Puja puja!

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:

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.

Sicily in the spring

I've just returned from a week-long holiday in Sicily – four days in Syracuse (Siracusa) and three in Palermo – and thought I would record some impressions.

Studying the Blue Guide to Sicily on the plane already gave me an impression of the island as offering almost a crash course in architectural history. (The book itself, like a lot of older guidebooks, is rich in detail and judgement about art and architecture, but deals with restaurants and transport in a few throwaway sentences; very different from the Lonely Planets and Rough Guides our generation has got used to!) Sicily has examples of every style from Doric temples to Baroque, and even some good modern design (the Venetian Carlo Scarpa, an unfairly talented designer who could sketch with both hands simultaneously, left his distinguished mark on the Palazzo Abbatis in Palermo). What I wasn’t quite prepared for was the impact of these styles being layered on top of or mixed up with each other. The duomo in Syracuse is a strange architectural palimpsest: to see the columns of a Greek temple emerging from the wall of a Romanesque church is a truly uncanny experience, not at all a successfully “unified” one of course, but a sort of perceptual flicker between feeling oneself loosely surrounded by spaced rows of ancient columns and tightly bound in by thick Norman walls. The façade is Baroque, recently restored to gleaming splendour at the centre of the main piazza. Some examples of this eclecticism, on the other hand, verge on the nauseating: La Martorana in Palermo had many of its Byzantine mosaics obliterated and replaced by Baroque fresco, styles that really have nothing in common with one another, and in juxtaposition produce a sort of fairground gaudiness.

Another effect of the passage of history could be felt in the texture of the stone used for many of the buildings and sculptures – the light, friable, originally volcanic tufa. It erodes easily and becomes “sunburnt”, so that the Baroque town of Noto, which is almost all built from it, is now after a few centuries almost the colour of apricots:

Meanwhile the ornamentation on the facades – once perhaps as crisp and dazzling as some of the churches in Rome – has become soft and fuzzy, as if it had lain underwater or become overgrown with some organic substance. (This impression of calcification, of living growth and movement arrested yet preserved, is striking travelling through the landscape of central Sicily. Lampedusa in his great Sicilian novel The Leopard described it as "comfortless and irrational, with no lines that the mind could grasp, conceived apparently in a delirious moment of creation; a sea suddenly petrified at the instant when a change of wind had flung the waves into a frenzy.") One bust in tufa of an old man that I saw in the archaeological museum in Syracuse had been dredged up from the bay, which can only have accentuated its boniness, the sunken cheeks and ridged brow. Of the more ancient of these sculptures scarcely anything of the form remains – the friezes from “Temple E” at Selinunte, now in the archaeological museum in Palermo, are decayed beyond recognition. The effect is haunting in conjunction with the knowledge that Selinunte itself (which I did not visit) was once one of the largest cities in the ancient world, a Greek colony with its own “acropolis” of five temples and a population of 100,000; it was (e)rased in three catastrophes, sackings by the Carthaginians and Romans and then an earthquake in the medieval period as coup de grace. The lust for utter destruction, apparently without reasoned or ideological motives, must be one of the most regrettable and incomprehensible things about the ancient world. One would love to know more about the lost cities of Tyre and Carthage (brutally sacked by Alexander and the Romans respectively), and the seafaring Phoenician civilisation that produced them, whose language was so similar to Hebrew that they were mutually intelligible and which left us the word “Bible” (the Greek root biblos is from the name of the Phoenician city Byblos, famous for its papyri).

Papyri were one of the many things on this trip that reminded me of the East, in this case of Egypt. Near the Fonte Aretusa (the subject of Greek myth and a Latin ode by Horace), with its clump of papyrus plants:

we also found what looked uncannily like a banyan tree, with its aerial roots that drop down and fix themselves in the soil to form (given time) new “trunks”. (Calcutta’s botanical gardens have one of the largest examples in the world: it gives the impression of entering a small forest, and indeed the tree is so old and the secondary trunks so numerous that the original central stem has died away.) In fact it was not a banyan, but an originally Australian member of the same genus (Ficus microcarpa): in the Piazza Garibaldi in Palermo were two century-old exemplars. Their twisted branches look disturbingly animal, like muscles or tentacles:

Then there are the fruits: the loquats (Italian nespole), indigenous to China and already ripe in April in Sicily, with an acidic but sweet flavour, not at all bitter; the oranges, which were still bitter and unripe, at least when plucked from the tree; and the chinotto, also thought to be originally Chinese (hence the name), and available everywhere as a type of Fanta, which looks like Coca-Cola but is much more herby and interesting. Almonds are common, processed into milk as well as a very tasty granita, which may well have had a dash of almond liqueur when I tried it (although the owner of the gelateria wasn’t letting on).

The most intriguing example of eastern influence is by a long way the art of medieval Sicily. Here stylistic mixing is unquestionably successful on every level: the styles reflect the cultural, ethnic and religious diversity of the Norman kingdom that produced the great cathedral at Monreale near Palermo, as well as the many smaller churches and palazzi in Palermo itself. Many of these have a serene and dignified simplicity one would perhaps not associate with an eclectic approach:

Monreale is however a good deal less restrained. Inside a Romanesque structure, the iconic art of Byzantine mosaic, dazzling and affectingly naïve at the same time, crowns a dado striped with the elegant, aniconic, geometrical patterns of Arabic art. These are echoed in the columns of the cloister and burst out in the splendid exterior of the apse:

More subtle but also more daring was the geometrical sensibility I believed I could feel in a Sicilian painting of the later medieval era, the anonymous Triumph of Death in the Palazzo Abbatis. Across the swathe of collapsing figures down the right side of the picture the trapezoidal motif of the fountain at the top seems to be echoed in tiny details of drawing, from foreheads to eyelids to lips, all with delicately raised corners. And yet this fascination with abstract “lines of beauty” was present side-by-side with naturalistic, fully modelled and directly expressive figures of an almost Renaissance type. The composition as a whole does not “work” but this does not matter in the least: it is there, like a tapestry, entirely for the sake of the details.

Such a richness of styles and aesthetics made me curious about the culture which produced this artistic flourishing. So on my return I did a little reading, and discovered a historical personality of a cosmopolitan and enlightened cast of mind such as one simply doesn’t expect to meet with in the medieval era (if one isn’t a medievalist, I suppose). The Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, stupor mundi (the astonishment of the world) and ruling much of it himself from Palermo, was half-German and half-Sicilian, combining a rough and energetic temperament with indefatigable curiosity about the arts and sciences. His education, which was eclectic and largely self-conducted due to political circumstances and the early death of his mother, took place in and was formed by Palermo in the late twelfth century, of which his early twentieth-century German biographer Ernst Kantorowicz gives a wonderfully poetic sketch:

“unsupervised, the eight-, nine-year-old boy roamed through the alleys, markets and gardens of the half-African capital at the foot of Mt Pellegrino, where a bewildering variety of peoples, religions and customs interpenetrated: mosques with their minarets and synagogues with their domes stood there next to Norman churches and cathedrals, that in turn were decorated with golden mosaics by Byzantine masters, and whose structure incorporated Greek columns in which Saracens had engraved the name of Allah in Kufic letters. Round about the city in the exotic gardens and vivaria of the Conca d’oro lay the summer palaces and fountains of the Norman kings that once so enraptured the Arabic poets, and in the markets the people in all their colourful variety went about their business: Normans, Italians, Saracens, Germans, Jews and Greeks. The youth depended on intercourse with all of these and soon learnt their customs and languages. Perhaps there for some time a wise imam might have taken over the direction of the youth’s education…we do not know.” (Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite, Munich 1961 [1927], pp. 30-1)

One should interpolate here that Kantorowicz, a member of the poetical circle of Stefan George, was much criticised by other historians for this sort of speculative description, however successful it was in conjuring up the “tone” of the period. What seems to be more generally accepted is that Frederick’s open-minded attitude and cultural and linguistic adaptability (he spoke half a dozen languages) had a great deal to do with his environment as an adolescent, for no other European monarch or kingdom of this era came close to it. The court he eventually established in Palermo included figures from many countries and areas of scholarship: Michael the Scot, an astronomer learned in Hebrew and Arabic, who was assisted by the Provencal Jew Jacob ben Anatoli in translating Aristotle; the mathematician Leonardo of Pisa, better known as Fibonacci, who introduced the modern system of Arabic numerals to Europe from Algeria; or the Italo-Byzantine poet John Grasso, who produced violent tragedies on classical Greek models. Frederick himself corresponded with Arabs and Jewish scholars in Spain, wrote a Latin treatise on falconry with some unusually accurate illustrations, and sponsored and allegedly contributed to the first school of Italian poetry, the “Sicilian school”, which fixed Italian as a literary language for the first time and coincidentally gave birth to the most prestigious European lyric form, the sonnet. (Given Dante’s acknowledged debt to Sicilian sources in his efforts to establish the dignity of the Italian vernacular, it seems rather ungrateful of him to cast Frederick into the sixth circle of his Inferno as an “Epicurean heretic”.)

Still more surprising was Frederick’s attitude to religion. He seems to have been more or less atheist according to many sources (one of which, quoted by Thomas Curtis van Cleve, lists his many talents and virtues, and concludes that he would have been a great Christian emperor – if he had only been Christian!), merely jovially sceptical according to others, and at all events tolerant and respectful of Judaic and Islamic tradition (the robe he wore at his coronation was embroidered in Kufic script). This emerged most strongly when he was called upon to do the duty of a medieval emperor and lead a crusade. The venture scarcely got off the ground before Frederick was excommunicated by the pope (twice!), thus nullifying the sacred purpose of the entire expedition. When he arrived at Jerusalem, accompanied by his Arab tutor and a small army containing Saracens alongside Christians, he spent five months in friendly negotiations and feasting with the Egyptian sultan in control of the city, Al-Kamil, reportedly enjoying hearing the call of the muezzin in the morning, and finally signed a truce by which he crowned himself “King of Jerusalem”. He then left and the city returned to Muslim control a few years afterwards. It was apparently the only “successful” crusade since the first – and considerably less bloody than any.

This cosmopolitanism went hand-in-hand with a rational and highly inquisitive attitude to knowledge: van Cleve notes that “it was [his] quality of cosmopolitanism, together with his intellectual honesty – his insistent search for truth as opposed to tradition – that was so clearly expressed in Frederick’s alleged remark: ‘One should accept as truth only that which is proved by the force of reason and by nature.’” (p. 305) Although many texts by Aristotle were translated (with their Arabic commentaries) at his court, he did not treat them as the quasi-infallible word of “The Philosopher” that they became for later Christian thinkers, but felt quite free to disagree with the Greek sage when he felt his own observations were superior, especially on his favourite topic of falconry.

One wonders why this episode in history has not received more attention, given the current debate about Islamic-Christian relations. (I could find hardly any literature devoted to it on the shelves of the major London bookshops, and David Abulafia’s soberly critical effort at debunking the Frederick “myth” is the only biography available via Amazon.) It seems to provide another strong example of how close contact between cultures and religions, even on an unequal and authoritarian basis (which Frederick’s rule was, after all), is not only socially viable but can foster many virtues: tolerance, intellectual curiosity and independence, and artistic inventiveness. Other examples would be the court of the sixteenth-century Mughal emperor Akbar in India, or late-twentieth-century New York: Norman Sicily would I think bear comparison with these.

I suppose I shouldn’t end an entry on Sicily without some mention of the Mafia, but to be honest, it didn’t really inform my experience of the trip to any great degree (in contrast to my brother, who’s at the age where it exercises enormous fascination, and imagined mafiosi around every corner). There were a few reminders of its continuing grip in Palermo: fly-posted stickers urging resistance to the pizzo (the “tax” or protection money shopkeepers pay), and a large iron monument near the harbour dedicated to “those fallen in the struggle against the Mafia” ( – one wondered how much bravery even the erection of the monument itself must have demanded). All that really came across was a certain aspect of the Sicilian temperament that I imagined as belonging to that way of life – an occasional tight-lipped, unforthcoming, almost owlish air to people (maybe here I’m merely recollecting the title of Leonardo Sciascia’s, the Sicilian crime novelist’s, most famous book, The Day of the Owl – but another story of his, Equal Danger, had some of this quality in its oblique style). On the other side, an almost childishly direct and naïve quality was equally evident, in the faces and animated conversations of pensioners on the bus to Monreale, in some of the art, or the ceramics with their bright colours and smiling suns – as if Sicily was after all a beamingly happy country, unafflicted by poverty, corruption and social ills. Perhaps that very contrast of temperaments is what is characteristically Sicilian. I would have to spend longer there to find out.