I think it’s time we stopped worshipping Durga in autumn and went back to glorifying her in spring. The name of the Sharodiyaa Devi Paksha, “Awkaal Bodhan”, is a literal and unambiguous reference to an “un-timely awakening”.

According to the Markanda Purana, Raja Surath with his Vaishya friend, performed the first ever-recorded puja of Durga, in spring, after the former had lost everything he owned and believed only a worship of the Ati Prakruitika Shakti, Durga, would reverse his misfortune. It did.

Much later, deep in the archives of our incredible phantasmagoria of myths and history, Lord Rama from Ayodhya was scared of facing Ravana, who was from what is now Uttar Pradesh and who had gone and usurped the throne of Sri Lanka from his wonderful half brother Kubera. Ravana’s battle for Lanka is beautifully carved into the walls of the great temple of Angkor Wat, in Cambodia. A must see.

As our prehistory unfolded, it was in autumn that Lord Ram arrived on the shores of the Emerald Isle to rescue his wife from the clutches of the Rakshasa king and decided to worship Durga to obtain the powers he would need to defeat Ravana. It is said he worshipped her with blue lotuses. He found 107 blossoms but failed to find the last and 108th, and so courageously picked up an arrow to pierce and pluck out his eye and sacrifice it at the feet of the Adhyashakti Goddess. Durga intervened, granted Rama his prayer and the rest is epic: history.

Thereafter, in deference to the blue-eyed boy, Durga Puja was moved to the autumn, when lotuses are also a little easier to find, than they are in spring. Interestingly, to the best of my ignorance, we have just one temple dedicated to Lord Rama in Burra Bazaar in Calcutta and hardly any of historical significance anywhere else in Bengal. Though we happily slotted Durga soon after Nishkarma Day in September that heralds our season of merrymaking when we invite the industrial world to dump their damn engines and come fly kites with us.

Exactly 99 years before Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, “Jezebel of India”, the “most dangerous of all Indian leaders”, died a warrior, killed by British forces, Lord Clive, who made a killing from the nobility in Bengal, hit the headlines with his victory over Nawab Siraj ud Daulah. India changed, forever.

When, after Pôlaashi, our zamindars of Calcutta began cosying up to the British, inviting them to lavish banquets in their rajbaris during the Durga Festival, and the barowari concept of community worship was conveniently established, little did we realise how the cunning Mir Jafar, the “Nang-e-Deen, Nang-e-Watan”, had introduced a cult of deceit and corruption and bania-like trading and underhand deals, with Britain’s clerks and shopkeepers, that would stay and become the dominant consciousness and signature tune of Bengal for centuries. The only thing of inter- national consequence that Bengal manufactured and exported thereafter, to ensure the legacy of betrayal never dies, and Bengal’s acts assume a warped historical symbolism, was the coronation of Iskander Mirza, Mir Jafar’s great-grandson, as the first president of Pakistan.

Hingsrok Mangshashi Boishnob. Violent Carnivorous Vaishnav. Would any of you agree that those three words sort of, more or less, in a way, sum us up today? Personally, I’ll stick my neck out and say that they do.

Ours is the only state in India, the land of Chaitanya Dev, where the blood of innocents was spilled during the last general elections because we have for four decades lived under the gover-nance of bloodthirsty conspirators who perpetrated a cultural and social downgrade that is no longer a blemish but a permanent stain. I vividly remember Charu Mazumdar, like some deranged psychopath, frothing at the mouth and grunting obscenities about the bourgeoisie while watching a scene in one of Utpal Dutt’s plays at the Academy of Fine Arts. He still has clones in our midst.

Carnivores we are, and very content ones at that. Bengali Brahmins are a far cry from Tam Brams, or others, in our obsession with the flesh of every edible creature that’s walked the planet, except for the Big Moo amongst Hindus and the snouted quadruped that represents and remains the only thing that Muslims and Jews agree on.

In this short essay that follows, I plan to redefine today’s senseless civilisation and concede its savaging by our home grown style of intolerance to any form of discipline or governance and our paranoiac obsession to destroy and kill anyone or anything that stands in the way of the most absurd human and social or, worse still, political
demands we whimsically conjure up. Gone are Chaityanyadev’s Vaishnavism, Ram Krishna’s Vedanta or even the sane rationalism of Karl Marx.

You might say we’ve borrowed our chapters on violence from Mahisha-sura Mardini and Maha Kali, but a
little research will reveal that the origin of both these fearless species is from outside our realm and hence our
rambunctious rôshogollah-wolfing Durga bahinis are incapable of solo acts of courage (some noble exceptions excepted) and have simply revolutionised mob violence and fine-tuned it over three decades, coming on four, into a bloody fine art.

Durga Shakti or Shaili Putri, daughter of the mountains, could hardly have emanated from the Gangetic
estuaries of Bengal. And Kaushika, when the dusky epidermal sheath of Durga was torn off and which metamorphosed into the most powerful manifestation of Shakti in our Puranas, Kali, has no justification to be so embedded in our psyches as to turn us into thugs and murderers. The Kalika Purana that dates back to almost the Vedic Era, is where the word Kali and Kalika first appear in our scriptures to describe an incredible feminine power in creation that demands worship as a Goddess.

The pre-historic nomadic Abhira shepherds of the Himalayas worship-ped a War Goddess and slowly, down the ages, transformed her from the ‘destroyer of Time’, Kali, into the primordial Adya Shakti, redeemer from “Samsara” and the cycles of rebirth and, thus, assiduously merged the beliefs with Brahmanic mythology and philosophy.

Let me now take you back to the legend of Rama. A few years ago, the Sinhalese in their defence against the
oppression of Tamils who are looked upon as slaves imported from India, claimed they were of Indian origin
too. And to the astonishment of the anthropological world claimed direct lineage from Bengal and Odisha
in eastern India. The Tatas having fled Singur, that sociological and geographical nonentity of a place till we shed blood there, has now been reclaimed by some adventurous Sinhalese, I’m not joking, as where
they once came and derived their name from. A little idle research and Googling will reveal claims and counterclaims that have been reluctantly accepted by academics as a genetic possibility that cannot be ignored or categorically denied.

In other words, Ravana was one of us. Lord Rama didn’t kill a foe; he slew an ancestor. One who was the greatest known scholar of the six Shastras and four Vedas, hence the 10 heads of supreme knowledge, a devout Shaivite and the most amazing veena player, a celestial instrument that Saraswati plays and that, by comparison, makes the sitar sound like an ektara tied to a tin can.

Autumn isn’t a season of mellow fruitfulness in Bengal.  The leechoos are the first to go and by October mangoes disappear from the shelves and the fruit they bear are citrus and acidic and mimic the sourness that has become the trend in our speech and behaviour. Then, hilariously, in a state that has virtually destroyed entrepreneurship and manufacturing enterprise by putting down tools and stopping work and demanding ridiculous terms of employment, we start our season of fun and frolic by worshipping Vishwakarma and the rusted machinery in ruined factories that we have forced to shut down.

So, since we Bengalis are accustomed to making a song and dance and an infuriating and irrational racket about anything and everything under the sun that may or may not concern us, I’d like to recommend that we take up arms against seas of opposition that will appear to oppose our celebrating Durga Puja in Chaitra, as it was always done till an enemy of our ancestor in his wily machinations to defeat Ravana, performed an unseasonal, “Awkaal Bodhan”, worship of Ma Durga and left us with nothing except eating Padma’s ilish and paantaa bhaat in Dhaka, on Poilah Boishakh.

Once we move to the glory of spring instead of the dullness and melancholy of autumn, I firmly believe our spirits will be aroused and Bengal will become a land of ankurs, blossoms and fruit like it hasn’t seen since Clive joined hands with Mir Jaffar.

Let us expel the violence associated with Durga and Kali and embrace Maha Gauri, the Beautiful Goddess Durga as she was worshipped 2,000 years ago, in Megalithic times, in Curdi, in Goa, as Lajja Gauri, the greatest Goddess in our pantheon, creator of the universe with her consort Shiva, in her most peaceful form, “Shaanta Durga”.

With my devoted pronaams to my Gurujon, I wish everyone a Shubho Bijoya and Happy Holidays. Contemplate Basanti Pujo after your glass of shiddhi. Smile.

Victor Banerjee is an author, the brand ambassador of the Shankaradeva Movement of Assam, and an actor