পালিক ৫
Durga Utsab – From the East to the West েলখকঃ েযাগােযাগঃ পিরিচিতঃ
Mayukh Ghosh
[email protected] Mayukh Ghosh is from Bandel, a town located 40 km away from Kolkata. He lives with his family in the Midwestern town of Columbia, Missouri in USA. He is currently working as a Continuous Improvement specialist for Schneider Electric, and likes to play cricket, work out and blog.
Durga puja means a whole lot of different things to different people but to the Bengalis it is the single most important event of the year. The time elapsing from one year’s Puja to next year’s is what defines one year for a Bengali. This article is all about the Puja and the joys and memories associated; I will also attempt to present a picture of the difference in celebrating styles in the east and the west from my perspective. Durga Puja (ritual worship of the Goddess Durga) is the time for giving and spreading the love, and also the time when one just has a blast. Celebrating Durga Puja in a midsized town in West Bengal came with its share of joys and more joys. It is typically a time when exams of the kids are done. It is about making sure that all of the family Puja shopping is done, and that the autumn cleaning of the entire house has been completed, taking a break from the normal run of day to day life to spend time at the Pandal helping the preparation for the Puja and the Bhog (the food offering to the deity) – five‐seven days of spending more time outside the house than during the rest of the year; this also meant endless cricket episodes from dusk to dawn for me outside the Pandal (the cloth‐and‐bamboo structure surrounding the area where the rituals are undertaken). This also includes eating all of the fried food which could put the trans fat content of the popular fast food joints to shame, “pandal‐hopping”, which was the task of evaluating how big or small the Durga Thakur (deity) “Murti” (statue) was in the neighboring rival pandals and marking the ones visited off your to‐do list. It is about wrestling the large volumes of crowds that are out pandal‐hopping just as you are. The end of the Puja comes with the Bijoya dashami where Durga Maa is given “Visarjan” (the immersion of the statue). Before the Visarjan, married ladies enjoy a pseudo‐Holi (the festival of colors)‐like experience with the Sindur‐Khela which is smearing crimson powder called Sindur over each other in a fun manner. This is right after the final prayers and sweets are offered to each of the Gods and Goddesses, and yes, the “Asura” (the demon) gets his share of sweets, too. Moving West, cut that really fun time by almost 96 hours, make it all indoors – no unlimited boundless space to move around, add “pandal hopping” distances of greater than 500 mile in between pandals, make most of the Dhak (a beating drum that Palki – 5th Edition – 14th October, 2008. http://www.calcuttans.com/palki
পালিক ৫ accompanies the ritual) sounds electronic, allow for the big negatives – no time off for puja, no friendly food stalls, liability issues to worry about if any kind of game results in some form of irreversible physical transformation (read, breaking the car window glass), heavily accented mantras, no free throws of the “pushpanjali” (ritual flower offering to the Goddess), no complex material handling issues with the lifting of the statue to and from the assigned position in the Pandal, no wild Bollywood style dancing in front of the procession to the beats of the Dhak on the way to the Ganges for the immersion ceremony, no politics on who gets more “handis” (containers) of Bhog during the five days of Puja. All right, there are positives too; we do have one day where we display all of our new clothes – a fashion show off the stage, get all the Bhog and food which is close to what we get in the East, have all the Adda (chatting up) squeezed into everything that we normally would spread over five days…. The positive part is that different cities celebrate the Puja on different weekends and therefore, we were able to attend two Durga Pujas, one in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and the other in Kansas City, Missouri. The Cedar Rapids puja was held in a Masonic temple and mainly organized by the Indian student communities of Iowa State and the University of Iowa. The puja commences with the Pushpanjali in the morning, the Bhog in the afternoon, and the cultural programs in the afternoon extending into the evening, and finally ends with a round of snacks and the pseudo‐Visarjan. As the Durga Murti needs to be retained for next year, there is no immersion happening, and also it would require extensive permissions to even come close to having a parade like the ones that happen back home. The Puja in Kansas City Missouri followed a similar format. To conclude, Durga Puja has a special meaning to a Bengali and there is not quite another event in the Bengali’s life that can bring so much joy, happiness and hope. Whether it is celebrated in the Eastern hemisphere or the Western hemisphere, Durga Puja is and always will be the main attraction of the year in a Bengali’s life.
Palki – 5th Edition – 14th October, 2008. http://www.calcuttans.com/palki