.2 (Nov. 1994): 152–189; Rachel Fell McDermott, “Kālī’s Tongue: Historical Reinterpretations of the Blood-Lusting Goddess,” paper delivered at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference of the American Academy of Religion, Barnard College, 21 March 1991; and Usha Menon and Richard Shweder, “Kali’s Tongue: Cultural Psychology and the Power of Shame in Orissa, India,” in Emotion and Culture: Empirical Studies of Mutual Influence (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 1994), pp. 241–284.