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Towards a Secular Festival

by Waheedul Haque
THE shifting of the festive worship of Devi from spring to autumn by a helplessly embattled Rama, in the face of frustrating stubbornness of Ravana's resistance, is apocryphally non-history. The whole of Rama’s cycle of events, as told by Valmiki. is agreedly high poetry — ma-hakavyd — and not so much history But how wonderfully
the shift has suited the Bengal clime as well as the psyche! So much so that one can suspect the akaal-bodluut episode to be an interpellation by a Bengali trying to justify the convenient shift. And perhaps from that point — the shifting of the puja season — the puja itself together frith the deity worshipped started being Bengallsed. To the best of what living memory can scarp up, the great Durga Puja festival of Hindus has always been a pe-
culiarly Bengali institution., with Durga and her other manifestations of Uma, Parvati or Sati enticed away from the all India Hindu pantheon to be set on a loving seat in the Bengali mind. The Bengali genius has always been, it seems, very adept in this job of naturalising subcontinental divinities as intrinsically and essentially Bengalee characters — a glorious example of which is Ramprasad’s Tara or Kali.
The genius of the people, this wet and swampy malaria-infested land, redeemed by the mighty flow of the world’s greatest rivers as also by a shining and mellow and dry half-year from the onset of autumn to the end of winter, did not stop at that. The puja began its transformation from a strictly religious ritual to a festival of the human milieu — cutting across narrow communal bounds understandably for reasons more mundane and secular than religious. But where? With the introduction . of the shorbojonln or sarbe-Janin puja? A date for this new wave can be found, of course. But this event, rather than heralding the transformation was indeed a result of .a process of the latter continuing, may be. for centuries. From spring to autumn and from the dark recesses of the sanctum of a temple to the open dazzle of an autumn landscape. Devi has been making a long sojourn. steady but sure, and never stopping.
It is rattier easy and almost cast to read in Durga's genesis and her demolition of the demons Mahisha, Madhu and Kaitabha, the allegory of good triumphing over evil, light over darkness. Ahura Mazda over Ahriman. Those to whose intellect the allegorical aspect appeals are only a miserable few and rather than Joining the eternal battle between good and evil on the side of the former. they keep on congratulating themselves yearly on the brilliance of their mind. The majority are those who do not see the allegory and take Devi and Mahisha as characters • in a true story enacted at some point of our hoary past. And how are they helped in society and in the .seclusion of their personality development by the yearly commemoration of one ancient bisexual engagement? What do anyone caring to indulge In sets of special feelings on the occasion of the puja gain by way of social and individual
material and moral-spiritual development? Plainly, what's the use of it? Was it Lenirf who said if you want to make a man ineffective, canonise him, and then went on to be canonised himself * and ineffectivised? What chance Devi stands to be able to inspire the devotees to a war against evil? Very slim if. at all — for both those who get the allegory and those that don't. And how would the puja elevate one in one’s inner life, make him at one with all mankind and the universe and transcend sorrow and pain and death? Nothing in the elaborate regimen of rites followed from the bodhon on shashthi to bishar/an on the dashami on the tenth day of the Ashwin new moon, that can be expected to work improvement in the self of the devotees of Devi.
The Lakshmi puja or the one addressed to Saraswati are quite explicitly reward-oriented in that the puja Is offered more as a prayer for wealth or proficiency in the arts and learning rather than puja proper which is wholly a tendering of reverence with flowers. In the pristine Jq/nyas of the newly arrived Aryanspeaking Caucasoids, the war and wealth-minded nomadic tribes from the Erasian plains invoked and placated gods to seek of them victory in war and wealth of cows and streams of progeny and fall of enemy citadels. The puja signifies a shift, no doubt as a result of influences of the eastern Indian Vedantic speculations, away from material craving' as also from magical belief, as shown by Frazer, that gods were bound to respond and oblige if the rituals were gone through without a flaw. In the changeover from bloody sacrifices and fiery ahuti-s of theja-Jnyas to the offering of flowers in the puja. a switching over to spirituality was discernible. Durga or Devi is come from the Vedic — and not Vedantic — times and the cravings her worship occasioned were quite material. But is this known to the puja enthusiasts of today? Is the puja — specially the communal or shorbojanin edition of it — offered indeed with the age-old desiderata of rupa. Jaya. yasha. arogya. saubhagya so on and so forth? To my mind it must be centuries that celebration of Devi's triumph was commemorated in the puja form with the idea of realising some heart's desire or worldly need — exactly as Ramachandra is said to have dpne seeking to overcome
Ravana's resistance. Why has then over the years this particular puja to Durga has grown and grown to overshadow, all of the myriad others, so much so that the lone word puja now signifies, first of all. this autumnal social festivity and not the glass comprising ritual worship of any of the proverbial 330 million divinities? It cannot surely have happened because millions were charmed by the allegory represented by Durga and her Intimate team and fired by the idea of Joining the fray against evil. Then what was the magic that lay behind the autumnal puja gaining preeminence? Durga is but a transformation of Chandi. harking back to Adyashakti or the matriarchal roots of the subcontinental society leaving an imprint by way of religio-philosophical formulation of the mother principle engendering the universe and living forms and human society. How could her celebration become almost universal in a land enveloped by the many, splendoured and multi-stream Vatsbnavite surge — the triumph of Bhagavat-dharma that is, over at least six hundred years? This latter religious sweep was incorrigibly patriarchal in tamper although championing love and renouncing violence. How could Durga become such a dear deity beloved more than even Radha without recalling whom neither a song nor a dance could be performed till very recently?
For too long Indian society was relentlessly being scattered as if driven by some hidden yet most powerful centrifuge. Society was coming off. getting sort of unstuck, to a state of non-society, which is no state indeed for a society. Religions exist in society. Good if they exist for society also. Bad if they run counter. For much too long religion as a unique phenomenon of man was, in the subcontinental context. running counter to society. a sad fact so very well understood by Vivekananda. Society here was for centuries pining for some bonding action. some centripetal force to come into play to halt the degeneration and set the society on a path of regeneration. The social revolution wrought by Shri Chaitanya sweeping the entire eastern Indian region into one great egalitarian surge. The good work had all but been spent out and social stagnation once again set snug on the back of the people when, five hundred years later, Vivekananda arrived on the scene. Society by that time has again been fragmented as if into smithereens, beyond any powers of even a genius of ti-
tanic prowess like Narendranath Dutta who left the normal cares of life to become a swami' — a sannyasl —. not to speak of Aurobindo Ghose
The development of what was a puja. performed only .by the initiate working as an intermediary between the laity and the deity, into a festival involving a much wider clientele, was one of the main forces that held back the society from irrecoverable decay. Necessity was what dragged puja out of the esoteric' practice it was and into broad exposure and participation of people. To cope with the new locale, functions changed and festivity overtook what was previously a matter of dark mysteries
Two most lucky things capitally helped Devi Puja become the great festival it Is for well over a hundred years. First its timing. — late in the early autumn or sharat It is not for nothing that this selfsame sea son is also the time of Kalhin Chibor Daan — the great Buddhist festival when the mendtnt Bhikkhus and Shraznans come out to the society ending the quarter-of-a-year adhlsthan. the obligatory
retirement during the rains into a spell of intense study and meditation — for which purpose the Ajanta caves with ■ its viharas and chattyas were built continuously for eight hundred years. During the rains the whole society of eastern- subcontinental humans go into adhlshthan or a kind of forced lifegiving hibernation. And when the showers from up above and the waters enveloping the plains underneath are well on their way of recession and light beams out sundering the overcast sky and anoints the whole landscape with our other-worldly splendour — yes now is come the time for bursting out Into na ture, to don new apparels and to gift the Bhikkhus with the year s clothing, to go visiting kins and friends, and to embark on a longish and self-indulging chhutl. It is hard to find in English, or in any other European language a word for chhutl. The gay abandon it denotes and the sense of freeing oneself from yearlong fetters of daily chores and into the care free aq) blna kaqje bqjtye banshl kaatbe shakol beta mood doesn't ring true tn words like vacation or holiday
A resplendent nature, the unique chhutl and the puja — all Join In fashioning the true
halcyon time of the year. And this is augmented by the fact of everyone in the society being, for the first time for anything even remotely connected with religion, equally privy to the gaiety of the occasion. Bengali literature of the past hundred yesterday. specially Rabindranath, has contributed stupendously to making puja and chhutl a synonym for one another.
The other great factor that contributes to the greatness of puja as a festival involves the society's preoccupation with artistic activity, almost by way of a cultural compulsion. Faridpuris a small town by all standards. When in its sixty and something mandaps pra-timas rise to full glory — there are close on to 400 sculptures of full size human beings and animals done exquisitely to the exacting attendants of historical Bengal statutory — It takes more than twenty groups of sculptors to do these. And in bhashan or blshorjan the provision is perpetuated that these images would have to be done all over again, employing all of the available sculptors. And then there are the drummers — the dhooltes and dhaktes — who tick on in the present extremely adverse sit uatlon — largely because of the
puja.
Attended by all these, puja has become an essential part of organic whole of the society.
And in so doing it has also burst out of its communal shell. The biggest milestone in this process has been true emergence of the sharbojanln puja. The epithet as well as its practice has come to denote a kind of universalism not only within the bounds of sects such as Shaiva. Shakta or Vaishnava or even of the community such as the Hindu — but across the whole of the society reaching out to Christians and Buddhists, and most Important. to Muslims.
To back to Faridpur — it Is a very very crowded affair there for five days. The rush on the roads and the stampede at the mandaps are composed mostly of peasants, both Hindus and Muslims, come to town for the occasion. The grand spectacles at the mandaps made the grandeur by lighting artists hired even from Calcutta are the handiworks of puja committees comprising a lot of Muslims and often headed by them. The puja has travelled a long way to a clearly discernible secular festival. And may it continue in that, to the benefit of the whole people.