Legend has it that originally — the point of origin is lost in time — the worship of the goddess Durga took place just before the onset of spring. But Rama — call him mythical, call him historical, call him human, call him god — took the radical step of worshipping Durga to seek her blessings before his great battle with Ravana even though it was the month was Ashwin, before the beginning of autumn. Rama thus started a tradition which thrives today as the biggest festival of Bengalis all over the world.

In historical time, it is known that Nabakrishna Deb, the banian (or agent) of Robert Clive started his family Durga Puja in 1757, the year of the battle of Plassey. He wanted to celebrate the victory of the British. There were other families in and around what would become the city of Calcutta — the Srabarna Chaudhuris, for example — who had been worshipping Durga earlier than 1757. (The Srabarna Chaudhuris owned the three villages of Sutanuti, Govindapur and Kolikata which formed the nucleus of the first British capital in India.)

What can be said without any undue speculation and without recourse to footnotes to authenticate the statement is that the rich Bengali families of Calcutta and Bengal — the wealth had come either from rent or from trade or both — performed Durga Puja in their homes. In fact, Durga Puja was the most important status symbol in Bengali society. It announced the arrival of a family in Calcutta high society.

The five days of the festival were marked by piety and conspicuous consumption. The show of wealth could often be vulgar and there was competitive charity in terms of the number of poor that were fed each day. Some of the family Pujas passed in to the lore of Calcutta. It was said, for example, that when Durga arrived in Calcutta she went to the house of Shivakrishna Dawn in Jorasanko to be decked out in jewels; she went to Abhayacharan Mitra’s house in Kumartuli to be fed; and stayed up all night in the house of the Sovabazar Debs to watch the dancing.

What is remarkable is that many of these families, despite fall in wealth and divisions within the family, continue the tradition of Durga Puja. The ostentation is gone but the Puja carries on and some of the forms of ritual and worship are still preserved. The best example of this is the worship in the Sovabazar Deb family — the family of Nabakrishna referred to earlier. But there are other families in north Calcutta and other parts of the city who continue with their Pujas. It is the time when all the members of the family come together, when disputes over property and legal cases are forgotten. The goddess is obviously a unifier albeit a temporary one.

In the districts of rural Bengal, in the past the Durga Puja took place in the zamindar’s house. This is where the village congregated to worship collectively. What is significant — and this was especially true in east Bengal, what is now Bangladesh — Muslims were not excluded from the festivities. Throughout the 19th century, there is no record of the Muslims staying away or of any communal tension. This is not to suggest Bengal was some kind of idyll of Hindu-Muslim amity but to emphasise the sense of collectivity and a sense of community that was not based on religion.

Simultaneously, with more and more families performing Durga Puja, there was another development whose social significance is perhaps much more interesting and enduring. This was a movement away from families to a wider community. This in the 19th century was barawari puja. The term is still in use. Literally it means 12 families or friends coming together to perform the puja. In other words, the money for the worship did not come from one person or family. Kaliprassana Sinha, who in his Hootum Pyanchar Naksha (the title is untranslatable; the conventional “Sketches by Hootum” misses the earthiness of the original) satirised many aspects of 19th century Bengali society, wrote about the barawari puja. And this was as early as the 1860s. The practice probably originated in the districts. There are references to very popular barawari pujas in Santipur in Nadia and Guptipara in Hooghly. But this form of worship where members of an area pooled their resources for the festival also caught on in the city.

In Calcutta the barawari puja acquired a new character. It became worship based on public subscription. Each householder of a locality was requested to make a contribution; the richest was obviously expected to be the chief patron and make the biggest contribution. By the middle of the 20th century, this had become the dominant form of worship in the city. Durga Puja had moved from the family to the locality. Every locality had its own Puja — the women of the locality looked after the ritual aspects of the worship and the entire community gathered in the pandal (the marquee) that served as the makeshift temple for five days. By the 1970s some of these community Pujas were poised to go through a dramatic transformation.

One of the earliest to experience this transformation was a Puja on Ekdalia Road in Ballygunge in South Calcutta. There was a Puja there that was about 30 years old when it began to receive the patronage of the Congress leader Subrata Mukherjee who had come to live near Ekdalia Road. His patronage changed the scale of the Puja. The pandal became larger, the lighting grand; the crowds huge.

Similar changes were noticeable in other barawari pujas. From the endowment or support of a powerful patron it was a short step away to receive the support of a company. Soon the bigger Pujas came to be sponsored. Areas which had Puja pandals drawing big crowds saw hoardings and signages. Celebrities came to such pandals to inaugurate the Puja. Rumour has it that they take huge fees. Durga Puja is a now a theatre of big money.

These changes engendered other changes some of which were very innovative. The first item where change was noticeable was lighting. It became thematic. Lights strung across the street depicted a recent incident. A firm of electricians from Chandannagore pioneered this form of street lighting during the Pujas. And this form has come to stay. There have been occasions when people have thronged to a particular Puja pandal just to see the lighting. The deity had been replaced by lights. The pandals themselves underwent a change. Those Puja committees with really big budgets now construct pandals in the model of well known buildings— temples, libraries, famous residences and so on. In the year the film Titanic hit the box office, one Puja pandal was constructed in the model of the ship. The pandal didn’t sink however.

But the most remarkable innovation has been witnessed in the construction of the deity from material other than clay. Various things have been tried from gramophone records to the small clay bowls from which tea is drunk. The spirit of innovation has now become part of the Pujas with one locality trying to outdo the other in terms of the surprise element.

Durga Puja has always been a religious and a social occasion. It is the time of the year when families come together, when new clothes are given as gifts and the new clothes are worn over the five days. From the contemporary scene in Calcutta and even perhaps elsewhere it will be no exaggeration to suggest that the social aspects of the occasion have overtaken the religious.

Among the orthodox and the pious there is the feeling that in many of the barawari pujas the strict protocols of ritual and worship are not followed. But this is a minority opinion. For the populace at large, this is the season of enjoyment. Calcutta, already over-populated, gets choked with people as the suburbia and even nearby villages pour into the city to see the lights, the pandals and the images. The crowds last till 4/5 in the morning. The police force is overworked but does a marvellous, if thankless task, of crowd control and traffic management. For four days the city comes to a standstill and life there doesn’t quite get going till Lakshmi Puja, which comes four or five days after dashami — or what north Indians call dushera.