A brightly lit Kali Puja marquee was made to look like an identity card for the goddess – complete with a heavenly address
This photo of a pandal or marquee was taken on my phone from the car window as we passed through Dover Terrace in south Kolkata, India. Dover Terrace is a middle- and upper-middle-class area, but just over here there’s a slum. So the Kali Puja festivities, which this marquee was at the centre of, were primarily participated in by working-class people who anyway treat parts of the road as their drawing room, so that cars need to negotiate this brief, congested stretch regardless of whether it’s hosting festivities.
The main festival in West Bengal is not Kali Puja but Durga Puja, which takes place in late September or early October. It celebrates the mother goddess Durga’s advent with her children into the world for a week, after which she returns to Kailash (the peak in the Himalayas where she lives with her husband, Shiva). She’s visiting her father’s house, and then, like all married women, must return to the house she shares with her husband. The festival’s other mythic narrative has to do with Durga vanquishing a demon, Mahishasura, who threatens to destroy the world; Durga, 10-armed, and bearing weapons, rides a lion and tramples the demon underfoot. The festival is a mix of triumphal adoration (Durga’s victorious slaying of the demon) and, increasingly, as it draws to a close, a sense of valediction (the daughter must, again, leave the house she grew up in).
Amit Chaudhuri is the author of eight novels, including Sojourn; his nonfiction works include Finding the Raga
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