My interest in the annual public festivals for the three Hindu goddesses Durgā, Jagaddhātrī, and Kālī began in 1988, when I arrived in October for the commencement of two years of dissertation work on something else. I had come to study the devotional poetry tradition to Kālī and Durgā in her form as Umā, and the festivals, or Pūjās, were a fascinating sideshow, effectively and forcibly stopping all work possibilities for nearly three weeks each autumn. I remember the stern and utterly astonishing advice of my new mentor, Professor Narendra Nath Bhattacharyya, who told me when I first met him in mid-October to get out of Calcutta—no, Bengal—as soon as possible, as the Pūjās were a form of gaudy, pseudo-religious commercialism that had nothing to do with the heartfelt devotion to the Mother that I had come to study. I did not get out, and the experiences I had of Durgā and Kālī Pūjās that year were formative. One, as recounted in chapter 8 below, turned me off the Goddess’s temple ritual for nearly eight years; as a whole, however, I realized that I wanted to know more about the ebullient, mesmerizing, carnivalesque festivals that engulfed the entire state. I saw three Pūjā seasons (1988, 1989, 1991) before work on the project began in earnest, in 1995. Thereafter, thanks to the happy chance that the festivals’ lunar calendrical schedule coincided with Columbia University’s Election Day holiday, as well as to the kindness of various colleagues who taught for me for a week before or after the holiday, I was able to escape to Calcutta for ten days in the fall semesters of 1995, 1996, 1998, 1999, and 2001, thus enabling me to drop in on at least one Pūjā in each of those years. In 2000, by grace of a grant from the American Institute of Indian Studies, I spent an entire semester in Calcutta, and much of the present book stands on interviews and material gathered during that four-month period.
In 2002, with the plan of a book in mind, I realized that I needed to think of the Pūjās in a transnational context, and that no study of Bengali public festivals in our current world could be undertaken without an appreciation of the diasporic forms. So I spent the Pūjā seasons of 2002–2008 in the New York / New Jersey area, attending the celebrations of local Bengali groups and watching how they developed over time. During the years that I was unable to attend the Pūjās in Bengal, I was remarkably fortunate to benefit from the research assistance of Hena Basu and Jayanta Roy, who sent me, respectively, packages of newspaper clippings and professional photographic coverage of the Kolkata Pūjās.
Every year something new happens in the Pūjās—some new form of creativity, some unexpected controversy, some innovative mode of festival aggrandizement. One is tempted to keep gathering information forever. However, I take a lesson from the Goddess, who allows her images to be immersed at the conclusion of each Pūjā, her beauty and form consigned to a disintegrating, watery fate. All good things come to an end. I am blessed to have lived with this project for so long.1