Bijoya: The Grammar of Farewell in Bengal's Durga Puja

Prologue: The Afternoon the Light Changes

There is an hour on Dashami afternoon that every Bengali recognises without being taught. The dhak has not stopped, but its rhythm has changed. The pandal lights are still on, but they look smaller in daylight. A woman in a red-bordered white garad sari is wiping vermilion from her cheek with the end of her anchal, and she is laughing, and her eyes are wet. Somewhere a child asks why everyone is sad if the Goddess won.

The child has asked the right question. In most of India, the tenth day of the bright fortnight of Ashwin is Vijayadashami: the day of victory. Rama has killed Ravana; Durga has killed Mahishasura; weapons are worshipped, effigies burned, frontiers symbolically crossed. The grammar of the day is triumphal. In Bengal, the same day carries the same Sanskrit root, softened in the mouth to Bijoya, and yet its dominant mood is not triumph. It is leave-taking. The word that comes most easily to Bengali lips on this day is not jay (victory) but mon kharap: a heaviness of heart, the particular ache of a house after a guest has gone.

This chapter is an attempt to explain that inversion. It argues that Bengali Bijoya is best understood not as a regional variant of a pan-Indian victory festival, but as a distinct ritual and emotional complex built around a different myth. Its centre is a daughter’s departure. That relocation of meaning from the battlefield to the household is the key that unlocks almost everything else: the mirror in the water, the vermilion on the faces, the embraces between estranged neighbours, the plates of nimki and narkel naru carried from door to door for weeks afterward.

The argument proceeds in six movements. It begins with the poetry that gave Bengal its intimate Goddess. It then walks through the liturgy of Dashami morning, follows the procession to the river, and examines the social rituals that turn farewell into reconciliation. It closes by setting Bijoya against pan-Indian Vijayadashami and tracing how the practice has travelled from aristocratic courtyards to apartment complexes and diaspora community halls.

I. Uma Comes Home: The Theology of a Daughter

Bengal’s Durga has two faces, and the festival cannot be understood until both are seen at once. The first is the face of the Devi Mahatmya, the Sanskrit text recited as Chandipath through the puja days. Here she is Mahishasuramardini, the slayer of the buffalo demon, formed from the concentrated fury of the gods. She is cosmic, armed, and terrible. The second face belongs to no Sanskrit text at all. It belongs to Bengali village song, and it is the face of Uma: a young married girl, daughter of Giriraj Himalaya and his queen Menaka, who has been sent away to live with a husband her mother does not trust.

The pratima in every pandal shows the first face. The emotional life of the festival runs on the second.

The Agamani and Vijaya songs

The songs that made Uma a daughter belong to a genre Banglapedia calls Agamani-vijaya. Banglapedia defines the two halves simply: Agamani songs narrate Uma’s return to her parental home, and Vijaya songs her departure back to her husband’s house. Together they form a single sung arc that brackets the festival.

The genre’s founding voice was the eighteenth-century Shakta poet Ramprasad Sen (c. 1720–1781) of Halishahar. Ramprasad is remembered chiefly for his songs to Kali, whom he addressed with an unprecedented intimacy, as a mother and even as a little girl. Banglapedia notes that his Agamani songs, giving voice to Menaka’s feelings, form an important part of his legacy alongside the better-known Shyama Sangeet. His successor in both genres was Kamalakanta Bhattacharya (c. 1772–1821), born at Ambika Kalna and later guru to the Maharaja of Bardhaman. Rambasu (1786–1828) and Dasharathi Roy (1806–1857) extended the tradition into the nineteenth century.

The plot these poets share is domestic to the point of plainness. Menaka has not seen her daughter in a year. She has heard that Uma’s husband is a penniless ascetic who smears himself with ash, smokes ganja, and lives among ghosts on a cremation ground. She nags Giriraj to fetch the girl home. A line widely attributed to Ramprasad has Menaka vow that this time, once Uma comes, she will not send her back. Giriraj goes, half-reluctant. Uma arrives on Saptami with her children. A song attributed to Kamalakanta pictures the queen running out with her hair unbound at the news. Three days pass in a blur of feeding and fussing. Then Navami night falls.

The Vijaya songs live in that night. Their characteristic address is to time itself: Menaka begging the night of Navami not to end, because its ending means dawn, and dawn means Dashami, and Dashami means Shiva at the door. The most famous literary descendant of this convention is Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s sonnet “Bijoya-doshomi” (1866), in which the queen pleads with the night not to leave with its host of stars, because her life will leave with it. A modern poet, writing in a European form, reached instinctively for the old folk motif. That is a measure of how deep it ran.

Why a daughter? The social ground of the song

It would be easy to read the Agamani-vijaya corpus as sentimental decoration on a martial cult. It is better read as social history set to music. In the Bengal of Ramprasad and Kamalakanta, girls of upper-caste households were often married before puberty and sent to live among strangers, sometimes far away and sometimes in harsh conditions. Banglapedia makes the connection directly: in an age of early marriage, mothers like Menaka worried about their daughters’ welfare, rejoiced to see them, and grieved when they left.

Read this way, Uma’s annual four-day visit to her baper bari (father’s house) is the mythic form of a lived institution: the married daughter’s ritual return to her natal home, a visit that was both a right and a rationed privilege. Every Agamani song was sung by women who had been Uma once and were Menaka now. The Goddess who comes home is the daughter the household lost to marriage, permitted back for exactly as long as custom allows.

The scholar Rachel Fell McDermott, whose Mother of My Heart, Daughter of My Dreams (2001) remains the essential study of this poetry, frames the Bengali Goddess as held between these two poles: the mother of the universe and the daughter of the house. The tension is not resolved. It is lived through, every autumn.

The bittersweet duality

This is the root of Bijoya‘s paradox. The word means victory. Theologically, the victory is real: the tenth day marks the completion of the Goddess’s cosmic work, the restoration of dharma after Mahishasura’s usurpation. In the Sanskritic frame, Dashami should be the climax of triumph.

But Bengali religious feeling does not live mainly in the Sanskritic frame. It lives in the songs. And from the songs’ point of view, the victory has already happened, off-stage, months ago. What happens on Dashami is that a girl goes back to a difficult marriage. The cosmic register and the domestic register run in parallel, and on this one day they point in opposite emotional directions.

The result is a festival that rejoices and grieves at once, and does not ask its participants to choose. The mon kharap of Bijoya is not a failure to understand the theology of victory. It is a second, older theology of the household, insisting on being heard. A Bengali Hindu can say Shubho Bijoya (auspicious victory) with complete sincerity while feeling that the house has gone quiet. The two sentiments are not contradictory. They are the two faces of the same clay image.

II. Dashami Morning: The Liturgy of Letting Go

The theological departure of the Goddess happens hours before her clay body leaves the pandal. Dashami morning carries a compact, ordered sequence of rites whose purpose is to undo, gently and reversibly, what Bodhon and Pranpratishtha set in motion days earlier. Practice varies between household (barir pujo) and community (sarbojanin) pujas, between the Brihannandikeshwara and Kalika Purana liturgical traditions, and between priests. The outline below follows the most widely observed pattern.

The sequence of the morning

1. Dashami puja. A brief concluding worship, shorter than the elaborate rites of Saptami to Navami. In many households the bhog is deliberately humble: dodhikorma (flattened rice with curd, sweetened) or, in some families, cooked rice soaked overnight, food for a traveller.
2. Darpan bisarjan. The ritual withdrawal of the Goddess’s presence through her reflection in water (detailed below).
3. Visarjana mantra. The priest bids the Goddess depart to her own abode and return after a year.
4. Aparajita puja. Worship of the Goddess as the Unconquered, embodied in the blue aparajita creeper.
5. Debi boron and Sindoor khela. Married women bid farewell to the Goddess as to a departing daughter, then smear vermilion on one another.
6. Preparation for bisarjan. The pratima is readied for the procession to the river, usually in the afternoon or evening.

Darpan bisarjan: the Goddess in the mirror

Of all the rites of Bengali Durga Puja, darpan bisarjan is perhaps the most philosophically arresting, and the least seen by the crowds who throng the pandals.

The mechanics are simple. A shallow brass vessel (often a tamrakunda or thala) is filled with water, sometimes with durba grass, flowers, and a little turmeric. The priest holds a small mirror, traditionally of polished brass or bell-metal, so that the face of the pratima is reflected in it. The mirror is then lowered so that the reflected image touches the surface of the water, or is placed in the vessel so the Goddess’s reflection lies in the water itself. With the appropriate mantras, the priest performs the visarjana: the ceremonial release of the indwelling presence (prana) that was invoked into the image at Pranpratishtha on Saptami.

From this moment, in strict liturgical terms, the clay figure is no longer a living deity. It is a sacred but vacated form. The Goddess has been immersed, through her reflection, hours before her body will be.

The philosophical economy here is elegant. The Goddess was never the clay. She entered it by invitation and leaves it by the same route. The mirror makes the logic visible. A reflection is a real presence that is not a material thing; it can be immersed without anything being destroyed. Vedantic readers have long found in the rite an image of the relation between Brahman and the world: the one reality appearing in many forms, as the sun appears in a thousand water-pots, and withdrawing without loss when the pots are broken. The clay pratima, after darpan bisarjan, becomes the broken pot. What it held was never contained in it.

There is also a gentler, folk reading. Many households say that the Goddess’s last sight of her baper bari is in the mirror. She looks back once at the house that fed her before she goes. Seen this way, the mirror is the final glance of the departing daughter at the doorway.

The mantra of return

The visarjana formula recited over the vessel asks the supreme Goddess to go to her own supreme abode, and to come again when a year has passed. The phrase punar agamanaya (for coming again) is the liturgical seed of the crowd’s cry later in the day, Aschhe bochhor abar hobe: next year it will happen again. The Sanskrit of the priest and the Bengali of the street say the same thing. The departure is never pronounced without the promise of return.

Aparajita puja

After the visarjana, many households and community pujas worship the Goddess as Aparajita, the Unconquered. The ritual focus is the aparajita creeper (Clitoria ternatea, the butterfly pea), whose deep blue flowers bloom in the Bengali autumn. A sprig of the vine, sometimes with a little haldi-dyed thread, is worshipped and then tied around the wrist or upper arm, often by the priest or an elder.

The gesture is protective. The wearer carries a fragment of the Goddess’s invincibility into the coming year. In older practice, it was linked to jatra: setting out on journeys, trade expeditions, or campaigns after Dashami, the traditional opening of the travelling season once the rains had ended. This is one of the few places where the Bengali rite touches the martial, Kshatriya grammar of pan-Indian Vijayadashami (Section V). Even here, though, the emphasis falls on protection rather than conquest.

In many Bengali homes another small custom follows: writing the Goddess’s name. After the immersion rites, family members write Sri Sri Durga on paper, often a set number of times, sometimes in red ink or with alta. The act is part blessing and part inventory. The name stays in the house after the image goes.

Sindoor khela: vermilion and farewell

The most photographed rite of Bijoya begins in a quieter ritual called Debi boron: the welcoming-in-farewell of the Goddess by married women. Each woman carries a boron dala, a tray holding betel leaves (paan), areca nut (supari), sweets (usually sandesh), vermilion (sindoor), and a lamp. She approaches the pratima and touches the betel leaf to the Goddess’s cheeks and forehead. She offers a sweet to her lips, sometimes with a little water. Then she touches sindoor to the parting of the hair and to the shankha-pola, the white conch and red coral bangles of the Bengali married woman.

The gestures are those of a mother sending a daughter back to her in-laws. The sweet is food for the road; the paan is the traditional courtesy to a departing guest. The vermilion is a prayer that the girl stays a married woman, her husband long-lived. Many women whisper in the Goddess’s ear as they do this, a private message for the year.

Then the sindoor turns outward. Women smear it on each other’s foreheads, cheeks, and shankha-pola until faces and white saris turn red. This is sindoor khela, the vermilion game. It is joyous, noisy, and physically intimate. It is also a rite of solidarity among those who share the status Uma holds: married women, each sending a daughter (or remembering being sent) and wishing one another the same protection.

Its folk roots are clear. Sindoor marks sadhava status, the auspicious state of a woman whose husband lives. The rite is a collective act of saubhagya, good fortune, renewed by contact with the departing Goddess.

That same root is the source of the rite’s contemporary controversy. In its classical form, sindoor khela excludes widows, unmarried women, and others outside the marital norm. Over the past decade and more, a number of community pujas in Kolkata and beyond have opened participation to widows, unmarried women, and transgender women. Others have reframed it as a celebration of womanhood rather than of marriage. Traditionalists object that this hollows out the rite’s meaning; reformers answer that a Goddess who is herself sovereign power cannot be honoured by a ritual of exclusion. The argument is unresolved, and it is one of the liveliest places where Bengali Hinduism is renegotiating its gender politics in public.

A quieter shift is visual. Sindoor khela has become one of the most circulated images of Bengali identity on social media. For diaspora women especially, a red-smeared selfie on Dashami is now part of how Bengaliness is performed and recognised. The rite has acquired a second audience beyond the Goddess and the neighbours.

III. Bisarjan: The Procession to the Water

If darpan bisarjan is the Goddess’s private departure, the immersion of the pratima is the public one. The two are often confused, but they do different work. The first is theological; the second is communal. By afternoon, the Goddess has already gone. What the crowd escorts to the river is her body, and its own grief.

The sound of leaving

The dhak, the large barrel drum slung from the shoulder and beaten with two thin sticks, is the voice of Durga Puja. Its rhythms are specific to each moment: one for Bodhon, another for Sandhi Puja, another for arati. On Dashami it plays the bisarjaner bajna, the immersion beat. Listeners describe it the same way across generations: faster than the festive rhythms, yet heavier, driving and mournful at once. The dhaki‘s companion, the small kasar gong, keeps a relentless metallic pulse beneath it.

To this music the procession dances. The bhaashan naach (from bhasan, to float away or set adrift) is not choreographed and not pretty. It is loose, sweaty, and ecstatic: young men in vermilion-streaked panjabis, women who have just finished sindoor khela, children on shoulders, all moving in front of the image as it is carried or trucked through the lanes. Outsiders often read it as celebration. It is better understood as a kind of collective keening in the body, grief expressed as exhaustion. The more frantic the dance, the more the dancer is putting off the moment at the ghat.

The chant rises over the drums: Bolo Durga Mai ki jai! (Victory to Mother Durga), and then the call and response that every Bengali child learns before they can spell it: Aschhe bochhor! (Next year!) Abar hobe! (It will happen again!). The cry is a promise, a consolation, and a contract. It completes the priest’s Sanskrit punar agamanaya in the language of the street.

At the ghat

In Kolkata, the procession ends at the ghats of the Hooghly, the Bhagirathi-Hooghly distributary of the Ganga: Babughat, Bagbazar, Nimtala, Ahiritola, Judges’ Court and others along the eastern bank. Older bonedi families had their own ghats and their own customs. Some carried the image out between two boats and released it midstream. Some, by long tradition, released a nilkantha (the blue-throated Indian roller) to fly ahead to Kailash and tell Shiva that Uma was on her way. Under wildlife law, live birds have given way to symbolic substitutes.

Before the final moment, the image is turned seven times, or carried round, in some places. A last arati is performed and a last look taken. Then the porters wade in and tip the figure backward into the water.

For a few seconds the painted face stays visible beneath the surface. Then the river takes it.

Earth returning to earth

There is an ecological poetry in the material history of the pratima that UNESCO’s own description of the festival captures. In the months before the puja, artisans sculpt the images from unfired clay drawn from the Ganga; on the tenth day, the images go back into the river from which the clay came. UNESCO notes that the festival has, for this reason, come to signify homecoming, a seasonal return to one’s roots.

This is the deepest layer of bisarjan‘s meaning. The Goddess, in her clay form, is literally made of the river. The kumors of Kumartuli build her on frames of bamboo and straw, coat her in entel mati (sticky clay) and bele mati (sandy clay), and finish her with paint. Unfired, she is designed to dissolve. Immersion is not destruction. It is the completion of a cycle the material was built for: river to image to river. In the language of the Samkhya and Vedantic traditions, form (rupa) returns to its elemental source while the conscious principle that animated it was never bound to it.

The philosophical claim and the physical fact coincide. That is why bisarjan can be both a funeral and not a funeral. Nothing has died. A shape has been returned.

When the cycle broke

That elegant cycle depended on materials that no longer dominate. Over the twentieth century, image-making adopted synthetic enamel and oil paints, often containing lead, chromium and other heavy metals. Plaster of Paris, cheaper and lighter than clay, entered wider use in many parts of India. Images grew larger and more numerous. The river, which could absorb a few hundred clay figures, could not absorb thousands of painted ones, plus their straw, bamboo, synthetic fabrics, plastic ornaments, and the flowers, sindoor and plastic wrapping that came with them.

The legal response has been slow and layered. In 2008, the Calcutta High Court directed the city corporation, the port trust and the police to set up a joint committee to clear immersion debris from the Hooghly within a week of immersion (India Environment Portal). At the national level, the governing document is now the Central Pollution Control Board’s Revised Guidelines for Idol Immersion, issued on 12 May 2020. As an India Water Portal explainer notes, those guidelines do not ban river immersion outright; they recommend eco-friendly materials and prefer artificial ponds, with designated zones in natural water bodies where immersion is unavoidable. Because the guidelines are advisory, enforcement has come mainly through High Courts and the National Green Tribunal.

In Kolkata, the visible result is the crane. The municipal corporation now stations cranes and crews at designated ghats to lift idol frames out of the water almost as soon as they go in, before the paint and frame break apart. Flowers and other offerings are collected separately. Practice has been uneven. A 2020 report by Dialogue Earth documented a state pollution board official describing immersion arrangements at most Kolkata ghats, particularly in the north, as inadequate under National Mission for Clean Ganga guidelines, while a few pujas trialled “green immersion” models, including one where idols were rolled down rails and lifted out quickly.

The ritual adaptations are as interesting as the legal ones:

• Materials. A growing number of kumors and puja committees use natural pigments (earth ochres, turmeric, indigo, alta), traditional unfired clay, and minimal synthetic ornament.
• Artificial ponds and tanks. Smaller household and apartment pujas increasingly immerse in municipal tanks or in water drums on site, sometimes dissolving the image with a hose and returning the clay to gardens.
• Token immersion. Some families immerse a small clay ghat or the nabapatrika in the river and handle the large image separately.

These changes provoke debate about whether a Goddess lifted out by crane, or hosed down in a courtyard, has truly been immersed. The tradition’s own theology offers an answer. The Goddess left at darpan bisarjan, through her reflection, before anyone carried her anywhere. The rite was always more about release than about water volume. A tradition that could immerse its deity in a mirror can probably accommodate a tank.

IV. After the River: The Social Grammar of Bijoya

When the procession returns from the ghat, the festival does not end. It changes register. The sacred drama of the Goddess’s departure gives way to a social drama among the people she has left behind. This second Bijoya can last for weeks, and for many Bengalis it is the part of the puja they remember most.

Shantijol: the threshold

The hinge is a small rite. On returning from the immersion, the household or community gathers before the empty mandap or the family thakur dalan. The priest sprinkles shantijol, peace-water, over everyone with a sprig of mango leaves or durba grass, drawn from the same vessel used in the morning or from a fresh ghat. The empty dais where the Goddess stood is lit with a single lamp. In many homes it will stay lit through the night, so that the house is not left in darkness on its first evening without her.

Only then do the greetings begin.

Kolakuli: the embrace that resets the year

Kolakuli is the formal embrace of Bijoya. Two people hold each other shoulder to shoulder, typically three times, alternating sides. Between men it is the standard Bijoya greeting among equals. Women commonly exchange it too, though in many families women’s greetings centre more on pronam and the sharing of sweets.

The embrace carries a social function out of all proportion to its brevity. The folk understanding, repeated in household after household, is that Bijoya kolakuli dissolves the grudges of the year. Brothers who have quarrelled over property, neighbours divided by a boundary wall, colleagues who have not spoken since a promotion went the wrong way: on Bijoya, they are expected to embrace. Refusing a Bijoya kolakuli is a serious public statement. Accepting one, even stiffly, opens the door to repair.

Anthropologically, this places kolakuli in a familiar class of calendrical reconciliation rites: moments, fixed in the year, when a community suspends its ordinary accounting of grievance and resets relations. The timing is not accidental. The rite follows directly on a shared experience of loss. Having just watched the Goddess go into the river together, people are briefly placed in the same position, mourners at the same farewell. Grief is a powerful leveller, and Bijoya uses it deliberately.

The claim that kolakuli erases hierarchy should be stated carefully. In the colonial and pre-colonial village, it did not dissolve caste. Purity rules governing touch and commensality persisted, and many bonedi households observed Bijoya within strictly bounded circles. Its levelling force operated mostly among status equals, and across the lines of faction rather than of caste. Yet in the urban sarbojanin puja, where the festival was explicitly reorganised as a neighbourhood’s common property, the embrace extended further. Today, in a Kolkata para (neighbourhood), the local club secretary, the shopkeeper and the software engineer embrace as members of the same puja. That is a real if partial democratisation, and the kolakuli is one of its rituals.

The gesture itself is shared across Bengal’s religious communities. Bengali Muslims exchange the same triple embrace on Eid, and it is called by the same name. The kolakuli is, in this sense, older and wider than any one festival: a Bengali body-language of reconciliation that each community has attached to its own calendar.

Pronam and ashirbad: the vertical axis

If kolakuli is horizontal, between equals, pronam is vertical. Younger family members bend to touch the feet of their elders, then their own forehead or chest. The elder places a hand on the bowed head and gives ashirbad, blessing. Often a sweet is put into the junior’s mouth, or a little money into the hand of a child.

Bijoya is the one day in the year when this exchange is close to universal and obligatory. Children are sent from relative to relative to complete the circuit. A young person who has missed a grandparent’s Bijoya pronam will hear about it. In this way the rite annually redraws the family tree in bodily form: who bows to whom traces exactly who stands above whom in the kin network.

It also makes the generations visible to each other. For the elder, a line of grandchildren and grand-nephews bending to touch one’s feet is a public reckoning of one’s place in a lineage. For the child, the ritual is an education in which relatives exist and how each is related. Before printed family trees, Bijoya pronam was one of the ways a Bengali family kept its genealogy alive.

Bijoya ghorano: the visiting season

Over the following days and weeks, the greetings move outward. Bijoya ghorano (going round for Bijoya) or Bijoya kora is the custom of visiting the homes of relatives, friends and neighbours who could not be met on Dashami itself. There is a protocol: juniors visit seniors, not the other way around. The host must offer sweets. The guest must eat at least something. To leave a house on Bijoya without having been fed is a minor scandal; to refuse food offered is a small insult.

Until the age of the telephone, the season also had a written form: the Bijoyar chithi, the Bijoya letter. Those who could not visit in person wrote to their elders, opening with a formula of pronam (Sri charaneshu, “at your revered feet”) and closing with good wishes for the year. Elders wrote back with blessings. For migrants in other cities, the Bijoyar chithi was often the one letter of the year that could not be skipped. Its descendants are the Shubho Bijoya messages that now arrive by the hundred on phones on the evening of Dashami, and the calls made dutifully to grandparents abroad.

The season traditionally runs up to Kali Puja or Bhai Phonta, sometimes later. In practice, “we haven’t done Bijoya yet” remains a respectable Bengali reason to visit someone well into November.

The food of farewell

The Bijoya table is distinct from the puja bhog. The bhog of the puja days is cooked food offered to the Goddess: khichuri, labra, fried vegetables, payesh. The Bijoya spread is mostly dry, portable and made in advance, because it must be ready for unannounced visitors over many days. Its classic items:

These foods do social work. The division between home-made and bought matters. Narkel naru and nimki are made by the women of the house, often in a collective session days before Dashami: they carry the household’s labour and identity into the hands of every visitor. Sandesh and mishti doi are bought: they carry the household’s standing. A plate combining both says, at once, “we made this for you” and “we spared no expense.”

The portability matters too. Dry sweets and savoury snacks are what one offers a traveller. In a festival whose central emotion is a daughter’s departure, the Bijoya plate is, quietly, provisions for the road. Every guest who leaves with a naru in hand has been sent off the way Menaka sent off Uma.

V. One Date, Two Festivals: Bijoya and Vijayadashami

Bengali Bijoya and pan-Indian Vijayadashami fall on the same lunar day, the Shukla Dashami of Ashwin. They share a name and a Goddess. Yet in myth, mood, ritual and social function they are close to opposite festivals. Treating Bijoya as “the Bengali way of celebrating Dussehra” misses almost everything that matters about it.

The Sanskritic and pan-Indian Vijayadashami

Across most of north, west and south India, the day’s meaning is organised around victory in battle, and its paradigmatic hero is a king.

The Ramayana frame. In the Gangetic north, Vijayadashami commemorates Rama’s victory over Ravana. The preceding nights are given to Ramlila, the dramatic enactment of the epic, most famously at Ramnagar near Varanasi. On the tenth day, towering effigies of Ravana, Kumbhakarna and Meghanada are filled with fireworks and burned. The emotional climax is a public explosion: evil destroyed, order restored, the crowd cheering.

Akalbodhan: Bengal’s borrowed bridge. Bengal knows this story too, and in a distinctly Bengali version. In the fifteenth-century Bengali Ramayana of Krittivas Ottha, Rama, before his final battle, performs an untimely autumn worship of Durga, the akalbodhan (out-of-season awakening). Durga was, in this telling, ordinarily worshipped in spring. Krittivas has Rama offer 108 blue lotuses. When one is found missing, he resolves to offer one of his own lotus-like eyes, and the Goddess appears to stop him and grant victory. This episode, absent from Valmiki, became the charter myth for Bengal’s autumn timing: the Bodhon that opens the puja is a re-enactment of Rama’s akalbodhan. But note what Bengal did with it. The Rama story explains why the Goddess is worshipped now. It does not supply the emotional content of her departure. For that, Bengal turned to Uma.

The martial calendar of the west and south. In Maharashtra, Karnataka and much of the Deccan, Vijayadashami’s ritual grammar is that of the warrior and the campaigning season:

• Shami puja. The shami tree is worshipped, recalling the Mahabharata‘s Virata Parva, where the Pandavas hid their weapons in a shami tree during their year of concealment and retrieved them for battle.
• Seemollanghan. The ritual crossing of the village or city boundary (seema) on Dashami. Historically it marked the start of military campaigns once the monsoon ended; Maratha armies set out after Dussehra. Today it survives as a symbolic procession beyond the town’s limits.
• Apta leaves as gold. In Maharashtra, people exchange leaves of the apta tree (Bauhinia racemosa) as sona, gold, with the greeting “sona ghya, sonyasarkhe raha” (take gold, stay like gold). The custom is linked in folk narrative to Kubera’s rain of gold and to Rama’s and the Pandavas’ victories.
• Ayudha puja. Weapons, tools, vehicles, account books and instruments are cleaned, laid out and worshipped, usually on Navami in the south and on Dashami in parts of the west. It is the Kshatriya ethic extended to every trade: the tool of one’s work is one’s weapon.
• Royal Dasara. In Mysuru, Dasara remains a festival of kingship. The procession of the Goddess Chamundeshwari on the palace elephant through the city on Vijayadashami continues the court ceremonial of the Wodeyar dynasty and, before them, of Vijayanagara.

Across these regions, the dominant affect is triumph and auspicious beginning. Vijayadashami is a favoured day to start new ventures, enrol children in school (Vidyarambham in Kerala), buy gold or vehicles, and begin journeys.

The Bengali Bijoya

Bengal shares fragments of this grammar: the aparajita thread, the old custom of beginning journeys after Dashami, even a sotto voce acknowledgement of Rama through akalbodhan. But it re-centres the day on a different myth, and the difference changes everything downstream.

The hero of Bengali Bijoya is not a king; it is a daughter. Its central event is not a battle but a departure. Its fire is not a burning effigy but a lamp left lit in an empty courtyard. Its crowd does not cheer an enemy’s destruction; it dances itself to exhaustion so as not to watch a beloved figure go under the water. And its social product is not a new campaign or a new venture but a renewal of existing bonds: the embraces, bows and visits that re-knit a family and neighbourhood before winter.

In short, Vijayadashami looks outward and forward, to conquest and new beginnings. Bijoya looks inward and backward, to kin and to the home the Goddess has just left.

At a glance

The contrast should not be overdrawn. Every one of these traditions honours the Goddess, and pan-Indian Navaratri also contains household intimacy, for example in the kolu or golu doll displays of Tamil Nadu and the bommai kolu of Karnataka. But the centre of gravity is unmistakably different. Bengal took a pan-Indian festival of victory and rebuilt it around a farewell.

VI. From Courtyard to Condominium: Bijoya in Motion

Bijoya has never been a fixed practice. Its forms have shifted with each change in who hosted the puja, where Bengalis lived, and how they reached one another. Tracing that movement shows what has been lost, what has been invented, and what has proved remarkably durable.

The bonedi bari: Bijoya as household sovereignty

The earliest documented Kolkata pujas were household affairs of the new colonial-era elite. The most famous is the puja begun in 1757 at the Shobhabazar Rajbari by Nabakrishna Deb (Wikipedia: Shobhabazar), traditionally said to have been staged in honour of Robert Clive after Plassey. Some historians treat that origin story as self-promotion by the Deb family; either way, attendance by Englishmen at such pujas became a recognised index of a family’s prestige.

In these bonedi bari (old aristocratic houses), Bijoya was an expression of household sovereignty. The thakur dalan, a pillared courtyard shrine, was the stage. The family’s own ghat, its own boats, its own priests, its own dhakis retained for generations: all of it announced lineage. Bijoya receptions in these houses were famous for their scale. Retainers, tenants and dependents came to perform pronam to the patriarch and were fed. Kolakuli among the menfolk sealed alliances between great houses. The same rite that reconciled a village’s quarrelling brothers here confirmed a social order with the family at its apex.

Many bonedi pujas continue, now opened to visitors as heritage events, their Bijoya rites watched by tourists and documented by photographers. They are living museums of the older form.

Barowari and sarbojanin: Bijoya becomes public

The decisive shift came with the community puja. Tradition places the first barowari puja (from baro, twelve, and yar, friends) at Guptipara in Hooghly district, when twelve men excluded from a local household’s puja pooled funds to hold their own. Sources disagree on the year, giving 1761 or 1790 (Wikipedia: Guptipara). In Kolkata, the first fully public sarbojanin (for everyone) puja is usually dated to 1909 or 1910, organised by the Sanatan Dharmotsahini Sabha at Balaram Bose Ghat Road in Bhowanipore (Wikipedia: Barowari). Through the nationalist decades, the sarbojanin puja spread through the city’s neighbourhoods, and the para club became its custodian.

This changed Bijoya in two ways. First, the kolakuli and pronam moved from the family courtyard to the street and the club room. The neighbourhood, not the lineage, became the unit of reconciliation. Second, bisarjan became a public spectacle. Processions of dozens, then hundreds, of community images to the ghats turned the evening of Dashami into a citywide event, with all its attendant noise, policing and political significance. It is no accident that disputes over immersion timing and routes have periodically reached the Calcutta High Court, including the 2017 case over a state order restricting immersions around Muharram, which the court put on hold (Business Standard).

The state has since embraced the spectacle. Since 2016, a selection of Kolkata’s leading pujas parade their images in the government-organised Durga Puja Carnival before immersion (Wikipedia: Durga Puja in Kolkata). In December 2021, UNESCO inscribed “Durga Puja in Kolkata” on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (UNESCO). Bijoya, once a family’s private grief, is now also a curated public heritage.

The apartment complex: Bijoya in the vertical para

From the 1990s onward, Kolkata and its satellites filled with multi-storey housing complexes. Many of them now hold their own abasan (housing society) pujas in a clubhouse or open courtyard. In these pujas, a new form of Bijoya has taken shape.

The para was a horizontal neighbourhood, built on decades of face-to-face familiarity. The housing complex is a vertical one, often of relative strangers who share a lift and a maintenance bill. For many residents, the complex puja is the main occasion on which they meet neighbours at all. Bijoya in this setting does a different job. It creates relationships rather than repairing them. The kolakuli between two residents of Tower B may be their first physical contact in a year.

The forms adjust accordingly. Sindoor khela happens in the clubhouse. Immersion may happen in a tank arranged by the housing society or the municipality. Bijoya ghorano is replaced, in part, by a single collective event in the community hall. The rituals are thinner. The social need they answer is, if anything, sharper.

The diaspora: Bijoya without a river

Bengali migration carried the puja first to other Indian cities, where pujas such as Delhi’s Kashmere Gate puja date back to the early twentieth century, and then abroad: to London, New York, New Jersey, Toronto, Houston, Sydney, Singapore, Dubai and dozens of other cities. Today Bengali community associations abroad hold pujas in school gymnasiums, rented halls and, increasingly, purpose-built temples and cultural centres.

Diaspora Bijoya faces practical constraints that force inventive solutions:

• Calendar. Many diaspora pujas are held on the nearest weekend rather than on the lunar dates, so Bijoya may fall on a Sunday afternoon days after Dashami in India.
• The image. Clay images shipped from Kumartuli are costly; many associations use fibreglass or other durable images that are kept and reused for years. Only darpan bisarjan and a symbolic immersion (often of the ghat or flowers) are performed.
• The river. Municipal rules usually forbid immersion in local water bodies. Some communities obtain permission for a token immersion; others treat darpan bisarjan as the full immersion, which, theologically, it already is.

What survives intact, almost everywhere, is the social core: sindoor khela, pronam, kolakuli, and above all the food. For second-generation Bengalis abroad, a plate of nimki and narkel naru and an uncle insisting they touch his feet may be the most concentrated experience of Bengaliness they have all year. Diaspora Bijoya is, in a precise sense, Uma’s situation inverted. The children have left home; once a year, the puja lets them come back.

Bijoya sammelani: the long tail of the festival

The most distinctive modern institution of the season is the Bijoya sammelani (Bijoya gathering), held in the weeks after Dashami by neighbourhood clubs, housing societies, alumni associations, professional bodies, offices, and diaspora associations.

A typical sammelani combines:

• an opening of greetings, pronam to senior members and kolakuli among the rest;
• a cultural programme: Rabindrasangeet and Nazrulgeeti, recitations of Tagore and Jibanananda, children’s dances, sometimes a one-act play;
• felicitation of elders, achievers, or the puja’s organisers;
• a communal meal, often the high point, with fish, mutton, and sweets.

The sammelani institutionalises Bijoya ghorano for an age when few people have the time, or the dense local networks, to visit house to house for weeks. It compresses many visits into one evening. In doing so it shifts the season’s centre from the family to the association. It also turns Bijoya into a platform for Bengali literary and musical culture: the poetry recited at a sammelani is often the most Bengali-language literature some members of the diaspora encounter all year.

Critics within the community sometimes describe the sammelani as Bijoya hollowed into entertainment. A fairer reading is that it preserves the rite’s social function, renewing bonds within a defined community, while relocating it to the forms of association modern Bengalis actually inhabit. The household courtyard became the neighbourhood street, then the clubhouse, then the rented hall abroad. The embrace has survived every move.

Epilogue: Aschhe Bochhor Abar Hobe

Return to the child at the start of this chapter, asking why everyone is sad if the Goddess won.

The honest answer is that Bengal decided, some three centuries ago, that victory was not the most important thing that happens on this day. It kept the Sanskrit name and the cosmic theology. It kept Rama’s akalbodhan as the reason the Goddess is woken in autumn. But it placed at the centre of the day a much smaller and much more human story: a mother who cannot keep her daughter, and a daughter who must go.

That choice turned Bijoya into one of the most emotionally intelligent rituals in South Asian religious life. It does not ask its participants to suppress grief in favour of triumph. It gives grief a form: a mirror in water, a sweet pressed to clay lips, a drum that speeds up as the river comes into view. Then it does something more radical. It converts the grief into obligation. Because the Goddess has gone, you must embrace your estranged brother. Because she has gone, you must touch your grandmother’s feet. Because she has gone, you must visit, and feed, and be fed, until the house feels full again.

The festival’s final word is not loss but a promise. The priest says it in Sanskrit over the vessel of water. The crowd shouts it in Bengali at the edge of the river. The grandmother says it quietly, putting one more naru into a departing grandchild’s hand: next year, again. That repetition is the theology of Bijoya in a sentence. What leaves is not lost. What dissolves returns. The daughter will come home.

Sources and further reading

• Agamani-vijaya, Banglapedia: genre definition; Ramprasad, Kamalakanta, Rambasu and Dasharathi Roy as composers; link to early marriage.
• Ramprasad Sen, Banglapedia: life dates and Agamani songs.
• Shyamasangit, Banglapedia: Kamalakanta as Ramprasad’s successor.
• Kamalakanta Bhattacharya (Bengal), Wikipedia: birthplace and Bardhaman court connection.
• Durga Puja in Kolkata, UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage: clay from the Ganga, immersion, “homecoming”; inscribed 2021.
• Durga Puja in Kolkata, Wikipedia: Durga Puja Carnival since 2016; UNESCO inscription date.
• FAQ on idol immersion in India, India Water Portal: CPCB Revised Guidelines (12 May 2020) and the role of courts and NGT.
• Joint panel to clean river after immersions, India Environment Portal (from The Telegraph, 2008): Calcutta High Court direction.
• Rare green immersion stands out after Durga Puja, Dialogue Earth (2020): Kolkata ghat conditions, cranes, green immersion models.
• Durga Puja concludes peacefully with immersion of idols, Business Standard / PTI (2017): Calcutta High Court and Muharram immersion dispute.
• Shobhabazar, Guptipara and Barowari, Wikipedia: 1757 Shobhabazar puja; Guptipara barowari (1761 or 1790); first Kolkata sarbojanin puja.