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Durga Puja as an Invitational Space: Bengal as a Progressive Register for Transformation

Courtesy Pradip Kumar Dutta


© Devi Chakrabarti, India, 2018

The joys of Durga Puja as a celebratory space are intricately tied to the cultural celebration of difference. 

Growing up in the Bengal of the 1970s and 1980s, this syncretic philosophy of Bengali culture was best reflected in the Red Book stalls that would be put up right in front of the Durga Puja pandals.


You could pick up your Bengali translation of Marx or an essay collection of Nabanita Deb Sen or a collection of plays by the icon of the Left, Utpal Dutt, just as you wrapped up offering your tributes to the Goddess. 

The dialectical tensions that were opened by these diverse cultural symbols formed the spaces for progressive dialogues, bringing in critique, interrogating the casteism of Durga Puja practices, and turning to ideas of culture as progressive inclusion. Progressivism as a cultural value in Bengal upheld the fundamental commitments to equality, justice, and inclusion through the practices of celebration.

Progressivism meant that traditional values could be critically interrogated, that debate was welcome, and a commitment to authentic dialogue opened up spaces for difference.

Personally, I grew up witnessing progressive culture in intimate spaces of celebration. In my family, the celebration of Durga Puja was often an occasion for inviting interfaith dialogues. The life of activism, trade unionism, and Left politics worked dialogically with the practices of cultural inclusion and progressive transformation. 

I recall distinctly how Alladiya Sahib, the peer who spent much time offering us blessings, would visit our family home during the time of Durga Puja. In later years, his son and their family would become part of our celebrations of the Goddess, as much as we would become part of their family's celebrations of Eid. 

The pluralism of the food dishes, from vegetarian to non-vegetarian, the diverse registers of traditional wear, were accompanied by the plural practices of interfaith celebrations.

This model of interfaith participation formed the bedrock of the familial constructions of the sacred. ন জেঠু (Naw-Jethu), once upon a time a teacher, and then a celebrated lyricist, playwright and film director, Mukul Dutt had married the amazingly talented actress, Chand Usmani, our ন Jethima. 

Their interfaith practices in intimate spaces were also reflected in the interfaith harmony that was upheld in familial cultural practices. 

Their life story of being in an interfaith marriage formed the core of familial identity and understanding of celebration. 

These familial spaces taught us across generations the value of openness, that Durga Puja celebrations found meaning in inviting in difference, in celebrating difference, and in building spaces for mutuality, love, and care.


(from https://youtu.be/oXYFnE_fT_o?si=BQP-3XzT4eu77lYa)

As we grapple globally with the proliferation of Hindutva, a far-right almost fascist ideology that continually works through the production of the other, it is vital in this season of Durga Puja that we re-turn to the progressive registers of Bengali cultural life. 

It is vital that as we celebrate this Durga Puja we attend to the spirit of progressive cultural politics that has long shaped the celebratory spirit of Bengal. Durga Puja as an invitational space is an opening for dismantling the practices of othering that form the infrastructures of Hindutva hate. My prayers to the Goddess are offered in that spirit of a transformative present that through its inclusion dismantles the hate politics of Hindutva.




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