My earliest memory of Durga Puja — a sarbojonin festival, that is a festival for all — is, ironically, that of exclusion. In the early 1980s, with the dawn of communist rule still less than a decade old in Bengal, several families with sympathies for the Left Front had in place a set of firm, albeit unobtrusive, red lines that children were forbidden from crossing. So while the Red Book that families like mine venerated did not prohibit indulging in festive activities like shopping for clothes or that other, enduringly magical ritual of thakur-dyakha, participation in explicit religious rites was frowned upon. Thus, I remember looking longingly at, from my solitary corner, my mouth salivating, kids my age gathering around a matronly woman to get a scoop of dodhikorma (a delicious mix of mishti doi, khoi, murki and batasha); or watching, again from a corner, my friends, in their Puja finery, bowing their heads in reverence as the priest uttered incantations during anjali. These customs were, we knew instinctively without our families having to force them upon us, out of bounds for us: apparently, they violated a Left-leaning clan’s commitment to secularism.
But the devi is not a figure cast in stone; she is made of earth and soil that shift shape, altering not just her — from, say, a maternal to a martial avatar — but also the cultural rituals associated with her veneration and our understanding of them. Thus, as my boyhood gave way to adolescence and, later, youth, as my mind took in works — literary and scholarly — on the Puja’s history, sociology and economy, as I, most crucially, had the opportunity as a journalist to travel and study contrasting community festivals around the country wherein, more often than not, religiosity eclipsed the social and the communitarian, I began to reason that the Left’s conflation of the Durga Puja with the sacred was reductive, even faulty, under the conditions peculiar to the Indian polity. It mirrored — borrowing heavily from the Frenchman’s laïcité — a tendency to rigidly ignore the interstices between the social and the religious in a bid to advocate the stern distancing of the proverbial Church and State. On the other hand, the Indian constitutional principle of secularism, an inspiring experiment, while prohibiting discrimination against any faith in a multi-religious society, very much encouraged, unlike the Frenchman’s laïcité, collective involvement — neutral on the part of the State but free and spontaneous on the part of the citizen — in religious events.
Durga Puja, a multi-textured phenomenon, ticks nearly every box when it comes to the test of Indian secularism. Yet, the Comrades, who did not mind putting up stalls outside pandals for three decades, would have none of the sociological claptrap of the Durga Puja being a vehicle of secularism.
Durga Puja’s foremost claim to the secular ethic lies in its representativeness — well almost. Muslims are not only integral to the Puja’s myriad craft traditions as artisans but in many pockets of Calcutta, members of the community participating in
the festivities is not novel or ceremonial; it is organic.
This spirit of accommodation, the leitmotif of secularism, unfolds in other, radical, ways, leading to the realignment — retreat — of the lines of orthodoxy. Women-led Puja organisations and, most impressively, women priests are no longer singular: a team of women priests under the aegis of Shubhamastu have been conducting Durga Pujas for a while now in the city. Sonagachi, among Asia’s largest red-light districts, has had its own Durga Puja for over a decade after triumphing in a protracted battle against self-declared custodians of morality that included litigation. Perhaps the only demon that the goddess is yet to slay comprehensively is that of caste. While, unlike in some hallowed temples in India, entry to pandals remains refreshingly free of ascriptive barriers, the relationship of bahujan and tribal communities with this particular festival is complex, featuring not only subaltern counternarratives and resistance — the Asur community’s ‘mourning’ during Durga Puja is an example — but also revelry. This is only to be expected of a socio-religious event that had its birth in the feudal and Brahmanical crib.
What further enhances Durga Puja’s secular moorings is its capacity to transcend the sphere of divinity by leaving a deepening imprint on realms material and artistic. In 2019, a report, Mapping the Creative Economy around Durga Puja, compiled by the British Council on behalf of the tourism department of the Bengal government, had pegged the economic value of only the creative industries associated with Bengal’s Durga Puja at Rs 32,377 crore; four years later, the value of the ‘Puja economy’, as it is now termed, reached an estimated 50,000 crore. That this festival is also a celebration of public art is undeniable. The emergence of ‘theme Pujas’, arguably a spectacular melting pot of artistic sensibilities and collective faith, may rile the puritan but Tapati Guha-Thakurta points out in her scholarly and aesthetically produced book, In the Name of the Goddess, that “… As an exhibitionary event spread across the entire metropolis, it [the Durga Puja]… lays out for mass viewing a vast display of architectural and archaeological sites, craft tableaux, tribal art villages, and new orders of public art installations.”
Two elements central to the philosophy of Indian secularism are concord and cohabitation. The Durga Puja is a conduit for both these facets, uniting the devout and the doubter as they stand — enchanted — experiencing, together, the pious and the profane, captivating art and unambiguous mercantilism, the sights — the looming goddess in her elegance and splendour — the sounds — ululation, dhaak, rustle of new clothes — the smells — incense, sweets, the sweat of bodies pressed together in a pandal — the lines, divine, temporal, spiritual, bodily, intersecting all at once in a brief, mesmerising moment.
And what of that irrational joy, the lingering sense of expectation, that floods the Bengali psyche irrespective of penury and privilege, across the borderlines of gender, class and caste, as the autumnal days creep towards Shashthi? If the pivot of secularism spins on the principle of the great equaliser, there is perhaps none greater than the goddess with ten arms.
Of course, Durga Puja’s claim to be secular, politically and performatively, is not uncontested. In her book, Guha-Thakurta presents a compelling counter-argument in the context of a country where the borders separating religion, pageantry, spectacle and mass consumption are known to coalesce in complex and fantastical forms. Guha-Thakurta thus argues in favour of locating Durga Puja in liminality. “It will be my contention that the festival has… opened up a domain of social affect and transaction where the normative, institutional categories of the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ can neither fall comfortably in place nor be set off in opposition to each other. Following Giorgio Agamben, it may be pertinent to replace these categories of the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ with those of the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’ and to think of their co-mingling and co-constitution in a process that he calls ‘profanations’, in which the consecrated object of the divine is continually returned to the ‘free use and commerce of men’. The Pujas may be positioned within that everyday liminal zone…”
This, though, is a time for the devi’s return from the liminal to a sphere that is expressly political and pluralist. In a nation where there are mischievous attempts to stop a Booker-winning, Muslim author from inaugurating the Dussehra festival in Mysuru, where there are advisories issued to check the Aadhaar details of enthusiasts before allowing them to participate in garba events during Navratri so as to sieve out Muslims, where self-proclaimed sanatani Hindus object to Bengalis partaking of meat during Durga Puja, or, in another revealing incident, scoff at a pandal playing Sanskrit hymns and the azaan to mark syncretism, the goddess and her admirers — the devout and the disbelievers — cannot afford to occupy in-between, abstract spaces.
She must reclaim the terrestrial — socio-political — plane by piercing the heart of the demon of division.
uddalak.mukherjee@abp.in