Durga PujaFive thousand hands, one homecoming: the origins, rituals, and living heritage of Bengal's greatest festival

I

Who started it, and when

There is no single birth certificate for Durga Puja. Mythologically it is ancient, but the earliest recorded celebrations trace to Bengal at the turn of the seventeenth century, beginning as a private affair of landlords and royal households, long before it became public.

In short: private zamindari worship gave way to aristocratic Bonedi Bari pujas, which gave way to the twelve-friends' community puja, which gave way to the Sarbojanin public puja of today. Along the way, during India's independence movement, the Goddess also became a symbol of Bengal's and India's resistance spirit.

II

Bengal's own festival

Durga Puja is often called "the Bengali Christmas": Bengal's biggest festival and the clearest marker of its cultural identity, distinct from how Navratri or Dussehra unfolds anywhere else in India.

That image mirrors a real Bengali custom, married daughters visiting their maternal homes, and it is why the festival feels less like formal worship and more like a family reunion. It grew, uniquely in Bengal, from private zamindari ritual into the world's largest public art festival: religion, sculpture, music, food, and community life fused into one. Wherever Bengalis have settled, in Delhi, Mumbai, London, the Middle East, or the United States, Durga Puja has travelled with them. London's puja, started in 2009 by the Bengal Heritage Foundation, has grown from a handful of families to roughly nine thousand visitors a year.

III

Mahalaya: the festival begins before it begins

Mahalaya marks the hinge between Pitru Paksha, the fortnight for honouring ancestors, and Devi Paksha, the fortnight of the Goddess: the symbolic start of the Durga Puja season, roughly a week before Shashthi.

IV

Akal Bodhan: the untimely awakening

Akal Bodhan literally means "untimely invocation," and it is the reason the grand autumn Durga Puja exists at all.

Durga was traditionally meant to be worshipped in spring, during Chaitra, a tradition still kept alive, on a smaller scale, as Basanti Puja. But the Bengali Krittibas Ramayana tells a different story: before his final battle with Ravana, Lord Rama needed the Goddess's blessing to win. The trouble was timing: it was Dakshinayana, the season when the gods traditionally sleep, an inauspicious time to invoke any deity.

That "out of time" autumn worship, begun by Rama, is the root of the Sharadiya Durga Puja celebrated across Bengal today.

V

The ten days

The festival is widely called ten days, though the active public worship is concentrated in six, Mahalaya through Vijaya Dashami, with the days between spent on shopping, idol-buying, and preparation.

VI

Sandhi Puja: forty-eight sacred minutes

Performed at the exact junction of Ashtami and Navami (the last twenty-four minutes of one and the first twenty-four of the other), Sandhi Puja is considered the most powerful moment of the entire festival.

During the battle with Mahishasura, two of the demon's allies, Chanda and Munda, tried to ambush the Goddess. Her third eye opened in fury, and the fierce form Chamunda emerged to kill them at precisely this moment. That is why Sandhi Puja is sometimes called Mahishasura Mardini Puja, and why the Goddess is worshipped here in her Chamunda form.

Devotees make the ululating "ulu dhwani" sound to ward off evil, and a symbolic offering, traditionally an animal though today usually ash gourd, sugarcane, or banana, marks the transition from the destruction of evil to the return of auspicious power.

VII

Recognised as the heritage of humanity

In December 2021, UNESCO inscribed "Durga Puja in Kolkata" on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, the first festival from Asia and the first from India to receive the honour.

UNESCO's committee described it as the best instance of the public performance of religion and art, and a thriving ground for collaborative artists and designers, praising, in particular, how the festival draws in marginalised groups, individuals, and women through its "Sarbojonin spirit," a spirit of community worship for everyone that has defined the festival since 1926.

For ten days each autumn, an entire city turns into a temporary, open-air gallery: clay sculptors, drummers, designers, and neighbourhood organisers building fresh artistic themes from bamboo and river clay, torn down and rebuilt from nothing the following year.

VIII

Famous pandals

Kolkata's pandal culture, vast and artistically themed temporary structures, is the most visible face of the modern, public Durga Puja.

IX

Bonedi Bari: houses of the old aristocracy

Long before the public Sarbojanin puja existed, Kolkata's zamindar and royal families held their Durga Puja privately, inside the ancestral courtyards, known as the Thakurdalan, of their own mansions. These are the Bonedi Bari pujas, still running today, centuries on.

These families are also credited with originating Daker Saaj, the silver and zari ornamentation of the idol; Shobhabazar Rajbari is said to have pioneered the style. Each household follows its own unchanging rituals, often served for generations by the same families of idol-makers and dhaakis. Today, visitors trace a "Bonedi Bari Parikrama," a heritage route through these historic homes, for a glimpse of pre-independence aristocratic Bengal, standing apart from the scale and spectacle of the modern community pandal.