Mughals to Mamata and now BJP: Politics at the heart of Durga Puja

Every year, despite the ravages of time, autumn stirs up a strange mix of nostalgia and mirth in 83-year-old Ghanshyam Biswas. A resident of South Kolkata’s famed Kalighat, Biswas likes to soak in the warmth of memories — of pleasant mornings and lazy afternoons, starlit nights and the fragrance of shiuli blossoms (the flowering night jasmine) strewn over the ground.

All this, he says, heralds one thing — Durga Puja. But time, he says, has not been very kind to both Kalighat and Durga Puja celebrations. “Now, puja also means bitter political fights,” he adds.

Months before Bengalis could bask in the quintessential “pujo-pujo” sense of bliss this year, the ruling Trinamool Congress and its main challenger, the BJP, got into a bitter fight over control of puja committees in West Bengal.

The fiercest of the battles was fought in Biswas’s Kalighat, not far from the residence of TMC supremo and chief minister Mamata Banerjee, in July. For the uninitiated, Kalighat is the seat of city’s presiding deity ‘Kali’. The shrine of the goddess here is considered one of the 51 Shakti Peethas spread across the Indian sub-continent. This makes it the most prized possession for the Hindu nationalist BJP.

It so happened that the Sanghasree Durga Puja Committee in Kalighat’s Gurupada Haldar Street roped in senior BJP leader Sayantan Basu as its president, who, in turn, had announced to get Union Home Minister Amit Shah to inaugurate the puja this year. For the BJP, it was nothing short of a political coup as the president of the committee last year was none other than Kartik Banerjee, the chief minister’s brother.

Also read: Kolkata may go saffron this Durga puja, Trinamool could lose ground

In the battle of pride, the TMC, however, ultimately regained its lost ground, literally elbowing out the BJP from the committee, instating local resident Shiv Shankar Chatterjee as the new president.

This was just one of the instances. The tug of war between the two parties for control of Durga puja committees has been a recurring topic of this year’s festival in West Bengal. The current tussle could be traced back to the Lok Sabha elections earlier this year. At public rallies across the state, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other BJP leaders kept on harping how the TMC undermined the festival during its rule.

This allegation of the BJP, however, did not hold much water as the state’s current ruling dispensation is a veteran in the game. It was Durga Puja that the TMC used for its public outreach to defeat non-believers, the Communist.

Maa and Mamata

Soon after breaking away from the Congress in 1997, Mamata Banerjee realised that she would need a band of dedicated workers to take on the pugnacious CPI(M) cadres. “That is when her party leaders started patronising pujas organised by local committees and clubs to get a toehold in neighbourhoods (or paras in Bengali). Puja committees were the only organisations where the Communists had not penetrated as direct association with such religious event was anathema to them,” recalls Subroto Chakraborty, a retired government employee who, at one point in time, was also a cardholding member of the CPM.

The TMC’s association with puja committees further increased after it came to power in 2011. But, even by its own standards, the patronage was taken altogether to a whole new level last year by the state government’s cash dole amounting to crores of rupees for puja organisers. The grant was increased to ₹25,000 (for each committee) this year from ₹10,000 given last time. No wonder, the chief minister remains a hot draw for the puja organisers.

According to various media reports, Banerjee this year got over 12,000 invitations from across the state to inaugurate puja pandals as against around 75 for BJP leaders. Last year, she had over 10,000 invites, prompting her to start inaugurating pandals for public viewing on the day of Mahalaya, a week before the formal commencement of puja, drawing flak from the BJP and other Hindutva outfits.

But attempts to ride piggyback on Durga to make inroads into the Bengali hearts have a long history.

History of appropriation

The first written record of Durga Puja celebrations in autumn — months of September-October-November as per the Gregorian calendar— in Bengal goes back to the time of Jahangir’s reign.

This was a time when the Mughal emperor was empowering Hindu zamindars as a counterbalance against the bickering nawabs of Bengal Subah.

One of Jahangir’s allies, Raja Kansa Narayan of Taherpur (in modern-day Rajshahi in Bangladesh), in 1610 organised the first autumnal Durga Puja or Saradiya Durga Utsov in Bengal in a grand fashion. Soon, other zamindars close to the empire, such as Bhabananda Majumdar of Nadia, too jumped on the bandwagon.

The shifting of puja celebrations from spring to autumn itself, many historians claim, was perhaps done to win over the masses.

Although according to the Markandeya Purana, Durga Puja (also called Basanti puja) was celebrated in spring and not autumn, the latter being a harvest season was more favourable for festivities. Moreover, spring was also the season of deadly pox in Bengal. For instance, in 1770, a great epidemic of smallpox raged in Murshidabad, killing 63,000 of its inhabitants.

It could be sheer pragmatism that prompted Raja Kansa Narayan to celebrate Durga puja in autumn, instead of spring. Interestingly, the religious sanction to his autumnial celebration was derived from the Bengali translation of Ramayana by Krittibas Ojha, who himself had deviated from the original text of Valmiki to invent unseasonal Durga Puja or Akaal Bodhan (unseasonal worship).

The 15th century Bengali poet in his translation of the epic, claimed that Rama, before going into the war with Ravana had worshipped goddess Durga in the month of Ashwin — an uncustomary time for worshipping the goddess. In Valmiki’s Ramayana, however, it was the Sun god and not Durga, whom Rama invoked before the battle.

“Fortunately, there were no purists like the present-day Hindutva brigade to hold Ojha accountable for such ‘sacrilege’,” says Chakraborty.

Such improvisation of religious practices, however, was quite common as Hinduism was still evolving with the composition of Mangal-Kavya — the Bengali Hindu religious texts that contained narratives of indigenous deities of rural Bengal in the context of the then social milieu.

More twists to the tale

The twists and tweaks to Durga Puja celebrations did not end there and neither were the ruling classes’ attempts to use the festival for gaining mass support.

“It is not usually remembered that after his victory at the Battle of Plassey (1757), Lord Robert Clive did not offer thanksgiving at a church but at a Duga puja organised by Nabakrishna Deb in Kolkata,” writes Sanjeev Sanyal in his book, ‘Land of the seven rivers: A brief history of India’s geography.’

Many historians argue that Clive chose puja organised by his agent Nabakrishna Deb for thanksgivings to send across a message to the natives that the East India Company was not averse to their religion.

The overriding narrative of Durga pujas organised by the zamindars was pro-British, with some idols of the deity even reportedly modelled after the queen.

Durga metamorphosed into her swadeshi (native) avatar only after the emergence of community pujas, organised with public donation. The first such festivity was held in Hoogly’s Guptipara in 1790 with 12 friends, who were denied participation in one such puja (organised at a private residence) of the neo-rich. From then on, such commune pujas are referred till date as ‘barowari‘ (baro is Bengali for 12 and yaari is camaraderie) puja.

Taking a cue from Bal Gangadhar Tilak, freedom fighters, both from the Congress and other revolutionary streams, actively took part in the festival to further their political cause. The veteran leader had by then popularised large-scale community Ganpati pujas in Maharashtra to establish a sense of common national identity, bridging caste divides.

In tune with the political affiliation of the new class of puja organisers, the buffalo-headed demon Mahishasura, whom Durga is believed to have slayed in a battle, was often depicted as a British officer — dressed in hat-tie and suit-boot.

Meanwhile, to make Durga more appealing to the common people, the Bengali ingenuity by then had already invented an alter ego of the deity — a loving and caring ‘mother’, more than a fierce warrior.

“This concept of Durga or Uma coming to her birthplace for a five-day annual visit is purely a construct of Bengali folklore. This image of Durga as a compassionate mother was popularised by 18th century mystic Ramprasad Sen through his bhakti poems,” says professor Dr Anasua Roy Chowdhury, who teaches Bengali in Kolkata’s Rammohan College.

Also read: What stands between Mamata’s dole politics and BJP’s Hindutva in Bengal

The image makeover helped many nationalists during the freedom struggle to conjure an image of Durga and motherland as one and the same. This overlap was clearly evident in Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s ode to the motherland — Vande Mataram. In the second last stanza of the song, he equated the motherland with Durga — Tbaṃ hi Durgā daśapraharanadhārinī.

Needless to say, both Congress leaders and revolutionaries viewed Durga Puja more as a social event, considering that the festival was never steeped in religiosity and was flexible to adaption. Durga could morph with élan from Queen Victoria to ‘Mother India’.

Post-independence celebrations

Even in post-independent Bengal, the annual festival remained the most preferred platform for politicians to propagate their ideologies. However, there had been no such turf war among political parties to dominate puja committees until last year when the BJP started making inroads into Bengal.

But all along, puja remains as much a socio-political event as a religious ceremony. Hence, from Balakot airstrike to NRC, every relevant political issue gets encapsulated as “pujo theme”.

Even the Communists in Bengal, who otherwise abhorred religion and rituals, scurry to get vintage spots outside popular puja venues in the state to put up stalls and sell their Marxist literature. Ironically, these stalls almost always witness good footfall as ‘Maa‘ and ‘Marx‘ happily coexist in the state.

It is this fusion that makes Durga so dynamic and universal in Bengal. This is what the BJP might find contradictory to its rigid and regimental concept of religion, as it tries hard to appropriate the festival to conquer the state.