The last month or so here in West Bengal has been one long holiday, occasioned by a series of three "pujas" or religious festivals each dedicated to the worship of a goddess. First comes the martial but fundamentally benevolent Durga, invoked by Rama in his battle against the demon king of Sri Lanka, Ravana - the climax of the Ramayana epic, and the main focus of the Dussehra festival held on the same days throughout the rest of India. Then comes Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, who is celebrated slightly earlier here than elsewhere. Finally the fierce and terrible Kali arrives to demand her sacrifices, the black goddess appearing ironically on the very day of Divali, the festival of light. (Divali is celebrated simultaneously with Kali Puja by Bengalis in the manner traditional across India, by the lighting of "rows of lamps" - the Sanskrit meaning of the word di[pa]vali. This is supposed to be in imitation of the citizens of Rama's city Ayodhya, who did the same to welcome their king back after his victory against Ravana.) Bengalis decide to link the three up as a single puja season, giving one the chance to get properly into the festival spirit - although also ensuring that little or no official work gets done for four weeks. In England we have bank holidays; in India they have holi-months.
Durga Puja in Calcutta focuses on what is colloquially known as "pandal-hopping": visiting pandals, temporary pavilions built to house an image of Durga. During the puja period one finds them virtually at every street corner, most no more than a sort of tinselled tent - although the statue inside is always magnificently adorned - but some enormous, and/or enormously expensive. Visiting College Street a few weeks before the puja, I caught sight of this structure in scaffolding (the figures at the top give you an idea of the scale!):
Returning in the late afternoon of Saptami (the seventh day of the festival, but the beginning of the actual festivities), it had been transformed into a life-size replica of the Hava Mahal, or Palace of the Winds, the famous free-standing facade in the "pink city" of Jaipur, Rajasthan:
Without a contact in Calcutta at the time to guide me round, I couldn't quite get into the spirit of pandal-hopping on my own. Festival time here is very family- and community-oriented, and one wants to feel included, rather than hovering about in the background taking photos all the time. So I left the city and returned to Santiniketan, thinking to accept the kind offer my friend Partha Gupta had made to me that I visit his village, Daronda, 8km away, for the last couple of days of the festival. Here the urbane touring of pavilions gave way to a more dramatic spectacle: the mass slaughter of goats. First the dhak drummers summon the villagers to the temple. The dhak is a heavy drum, worn slung over the shoulder so that the attached plumes curl up over the drummer's head, and played with two sticks from underneath. The sound is loud without being deafening, and according to Partha can travel long distances.
In the centre of the cleared space in front of every temple, a small area is earthed up and a heavy six-foot fork driven hard into the ground, leaving only its two prongs visible.
A decorative pattern made of red earth and white rice flour links it symbolically to the temple entrance, which stands open so that Durga can witness the sacrifice. The fork's distinctive shape both reminds one of other symbols in Indian mythology (such as Shiva's trident), and also serves a practical purpose. Its narrow neck, bolted across with a bamboo stick, prevents the victim from wriggling its head out of the block.
On hand to sprinkle the victim's neck with water is a Brahmin priest:
Returning in the late afternoon of Saptami (the seventh day of the festival, but the beginning of the actual festivities), it had been transformed into a life-size replica of the Hava Mahal, or Palace of the Winds, the famous free-standing facade in the "pink city" of Jaipur, Rajasthan:
Without a contact in Calcutta at the time to guide me round, I couldn't quite get into the spirit of pandal-hopping on my own. Festival time here is very family- and community-oriented, and one wants to feel included, rather than hovering about in the background taking photos all the time. So I left the city and returned to Santiniketan, thinking to accept the kind offer my friend Partha Gupta had made to me that I visit his village, Daronda, 8km away, for the last couple of days of the festival. Here the urbane touring of pavilions gave way to a more dramatic spectacle: the mass slaughter of goats. First the dhak drummers summon the villagers to the temple. The dhak is a heavy drum, worn slung over the shoulder so that the attached plumes curl up over the drummer's head, and played with two sticks from underneath. The sound is loud without being deafening, and according to Partha can travel long distances.
In the centre of the cleared space in front of every temple, a small area is earthed up and a heavy six-foot fork driven hard into the ground, leaving only its two prongs visible.
A decorative pattern made of red earth and white rice flour links it symbolically to the temple entrance, which stands open so that Durga can witness the sacrifice. The fork's distinctive shape both reminds one of other symbols in Indian mythology (such as Shiva's trident), and also serves a practical purpose. Its narrow neck, bolted across with a bamboo stick, prevents the victim from wriggling its head out of the block.
On hand to sprinkle the victim's neck with water is a Brahmin priest:
The goat's neck is then severed with a single blow from a heavy sacrificial sword. It is of course considered inauspicious if the executioner fails to achieve this cleanly - something that happened once out of 15 times during the main village sacrifice. Having never witnessed the killing of a large animal before I was a bit alarmed that, even with a true blow, the goat does not appear to die immediately. Both head and body writhe bleeding on the ground for a period of up to half a minute. I was advised against photographing any of this, and I'm not sure I wanted to anyway. Once it is over, the bodies are placed at the temple door:
More goats get the chop when Kali Puja comes round a month later. (By the end of all this I'm surprised there are any of the poor animals left in Bengal.) Since on this occasion the slaughter took place after midnight I had an easy excuse to miss it out. Kali is in fact particularly associated with goat sacrifice on account of the famous Kalighat temple to her in Calcutta, where the goddess's bloodlust is satisfied on a daily basis. Her image there is black, as her name suggests (black is kalo in Bengali); but the version more often found is blue, like a number of other Hindu deities.
In all versions she has her tongue poking out. I've read that this is a reaction of surprise (although when do you ever express surprise by sticking your tongue out?! Usually we do it to surprise someone else!). The occasion for this is depicted in the image above. Under Kali's feet is her consort Shiva, who has unexpectedly thrown himself under her feet to halt her spree of destruction.
Despite the pretty dark connotations of the deity being worshipped - incidentally, Kali was also the main goddess of the murderous dacoits, described in another post on this site - Kali Puja seemed mainly to be an excuse for a full-blown, let-your-hair-down party. Or maybe it was just where I was - the area just south of Sriniketan, Santiniketan's partner village, at the house of my Sri Lankan dancer friend's guru, Bosanta. In consequence there was a good deal of dancing, both before and during the procession of the deity around the village, which lasted around three hours.
Under the influence of a quantity of surreptitiously consumed rum, it can't be said that the family exhibited their dance training to best effect... Other intoxicants were on hand: I assisted with the preparation of a very thick, sweet beverage called siddhi. The ingredients include bananas, milk, sweets, jaggery (palm sugar), and the ground siddhi leaves, which I was assured were not the same as bhang, even though they looked pretty similar.
There was also country liquor, a curious local rice-wine, greyish white and quite pleasantly sour. Asking the name I was told they called it bachui here - not a word I was able to find in the dictionary or online, but to judge from the preparation method it may have been similar to hadia. To sustain all the dancing, plenty of food was provided too - enough for about five hundred people, served in the courtyard on banana leaves in a series of consecutive sittings:
Everyone is included in the festival spirit - even the cows are painted with pink polka-dots!
While waiting for things to get under way, the charmingly irrepressible Titi, Bosanta's niece, conducted me on a little tour of the area's notable buildings, including a terracotta temple, similar in design to the famous ones of Bishnupur. We also walked around the "boro bari", literally "big house": the mansion of the erstwhile local zamindar, perhaps 200 years old. Predating the invention of the "Indo-Saracenic" style, it seems to have no native architectural elements at all - apart from maybe the colour scheme:
Yet this building, its central, partially enclosed courtyard strangely ecclesiastical in design, has been taken over by the locals for their own ceremonies. Behind an iron grille framed by a decidedly Gothic arch, rather like a side-chapel entrance in a Catholic cathedral, the image of Durga is installed during her puja, and in front of it lights were burning that evening for Divali.
That this did not look at all out of place prompted me to think how universal a religious symbol the lighting of candles is. Only Islam makes little use of it, as far as I know. The candle-flame seems like an emblem of human consciousness - finite, vulnerable, insubstantial, but steadily shedding illumination, rescuing a certain area of space from the larger, encompassing dark. To worship that darkness itself still seems to me counter-intuitive, not to say perverse, and for that reason I still cannot sympathize with the devotion to Kali and Durga that is so central to the religious calendar here in Bengal. The Tantric tradition in which it is rooted is undeniably fascinating - originally not traditional or Vedic Hindu, but Mahayana Buddhist in its emphasis on the female, and doubtless very rich in psychological insights. And the festival atmosphere sweeps one with it anyway, without too many scruples about the meaning of what is being celebrated! But I would be curious to have a Bengali explain their relationship to or conception of Kali, and what it is they find inspiring about such an image. I could have asked then, of course, but found neither the timing nor the phrasing of the question easy to judge. To interrogate any religious tradition like that is fraught with the danger of immediate offence; even though such questions may be necessary if outsiders - or even insiders - are to understand the meaning of religious practices and symbols.
More goats get the chop when Kali Puja comes round a month later. (By the end of all this I'm surprised there are any of the poor animals left in Bengal.) Since on this occasion the slaughter took place after midnight I had an easy excuse to miss it out. Kali is in fact particularly associated with goat sacrifice on account of the famous Kalighat temple to her in Calcutta, where the goddess's bloodlust is satisfied on a daily basis. Her image there is black, as her name suggests (black is kalo in Bengali); but the version more often found is blue, like a number of other Hindu deities.
In all versions she has her tongue poking out. I've read that this is a reaction of surprise (although when do you ever express surprise by sticking your tongue out?! Usually we do it to surprise someone else!). The occasion for this is depicted in the image above. Under Kali's feet is her consort Shiva, who has unexpectedly thrown himself under her feet to halt her spree of destruction.
Despite the pretty dark connotations of the deity being worshipped - incidentally, Kali was also the main goddess of the murderous dacoits, described in another post on this site - Kali Puja seemed mainly to be an excuse for a full-blown, let-your-hair-down party. Or maybe it was just where I was - the area just south of Sriniketan, Santiniketan's partner village, at the house of my Sri Lankan dancer friend's guru, Bosanta. In consequence there was a good deal of dancing, both before and during the procession of the deity around the village, which lasted around three hours.
Under the influence of a quantity of surreptitiously consumed rum, it can't be said that the family exhibited their dance training to best effect... Other intoxicants were on hand: I assisted with the preparation of a very thick, sweet beverage called siddhi. The ingredients include bananas, milk, sweets, jaggery (palm sugar), and the ground siddhi leaves, which I was assured were not the same as bhang, even though they looked pretty similar.
There was also country liquor, a curious local rice-wine, greyish white and quite pleasantly sour. Asking the name I was told they called it bachui here - not a word I was able to find in the dictionary or online, but to judge from the preparation method it may have been similar to hadia. To sustain all the dancing, plenty of food was provided too - enough for about five hundred people, served in the courtyard on banana leaves in a series of consecutive sittings:
Everyone is included in the festival spirit - even the cows are painted with pink polka-dots!
While waiting for things to get under way, the charmingly irrepressible Titi, Bosanta's niece, conducted me on a little tour of the area's notable buildings, including a terracotta temple, similar in design to the famous ones of Bishnupur. We also walked around the "boro bari", literally "big house": the mansion of the erstwhile local zamindar, perhaps 200 years old. Predating the invention of the "Indo-Saracenic" style, it seems to have no native architectural elements at all - apart from maybe the colour scheme:
Yet this building, its central, partially enclosed courtyard strangely ecclesiastical in design, has been taken over by the locals for their own ceremonies. Behind an iron grille framed by a decidedly Gothic arch, rather like a side-chapel entrance in a Catholic cathedral, the image of Durga is installed during her puja, and in front of it lights were burning that evening for Divali.
That this did not look at all out of place prompted me to think how universal a religious symbol the lighting of candles is. Only Islam makes little use of it, as far as I know. The candle-flame seems like an emblem of human consciousness - finite, vulnerable, insubstantial, but steadily shedding illumination, rescuing a certain area of space from the larger, encompassing dark. To worship that darkness itself still seems to me counter-intuitive, not to say perverse, and for that reason I still cannot sympathize with the devotion to Kali and Durga that is so central to the religious calendar here in Bengal. The Tantric tradition in which it is rooted is undeniably fascinating - originally not traditional or Vedic Hindu, but Mahayana Buddhist in its emphasis on the female, and doubtless very rich in psychological insights. And the festival atmosphere sweeps one with it anyway, without too many scruples about the meaning of what is being celebrated! But I would be curious to have a Bengali explain their relationship to or conception of Kali, and what it is they find inspiring about such an image. I could have asked then, of course, but found neither the timing nor the phrasing of the question easy to judge. To interrogate any religious tradition like that is fraught with the danger of immediate offence; even though such questions may be necessary if outsiders - or even insiders - are to understand the meaning of religious practices and symbols.
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