THE approach of the Poo ia is never announced by any human agent. A neighbour doesn t come up to you and help you with the knowledge that the Pooja would commence next fortnight. For you know it by yourself, per haps told by the sun breaking brilliantly out of an overcast dark sky of the rains and the green around you shimmering in that light making you forget the dank earth and an ambience robbed of colour that tarried beyond their term. When one feels the approaching footsteps of Pooja, does one feel a great event of worshipping nearing? Never. When Tagore rhymes to say when there's chhuti or abandon painted all around, there rises the Pooja sun on a Pooja horizon, it's no worship or religious ritual that he talks of. Pooja is a kind of worship native to this subcontinent for at least four or five thousand years and not at all imported by the so-called Aryans. Pooja is flower-offering as a mark of respect and love. But when we say the Pooja — in English — and Pooja in Bengali with a special accent we do not at all mean worship, whether in the meaning of that which a yajmani Brahmin does on occasion in a house-holder's quarters or the nubile girl offers her Shiv-thakur in expec-

tation of the groom of her dream or the women do to the domestic Thakur-asan of the inseparable duo Radha-Krishna. It very precisely means the all-involving social festival that goes into an uproarious five-day session actuated five days before at the Aswin new moon predawn with a very evocative recital of verses from the Chandi. (How nostalgic one feels about this Mahalaya function broadcast over radio by Pankaj Kumar Mallik and Birendra Krishna Bhadra!)

The Pooja is very clearly a celebration of nature. The Buddhists do the same thing —. marking the end of Adhisthan or rainy season non-movement with a celebration of the rise of the glorious sun and the awaking refulgent nature with the very touching rites of the Kathtn Chivar Daan — presenting the Bhikshus with a yearly apparel of sack-cloth.

That Pooja is decidedly more a festival than any religious rite is evident from there being an unsuspected plan behind it. While Pooja particularly means the festival of Durga — the Lady of the Fort — it actually opens a set of three festivals in one lunar cycle — the Aswin new moon to the new moon next.

The Durga Festival is closely followed by the full moon Lakshmi Pooja and next fortnight comes up the Kali Pooja. And Durga, Lakshmi and Kali are all manifestations of the divine goddess — of bliss, of wealth, of relief. So it's a monthful of festivals all celebrating the divine goddess in her divergent aspects of the benign restorer of order and light, the giver of wealth and plenitude and the demonic destroyer of evil. A magic casement of occasions to rejoice with the sunshine in the first of the occasions, with food and art in the second and with light, myriads of them in the dark of a new moon night, in the third. As with all other great human events on the calendar the Pooja can be taken to mean so many different things by different people and only true catholicity of mind can comprehend it from more than one point of view.

The Bengali mind has humanised the simhabahini, slayer of the demons Mahisha. Madhu and Kaitabha — a very formidable expression of woman-power indeed — into a most lovable daughter of the house. He was never bothered by the difficulty of equating himself with the Himalaya, tne fa-

ther of Uma and was literally gone beside himself with the joys of the daughter come home from her consort's abode in far Kailasa and the sadness of her going back away after all too short a stay at her father's. This is wholly a Bengali perception of Durga shared by no other people of the multinational subcontinent. What can it mean? Not only humanising the deity but investing it with a persona very very dear to the Bengali — that of the daughter’s. Doesn't one hear a cry across the Aryanised patriarchal millennia, from our matriarchal anarya days?

But it will be foolish to make a stereotype of the Bengali mind. For doesn't the same mind, from amongst the myriad peoples worshipping her. find in the same girl Kali, the revolting manifestation of Shakti — power — and go to inconceivable Tantrik heights of supra-normal, superhuman — almost anti-human — achievements? And through this the Bengali mind reaches up to the Adyashaktl — the Primordial mother — or the primacy of the feminine principle as accepted by the very much Aryan Sakkya in its conception of Prakriti.

But whatever it is. it is Pooja — the festival, to the Bengali mind — to rejoice.