This post represents the fourth and final part in a series on The Days of Awe: Rosh Hashanah, Eid, Navratri, Durga Pooja, and Yom Kippur... extending through and/or including Lokhi Puja, Kali Puja, and Diwali.
Comparative Pujas: Durga vs. Kali
October 2008
This is what I understand: the city shut down. The women – conspicuously under-represented in any public enterprise – were everywhere, sequins glittering on saris and ruffles bouncing on little girls’ swishing cotton and gold-lame skirts. The artistry was instantaneous; the bamboo polls that had been sitting, lashed upright with string in towering structures for weeks, became more real than the overflowing sidewalks and slowly molding apartment balconies with overnight cotton bunting and steel nails and hay and plaster and paint and glittering idols and real electric chandeliers.
Durga’s eyes are everywhere in Kolkata, all three of them with a bride’s wide nose ring drawing a perfect curve across her lips. They peer at you from the rear-view windows of auto-rickshaws, they gaze from billboards and sit silently inside roadside shrines by the dozen.
This is what I understand: Durga is a conglomerate, a goddess created to defeat a demon who thought he’d worked a way out of the system. She carries the weapons of ten gods in ten hands, and two of her children are incarnations of the same goddess she represents. Her sons are the sons of that goddess, of Parvati the good wife and Shakti the formless female energy.
Kalighat, known for its bloodied goat bodies and incessant beggars, is the name of our nearest Metro station. I’ve never been inside the temple, but I drive by its subsidiary burning ghats every day on the way to and from work, and twenty-five percent of the time I notice my co-commuters marking the passing with a gesture of respect.
This is what I understand: in the season when the natural light fades, we celebrate its memory. Diwali is the Hindu festival of lights, and like the gods it represents, it comes in a million iterations. Diwali follows Dassera, which is Durga Puja, and Diwali is for Laxmi, but Lokhi Puja comes between the two here because Diwali in Kolkata is Kali Puja – and you always worship Ganesha first, for auspicious beginnings.
The air was thick the night I walked home with my neighbor, but we could almost breathe when we stopped on the bridge and watched the hand-detonated fireworks blooming over our affluent neighborhood. The streets, as they should be, were carpeted with the cardboard shells of sparklers. Earlier, when our knees were close to buckling, but all the cabs were going the wrong way, we stepped inside what had been an artic tundra populated by polar bears for a global-warming-aware Durga and was now a haunted house for a bloodthirsty Kali and would soon be a soccer field for the boys team.
Kali was deep in a cave, protected by her terrific handmaidens, bare-breasted women with long tusks and longer hair, their hips wrapped in tiger skins. This Kali wasn’t just an image of a woman with a blood-red tongue and a necklace of skulls; she was the tongue, a long pinkish gash in the Styrofoam stone immediately suggesting humanity’s passage into the world through a pair of garish oblong purpled lips.
This is what I understand: we celebrate what we love, and what we are terrified of, and they’re usually the same thing.
[Note: photo albums of both Durga Puja and Kali Puja are available on my Picasa account]
Comparative Pujas: Durga vs. Kali
October 2008
This is what I understand: the city shut down. The women – conspicuously under-represented in any public enterprise – were everywhere, sequins glittering on saris and ruffles bouncing on little girls’ swishing cotton and gold-lame skirts. The artistry was instantaneous; the bamboo polls that had been sitting, lashed upright with string in towering structures for weeks, became more real than the overflowing sidewalks and slowly molding apartment balconies with overnight cotton bunting and steel nails and hay and plaster and paint and glittering idols and real electric chandeliers.
Durga’s eyes are everywhere in Kolkata, all three of them with a bride’s wide nose ring drawing a perfect curve across her lips. They peer at you from the rear-view windows of auto-rickshaws, they gaze from billboards and sit silently inside roadside shrines by the dozen.
This is what I understand: Durga is a conglomerate, a goddess created to defeat a demon who thought he’d worked a way out of the system. She carries the weapons of ten gods in ten hands, and two of her children are incarnations of the same goddess she represents. Her sons are the sons of that goddess, of Parvati the good wife and Shakti the formless female energy.
Kalighat, known for its bloodied goat bodies and incessant beggars, is the name of our nearest Metro station. I’ve never been inside the temple, but I drive by its subsidiary burning ghats every day on the way to and from work, and twenty-five percent of the time I notice my co-commuters marking the passing with a gesture of respect.
This is what I understand: in the season when the natural light fades, we celebrate its memory. Diwali is the Hindu festival of lights, and like the gods it represents, it comes in a million iterations. Diwali follows Dassera, which is Durga Puja, and Diwali is for Laxmi, but Lokhi Puja comes between the two here because Diwali in Kolkata is Kali Puja – and you always worship Ganesha first, for auspicious beginnings.
The air was thick the night I walked home with my neighbor, but we could almost breathe when we stopped on the bridge and watched the hand-detonated fireworks blooming over our affluent neighborhood. The streets, as they should be, were carpeted with the cardboard shells of sparklers. Earlier, when our knees were close to buckling, but all the cabs were going the wrong way, we stepped inside what had been an artic tundra populated by polar bears for a global-warming-aware Durga and was now a haunted house for a bloodthirsty Kali and would soon be a soccer field for the boys team.
Kali was deep in a cave, protected by her terrific handmaidens, bare-breasted women with long tusks and longer hair, their hips wrapped in tiger skins. This Kali wasn’t just an image of a woman with a blood-red tongue and a necklace of skulls; she was the tongue, a long pinkish gash in the Styrofoam stone immediately suggesting humanity’s passage into the world through a pair of garish oblong purpled lips.
This is what I understand: we celebrate what we love, and what we are terrified of, and they’re usually the same thing.
[Note: photo albums of both Durga Puja and Kali Puja are available on my Picasa account]
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment