Durga Puja Research Articles

"Ramayan Gaan" or Singing the Ramayan in West Bengal, Assam, and Bangladesh

The Indian epic, the Ramayan, has been kept alive in the popular imagination in India, through various textual, oral, visual, and performance forms. While Ramlila is the most popular live performance form to enact the Ramayan in the Hindi-speaking regions of North India, Ramayan Gaan is the form that prevails in the Bengali-speaking regions of West Bengal and Assam in India, and in Bangladesh where the event is also called "Kushan Gaan" or "Kush's Song." While Ramlila is based chiefly on Tulsidas's Rāmcaritmānas, Ramayan Gaan is indebted to Krittibas Ojha's slightly earlier Ramayan. This essay discusses salient features of Ramayan Gaan with occasional reference to Ramlila, illustrating some of their shared narrative and ideological elements as well as some of their critical disjunctures. It underscores the fact that in Bangladesh, a Muslim-majority country, Ramayan Gaan is enthusiastically performed and appreciated by Hindus and Muslims alike. This essay also charts the transitional zone, ontologically and geographically, where Ramlila meets Durga Puja in the eastern regions. Significantly, in Ramayan Gaan, Ram invokes Mahashakti (Durga) before his battle with the ten-headed Ravan, and Sita, in the form of Bhadra Kali, defeats the thousandheaded Ravan. Together, these narrative elements help explain the conjunction of Ramayan Gaan and Durga Puja in the Bengali-speaking regions.

M. K. Gandhi, N. K. Bose, and Bengali Village Society

N. K. Bose, a close disciple of Gandhi, was the author’s Indian mentor in anthropology and with respect to Gandhi’s social thought as well. Gandhi visualised a village society integrated by mutual interdependence but freed from the inequality of caste. The author’s fieldwork in West Bengal villages found two opposed ritual postures that were struck during the two most important community rituals of the year, that is, Gajan in the spring and Durga Puja in the autumn. During Gajan, the ordinary people became temporary ascetics ( sannyasi) and gave up distinctions of caste and rank among themselves, like the disciples of Gandhi, who were expected to free themselves of such differences. During Durga Puja, the traditional caste occupations of the dependents of the former zamindars were mobilised to play differentiated roles in the ritual even when those occupations no longer provided their livelihoods; the jajmani system still prevailed during the puja. Gandhi’s social theory aspired to elements of both ritual postures: the radical equality and ‘communitas’ of the Gajan ascetics, and the mutual contributions to the community of occupationally specialised castes, which, however, have not escaped inequality.

The Social Drama of Durga Puja: Performing Bengali Identity in the Diaspora

Abstract The Durga Puja festival—arguably, the most important ritual celebration among Bengali Hindus—is much more than simply a religious event. This essay demonstrates how the festival becomes a site for diaspora Bengalis to perform Bangaliyana, or a ritualized Bengali identity, away from the homeland. Attending to Durga Puja as organized by the Bengali Association of Southern California, and using anthropologist Victor Turner's concepts of liminality and social drama as a launching pad, the essay describes how the diasporic Bengali subject traverses two poles of identity. A social drama like Durga Puja, the essay argues, allows the subject to reintegrate into a social structure after the crisis that is initiated by diasporic movement away from the homeland.

When Durga Strikes. The Affective Space of Kolkata’s Holy Festival

This paper provides a description of the Durga Puja religious festival that is held each autumn in Kolkata. During the ten days of the celebration, the Indian city is enriched by a multitude of temporary temples, where local communities come together for both religious and social gatherings. The colourful marquees host rituals and music, flooding urban space with a festive atmosphere that has become a hallmark of Kolkata, attracting large crowds of visitors and tourists who are interested in the folk festival and in its religious connotation. The description focuses on the emotional response to the transformed space, analyzing how the rituals performed in the temporary temples, and the urban and architectural features of the festival’s instalment affect the visitors’ corporeal feelings.

Of Festivals, Rights and Public Life: Sex Workers’ Activism in India as Affirmative Sabotage

In 2012, Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), India’s largest sex workers’ collective, organised a major Hindu religious festival of Bengal called the Durga Puja. It was a part of their rights activism for the de-criminalisation of sex work. In this article, I provide an account of this event as an act of re-ordering public life by sex workers and contend that the worldview which informs DMSC’s practice of the festival has points of convergence with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s articulation of the idea of affirmative sabotage. I argue that we are able to see this convergence between DMSC’s celebration of the festival and post-colonial feminist thought by attending to the particular location and the relations that DMSC’s practice of the Durga Puja inhabits. I situate this account of sex workers’ rights activism alongside a rival narrative of the festival put forth by Dalit and adivasi groups. I include this rival account to perform the limitation of my own reading of the political potential of DMSC’s practice of the festival. This rival assertion demands a recognition of the situatedness and limitedness of feminist practices.

Durga Puja Pandals of Kolkata 2016: The Heritage and the Design

Durga Puja Pandals of Kolkata 2016: The Heritage and the Design

Goddess in the City: Durga pujas of contemporary Kolkata

Durga puja, or the worship of goddess Durga, is the single most important festival in Bengal's rich and diverse religious calendar. It is not just that her temples are strewn all over this part of the world. In fact, goddess Kali, with whom she shares a complementary history, is easily more popular in this regard. But as a one-off festivity, Durga puja outstrips anything that happens in Bengali life in terms of pomp, glamour, and popularity. And with huge diasporic populations spread across the world, she is now also a squarely international phenomenon, with her puja being celebrated wherever there are even a score or so of Hindu Bengali families in one place. This is one Bengali festival that has people participating across religions and languages. In that sense, Durga puja has an unmistakable cosmopolitan hue about it. With more than 10 million people visiting the differentpandals(the temporary, covered pavilions or marquees created for the goddess) in Kolkata alone on any one of the four days of festivity (now effectively extended to a whole week), Durga puja could well be the biggest carnival on earth. Kolkata's image has become synonymous with this grand autumnal festival of the goddess.

Riding the Rhino: Conservation, Conflicts, and Militarisation of Kaziranga National Park in Assam

AbstractSince 2004, media and public opinion in Assam (India) have focused on increasing instances of poaching of rhinoceros for their horns and presence of Bengali‐speaking Muslim peasants, especially in and around the iconic Kaziranga National Park. From hastily made digital films, to anti‐poaching motifs at Durga Puja pandals, the plight of the rhinoceros has occupied an important position in an acrimonious political discourse on Assamese culture. The innocence and dignity attributed to the animal stands in marked contrast to the lack of discussion on the large numbers of young men who have been killed in anti‐poaching campaigns by the state. This article looks at the interstices of class, culture and commerce in an attempt to understand the popular deification of the rhinoceros and implications of the developmental discourse that seeks to put people and rhino in their “rightful” place.

From the President

It's Autumn, there is charm in the air. Festive days are not far behind. People are gearing up for the occasion. Durga Puja, Muharams, Kalipuja (the Festival of light). Brothers' Day, Jagatdhatri Puja, X-mas, New year's Day, Netaji's birthday, Republic Day, Saraswati (The Goddess of Learning) Puja etc. -- all these festivals are celebrated in October through January next year when the weather is mostly pleasant. I wish you the best for each and every celebration.

Managing diabetes during Navratris with special focus on Durga pujas

AbstractFasting during festivals is a common practice across all religions, believed to be associated with spiritual well-being. No literature is available addressing the challenges associated with blood glucose control in patients with diabetes during the festivals of Navratri and Durga puja, which are associated with both culinary extravagances and ritualistic fasting. Fasting alternating with binge eating can result in severe metabolic alterations, increasing both morbidity and mortality in diabetes. Dietary restraint is central to ensuring adequate glycemic control during Navratris and Durga pujas. Ritualistic fasting and dietary changes should be avoided in patients with poorly controlled diabetes with multiple comorbidities. Sulfonylureas should be avoided in case of prolonged fasting. Fast should be broken whenever blood glucose is < 70mg/dl. Target blood glucose during fasting state is 100-200mg/dl. Increasing awareness among patients, highlighting the need to enjoy festivals responsibly, and promoting healthy diet habits and exercise have an important role in maintaining glycemic control during Navratri and Durga pujas.

Calcutta and the Modern Woman: Reading the Films <em>Mahanagar</em> and <em>Kahaani</em>

In the history of Indian cinema, Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar (1963) and Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani (2012) are among the all too few films with strong, resilient, and resourceful women as their protagonists. Ray’s Arati Mazumdar and Ghosh’s Vidya Bagchi are the heroines with the men cast in supporting roles. Each woman finds her own way in the same city: Calcutta/Kolkata (the latter being the Bengali name in use since 2001). That Calcutta/Kolkata itself plays a central role in these woman-centric films is especially apt given that female emancipation became a contested issue there between British colonizers and Indian nationalists. As the capital of West Bengal, Kolkata today is a stronghold for chief minister Mamata Banerjee, the woman who defeated the Communist Party of India after thirty-seven years in power. Moreover, Durga Puja, a celebration of the Mother Goddess Durga, has been the city’s most important religious festival for the last two hundred years. Analyzing women’s negotiations of tradition and modernity, these two films imagine and intervene into the spaces and communities of post-independence Calcutta and neoliberal Kolkata.

Lessons in risk management, resource allocation, operations planning, and stakeholder engagement: the case of the Kolkata Police Force and Durga Puja

This study explores how the key challenges associated with mega-events revolve around the management of risk, resources, operations planning and stakeholder engagement. Examined throughout this paper are the challenges and achievements of The Kolkata Police Force (KPF) in their role of ensuring safety for the public during the Durga Puja mega-festival. The paper evaluates the various strategies adopted by the KPF to overcome the multifarious challenges of organizing the mega-event. Also offered in this paper is a detailed discussion and suggestions for strategic improvements to multiple-stakeholder collaboration in managing mega-events that are at the scale and scope of the Durga Puja in Kolkata.

Goddess encounters: Mughals, Monsters and the Goddess in Bengal

AbstractThis paper makes a case for exploring the cultural facets of Mughal rule as well as for a stronger engagement with sources in vernacular languages for the writing of Mughal history. Bengal's regional tradition of goddess worship is used to explore the cultural dimensions of Mughal rule in that region as well as the idioms in which Bengali regional perceptions of Mughal rule were articulated. Mangalkavya narratives—a quintessentially Bengali literary genre—are studied to highlight shifting perceptions of the Mughals from the late sixteenth century to the eighteenth century. During the period of the Mughal conquest of Bengal, the imperial military machine was represented as a monster whom the goddess Chandi, symbolizing Bengal's regional culture, had to vanquish. By the eighteenth century, when their rule had become much more regularized, the Mughals were depicted as recognizing aspects of Bengal's regional culture by capitulating in the end to the goddess and becoming her devotees. This paper also studies the relationship of the Mughal regime with Bengal's popular cultural celebration—the annual Durga puja—and explores its implications for the public performance of religion and for community formation during the early modern period.

The Emerging Consumer Culture in Bangladesh: Everyday Life and Festivals in Rural Areas

Problem statement: Bangladesh, often better known to the outside world as a country of natural calamities, is a poor and low-income country. Bangladesh’s main challenge is to reduce poverty through increasing equitable income. Although Bangladesh has faced many problems since its independence in 1971, its gross domestic product has been growing steadily and the country has achieved much success in social indicators. This article explores the culture of consumption in rural Bangladesh and answers the following question: How is Bangladeshi culture associated with consumption. Approach: This study employed a triangulation of methods: namely semi-structured indepth qualitative interviews, ethnography and unstructured conversations substantiated by secondary sources and photographs. Results: This study highlighted consumption and other related issues of marriage and dowry, household decision making, division of labor, as well as different festivals such as Eid (for Muslims), the Bengali New Year and Durga puja (for Hindus). Early marriage and dowry are still practiced in rural areas. Women in rural Bangladesh perform most of the household work but men, as in any other patriarchal society, make the major decisions. Conclusion: The government and NGOs should engage in various activities to boost awareness among the rural people.

Tracking the Goddess: Religion, Community, and Identity in the Durga Puja Ceremonies of Nineteenth-Century Calcutta

Focusing on colonial Calcutta in the later decades of the nineteenth century, this essay explores the evolution of a particular festival, the Durga Puja, to explore the ways in which religion negotiated its place in the ideological determinants of modernity. The essay surveys the evolution of the goddess Durga from premodern times and shows why and how the perception of both the deity (in gender terms) and the festival (in historical terms) had to be recalibrated following the imperatives of new classes and new discursive parameters. While the essay interrogates the development of new particular categories introduced by modernity, such as urban spatiality and the rhetoric of individual rights in colonial Calcutta, it also aligns these developments to answer the general paradigmatic question of the actual relationship between religion/faith and the modern moment.

Spaces of Recognition: Puja and Power in Contemporary Calcutta

As the most popular religious festival, Durga puja has become iconic of modern Bengali Hindu identity in West Bengal, India. Its transformation from a rural family ritual to an urban secular one over the last 200 years highlights the constraints on the emergence of a public sphere in post-colonial India.

From Court Ritual to Popular Ritual : Ethnohistorical Analysis on the Spread of Durga Puja in Bengal

From Court Ritual to Popular Ritual : Ethnohistorical Analysis on the Spread of Durga Puja in Bengal

Social Dramas and Stories about Them

Analyse de la structure sociale des Ndembu du nord-ouest de la Zambie et de la facon dont cette structure abstraite determine le type de relations concretes que nouent les individus et les conflits qui les opposent. La structure sociale Ndembu se caracterise par une opposition constante entre ligne paternelle et ligne maternelle, une residence virilocale inversee par les divorces frequents qui ramenent chez leurs peres les epouses et leurs enfants.